by Madi Le
Then she pushed forward, and he was pressed back onto the bed. Her leg didn't hurt any more. It was like she'd never been hurt, though she knew she had. She also knew that if he pressed on it then that feeling of pleasantness wasn't going to last very long.
She let out a long, low breath, and leaned over him until she was held up over his head. She let herself down enough for their lips to press together, just enough to be a little rough.
"Are you sure about this?"
The one question he shouldn't have asked. This wasn't time to wonder about whether or not they were sure about anything. This was time to decompress, to unwind, to explicitly not worry about anything or whether or not they were making the "right" decisions. Asking questions was anathema.
"No," she said. "But I'm not thinking about that right now." She pushed herself up until she was straddling his hips. She wasn't wearing anything, and with her hands lifted above her head, anything that Grant might have had to say to her about his doubts was swallowed up by the need to look at her breasts. He let one hand come up to cup one.
Grant was gentle with her. Too gentle, she thought. There was a time and a place for gentle. Desperation didn't go well with gentle, or sweet. Desperation didn't want to make love. Desperation wanted to fuck, and in that moment, Misty was as desperate as she had been the entire last year. The sooner she forgot about her worries and her troubles, the sooner that she could get back to thinking about them with a fresh head.
She moved her hips up until she was sitting on his chest, and then with another scoot forward, her wetness hovered above his mouth. Grant didn't need a hint about what she wanted. His hands gripped her hips and pulled them down. His tongue started exploring immediately, parting her folds and probing. He started shallow, exploring the opening, exploring her clit. Tasting her.
It was nice, but it wasn't enough. Misty started to rock her hips against him. He didn't complain, nor did he speed up the pace. His tongue kept moving exactly as fast as he wanted it to, deliciously teasing her. Forcing her to wait for what she wanted, even though waiting was the last thing that she had any interest in.
Then, just as she was about to give up, Grant seemed to change his mind. He decided to give her what she wanted after all, and pulled back, pressing his lips against her clitoris and sucking. She shivered at the sudden sensation, her fingers digging into his hair as if he could get any more pressed against her womanhood.
His mouth went back to exploring, but with a desperate need that overwhelmed Misty in exactly the way that she had wanted all along. Her body shivered as he did, a pressure building up in her entire body as she threatened to come in a shower of juices and need.
Her shoulders were the first to lock up. Her fingers tightened in his hair until she was sure that she couldn't have tightened them any more. Her toes curled up, and then the big muscles started to get involved, the long ones along her back, her abs, her thighs, until she was as tight as a drum from her forehead down to her toenails, and then… everything started to relax.
Through it all, his mouth never stopped moving, never stopped exploring, never stopped sending delicious electric signals coursing through her. Misty rolled over, off of him. Her breath came hard and fast, and kept catching in her throat, but she couldn't have asked for anything more. At least, she hoped she couldn't have–what she'd been given had felt hard enough to control already, and she wasn't sure what would put her any further over the edge.
She heard the zipper of Grant's trousers working, but it didn't mean anything to her exhausted, sex-addled mind. It didn't mean anything until he was the one hovering over her, and something hard and thick pressed against her opening.
Then it meant a lot. "I just came," she breathed.
"You've had a minute," Grant said. "Now you're going to cum again."
Misty didn't have time for a witty reply; he was already moving to take her knees in his arms, pulling himself tight against her opening and forcing the two of them together in delicious agony.
"You're a bastard, you know that?"
"Is that a problem?"
Grant buried himself deeper inside her, until it felt like he couldn't go any deeper. Until he was already too deep inside her for Misty's body to comprehend what was happening. Then it moved a little further, and she saw stars. Grant held himself there, in that place that touched her in ways that she didn't know that it could be touched, for a long moment, letting them both get used to the sensations.
Then he started to move, and any complaints that Misty might have had about being too sensitive were lost in a haze of sex and need that she knew was never going to go away until she had completely lost herself, and completely found herself again afterward.
His hips moved. She moved her own hips to meet his. They were slow at first, but never slow enough to give her any time to think. Never time to give her any time to breathe. Her body tingled with sex and she still felt completely lost.
She started to tense again, the familiar feeling of building up to an orgasm. His cock hurried her along, moving faster with every passing moment. The thrusts got harder. The feeling of fullness kept getting more and more powerful.
Grant seemed to lose any sense of rhythm himself, forcing himself faster, deeper, harder. His arms trembled beside Misty's head. Her body tensed for the third time, squeezing around his cock, and then she felt him spasm inside her, and she knew that as bad an ideas it might have been, he had finished with forgetting himself just like she'd forgotten herself.
She laid her head back on the mattress and sucked in a deep breath. Then she let it out slowly. Sometimes it was good to forget, she told herself. But it was never as good forgetting as it was coming back. If she ever remembered who she was before this, what would that feel like?
She decided, not for the first time, not to think about it.
