by L. J. Voss
“Are you done?” I see when she notices the fish because her eyes widen.
“Are you kidding me? You caught some fish? What did you catch them with, your bare hands?” she asks incredulously.
“Actually with a beer can tab.”
“Seriously? You’re like freaking MacGyver. What are you going to do next? Make a fire with some gum, a paperclip, and a stick?”
I bark out a laugh, “That would be something wouldn’t it? No, I have flint on my keychain for that. I’m just going to go and get some kindling from a dead tree I saw on my way back. Everything around here’s too wet to start a fire.” When I get to the dead tree I cut out some bark to get to the fibers inside. After digging and cutting out what I need, I gather it together and cut a strip from the bottom of my shirt and tie it to a stick I found. I grab my flint rod from my keychain. I scrape some magnesium onto the kindling and then turn the rod and flip my knife over. It takes a couple strikes but it finally lights. I set my keys down and cup my hands around the small flame and breathe some air into it. Slowly and carefully I make my way back to her.
Once I get the fire going I put a stick through the fish’s mouths and put them over the fire. I set the can next to the fire so the water can boil. Imogen is silently watching me, when I’m done I go sit next to her.
“So,” she says as she bumps her knee against mine.
I nudge her back as I respond, “So.”
“I guess I never really thanked you for rescuing me. So, thanks for that. And I guess I should probably say sorry for slapping you.”
Smiling I say, “You’re welcome and I probably deserved it.” We sit in companionable silence just watching the small flames of the fire for a few minutes. I check on the fish and rotate them before I sit back down.
“So what do we do now? I’ll need to find a way to get in contact with the FBI. Oh and Calder.” Her face falls and her breath catches. If her voice hadn’t revealed her emotion then the tears filling her eyes would have. I know she has feelings for him. This realization hits me like a ton of bricks. “I don’t even know what happened to him. I don’t even know if he’s alive!”
I wrap my arm around her and try to console her. “We’ll get out of here. And when we do we’ll find out about him, I promise.” Even though it rips me apart to say it, I mean it. I can tell that he means something to her and I would do anything to help put her fears at ease. Out of fear and anxiety she pulls her bottom lip through her teeth. I’m having a hard time keeping myself from stopping it with my lips. That’s the last thing she needs right now. I meet her eyes and she nods her head and then wipes her eyes. Not trusting myself to keep my self-control, I go and check on the fish. They’re done so I pull them off. I move the water away from the fire so it can start cooling down as we eat. I pull the skin off the fish and then carefully pull out the backbone and hand it to her. “Make sure to watch out for bones.”
“Thank you,” she says before she takes a bite. Her eyes close and she lets out a moan, “This is the best thing I have ever tasted.”
Her moans send my mind to other ways to make her moan like that. I shake that thought away, “Then you haven’t had my waffles.” She glances up at me through her eyelashes and I’m awarded one of her huge beaming smiles.
“I love waffles. You’ll have to make them for me sometime.” She looks a little embarrassed at her request. Changing the subject her face turns a little more serious as she says, “Seriously, thank you. Thank you for everything.” After that we eat in companionable silence.
Once we’re done I help her up and then grab the can of water. Rather than carry it while we walk we each drink then start making our way following the river. From what I remember from the little bit of scouting I did, there should be a dirt road a few miles from here. Or at least where I think here is. We move along slowly. Her body is stiff and sore from everything that has happened. Sleeping on the ground last night probably didn’t help. But she’s a trooper. She hasn’t complained once. If I didn’t think she’d hit me again, I’d offer to carry her.
“Ever heard of twenty questions,” she asks.
“Yeah, of course I have.”
“Okay, then what’s your most embarrassing moment?”
“You just go right for the good stuff don’t you? I’ll have to remember that when it’s my turn to ask a question.”
“Don’t answer that one! I want to change my question.”
