Taming Cross

by Ella James

“They'll find us, you know.” My voice is barely loud enough to be a whisper. “With Jesus dead, Christina will take over. His sister. She doesn't like me very much anyway, and she won't like you.”

  “That right?” He glances over his shoulder, holding a tool between his teeth, and I nod.

  “You think I’m not likable?”

  “You think this is a joke?”

  He doesn't answer me. Instead, he looks over his shoulder, at the house. “How did you know about the porch?”

  I zip my lips. I know about it because the elderly woman and teenage boy who used to live here were gunned down by Jesus. The teenager robbed one of Jesus’s country homes, and the old woman tried to protect him when Jesus came. I was in the back seat of his car at the time, and we'd just been to eat in Torreon. I'm not sure why he decided to stop on that sunny afternoon—maybe because he saw the kid's car or something—but I watched them try to open the trap door as Jesus shot them.

  I'm not telling angel that.

  Non-angel.

  Evan.

  I wipe my face and try to sound composed. “Just a lucky guess. Some houses in Mexico have those,” I say.

  “Is it abandoned?” he asks. He's doing something with his right hand and the bike’s wheel bar, something tool-ish. Something maybe with a wrench? I don't know. I'm not mechanical. What I do know is that the left hand is still tucked into his pocket.

  “It's empty, but we still shouldn't stay here,” I murmur.

  “I've almost got this straightened out.”

  I nod, not that he can see me, and wrap my arms around myself. I wonder if his story is a lie. Working for that bounty hunter company. I've never heard of anything like that, not that I for sure would have, but I might have.

  “Is your hand hurt?” I ask as he lifts the bike, again, just with the right hand.

  “Happened before this,” he mutters. Once the bike is upright, he looks to me. “Could you gather those tools? I can't hold the bike up and do that, too. One hand and all.” He mentions the hand too flippantly.

  “Okay.” I do as he asks, and as I tuck them back into his bag, I say, “Soooo…do you have a plan?”

  “Once we make it to the border, we'll be fine. I've got a passport for you.”

  My stomach twists. “We'll never make it. They'll find us first.”

  Evan throws his leg over the bike and looks at me from underneath those long eyelashes. “I'm a good shot. Get on.”

  So I do.

  I don't have a choice.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It's harder to drive the Mach with another person on the back. More weight to balance. More pressure on my shoulder.

  I'm grateful that she didn't ask more questions back there at that house. My pride won't let me admit that I crashed a bike, and even though that's what most of America thinks—that I got ripped and forgot how to drive—I can't stand to say it out loud. It's just not true. I was pretty drunk, sure, but I wasn't drunk enough to crash. To do that I needed help.

  It's weird remembering that with 'Missy King' behind me. Who thought I looked familiar. That had me sweating bullets. I wonder what she'd do if she knew who I really was. Not what she would do—what she will do. Because I can't hide myself from her forever.

  I just hope she trusts me before that happens.

  After we leave the farm house, she directs me to another road, one she says will take us through some rural land, and in the general direction of a city called Parral. After that, she says we should loop around Chihuahua and head for Ciudad Juarez, a border city where Merri says Cientos Cartel doesn’t have a lot of sway.

  We drive a dusty back road for a while, cutting through what must have, at some point, been cattle farms. I can chart the passage of time in the way the stars and moon cross the sky. It's late—or early, rather. I'm exhausted. I know she is, too.

  The road ends and we're bumping over lumpy dirt. Meredith is wearing my helmet, so the sand gets into my eyes. My shoulder aches. My neck feels tight. Finally I swallow my pride and turn around to her.

  “Where to?” I ask, like I'm not lost as lost.

  She points at a grove of trees maybe two hundred yards ahead. “Don't stop there,” she calls over the motor's noise. “Keep going. There's a river back here, I think.”

  I can tell she’s pretty sure, which means she’s been here with Jesus Cientos or his goons. I want to know what she went through. But I’m afraid to know, and could never ask, regardless.

