No Trespassing

by KD Robichaux

  Moments later, she slowly made her way back in the direction we’d come from, finding the wall of debris, then fell to her knees before it. I would’ve laughed at her dramatics if she hadn’t immediately curled in on herself and started crying her little heart out, and suddenly, surprising the shit out of myself, I felt my own heart breaking for her. My initial response was to run up and put my arms around her, but I thought better of it. It was her hatred toward me that caused all this in the first place. And after the things she yelled at me, I finally understood where the hostility came from for the past couple years.

  I’m not too worried, seeing how people know I am down here, and it would only be hours before they discover I’m trapped. As long as nothing else collapses, we can easily survive until they find a way to get us out. But like the girl, I do feel bad about the piece of history being destroyed. Yet, there is nothing we can do about that now, so finally, after hearing her weeping die down a bit, I decide it’s time to grow a pair and approach her.

  I try to make noise, shuffling my feet and kicking around pebbles as I go, so she can hear me coming instead of surprising her again, and then I squat down next to her. Throwing caution to the wind, I reach out and tuck a strand of the dark hair that had fallen in her face behind her ear, revealing a dirty and tear-stained yet still beautiful face. She glances up at me with her red-rimmed eyes, sniffling as her bottom lip trembles.

  Our gazes lock for a moment, making my heart race behind my dark gray zipper hoodie, and I have to fight the urge to kiss her, to distract her from what has clearly hurt part of her soul, knowing she’d caused this misadventure. Then it dawns on me, I still have no idea who she is. So to keep myself from pulling her into my arms and kissing away her broken heart, I speak for the first time since the rubble settled.

  “What’s your name, love?”

  Her watery eyes dart back and forth between mine, seeming hypnotized, as she breathes, “Emmy, short for Amelia. Named after Amelia Earhart, the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.” It comes out monotone, like she’d told the explanation countless times during her lifetime. “My mom was obsessed with Amelia’s disappearance during her 1937 world flight, and said if she ever had a little girl, she’d name her after her hero,” she added, blinking up at me then wiping her nose with the back of her hand before looking down into her lap. “Sorry, I ramble when I’m upset.”

  “No need to apologize, Emmy.” I try to put her at ease, which is so strange for me. The first couple years of my popularity, I’d reveled in all the attention from my female fans, enjoying the beauties throwing themselves at me. Living in the all-boys home for seven years, and then going to a college where I’d had no choice but to study every waking second or risk losing my full-ride scholarship, I hadn’t had much experience in dating. It wasn’t until after I graduated, hosted that first one-off documentary on my school, and then got my own show, No Trespassing, when I started letting loose and enjoying the less work-related things in life, like women.

  And for the first two years, it had been a steady stream, sometimes a couple different women during each weeklong stay at a location we were shooting. Then the excitement wore off, and the panties being thrown in my direction and the constant flow of vag-pics became more annoying than tantalizing. Not to mention, dealing with the ones who didn’t get the concept of a one-night stand—which I always made perfectly clear that’s all I had to offer—and became obsessed with me, blasting their stories of our short interactions on the internet, garnering me the reputation of a womanizing Casanova.

  So for the last five years, I’ve mostly avoided sticking my dick anywhere I don’t know for certain they’ll leave me the fuck alone afterward. The handful of fuck buddies I have spread throughout the continent are enough to take the edge off when I can’t take the solitude any longer. And now that I think about it, it’s been a good seven months since I even called one of them up. My nightly sessions with my hand had been fueled by what I had thought was an apparition, a dream woman my brain maybe conjured up, a face I might’ve seen in one of my history books, but who is actually the beautifully wrecked creature who now sits mere inches away from me.

  Her eyes meet mine, and I try not to visibly react to what I see in them, what is left of her now-broken spirit. “What are we going to do, Dean?” she asks, and the hopelessness in her voice brings out something inside me, something that makes me want to take away that fear and replace it with the light I’d seen in her when she was dancing around the cavern only a half hour before.