“Nope, it’s too late for that. There are no take backs in twenty questions.” I hurry so she can’t argue, “My most embarrassing moment. Hmmm. Well it would probably have to be when I was twelve. I dove into the public pool and lost my swim trunks. I had to swim around trying to find them. When I finally found them they had sunk to the bottom of the pool. As I dove down to try and get them the lifeguard thought I was drowning and dove in and pulled me out. Only I hadn’t had a chance to grab my shorts so she pulled me out completely naked. To make matters worse she was the hot lifeguard all of us drooled over. Now it’s my turn. Time for a doozy.” I pause after every word, “What, is, your, absolute, worst, pet peeve?”
She lets out a laugh as she answers, “Seriously? That’s all you are going to hit me with?”
“Hey lady, I have nineteen more questions. Just hold your horses. I’ll get to the good ones later.”
“Okay, if you say so.” She pauses like she is thinking. “I would have to say that my worst pet peeve is when people have messy eyebrows.”
We’re still hiking through the trees and she is a little ways behind me, so I glance back and raise my eyebrow at her. “Messy eyebrows huh? Interesting. So if I, let’s say, did this,” I take my finger and go along my eyebrow in the opposite direction, “It would totally freak you out.”
“Yes, so don’t be an ass. Fix it. Please.”
“Yes dear.” I fix my eyebrow and start walking again once she catches up to me.
“My turn again. What is your favorite candy?”
“That’s easy, it’s bubble gum.”
“That isn’t a candy, that’s gum.”
“Hey, these are my answers. If I want to say gum is my favorite candy I can if I want to,” I tease.
“Why bubble gum?”
“Nuh uh, it’s my turn to ask a question.”
I can hear the eye roll when she responds, “Fine. It’s your turn.”
“If you were a dinosaur, what dinosaur would you be?”
“What?”
“It’s a serious question. You can tell a lot from a person by the type of dinosaur they want to be.”
“Considering I’ve never thought about what dinosaur I would be, let me think for a second.” She takes about a minute before she answers, “I would be Ducky, from the Land Before Time. Or whatever type of dinosaur she is, I don’t the scientific name.”
“Interesting.”
“So what does that say about me?”
“Is that your next question?”
“Grrr.” She actually growls at me. “I never figured you would be such a stickler for the rules. No, that is not my next question. Why bubble gum?”
“It reminds me of my dad. Since I was only seven when he died I don’t have a lot of memories of him. Most of what I can remember revolved around baseball. He loved the Red Sox. My mom told him she would leave him if he kept chewing so he switched to bubble gum. Just the smell can make me think of him. I guess I just kept up the habit.”
I don’t think she was expecting a sentimental reason because she doesn’t say anything for a while. When she finally does all she says is, “Your turn.”
We continue asking each other questions for the next little bit. Some are more serious and deep and others are superficial and fun. We finally make it to a dirt road. It’s taken a couple hours to get here and now glancing up and down, I can see that we have another good walk before we find a car. Turning and loo
king at her, I’m not sure she’ll be able to keep walking.
“We probably have another half mile or so before we find a car. Do you think you are going to be able to make it? Should we take a break?”
She winces as she bends over to catch her breath, “No. No I don’t want to be here anymore. I want a shower. I want food. I want water. And mostly I want, no, I need chocolate. If you promise me chocolate, I will walk wherever you want me to.”
“That’s my girl,” I say with pride. The late afternoon sun is beating down us. We’ve been walking along this road for over an hour and I haven’t seen one car go by. I’m starting to worry that we need to find water when we come across some cars. It looks like they parked in front of an older dock of some sort. I hold my hand up to signal Imogen to stop. I whisper to her, “You stay here. I’ll signal for you to follow me.” She silently nods her head.
I quietly sneak up to the first car and check the handle. Someone is smiling down on us because the door is unlocked. Even better is it’s an older model without an alarm. Glancing back to Imogen I motion for her to come to where I am. When she gets to me I tell her to get in the back and I get in the front. I check for keys in the sun visor and under the seat. I find them in the console in between the seats. I wonder when our luck is going to run out. It never ceases to amaze me how many people leave their keys in the car. After I start the car we pull out and take off.