Misty woke up the way she woke up every morning. It was dark, and she was still exhausted, but there was nothing to be done but get up. So she extracted herself from Grant's arms and settled her feet flat on the ground and tried to ignore the doubts bubbling up in her mind. It was easier said than done, but in the end she managed it.
Every day that she was still breathing was a gift. Most people, she had it to understand, didn't see it that way. They weren't really capable of it. It wasn't their fault. But that didn't mean that she was the one to blame for it, either.
Most people didn't have the experience that she had, though. She'd been running around this earth for a year now, that she knew of. Twenty-and-something years before that, there was another woman, who hadn't made it this far. She had been a woman confident that her life was going in a specific direction, and it was all in her power to control.
But the woman who had woken up in the hospital a year ago was a woman with a new lease on life. A new person, whose first lesson in her short life was that sometimes things don't go the way that you intended. Everything that had happened since then had taught her dozens, hundreds, thousands of lessons.
All of them, though, shared one common core message: if you don't keep forcing yourself to adapt, to overcome, to make sure that you're never caught with your pants down, then you're never going to be able to survive the world. It comes at you fast, and hard, and it doesn't let up, so you had better be ready for it.
Grant rolled over in bed, but Misty was busy pulling her clothes on. She looked down at him. He looked so peaceful, lying there. There was none of the worry that seemed to mark his face through the days that she'd spent with him. He didn't look tense or uncomfortable. He looked like a strong man. She smiled, pulled up her pants.
There was something in her pockets. They were barely large enough to fit it, but it fit in well enough to press hard and uncomfortable against her hip as the jeans slid on.
She pulled it out. A phone.
The previous day came back to her slowly, but the phone jogged her back to recollection of what she had done, how she had gotten here. The phone she'd stolen. Who was that kid? Did he recognize t
he two of them, or was he just filming like an idiot?
She pulled the phone out. It didn't have a password on it. She frowned at that. Sure, it made her job a little easier, but the kid really should have known to put a password on his stuff. It was basic security practice, and there was nobody in the world that she knew of who wanted to have someone going through their stuff.
Still, she did. He used it for everything, she decided quickly. And now she had it. She flipped through his texts. Most of them were girls' names. Some of the text chains had photos in them. He had Snapchat installed. No photos there, except for the public stories of his friends. She ignored all of that as she found it.
Then she moved on to his gallery. There was a video there, the last thing recorded with his phone. He made a sweep of the entire restaurant, talking loudly. Misty got the impression of what was going on quicker than she had at the time. There was an elaborate prank going on, and he was about to be at the center of it.
From the way that they had talked, she guessed that he knew one of the female employees behind the counter, and he was about to order something that wasn't on the menu. It was going to embarrass the girl at the time, but when it went up on the internet, it would have become downright destructive. It was at least good to know that she had punched the right kid in the face.
Then he noticed the pair of them. He commented on Misty's looks, and his comments were not nearly so negative as she might have expected for a young man commenting on a woman ten years his elder. She almost smiled, but the thought that he was about to destroy some girl's reputation on the internet because it might be funny ruined any appeal that the unsolicited complement might have had.
Then the woman in the video stood up, shouted. The video cut as her hand came down across the video screen. The phone had clattered to the ground, and the kid had clattered along with it. She deleted the video and slipped the phone back into her pocket.
"Never took you for a voyeur," Grant said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You're digging through that kid's whole life."
Misty turned and shrugged. "I needed to know who he was. Needed to know if he was after us."
"Was he?"
"No," she said. She shrugged. "I guess it's possible. I don't see any reason to figure that he was, though."
"That's good to hear, at least."
"A real creep, though."
"So what's next?"
"We keep moving," she said.
The phone rang in her hand. She looked at it. The number wasn't one the kid had in his phone book. The phone log didn't have a single entry that wasn't recognized. Which meant that in the past two weeks, this was the first time that someone had called who the owner of the phone didn't recognize. She pressed her lips together.
"You shouldn't answer that," Grant said.
"Of course not."
The phone went to voicemail. They didn't leave one. Twenty seconds of silence later, and the phone was ringing again. Same number, still unrecognized. She let out a breath and looked down at it. There was something off about it. A coincidence that she hated.
"I'm going to answer it," Misty said finally.
"No."
She agreed with him in principle. In practice it was hard to think that there was something accidental about the pair of them having this phone when the call came in. It was too much to believe that the first unknown caller was calling a stolen phone, by coincidence. Someone who knew what had happened, someone who was responding to it, was the one making the calls. And that person wasn't looking to talk to 'Travis.' They were looking to talk to the thieves.
The phone went to voicemail again. Eighteen seconds, and it rang again. Same number. Misty's jaw pressed shut.
The phone went to voicemail again. This time the pause was longer. Sixty seconds. And they weren't called on the cell. The phone beside Grant rang. Misty strode over and picked it up.
"What?"