  I look her in the eyes, stand, give her my most devastating smile, and hold out my hand to her. “We’re going to explore.”

  I HESITANTLY PLACE my hand in Dean’s, allowing him to pull me to my feet, and then place my bag around me with its crossbody strap. I go to reach for my backpack on the ground, but he waves me off, putting his arms through the straps of the bright sequined bag, and I can’t help but find him cute. He looks completely unfazed by wearing a hot-pink sparkly backpack, making me draw my lips between my teeth to keep from laughing. That and the chivalry of the act itself is not something I imagined Dean Savageman doing.

  Add that to the list of surprises from the man since he scared the living daylights out of me when he first showed up in the cavern. Seeming to act on pure instinct, he’d grabbed me in the nick of time and started hauling ass right before the ceiling of the entrance could collapse on top of us, picking me up and running like I weigh nothing, my heavy-ass bags in tow. Then, when the rubble settled, he didn’t yell at me, he didn’t call me names or do anything to make me feel worse for my complete stupidity… my childish, idiotic, careless, rooky mistake. When I expected him to add to my pity party, he gave me space until I ran out of tears, then he’d spoken so gently to me that it snapped me out of my never-ending stream of self-deprecation.

  And when I asked him what we were going to do, his reply had me flashing back to my bath just a couple hours earlier. I’d asked myself, What would Dean do? And as if I was psychic, he’d answered exactly how I imagined.

  “We’re going to explore.”

  The words themselves and the way he said them, full of excitement, along with his incredible eyes looking down into mine, I felt my core clench. He was suddenly the Dean from my nightly fantasies, not the one I taught myself to hate.

  As much as this should be killing me right now, having to share my catacombs with the normally infuriating man, the one I’d conditioned myself to despise for the past two years, I just don’t have it in me. And the way he literally saved my life, I have to admit I’m feeling a little bit fangirlish toward him. Not because of who he is or because of his fame, but because he was like a real life superhero the way he swooped me up and got us out of danger. So when I’d normally be a brat and want to throw a tantrum, I allow myself to grasp onto the pleasant feeling of being in Dean’s presence. I even have the thought, Do you know how many people would kill to explore a site with the Dean Savageman?

  A lot. Like, a shit load. And seeing how he technically beat me here anyways, I decide to look on the bright side: I am finally fucking realizing my dream. I am inside one of the off-limits places hardly anyone in the world even knows about. I’ll be discovering pieces of history right alongside the sexy documentary host.

  We’ll just ignore the fact I destroyed a huge chunk of it by getting pissed off at a boner.

  I follow Dean—and my sparkly backpack—as he starts making his way deeper into the tunnel, and I take a moment to compose myself while he isn’t looking. I use my sweater from my purse to wipe the tears and dust from my cheeks as I walk a few feet behind him, and then brush off the dirt from my butt and knees where I’d been cuddled up to the fallen ceiling, praying to the archaeology gods to forgive me for my sins. I was parched and could’ve really used something to drink—

  Wait. My backpack! Thank you, fucking drunk munchies!

  “Hey, hold up a sec!” I call out, hustling up to him when he stops and turns toward me. I reach
behind him, accidentally brushing my boobs against his arm when I spin him around by the strap of my bag. The sensation of them rubbing against his bulging bicep instantly hardens my nipples, and I feel my face heat as I reach into one of the side pockets to grab one of the Gatorades I’d stashed inside. As I crack open one of the plastic bottles, he faces me once again, and I tell myself to ignore my tingling titties, because it’s not like he knows what just happened.

  That is, until I look up at him while I take a swig of the electrolyte-filled liquid, nearly choking as I guzzle when I see his eyes are zoomed in directly on the pointy peaks in question. I look down, and that’s when I discover that in my tipsy haste to start my adventure, I’d forgotten to put my bra back on, and my headlights are switched on to high-beam mode.

