Thin Love (Thin Love, #1)(114)

She struggled against a heavyset guard who held her against his large stomach until Keira settled, lifting her hands so that he would loosen his hold and still Kona watched her, mouth open, heart thundering. Her words were muffled behind the wall of plastic glass, but he knew her so well, caught every muted sound that left her mouth.

“I’m walking away and leaving you alone. I’m walking away because I have to save myself. But you f*cking remember this: I will haunt you, Kona. When you think of me, see my face, hear my name, you’ll only remember that I loved you. You’ll remember that my love for you was never thin. You’ll remember this moment because it will be the biggest regret of your life.”

Keira jerked out of the guard’s hold and Kona watched her hair, those soft chestnut waves he loved to kiss, he loved twisting in his fingers when he took her. He would never touch them again. He would never touch Keira at all. He’d done this. Convinced himself that this was what he wanted. Leaving Keira was his sacrifice; the absolution he’d willingly paid for his brother’s death. He told himself that he hated her, that he’d never really loved her, but as the door closed behind her and Kona was ushered into the hallway, back down to his bunk, the swing of her hair, the rage and betrayal that bunched up her nose, her lips, would not leave his mind.

He would never see her again.

He would never touch her again.

The thought crippled Kona, made his stomach twist, made a sharp blister of desperation coil and pinch in his gut. He ran for the bathroom with a guard trailing behind him, yelling his name, telling him to stop and Kona did, finally. Right inside the bathroom. He fell to his knees, scared, angry, desperate and Kona threw up in the toilets.





On February 26, 1970, General Motors introduced the second generation Camaro. It was what Kona called a “pony car” —lower, meaner, wider than the first generation. “A man’s car,” he’d told Keira, “meaner than anything on four wheels.”

One of those Camaros had caught Kona’s attention when he was fourteen. He’d spent two summers riding past it at the junkyard on Lafitte street, he’d told her, desperate to have it, to bring it back from the dead. And so, Kona had explained, he washed cars and mowed lawns and didn’t buy comics for six months straight, begged off trips to the river with his friends and treks after the ice cream truck when it moved slowly Uptown, calling hungry, bored kids, itching for their quarters. Kona, even at fourteen, had plans for his nickels and dimes and one late August evening, when he was sixteen, Kona walked up to the junk yard, smiling like a dog about to be thrown a steak and laid down $1500 for that rusted, ugly Camaro.

“Two years,” he’d told Keira one night when they sat parking in his baby just outside City Park. “I scrimped and saved and read and researched, bugged the shit out of every mechanic I met, asked how to use Bondo, how to ease out dents and get rid of rust, until I had her just the way I wanted.” He’d rubbed his hand along the dash of his baby, stroking her slower, petting her longer than he had Keira that night. “She’s the love of my life.”

Kona had been Keira’s.

She stood outside of the team house parking lot, ignoring the long looks she got, disregarding Nathan and Brian and the way they huddled on the front porch seeming to debate the wisdom of approaching her. One quick, hard glare and both boys hurried inside.

Good, she thought. Let them hide.

She wanted to be alone for this. It would be the last play she made. The last score to settle before she took Mark Burke’s three grand and left New Orleans behind.

Mark had come to her dorm, telling her that the news of her accident, the baby, had traveled around the hospital quickly. Her silent, gentle savior, Mark had let Keira cry onto his chest. Had told her she would survive. Dried her face with his long, nimble fingers.

“You’re brave, Keira. You’re so damn strong. Don’t let this break you.”

She’d wanted to believe him. She’d wanted to be as sure about her future as Mark seemed to be about it.

Leann and Keira’s aunt had offered her a home. They were still family. They loved Keira and she knew she and her baby would be safe with them. They would be loved. But Keira couldn’t move around the city, couldn’t touch trees that she and Kona had leaned against, walk down sidewalks they’d jogged down hurrying to beat the rain, or to tear off each other’s clothes while they rushed into her dorm.

She couldn’t risk her mother’s intrusion on the life she wanted to give her baby.

Keira had to leave and so she kissed Leann goodbye without telling her what she planned. She let Mark hold her, console her for the loss that had broken her down completely. She let him insist that she take his money, that she form a Grand Plan that didn’t involve their parents and the world they wanted them to emulate.

And then, just a few blocks from the bus stop on the CPU campus, Keira had made one last goodbye.

Keira thought that Kona should see. He should know what she meant; how destroying something so perfect, so beautiful, was the greatest sin anyone could commit. After all, he had done that to her.

His words were poison. His screams were a sharp point, piercing, tearing straight into what remained of her heart. This felt like a death. That great big solid thing in her heart had been shredded until only the fine wisps remained. It felt like she had been ripped apart, bits of her body and her spirit, torn to pieces and then quickly moved together again, but wrong, not as they had been, not as they should be.