by Payge Galvin
She finally saw that there was a big man with a shaved head standing by the van’s front fender. His arms were folded, and he looked impatient and intimidating.
He also looked angry.
“What’s going on?” she asked Elijah, and pulled on his hand to slow him down. “Are you in trouble?”
“I told you, my ride was waiting,” he said. “I really have to go. Just—look, you seem nice, okay? I don’t want to get you into this.”
“Get into me into what? Selling magazines?”
She knew that expression that crossed his face; she’d felt it in herself many times in the past two days. That was despair, and the wasteland. “Just go, Hope. Here. Take the money back.”
He tried to slip it to her, and she knocked his hand back.
“No! I said you could have it!”
“Hope, please—”
The bald man was heading their way now with brisk, heavy steps. Hope looked around. There were a few students in view, but nobody close, and the campus cops were nowhere to be seen. “Elijah, do I need to call somebody?”
“No!“ Elijah took her by the shoulders and looked directly into her eyes. “Get out of here. Now. Just go.”
“But—”
And then the big man was on them. “You’re late, E.J.,” he said. “Time to go.”
“Yeah, just give me a minute.” Elijah’s eyes were on Hope’s face now, and he took her hand again. “Take care of yourself.”
The big man shook his head and put his hand on the back of Elijah’s neck. Hope guessed it was supposed to look friendly, but it didn’t, especially when she saw Elijah flinch at the touch. “C’mon, kid. We’ve been waiting on you. You don’t want Mr. Solomon to get upset, do you?”
“Hey! Hey, let go of him!” Hope stepped forward. “Elijah? Are you okay?”
“This your new girlfriend?” The bald man laughed and shook Elijah by the hold he had on his neck, like a terrier with a rat. Elijah wasn’t small, but he wasn’t as bodybuilder pumped as the other man. “He’s got one of you on every campus, honey, so take my advice and walk away. You better have done more than get laid today, E.J. Your envelope’s been pretty short the last couple of days.”
“I’m sorry,” Elijah said. He didn’t say it to the man holding him. He said it to Hope. “It wasn’t like that. I swear.”
She believed him, and she didn’t even know why, really, except that he hadn’t taken advantage of her when he’d had ample opportunity. That open door haunted her, and the gentleness of his hands moving her into her room.
It wasn’t like that.
“Elijah, do you want to go with him? Really?”
“Yes,” he said. But she could tell he was lying about that. “I have to.”
“You don’t have to do anything. Come on. Just come with me, okay?”
“He’s not going anywhere with you, sweetheart. Walk.” The big man sounded bored, but he was also getting aggressive, and the look he gave her was chilling. “I’m not going to tell you again. He’s not worth it.”
“Are you taking him somewhere against his will? Because that’s kidnapping,” she said, and pulled out her phone. “And it’s a crime.”
That got the bald man’s attention. So did her punching numbers into the phone. She expected him to let Elijah go and back off—but instead, he grabbed for her. She wasn’t prepared for that. His right hand was huge and strong, and it closed around her wrist as he wrenched the phone from her hand with his left. “Let’s not do anything stupid,” he said. “Relax, honey. I’m just going to borrow this for a while—”
He’d let Elijah go to grab her and the phone, and that was a mistake. Elijah punched him from behind—a solid kidney punch—and the big guy grunted and swung around, still holding Hope’s wrist. He nearly wrenched her arm out of its socket. Elijah followed up with a fast uppercut and a kick that took the guy’s knees out from under him.
He almost dragged Hope down with him, but she wrenched free, panting, and grabbed her phone from where he’d dropped it. Elijah pushed her ahead of him across open ground, away from the van. The door slid open, and Hope got a glimpse of faces inside—five or six of them, young men and women. They didn’t get out. One of them made a motion that looked like she wanted Elijah to keep moving.
The big guy was getting up behind them.