- Imogen -
It’s late afternoon when we finally make it out of the woodsy swamp and find a car. Normally, I would have some qualms about stealing a car but desperate times call for desperate measures. I turn my head to the side and I’m surprised when a wave of exhaustion sweeps over me. My eyes close and I’m asleep before I even know it.
The stopping of the car wakes me up. I glance around and notice the sky is awash with the pinkish glow of the approaching sunset. Glancing at the clock on the dashboard, I realize I’ve been asleep for a little over an hour. “Sorry I fell asleep. You should have woken me up.”
“No, I wanted to let you sleep. You needed it.”
He’s pulled the car over on a street I don’t recognize. Looking over his shoulder, he tells me, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I’m not given much of a choice as he is out of the door and bounding down the street before I can even respond. Twisting around in my seat I notice that the street looks to be full of apartments and row houses. Rice is back and opening my door.
“Follow me and stay right at my back. If I’m going too fast, tell me.” He leads me down the street and then turns left down an alleyway. We cut down another street and then another alleyway. Finally he leads me to a back door of what looks like a row house that has been turned into a couple different apartments or condos. He takes something out of his pocket and jiggles with the lock for a minute and then I’m being lead inside and up the stairs. We approach a door and he does his jiggle thing again and then pulls me inside.
Flicking on the lights, I see we are inside a nice but fairly bare apartment. It’s filled with just the basics. Glancing down at the entry table I see a few pieces of mail. I’m not sure what triggers it or why but I just sort of lose it. “Are you kidding me? We can’t stay here. I’ve never even had a ticket and in the span of less than twenty-four hours we’ve committed grand larceny and now we are going to add breaking and entering onto the list too? And what about,” I look back down at the mail to see the name of the person whose house we are breaking into, “Maurice Fitzpatrick? Poor Maurice is going to come home and find out his apartment has been burglarized. Then he is going to call the police. Then they’ll come and dust for finger prints and then I’ll go to jail. And what if we’re still here?” My face falls at my realization, “Oh no. Oh gosh, you’re going to have to kill him right? He knows too much. Even if we aren’t still here you can’t risk him calling the police. So you’re going to kill poor old Maurice. He’s probably some little old feeble man. But that’s what you guys do, right? Whack people who know too much or get in the way? You aren’t going to cement his feet and throw him in a river or something or chop him up into little bits?” I start to feel woozy at the thought of this poor man being killed because of me. I didn’t even notice that my voice was increasing in volume and octaves. The panic is evident in my voice, “Hurry, we haven’t really touched anything we can leave and go somewhere else. We can go back to my place.”
I realize I’ve been wringing my hands together and I’ve been looking at my feet so I glance up and look at Rice. He is looking at the ceiling and shaking his head. What’s even worse is that his shoulders are shaking and I realize he’s laughing. And he’s laughing at me. I get defensive then. “I’m sorry. But I don’t find this funny! Sorry I have more regard for life than you do. Sorry I think it’s a big deal to murder someone just because they are an inconvenience, especially after we break into their house. I can’t be here. I can’t be here with you. I think…” He grabs me before I can finish my thought.
Putting his hand under my chin and bringing my eyes up to meet his, he says, “Imogen, calm down. We aren’t going to kill Maurice.”
“We aren’t?”
“Well, no. I don’t really think that would be helpful,” he chuckles again as he continues, “Mostly because I’m Maurice. And we aren’t breaking and entering because this is my apartment.”
Confusion wrinkles my brow, “But your name is Rice. You picked the locks.”
“I set my keys down back by the river and I forgot to pick them up. I didn’t even realize until the drive back here. I go by Rice but my name full name is Maurice.”
“Rice is short for Maurice? That’s the best you could come up with? Why not something like, I don’t know off the top my head, Mo?”
