by Kara Hart
“Julia should stay back,” I say. She doesn’t protest.
Gabe looks at her and whispers something. She nods her head and starts bawling. He holds her and looks over at me, with a tired expression. He nods.
What I wouldn’t give to have Soren back here with me, holding me in his strong arms, pulling me in close. I wish we could enjoy our homes together. Please, if there is anything out there… help him. Help him get home in one peace.
Silence. All I hear is silence and the muffled cries of Julia. For the next twenty minutes, that’s all that surrounds me. No answers. Nothing. And then it hits the third hour mark.
“I’m getting the hell out of here,” I tell Gabe. “I can’t sit around any longer. Either you’re coming with me or you’re staying here. It’s your choice, but I’m out.”
He looks at Julia. She wants him to stay, but he clearly wants to find his brother. “I won’t be long,” he tells her. “I love you.” She nods and he kisses her forehead.
“Let’s go,” he tells me. We leave the motel and head back toward Mary’s house.
“What if he’s—” I stop myself before finishing the sentence. I shouldn’t get that dark. He’s fine.
“Dead? What if he’s dead? Is that what you were going to ask me?” he asks.
“I guess so,” I whisper. My throat is dry when I try to swallow. My nerves are alert and erratic. Soren is strong. He’s a survivor. He’s got that type of luck on his side, at least. But can it last forever?
“If he’s dead, we’ll have to tread very lightly. They’ll be on the hunt for the rest of us, no doubt,” he says. “But he’s not dead. He’s alive. I feel it. Let’s call that brotherly intuition.”
I don’t know how to feel. All I know how to do is push my body forward and look at the ground in front of me. He feels it too. I can sense that much. For the rest of the walk, we don’t say a word. There’s only the crunch from the twigs and leaves below our feet.
Finally, we get there. It takes some quiet footsteps, but we make our way inside, only to find two men dead. “No sight of Soren anywhere,” I say. “Fuck, I have to get out of here.”
I run outside and nearly vomit. “What’s the matter?” Gabe asks. “You’ve never seen a dead body before?”
“Fuck off, Gabe,” I say.
He smiles, trying to be as lighthearted as he can, but it’s futile. This is as dark as it gets. This is officially the worst day of my life.
“Look,” Gabe points. “Over here. There’s a trail of blood.”
“Soren!” I scream. “Do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “But we should follow it. Maybe we’ll find him.”
“There are more of them out there. Aren’t there?” I ask. “There weren’t only two of them.”
“There’s one,” he says. “Keep your eyes peeled.”
We walk until we get back to the roads into town. The trail of blood mysteriously disappears at the edge of the forest. “Where do we go from here?” I ask Gabe.
He looks both ways and takes a breath. We’ve both been walking for at least two hours and it’s completely exhausting. “I’m going to be honest with you. I have no fucking clue,” he says. “I feel dead.”
“Me too,” I sigh.
“Maybe we should head back,” Gabe says. “This is getting too difficult to follow. If he’s alive, he’ll find us.”
“I can’t just turn around,” I say. “I need to know he’s okay.”
“You really love him, huh?” he asks.
“I do,” I tell him.
“Even after going through all of this shit?” he laughs. “You’re crazy.”
“You’ve never met anyone who makes you want to go through anything just to feel them again, or breathe in their scent, or laugh with them at all of their bad jokes?” I ask.
“Julia,” he nods. “But I don’t think she’d do the same for me.” He laughs and stares off into the distance for answers.
“Soren is like that for me. It’s an urge that aches inside my bones. When I’m without him, my stomach turns with pain. When he’s near me, I feel like the world is complete,” I say. “Even after going through all of this, it honestly just makes me want him more. And when I see him, I’m going to go crazy on him. I’m going to let him—”
“Alright, alright!” Gabe laughs. “That’s my brother you’re talking about.”
Footsteps sound behind us. “You talking about me again?”
I turn around and nearly fall over. “Soren!” I scream.
“Happy to see me?” He smiles. God, he has no idea.
“You bastard,” I cry and throw my arms around him. Our lips collide and we kiss. I breathe in and am instantly filled with comfort. “My bastard.”
“You guys are fucking weird,” Gabe laughs.
Soren flips him off. “God, I missed you so much,” he says, cradling my head. He kisses me again and smiles. “I’m sorry it took so long. Mary. She got hit in the arm.”
“Mary got hit?!” I’m shocked. She’s too old to take a bullet.
“Oddly enough, I think she’s going to be okay. I don’t get it either, but the doctors seemed confident. She had me worried for a while. She was saying her goodbyes to me,” he says.
“What’s in the briefcase?” Gabe asks him.
Soren holds it up and looks at it. “What? This old thing? It’s nothing.” He smiles.
“Tell me,” Gabe says. “I know there’s something good in that thing.”
Soren turns serious. “Half of this is yours, Gabe. Mary kept it for us. She wanted to give it to us when we were together. It’s from Dad.”
“Dad? Bullshit,” Gabe says. “Dad never gave us anything in his life.”