  Finally I see something sparkling, and we come up on the river, shaded by a cluster of those short, scruffy trees that seem to grow everywhere.

  “Stop here,” she calls, and I do.

  She gets off first; I’m off two seconds later. I tuck my hand into my pocket and take my time unfastening my bike bag while she sits down on a rotten log and folds her arms across her chest.

  “So you were really gonna go back to them?” I ask as I spread out a blanket.

  “It was my only choice.”

  “That's pretty damn selfless.”

  She doesn't reply, just starts picking at her colorless fingernails.

  “How long were you with Cientos?”

  This time, she flicks her gaze at me, but she doesn't answer. Her green eyes say, Do you really think I'll talk to you?

  “I'm on your side, you know that right? I chose to take this job, to come find you.”

  “Do you want a cookie?”

  “White chocolate macadamia.”

  “You’re from California.”

  “That's right.” I answer smoothly, even though the comment throws me off. “How could you tell?”

  “Your accent.”

  “Ah.” But she’s not saying I sound familiar, right? Because I’m now remembering every time I answered the land line when I was in high school and people thought I was my dad. Before she can put my familiar face and familiar voice together, I thrust forward the bag of girl stuff. “For you.”

  She sits the sack on the ground, beside the water, and takes three steps to the blanket. She lies on it and gazes up at the trees—or rather, the single one in this grove that’s tall enough to block our view of the stars. “How do I know you don't work for Priscilla Heat?”

  My stomach clenches tightly, but I don’t let it show. Instead I frown, like this is preposterous. “Why would you think I work for a porn star?”

  “Never mind.” She tucks her hair behind her ear and looks down at the blanket, as if seeing it for the first time. “Are we sleeping on this together?”

  “I couldn't bring two bags. If you like, I can sleep on the ground.”

  She shakes her head. “Just stay on your side.”

  I'm surprised she isn’t more leery of me. I wonder if it's my hand, and try to push all the self-loathing away. She's tough. Been through a lot. She can probably tell a good guy from a bad one at this point.

  I lie down beside her, looking up, like she is. I want to touch her, but I focus on the sky instead. Silence envelops us—silence and the sounds of water.

  “I'm not sorry I killed him,” I tell her.

  She doesn't reply, and I feel my chest fill up with something warm and unnamable. Concern, I guess it is. Concern that’s inappropriate, given who I am and who she is. Given what I knew and didn’t do. And still I can’t help but say, “I am sorry that this happened to you.”

  She rolls over, with her back to me. “We need to be up in two hours or so. We'll have to travel farm land until we're past Parral and Delicias, until we’re very close to Chihuahua. Otherwise they'll find us. They probably have the police on their side.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not kidding,” she says flatly.

  Damn; I really didn’t think this through. “You rest. I'll stay up.” And figure out how the hell we’re going to get out of this.

  She never replies, but eventually I hear her breathing even out.

  I know I'm being a bitch. I even feel a little sorry for it.

  The problem is, I just c
an't help myself.

  When he wakes me up about an hour before sunrise, after only one hour of sleep, I help him re-pack the bag and I try to find some equilibrium. I try to make myself feel human again. To feel sad for the loss of life yesterday, worried for the clinic, excited that I'm free. I try to care about this man who saved me, even if it's just one living creature to another.

  But I can't.

  Disliking him is easy, because it gives me a mission. It gives me someone else to blame, at least for a little while. Also, it helps me avoid temptation.

  Evan is beautiful. Stunningly handsome, and cool under pressure. Reckless, charming, and considerate. He even bought me deodorant. Real deodorant. My favorite brand and second favorite scent, at that. I’ve basically been putting chalk under my arms for the last year and a half.

  Since he likes Battlestar Galactica, I know he has good taste in TV, and before we take off on the bike, I find he has good taste in music, too. He's got a small iPod and it's fully charged. He hands me one ear-phone and takes the other for himself, and for the next hour or so, as we poke along at thirty miles an hour, through old, dried up fields, we're serenaded by Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, and Bon Iver.