  Completely mortified, I spin away from him, causing the Gatorade to slosh out of the bottle and directly onto the front of my white tank top. The one without a bra underneath. I squeak as the wetness trickles down my cleavage and doesn’t stop until it hits my waistband. I look down at myself and, sure enough, nothing is left to the imagination. The only thing that keeps me from screaming to force another boulder to fall and smoosh me right there is the fact I grabbed the white flavor as apposed to the red one, so at least I don’t look like I’ve been shot. With a curse, I throw off my purse and pull on my jacket, zipping it up to my throat. Yes, I’ll end up sweating like pig in no time, but at least the ladies will be hidden from the smoldering gaze I see coming from Dean as I finally turn back to face him.

  He finally tears his eyes away from my chest to look into my embarrassed face, and tries his best to keep from showing his amusement. I can tell by the twitch of his lips, before he asks, “Are you always this accident prone, or is today just my lucky day?”

  “Always. Without failure,” I admit easily, because there’s no point in lying. I’m a grade-A klutz. Rolling the sleeves of my jacket up, putting my purse strap back over my head, I cringe at the stickiness between my tits.

  Seeing my discomfort, Dean says, “You know, I could think of a way to clean up the mess you just made… but I’m pretty sure it would make a new one somewhere else.”

  My jaw falls open at his ballsy flirtation, and I feel my cheeks grow blazing hot at the image he just placed in my head. My mouth closes and opens like a fish a few times as my eyes go wide. I can’t even respond. I am so not used to men coming on to me… especially not ones who look like Dean Savageman.

  “Wow, that’s all I had to do to get you to quit yelling at me before?” He gives me a mischievous grin, pulls the bottle out of my hand, and proceeds to take a drink, all while I just stare up at him. He slides the Gatorade back into the pocket, turns, and continues on as if he didn’t just strike me stupid. I follow dumbly, a quick-witted comeback never finding its way from my brain to my mouth.

  Case-in-point, the reason I’ve never gotten laid outside of losing my V-card my first year of college. The first time I had sex had been the last. It had been awful, awkward, and embarrassing—like most things in my life—and instead of learning to hone my womanly skills, I’d focused on my studies, basically retarding my social skills by locking myself away and immersing myself in all things historical. I often told myself it was okay that I lived vicariously through my ho of a best friend, Erin, but according to the one time I let her shrink that part of my personality, she told me it was post-traumatic stress from losing my virginity that caused me to never have the guts to try it again. She also said the only way I’d ever get over it was to “Suck it up, buttercup. You’ll never get over it unless you save a horse and ride a different cowboy.” That was the last time I asked her for advice while we were at a country bar.

  I usually put off a please-don’t-talk-to-me vibe when we go out, and knowing how uncomfortable male attention makes me, or any attention for that matter, Erin usually pretends to be my lesbian lover to help me avoid having to interact with anyone of the opposite sex. It’s no wonder using my feminine wiles didn’t get me into any sites, ‘cause lord knows I haven’t had any practice.

  Now that I think about it, besides Ricky and Calvin, I’ve exchanged more words with Dean than any other man in… well, ever, that didn’t consist of me begging to get into a site. And even more alarming, I have never, in all the times I’ve run into him across the country, been nervous around him. My hatred toward him far outweighed my awkwardness, so I never had to deal with a panic attack or not knowing what to say, just because of the equipment he had between his legs.

  I mean, I know I’m not ugly. Both my parents are ridiculously good-looking people. But my inside doesn’t seem to match up with my outside. If you were able to project what I looked like internally onto a wall, you’d see a slight girl with mousy brown hair, thick glasses, a full mouth of braces, a flat chest covered by a button up shirt and a plaid jumper, sitting at a desk covered in history books while listening to the movie score of the Avengers as she studied, not for school but for pleasure.

  It was superheroes, voodoo shops, and museums that made my soul happy. Not makeup, boys, and… whatever else most girls were into. I’d managed to find the one other girl in elementary school who loved learning as much as I did, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Erin was as big into psychology as I was archaeology, even when we were kids. Since we had each other, we never really had to worry about what other people thought of us. And because we locked ourselves away in our “Nerd Cave” as Dad teasingly called it, our bodies might’ve changed on the outside as we grew up, but our love of all things geeky never did.

