Page 11 of Dance Practice, Marooned: Part 2

I can’t stand that he’s here. I can’t stand even more that a tiny part of me is relieved he is. My hands are useless. My brain won’t stop ricocheting off the inside of my skull. But I am so goddamned tired of being helped. He reaches for the stick, and I lunge for it, slapping his hand away. “I don’t need your goddamned help, Ace.”

He doesn’t move, just watches me for a second, all those unreadable emotions tightening his jaw. I can tell there are a million things he wants to say, but he holds them in. I get the stick standing upright, balancing the ends in the dirt. As I go to pull the rope through, my hands slip and the stick scrapes along my finger. Hard. I know it has pushed a splinter into my flesh, but I pretend it hasn’t.

My eyes water, and I ignore the pain and try to cinch it, but in the process I end up digging the splinter so deep into my finger that I hiss, jerking my hand away. “Fuck.”

Ace says nothing, except, “Let me see.”

I shove my finger angrily into my mouth and shake my head, refusing to meet his eyes. “It’s nothing.”

He tries again, this time gentler, and wraps his hand around my wrist. “Grace,” he says, the word so soft it actually registers beyond the pain, “let me help you.”

I yank my hand out of his. “No.”

Am I acting like a child? Yes, yes I am.

Do I care? No.

He leans in, and I can smell the musk of sweat and dirt and smoke from the fire. When his hand clamps over my wrist again, I don’t fight as hard as I want to. He turns my palm upward, peering at the splinter wedged into my finger, slowly trickling blood. It’s such a nothing injury, I want to scream for how childish it feels. Then his cold fingers press in, pinching the splinter between fingernails, and I clench my jaw tight to stop myself losing it.

When he gets it out, he wipes the blood with the hem of his shirt. I rip my hand away the second he’s done. The anger is so much sharper than the pain. “Happy? Hero moment accomplished?”

Gosh, I am such a fucking bitch.

I know it, yet the words just keep flowing.

The frustration in my chest is so strong, so heavy, I can’t seem to stop the words coming out of my mouth.

His nostrils flare. “You know,” he says, voice steady, “you can be mad at me all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m here and I’m goin’ to help you.”

I chuck the stick aside as hard as I can. It goes maybe two feet and thunks into the dirt. “Why are you here? To make me feel like shit? To beg? What? What do you want, Ace?”

“I’m here because we’re all fuckin’ here,” he snaps, his frustration bubbling to the surface now, too. “I don’t have a fuckin’ choice and neither do you.”

I finally look right at him, letting every cell in my body throb with resentment. “You think I don’t fucking know that? God, all I want is to not be on this fucking island. I want to not have to see your goddamned face every day. I want—all of us—to not be living like rats, waiting for the next person to get sick or die or have their heart broken or whatever fucking next trauma this place has planned for us.”

There’s a beat. Then he smiles, followed by a grunt, but it’s not a happy smile. It’s like someone just told him a joke about hell, and he recognised the punchline. “I never planned any of this, Grace.”

“Yeah?” My voice is shaking. “You and the others keep saying that, but you all knew what was happening. Every one of you. You could have fucking stopped all of this by not agreeing to sell a bunch of innocent girls.”

My voice breaks into a scream at the end, shocking even me.

He gets to his feet, looming over me in that way he does so well. I stand, too, because fuck him, I’m not about to let him have the high ground. I’m half his size but the moment I’m upright, the tension between us turns into something so boiling hot it makes the hair on my arms rise. His voice, when it comes, is low and dangerous. “You think I don’t fuckin’ regret it, Grace?”

“You made a choice, and you were going to follow through with that fucking choice until we took matters into our own hands. So fuck you, Ace. I have no sympathy for you.”

He’s inches from me now. “You’re so fucking heroic, aren’t you? Acting like you wouldn’t have made the same choice? You are the reason that yacht capsized, Grace. You are the fucking reason.”

I slap him.

It comes out of nowhere, a rage that just unleashes.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t react, just glares at me like I have done something wrong.

I’m trembling. “Fuck. You.”

He steps closer, crowding me so my back hits the tree I was leaning against. “You are proof that anyone is capable of doing something desperate, if it meant saving yourself or someone you love.”

I open my mouth, but the words aren’t there. He sees it. He sees every raw, ugly thought that’s flashing through me, the way my certainty runs out and is replaced with something even more dangerous. I want to scream at him, or hit him, or maybe just collapse. But I do none of those things. He studies me, so close I can feel his breath tickling my cheeks.