“Run!” Elijah yelled. He took her hand, and she managed to keep up, even with the heavy backpack dragging on her shoulder and shorter legs. She knew the campus, and pulled him to the right at a dead run as they rounded the building. That led through a water garden that had a path through the center—it looked from an angle as if they’d disappeared into the jets, but the path itself was only a little damp. With any luck, the guy chasing them wouldn’t see it.
Beyond that was the square faux-adobe of the Liberal Arts building. She and Elijah took the steps two at a time, careened into the hallway, and she pulled him up another flight of stairs and headed down another long hallway toward the Media Center at the end. It was still open, though it’d be closing in thirty minutes; there were a few students still parked in front of computers working on projects, but they hardly got glances, even though she was red-faced and gasping for air. God bless headphones and tunnel vision.
“There,” she said to Elijah, and pointed. She’d worked as a volunteer helping to set up this room, and she knew it backward and forward … which meant she also knew about the door at the end, behind which lay the routers and servers and cabling. Now she just had to pray that ASU-RV’s notoriously lax security standards hadn’t gotten an upgrade.
Sure enough, her code still worked on the keypad. The door eased open, and she pulled Elijah inside and yanked it shut.
“What is this?” he asked. It was dark, but she kept the lights off. The server lights were enough to see by, once their eyes adjusted. “Jesus, I can’t believe we just did that.”
“Who is that guy?”
“Trust me, you really don’t want to know. Is there another way out of here?” he asked.
“Where was he taking you?”
“Hope, is there another way out?“
“I’m not telling you until you explain,” she said. Her wrist was starting to hurt now that the adrenaline was receding. “What the hell is going on?” She tried to move her wrist, and winced.
Elijah took her arm in his hands and probed gently, murmuring an apology when she sucked in her breath at a glassy stab of pain. “I don’t think it’s broken, or even sprained; I don’t see any swelling” he said. “Bruised, maybe. Probably just needs some ice.” His hands moved and took her by the shoulders, and she was pinned under the weight of his stare. “What the hell were you thinking, getting in the middle of that? You really could have been hurt. It’s not your business, Hope.”
She’d kind of expected some sort of gratitude, and that hurt. Worse, it made her angry. “Well, sorry for wanting to help! I thought he was going to hurt you!”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, he wouldn’t have done it right out in the open. His job is to get us back in the van and back to the motel, and then hurt us.”
That shocked her into silence. Elijah took a step back, as if he’d surprised himself by saying that, and shook his head. “It’s not your business, like I said. I’m sorry I got you into it. Look, just show me the back way out, and I’ll go.”
“Go where? Back to the van?”
“I don’t have much choice,” he said. “They’ve got all my money, my clothes, everything I own. I have to go back.” He looked bleak, but braced, she thought, for what he saw as inevitable. “It’s not like they tell you in the ads. They tell you you’ll be selling magazines with lots of travel. See the country, that kind of thing. What they don’t tell you is that the second you sign up, they own your ass. They take your phone. They only give you enough money to eat, when you get to eat at all. They search you every night to make sure you haven’t hidden anything. And if you screw up—” He took in a deep breath. “I just have to go back, Hop
e.”
“What? You can’t. My God, it’s slavery! You can’t go back to that! You have to—you have to tell the police!”
He was already shaking his head. “It’s not that simple. Just—look, is there a back way out of here? I have to go back. I’ve got my reasons.”
“Your stuff? You can get new stuff. Elijah, I can lend you the money!” She stared at him, and for a long moment she was sure he wouldn’t answer her; a muscle clenched and unclenched in his jaw, and then he stepped very close to her and bent down. She felt the warm radiance of his skin through her shirt. He smelled like oak and sweat and tea, something that tingled all the way down through her body. It felt like he’d kiss her, and she was ready for that; she was aching for it, actually. Those soft, full lips were so close she could almost taste them.
But he held her inches away.
“It’s not about my stuff. Tell me how to get out,” he whispered. “Please don’t make me insist. I don’t want to hurt you, Hope. Not ever.”