  We often go to Comic-Cons, where I dress up as Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy and Erin as Khaleesi from Game of Thrones, excited to hang out with like-minded people. It’s the only time I can really tolerate being in a crowd. I think it’s because I’m able to hide behind my costume. Yet, for some reason, everyone is always surprised when we jump into conversations, throwing in our own theories of what will happen in the next season of Stranger Things, or who Jon Snow’s parents really are.

  But in Erin’s case, since she’s always had such an outgoing personality and not a single awkward bone in her body, she’s never had a problem with the opposite sex. Plus, being a psychologist, she can read people shockingly clear upon first meeting them, and knows how to get what she wants out of them. It’s a good thing she’s such a good person, because it’s scary to think what she’d be able to do with that ‘superpower’ of hers, as we call it.

  “Check this out,” Dean says, and I almost run into the back of him, not paying attention during my mental ramblings.

  “What is it?” I ask, squinting in the direction in which he points. I pull my phone out of my purse and turn on the flashlight app, shining it on the wall of the tunnel, still seeing nothing. Dean places his hands around mine, sending another jolt of electricity up my arms as he aims the beam of light at a tiny placard the same color as the wall, the single word chiseled into it.

  “Trois,” he reads aloud. “French for three.” He looks down at me with a curious look on his face.

  “Well, there are three tunnels that come off the cavern. Counter-clockwise, this would be the third tunnel. Maybe they labeled them to keep it stupid-proof.” I shrug.

  “Could be,” he agrees, but he doesn’t seem convinced. I want to just blow it off and continue our exploration, but knowing he has years more of experience than me, I decide it would be wise to take note. He pulls out his own phone and snaps a picture of the placard.

  “What are you thinking?” I question, looking more closely at the sign to see if there might be something on it he sees that I don’t.

  “Well, I went down one of the other tunnels, and there wasn’t a sign in there except for the one telling all the different dates in which the bones had been emptied from somewhere else and stacked down here. I just find it odd is all,” he explains, but then seems to shrug it off and continues walking. We don’t make it much farther before he stops once again, this time shining his flashlight app on
a placard on the wall, just above the ground. “Deux. Why would there be a marking for two?” he mumbles to himself. Then he looks to me, and adds, “Well, I guess we know it’s not a sign numbering the tunnels.” He snaps a picture of this one then keeps walking.

  As we traverse the seemingly never-ending channel, I search the walls, floor, and ceiling, trying to spot the tiniest things out of place. Dean spotted those camouflaged markers so easily, when I would have walked right past them. I find myself starting to become more and more in awe of the man than jealous. I could learn so much from him if I could put aside the negative feelings of the past.

  Finally, I spot something as he walks right beneath it. I stop and stare upward, but I am too short to read it clearly. “Here!” I call out, and he hurries back to where I stand, shining my phone’s light up at the ceiling. “I can’t make it out, can you?” I watch him squint and can’t help admiring the strong angle of his jawline as he tries to see what the marker says. I quickly look away when his gaze falls to me and he sees I was staring at him and not the placard. “I can’t see it either. Hmm… oh, wait.” He pulls out his cell and I watch as he brings up his camera, using two fingers on the screen to zoom in on the ceiling, but the image is too blurry to read.

  “Damn it,” I curse, and before I can think better of what I’m doing, or where the balls come from that I suddenly grow, I take off my purse and set it on the ground, then reach for my backpack on Dean’s shoulders.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, but allows me to slide the bag off his arms and put it next to my purse.

  “Stoop down. I’m going up,” I say, and with a surprised look that turns into a grin, he takes me by the shoulders, spins me away from him, uses one of his booted feet to kick mine apart, and I let out a squeal when suddenly his head comes out from between my legs and he stands up. It happens so fast my world spins, but I feel his strong hands grip my thighs at the same time my hands wrap under his chin.