  Bon Iver is what really gets me. I had barely heard of them when I was living in Vegas, but the two or three songs I had heard, I adored.

  After an hour or so on the road, I start feeling…weird. It’s that particular light-chested feeling I remember from my high school days. From my kissy slut days. And I know what it means.

  I'm hyper-aware of my arms around Evan;s hard, warm waist. Of the way his upper body tenses when we hit bumps. I can imagine that at this low speed, it's hard to keep us balanced, especially with that contraption he has for his left arm.

  I shut my eyes and remind myself that I'm not supposed to worry about him. It's his fault we're in this mess. This was not my plan.

  But aren't you grateful for it? a little voice inside me asks. Aren't you glad you didn't have to go back to the cartel?

  I wonder what it means for me that Jesus is dead. It doesn't mean more safety right now, but it might eventually. If Jesus was as humiliated as I think he was by my running away, he might have kept coming after me, even if I made it to America. If he’s dead, it all depends on Christina. Does she want to waste the resources?

  She was one of the select few who knew he was gay. I think she hated me because she hated that he felt he had to hide behind a mistress.

  Despite what happened before I ran off, I feel a sort of sadness that he’s dead. For all he turned out to be a total sociopath, he wanted to be a school teacher when he was a kid. He was a monster, but in many ways he was good to me—at least for most of the time I was with him. I was one of the few people he could ask for advice about his boyfriends. I remember the last time he bought new cologne. “Which one makes me smell like salvation?”

  It just seems impossible that he's dead.

  But Evan is right; he shouldn't be sorry for killing Jesus. Jesus was one of the bad guys, and the main thing I feel about his death is relief.

  I lay my cheek against Evan’s back and shut my eyes, trying to gather my thoughts.

  I don't want to go back to my old life in the States. Maybe that's part of why I'm feeling angry at him—Evan. I don't even know if I can go back. As long as Priscilla and Jim Gunn are around, I'll never be safe. And then there’s Drake. The honorable governor from the state of California. Who thinks I wanted to blackmail him, to ruin him, and who, I assume, didn’t mind one bit when Priscilla and Jim Gunn sold me as a sex slave. I have to assume he’d try to get rid of me again.

  I tighten my grip a little on the man in front of me. Evan told me his company would protect me, but I have no reason to believe him. Jesus told me once that he would fly me back to America in one of his own helicopters if I stayed with him for five years. But I finally ran away because his actions said otherwise.

  The bike hits a bump in the craggy farm road and I head-butt Evan. For half a second, as my butt flies off the warm, leather seat, my hands loosen their grip on his waist. When I grab him again, I realize one of my hands is on his crotch.

  I scramble to move it, but not before a pleasant burst of warmth kindles in my stomach. I turn my head so I'm looking out at fields and not at Evan, and I inhale deeply a few times, reminding myself that I don't want a man again. Not really. I'm like one of the Sisters. The physical attraction is there, of course, when the guy is hot like this one is, but my heart isn’t available.

  Even so, I wonder, as we cut through a field at the edge of a trash dump site, what this man thinks of me.

  Does he think that I'm a whore? That I had sex with the whole cartel? Does he think that I deserved what I got? He doesn't seem to know about the governor, so that's a point in my favor. I was a married man's mistress. Even though I was young and stupid and broke…it's not something I'm proud of. Not at all.

  We're getting near the outskirts of Parral now. I know this area. The police in Parral could never be bought, and Jesus had some childish delight in travelling into their territory. Sometimes just to get an ice-cream cone.

  If we can take little country roads around Parral and get to Camargo, we could stop for the night somewhere safe.

  The sun is directly overhead now, meaning it’s taken us at least an hour or two longer than normal to travel the distance that we’ve traveled. Between the music and my rambling thoughts, it doesn’t feel like a long time, but I’ve gotten sunburned. I can feel it on my scalp and my forearms. Evan seems to be feeling the strain of our rough terrain and slow speed, too. His torso will twitch occasionally, the way muscles do when they’re about to give out, and I can feel him breathing hard sometimes. When we reach a small grove at the edge of our current field, I rub his back and lean close to his ear.