Her breath bottled up in her lungs, and she felt faint again, not from blood sugar but from sheer fear. It was the way he said it, slowly and calmly, that made her understand that he meant it. Every word.
Especially when he reached down and lightly pressed his fingers around her injured wrist. Just enough to remind her of the ache.
“Why are you doing this?” She didn’t mean to say it out loud because she knew he was serious about his threat, but it came out all the same. You can’t hurt me. You just helped me. But had he? Really? Maybe he’d just been using her the entire time. Maybe that open door hadn’t meant anything after all.
“I just have to,” he said again. Underneath that calm there was something else, something she didn’t understand. “Just tell me: is there a back way out of here?”
“Yes. There’s another door through there,” she said, and nodded toward a shadowed hallway on the other side of the long banks of blinking servers that ran the IT behind the Media Center, and most of the classrooms in the building. It was cold in here, on behalf of the delicate computer parts, and she shivered as he looked at her directly. “It’ll sound an alarm when you push the bar, though. And there are cameras outside the door.”
“Cameras,” he repeated. “Yeah, of course there are. We probably got caught on them coming in here, didn’t we? So they’ll know it was you who got me inside.”
“They would anyway. I used my code.” Her voice had gone almost as soft, almost as even as his. “Don’t worry about me. Please don’t do this, Elijah. I know you don’t want to go with him, and I know you don’t want to hurt me.” She knew, even as she said it, that it was true … she could feel the struggle in him, see it in the play of muscles beneath the skin. “I’m already involved, right? Whatever happens. It’s my choice now.”
He let out a slow breath. He was still holding her injured wrist, but gently now, and his thumb stroked over the forming bruises. “What are you, crazy? You don’t even know me.”
“That’s true, I don’t.”
“I already told you I’m basically a con man. Hell, I tried to take your money for magazines that never would have arrived, you know that, right?”
“I suppose I did. But I wasn’t buying the magazine. I was buying—time with you, I guess.”
“That’s the con, Hope. I’m selling you the fantasy that you’re going to get to know me, but you won’t. And then you’re out the money. I told you, I’m not who you think I am.”
She laughed, just a little, and it sounded bitter. “You don’t know me at all, either. You think I’m one thing, but—” She ran out of words, because it was too big to say, even now. Even here. The tears were burning in her eyes again, and it was the wrong time to break down, no matter how good it would have felt to cry in his arms. He would have put his arms around her, she knew that. He would have given her his shoulder and his shirt would have mopped up her tears, and maybe, just maybe, some of the misery would have finally gone away.
But she couldn’t cry. Not now. He’d take it the wrong way.
“Hope, please listen to me,” he said. “I have to go back. It’s not for my stuff. It’s because—the way this works is that if one of us leaves, the others get punished. Their money disappears, food gets withheld. Sometimes worse. I have friends back there, and I can’t abandon them—especially one of them. I wish I could, believe me.”
“Oh God,” she said. “You can’t be serious. I said it was like slavery but it really is, isn’t it? How bad does it get?”
For answer, he unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. Then the next button, and the next. Beneath it was smooth skin … and then discoloration.
The bruising started halfway down his chest, in vivid red blotches; the ones on his stomach were older, blue and green. Hope caught her breath and, without thinking, reached out to put her palm against the injuries, a gentle touch that she meant as sympathy.
Even that light touch must have hurt him, because he flinched. His eyes closed. In that moment, he looked so much younger than she did. Than she felt. His skin felt as if it was shimmering with heat beneath her palm, and she felt angry for him, and so very sorry. “This is evil,” she said. “Elijah, this is evil what they’re doing to you. You can’t go back. If it was this bad before, what will they do to you now that I made trouble like this?”
“I can take it,” he said, and pulled his shirt back together with a quick tug. “There’s this other girl in the crew, she’s young. Really young. Her name’s Avita, and … she’s pregnant. There’s no telling what Solomon will do, and I can’t run off and leave her to take any kind of punishment, can I?”