“It was my grandfather’s name but growing up in Boston, Maurice wasn’t really a name you went by if you didn’t want to get beat up. Mo probably would have been better. I get some strange looks when people hear Rice. But I didn’t pick it. The nickname came from elementary school when something was covering the M-A-U and Pete, my best friend, thought my name was Rice. He made fun of me, I punched him, and we’ve been best friends ever since. It’s just sort of stuck. Now that we’ve established that I am in fact Maurice and we aren’t breaking any more laws, let’s get those cuts looked at.” He leads me into the bathroom and leaves to grab some first aid supplies. When he comes back in he tells me, “I didn’t plan on needing an arsenal of first aid items so I grabbed what I could. All right, let’s see them.” He looks at me expectantly and I realize he’s expecting me to take my pants off so he can see the one on my knee.
“Um, excuse me? I’m not just going to strip my clothes off.”
“Imogen, we’ve been climbing through the swamp. You’re dirty and sweaty. I need to clean those cuts and see how deep they really are. What you actually need is the hospital but we can’t go there yet so I’m going to need to clean and dress them here.” He smiles as he adds, “If it helps, I promise I won’t look.”
“Har har. Fine.” I know he has a point so I grudgingly wiggle my pants off. They get a little stuck on some dried blood on my knee and my breath catches as I tug them past it. He’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub so I step in front of him. I feel his hand on the back of my thigh as he lifts my leg and rests my foot on the side of the tub in between his legs.
“This is going to hurt,” he warns. Wetting a washcloth in the tub spout, he gently tries to rub along the cut and clean it. My sudden intake of breath stills his movement. He glances up at me, “Are you going to be okay if I keep going?” I nod my head and blink a few tears out of my eyes. Turning my head towards the ceiling I try to breathe through the pain. “Where is the other one?” I pull up the right side of my shirt and I hear him exhale and say something under his breath. The pain I felt when he was cleaning the cut above my knee was nothing compared to the pain of him washing the one on my stomach. His hand resting along my
back, bracing me while he cleans, does a little to help distract me but not enough.
“Now this part is gonna hurt like hell,” he says. When the alcohol hits the first cut it takes my breath away. I’ve started doing the labor breathing you see in the movies, the quick shallow fast breaths. As I squeeze my eyelids shut, tears spring from the corners.
He moves up to the cut on my stomach again and on every breath I mutter, “Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch.” Suddenly the pain and the emotions from the last week are all too much and I break down. I feel like I’m on an emotional rollercoaster. One second I’m angry and fighting and then I’m scared and then the next second sobs wrack my body. I’m engulfed in strong steady arms as I’m nestled onto his lap. His hand trails up and down my body and I rest my head on his shoulder as I let the reality of everything finally hit me. I’ve lost one of my best friends, or at least someone I thought was my best friend. Just because it was all a lie to him doesn’t mean it was to mean. My emotions are real and I need to mourn the loss of the friendship I thought it was. I’ve also been shot at, kidnapped, cut, and lied to. I soak his shirt for a good fifteen minutes. As the sobs subside, I’m suddenly very aware that I am half naked in Rice’s arms. My hands grasp his shirt as my head lifts to the crook of his neck. I know he’s feeling what I’m feeling because instead of the comforting grip from a few seconds ago, his fingers are now digging into my thigh and shoulder like he is afraid I am going to disappear.
My name is a whisper on his breath, “Imogen.” We look into each other’s eyes before our lips crash together and our tongues tangle. This kiss isn’t sweet or romantic, it’s carnal. Full of passion and a myriad of emotions. My hand runs up his neck and tangles in his hair, pulling him even further into me. I feel his hand on my neck as his other hand snakes around my waist pulling my whole body closer to his. As he pulls me into him my side stings and I wince. Hoping it went unnoticed, I try to continue our kiss. I was kidding myself thinking anything would get past him. Bracing myself for another humiliating rejection, I’m surprised when one doesn’t come. This time he slows the pace and intensity of the kiss before he gently pulls me away from him.