  “STOP HERE FOR A MINUTE!”

  We each guzzle bottles of water from Evan’s bag, and he offers me some beef jerky.

  “Sorry I don’t have any sunscreen.” He’s got his hand out near my face, like he wants to touch it, but he doesn’t.

  I just shrug.

  Sometimes at the clinic we gave the poorer children tubes of sunscreen. I think about Sister Mary Carolina and my eyes sting.

  In a matter of minutes, we’re back on the road. I spend the next two hours crying on and off, thinking about how much I’m going to miss the Sisters and my kids. Wondering who I’ll have to care about now. Praying they’re okay, that the cartel didn’t hurt them. I have to believe that they’re okay.

  Through a series of elaborate elbow tugs and shouts, I direct Evan to a tiny dirt road. It’s been so long time since I’ve been here, I’m a little worried that my sense of direction is off, but then I see the little cemetery to my right and I know it won’t be too much longer. Maybe a mile, tops.

  My scalp stings, and I have to squint into the afternoon sun. I see two enormous cacti a few feet to the left of the road, and my heart trips. I tug Evan's right arm and lean my lips up near his ear. “We're stopping up here! Take a right beside those rocks over there and follow the path through the weeds.”

  Evan looks curious, and I nod at the rocks. “Trust me,” I tell him.

  He nods once and speeds up.

  The house we're going to should be a total secret. It's partway built under a dirt mound, with only small parts of stucco showing, and they blend in with the dirt.

  This was one of Jesus's love nests. I know about it only because, in the months I spent as his beard, he took me here a few times for a long weekend—a weekend he really spent with his lover, David.

  David Perez. He was a short guy, buff with a shaved head and a half-moon tattoo on his left arm. I liked him okay until the last week I was with Jesus. After that, I hated him.

  As we round the corner and get to the house, Evan gasses the bike and I hold on tighter. Even if this is the most we’ll ever touch, it's nice to be close to a man this attractive for a little while.

  I'm thinking lustful thoughts when we n
ear the mound, and David steps out from behind a small tree and points a pistol at us.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Meredith's arms tighten around my waist, and she yells, “Go!” But it's too late.

  We're going so slow that when I gas the bike, I can't maintain our balance and we fall to the right. I catch us with my leg and balance the weight of the bike and our bodies as I reach for the gun, then realize I can't hold the handlebar with my right hand and grab the gun.

  Fuck!

  “EVAN, GO!” she screams, and I want to go, I want to get her out of here so fucking bad, but I'm too late.

  The bald dude with the gun is walking toward us as I try to push off with my leg and get us vertical enough that I can gas it without falling over. I try for half a second, which is as long as I need to know that I can't pull it off. I jerk my left hand out of its support system and yell, “Grab the handlebars!”

  Meredith does, and I get my gun and fire a shot at homeboy's hip. It grazes him, and he shoots the bike's front tire.

  “Shit!” Merri is off the bike, running, I assume until I feel her grabbing my left arm. “Come on!” she shrieks, and our friend shoots again. The bullet clears my blue jeans, then the tank, missing skin and bone by no more than an inch. I fumble off the bike and throw it in the direction of our friend with the gun.

  He lets out a howl, and it's only then I realize that he doesn't look quite sane. His bald head, gleaming in the sun, is scraped and scratched: fingernail marks. I made the same ones on my own skin when I tried to kick the Dilaudid. His face is streaked with tears. He howls again and shoots at Merri, to my left.

  “Fuck!” I yank her forward and lead her around the dirt mound, tugging her behind me, “Are you okay?” She must be, because she's running and I don't see blood.

  Our would-be killer screams as he fires more shots. They’re wild, but I push Meredith in front of me just in case. We round the dirt mound, out of sight for a moment, but I can tell from his screams that he’s getting close.

  Jesus, I’m so out of shape. Fucking accident. I was stupid. Can’t do this with one hand.