“He did,” Soren says. “Apparently he had been saving some of his earnings throughout the years. There’s 800,000 in here, half of which goes to you, brother. The other 400,000 goes to Emma. My fiancée.”
“Wait, a second,” Gabe takes a step forward and looks confused as hell. “You just dropped a load of bombs on me, bro. None of this is making any sense. You’re getting married too? What in the hell is going on here?”
Soren opens the briefcase and sure enough, there’s stacks upon stacks of money. Gabe looks at me and I look right back at him. We’re on the same page here.
Soren continues. “I didn’t believe it either, but Mary assures me it wasn’t her. It was Dad. Every time he got some money, he gave a portion to Mary. The bastard probably didn’t trust himself to deliver it to us, so he had her hold it for him. This covers my shop. This covers everything. I can open up something new. I can finally start over,” he says. “As for this beauty here, she’s my fiancée now. I proposed to her right before they started firing.”
“Very romantic,” I say.
“Man, you guys really are weird,” he says. “Man, I can put that money into my business. Goddamn, Jim! You ended up coming through after all!”
Soren looks at me now, with the biggest smile he’s ever shown. “We can do whatever we want, baby. It’s not millions, but it’s a start.”
“I have another favor to ask you,” I tell him.
“Anything,” he says. “Just name it and it’s done.”
“I want to go back to Los Angeles. I want to be closer to my family,” I tell him, feeling my heart start to race again.
“Seriously? But you haven’t even started the job at Johannson Publishing,” he says.
“I know,” I sigh. “I miss my mom. I miss the warm ocean breeze. I miss the city, which I know you hate, but it’s really wonderful. You’d like it and there are so many opportunities to run an auto shop out there.”
“Hm,” he thinks to himself. “I’ve put you through enough out here, I guess.”
“Is that a yes?” I ask him.
But before he can respond, there’s a rustle in the bushes and a loud cry of pain. It takes one turn of the head to see the barrel of a gun explode in my direction.
Soren
Death. De
struction. Pain and suffering. That’s been my life in a nutshell. Why the hell should it stop now?
Something pushes me to act. Something inside my bones throws my body into the fire. It’s just the way I’ve been made. It’s in my DNA. I guess my dad passed it down to me. I’m quickly learning, however, that it’s not always a bad thing.
As soon as I see the barrel of his gun, I see his blood dripping onto the leaves below him. The Good Boy himself. “How are you still alive?” I wonder to myself. But there’s no time for quick answers. He pulls the trigger and something clicks inside me.
I scream. I roar. I run and dive straight into the bullet. He tries to fire again, but there are no bullets left in the weapon. The bullet hits my gut and burrows deep into my flesh, ending up near or in my organs. I’m not a doctor and it’s too quick to make a diagnosis, but it’s not fucking good. Still, I have enough adrenaline in my body to kill a thousand wild boars, let alone this one dying loser.
“You’ll regret this,” he says, right before I swing my right hook against his face.
“Is that so?” I ask him, walking forward to his shaking body on the ground. “Well, guess what? You won’t regret anything because you’ll be lying in a casket, buried six feet under the ground.”
I jump onto his body and swing a left hook. Gabe watches with satisfaction, while Emma’s muffled screams echo throughout the forest. I swing down again and again, until he spits teeth out onto the earth’s soil. “You want more?” I ask him.
“You pussy,” he spits.
“Alright then.” I knee him in the gut and he squirms with pain. Blood is leaking from both our guts and there’s not much time before I’ll need to get to the hospital for an operation. “You tried killing my fiancée!” I scream, landing another fist against his face.
He lies on the ground, unable to move at this point. “Speak you bastard! Say your last words!” I scream with all the fury and rage in the world.
“Just kill me,” he says slow and gargled. “End this pain.”
“Pain is part of living. Deal with it,” Gabe says.
I turn to look at Gabe and then I feel it. It’s the cold, sharp feeling of a blade and it enters my thigh and then my side. I fall to the floor with the knife still in me. I look over at the unnamed man and he smiles, looking pale.
“No,” I whisper. “It can’t be.”
I look at Emma, but I can barely see her. Everything has started to blur, twist, and turn. Nothing feels real all of a sudden. This is just some fantasy, isn’t it? I close my eyes and get ready for the other side. I close my eyes and slowly fade away.
“Goodbye, Emma,” I whisper. “And thank you for helping me learn how to be a better person. I’ll always miss you.”
Soren
Blips on the radar. That’s all we are, right? Just little dots, like the fuzz on your television screen. Or the dots of the stars that shine above us, endlessly. Some go out, some are born. But in the end, we all know that time isn’t true reality. It’s just a guiding point, like a sidewalk or the street you grew up on. Like all those stars who have already died, yet we can still see them. Why?
Who cares? All I know is that I’m dead and there’s nothing I can do about it.
To hell with life anyway.
But then I hear her voice, like a distant dream. I struggle to remember what the sound is, even though I know it’s familiar. “Soren,” it says, echoing around me. I twist and turn, trying to find her.