Oh my God, she thought, and the second thought to hit her was, is it his baby? She almost blurted that out, but she wasn’t sure he’d tell her even if it was. She didn’t know what to say, or what to do. He was right, he couldn’t just abandon that girl, whether it was his baby or not … but she couldn’t let him go back to that, either. Not without some kind of a plan for how to make it better.
“Let me call the police,” she said, and pulled out her phone. He closed one hand over hers, stilling it. There was that strength again, precise and controlled.
“No,” he said. “No cops. Can’t do it, Hope.”
If he wouldn’t go to the police, she didn’t know how she could help him. Think of something, she told herself. Just … think! But it wasn’t working. She felt utterly helpless.
And then she heard the doorknob jiggling outside the room.
“Oh God,” Elijah whispered, and then she felt his body language shift, as if he’d made a final decision. “I’ll go with him. You just—forget you ever met me, all right? Go back to your life. I mean it.”
She had no idea what to say to that—no from the bottom of her soul came to mind—but as she hesitated, she realized that whoever was at the door wasn’t trying to break in. She could hear code beeps as they punched buttons.
The bald thug chasing them wouldn’t have a code, and if someone did have a code, they’d wonder what the two of them were doing hiding here in the dark.
Well, there was one way to explain that.
She grabbed Elijah, pulled him close, and kissed him.
For a second he felt wooden, as if he was too surprised to respond at all, and then his body altered, flowed against hers, and those fabulous soft lips came alive too … fever-hot, damp, and best of all, expert. His mouth parted and his tongue stroked and found entrance, and yes, yes he did taste like tea, like tea and strange spices and danger and wonder, and she hardly paid any attention to the door opening because this, this was so much more interesting.
The light blazed on, red through her tight-shut eyelids, and she heard someone laugh and say, “Oh, shit, occupied. Sorry, dude.” And then the light flicked off, the door slammed again, and it was just her and Elijah in the dark, surrounded by the firefly blinking of a hundred server lights. His arms were around her now, holding her closer and closer, and she felt all the heat in her body drain into the center, then flo
od down, warming her from the inside in red/gold bursts of pleasure. She reached up and ran her fingers through his soft hair, something she’d wanted to do from the moment she’d seen him, and skimmed down the long, strong curve of his cheekbones and into the hollows of his dimples. The slight burn of resistance from the beginnings of stubble made her shiver all over.
He made a sound into her mouth without breaking the kiss, and she knew it was all about hunger and need and want, and she felt the same echo inside her, in all the damp, dark places she hadn’t known were so very empty. A surge of desire stormed her defenses and overwhelmed all her good sense, and if she had a thought of I don’t even know him, I just met him, it was swept away on the white-water rush of sensation.
His hands slid up her sides, fitted around the curve of her waist, and pulled her closer. Closer. These were not the same gentle, deliberately polite hands he’d put on her before; these had purpose. Intent. She melted from the inside out and felt combustion ignite fires under his palms.
I’m a good girl, she thought. Then that rushed away, too, as unimportant as any other objection that might try to surface beneath the tidal sweep of pure, animal sensation.
There wasn’t much sound after that—the frantic kisses, the hiss of fabric on fabric as they moved together. Somehow, she was against the wall next to a server bank; the heat coming off of the metal registered only as a pale shadow of the intense sensation of Elijah’s body pressing on hers, the friction of cloth between them, the tingling, burning ache of her hard nipples beneath the suddenly confining bra. She let herself press against him, a constant grinding that let him know more than words that she was saying yes. God, yes.
She felt a tiny stab of panic when she felt his hands playing with the buttons on her shirt, but she fought it back as he pulled away enough to whisper, “Mind if I take this off—”
“One step at a time,” she managed to say. It was the last shred of self-control she had left. If he’d simply grabbed the shirt and pulled it open, she would have just abandoned all defenses, which was crazy, but she knew she was standing on the verge of that kind of surrender.