"Call for you, ma'am. I'm going to put it through."
Misty's expression was sour as she waited. But she did wait. She closed her eyes slowly. The voice on the other end of the line was totally unknown to her, but that didn't stop her from being able to guess who it was. She didn't like it one bit.
"Hello?"
"Who is this?"
"Doesn't matter who I am."
"What am I supposed to call you?"
There was a long pause, while the person on the other end of the line considered that question. He didn't answer her, at least not the way that she asked the question.
"Is the Sheriff there? Or, I should say, the ex-Sheriff."
She frowned and looked at the phone. Grant looked up at her, seemed to think for a long moment, and then held his hand out. "Give me the phone," he said. "I'll talk to them."
Misty didn't have a lot of experience with situations like this. At least, none that she could recall. But she knew that things didn't go well unless you forced them to, and she knew that this was going to be a time where things could go downhill, and very quickly, unless you were very careful. So she hesitated.
"Who should I tell him is calling?"
The voice on the other end of the line let out a long, exasperated sigh. "He'll know who it is. Just give him the phone, babe. It's easier if you don't try to fight it."
Fifteen ♥
*
Grant waited for the person on the other end of the line to explain himself.
"You didn't take my call."
"You know I screen my phone calls," Grant said. As far as he was aware, the person on the other end of the line had never met him before, but that didn't stop him from pretending that they knew him well.
There was a vague feeling in his gut that the person was very serious about something. Something that Grant strongly suspected he wasn't going to like one bit. He took a deep breath and pressed his lips together, and rubbed his eyes with his free hand.
"That's a very good practice to have," the voice on the other end of the line. "And besides, I know it's rude to answer someone else's phone."
"Who is this?"
"What?" The voice on the other end of the line tried to sound hurt, but instead he just sounded mocking. "You don't know?"
"I'd rather you just told me, so I didn't have to guess."
"That makes a lot of sense," the voice said. There was a pause. Grant wondered for a moment if they were screwing with him. But then he decided that they were, and that they obviously were. There wasn't any other way to interpret it.
"So you're not going to tell me?"
"Guess," the voice said.
It had a mechanical tone to it, but it was too natural to be a person. Probably, it was someone using a voice-changer. It didn't help Grant identify the voice. Not enough to arrest them, anyways.
"You're one of those hackers."
"Wow," the voice said. "Very specific, too. First guess. I'm impressed."
"What are you calling me for?"
"For? Why, I'm not calling you for anything at all, Mr. Ex-Sheriff."
"You're being awfully smug, for some punk kid."
"Is that what I am, Sheriff?"
"You know as well as I do that is exactly what you are," Grant answered. "But I take it you didn't call to trade barbs with me."
"Guessed it again, Mr. Holloway! I'm very impressed. You should have been a detective, or something, don't you think? You're awfully good at these deductions."
"So why don't you tell me what you're calling for?"
"And spoil the fun of teasing you? Boo."
"I could always hang up," Grant offered.
"The police would be on their way before you can sneeze."
"You haven't called them yet?"
"We're still considering," the voice on the other end of the line said. "Some of us think you're just like any of them. Like that mayor of yours. But, you know, some people think that you might just be saved."
"Saved?"
"I'm not going to sit here and explain it all t
o you on the phone. I'm sure that I'm eating up your hotel bill as we speak. This was just a courtesy call, you know. From the ones who want to keep seeing the rat running the maze. Nobody likes being in a cage."
"Are you–what? Is someone you know in jail? Wrongfully imprisoned? Is that what it is?"
"Goodbye, Mr. Ex-Sheriff. Have a good day. The clock is ticking."
Grant looked at the phone and frowned, set it down on the cradle and put his face in his hands. "We've got to get going."
"You don't say," Misty answered dryly. She was the only one ready to go, of course. Grant slid out of bed and pulled some clothes on in a hurry. She went outside. He didn't watch her through the window, because he didn't want to know what she was going to do next. He had a good feeling he wasn't going to like finding out about it.
When he left, he left quietly and took all his things with him. The room was left with the lights off, looking almost the same as it had when they checked in off the street the night before. Grant looked around the parking lot for only a moment before the car pulled up in front of him.
The truck had been big enough to stand out, and the car that Misty had stolen was expensive enough to be ostentatious. This, on the other hand, was as unremarkable as a vehicle could get–a small four-door Ford sedan, painted gray. A car that anyone who saw it might forget the moment that it left their line of sight.
"Do I want to know?"
"Get in," Misty said. It was an answer, in her way, and it was probably the answer he would rather have had.
Grant pulled the driver's side door out. He kept his eyes on the horizon. It made it easier to keep his nerves at bay, and it made it a lot easier to keep from noticing that the car had been stolen.
"We've got trouble," he said. The sound of sirens was audible with the shifting wind, and he knew that any minute now, a cop was going to come sliding around the corner, and they'd be trapped.