“We’re losing him!” another voice screams. I can’t be sure if any of this is real. I don’t even know if I am real. The Good Boys – they can’t be real, right?
“…stabilizing,” a young woman’s voice says.
More sounds come back to me. I’m not sure of the timeline anymore. When you’re in the state I’m in, limbo, you can’t be sure if a second or an hour has passed. It all sort of blends together in an instant.
I’m not scared of dying. I’m not scared of letting go of everything, of closing my eyes and jumping headfirst into the abyss. It’s what I was meant to do. It’s what I was pushed into.
“Oh, Soren.”
And then the other senses start to come back. Her smell. The way she felt in the Summer. The way that sweet pussy wrapped around my cock…my god.
“He’s back!” a nurse yells.
Eyes open. A flash of bright white lights. Tubes. Lots of tubes and beeping noises. “Fuck me,” I sigh. “Am I in a hospital?”
“Soren!” I see her. Emma. She runs over to my side, as tears fall down her face. “You’re… you’re alive!”
“What the fuck? You all think I was going to die on you?” I ask.
Gabe walks up next to her and smiles. “I told them you were a fighter,” he laughs with joy. Even he’s tearing up.
The doctor rips off her gloves and looks at me sternly. “Actually, you had a thirty percent chance of living. Not the best odds,” she says. “But you pulled through. Congratulations. Now, I’m going to need you to stay away from any stray bullets while hunting.”
“Hunting?” I mutter. Gabe and Emma look at me with hard eyes. I then realize that this hunting business is a lie they made up to get me out of trouble. “Oh, right. Did I at least get anything?”
“Nothing.” Gabe smiles.
“You want to know how long we’ve been in this room waiting for you to wake up?” Emma asks me. I feel her soft hand press against my cheek lightly. I kiss her palm and close my eyes.
“How long?” I ask.
“Three months,” she says. “They put you out the whole time.”
“A fucking coma?” I ask her. “No wonder why I feel like shit. Well, I’m not spending another fucking day in here. This place is the gateway to hell. I’m sure of it.”
I rip out every tube connected to my body. I stand up and the whole bed shakes wildly. “You can’t do that! Sir!” the doctor yells at me, but I ignore her. She ain’t the boss of me.
I stand up and grab a wheelchair. “Wheel me out, strawberry,” I tell Emma.
“Strawberry,” she repeats. “I’ve missed you calling me that.”
“Get ready to hear it for the rest of your life, baby.” I smile.
“Oh yeah?” she kisses me tenderly and I instantly get hard. She reaches down to feel it and smiles. “I guess that’s still working alright.”
“It works,” I assure her. “And you’re getting it tonight. Get ready.”
“Soren, you just got out of a fucking coma,” she says. “We can wait a couple of weeks for you to get better.”
“A couple of weeks?! Fuck no! I’m having you tonight,” I say. I feel like shit and just got out a dense world where space and time don’t exist.
We walk outside and head to the car. Home. We’re really going home. “I never want to experience what I just experienced. Being that close to the edge… it ain’t too fun,” I tell her. She looks tirelessly into my eyes. “I heard your voice. That’s what saved me. You guided me to the light.”
“Soren,” she chokes up. “I love you so goddamn much that it hurts.”
“I’d take a bullet for you any day, baby,” I kiss her and feel her.
“Please,” she laughs. “Do not.”
I laugh with her as she helps me in the car. Today is the first day that I feel like a real human being. I was a bastard with no direction and a lot of talk. I was lost and left my family. But with the help of Emma, I’ve found peace with myself. I’ve finally figured out what it means to be a man. It means caring, loving, and willing to act when everything has gone to shit. Most of all, it means being there for Emma whenever she needs me. That’s my promise to her.
Emma, I’ll always be by your side.
Epilogue: Emma
Three years later…
I wake up with him lying against my side. Correction: he’s not just lying down. He’s awake and his hand is snaking its way up my thigh and toward my—
“Morning strawberry,” I hear him whisper.
I open my eyes and see t
he Los Angeles sun begin to pour into our window. God, I really love it here. I can’t believe he came. “Don’t you have work,” I whisper.
“It’s my shop. I make the hours,” he says, which isn’t particularly true, but I don’t argue with him. “I want to make a baby with you.”
“Excuse me?” I whisper, turning around to face him.
He places his body over me and kisses hard and passionate. I feel the flood of endorphins run through my body. I breathe in and smile. I love this man more than anything. “You heard me,” he says.
“Since when did you start wanting kids?” I ask him.
“Since I woke up and saw that ass shining in front of my face,” I reach in front of me and grab his cock. It’s as hard as they come.
“Jesus, Soren,” I mildly protest, though if he was to reach out and touch me, his hand would be as wet as the splash zone at SeaWorld.
“You don’t want a little one running around, destroying our dream home?” he laughs.
“A boy or a girl?” I ask him.
“Girl,” he says. “Or a boy. Doesn’t really matter much to me. I’ll love them all the same.”
I kiss him and pull away quickly, placing my hand against his chest. “You really want a baby? Like, honestly?”
“A guy wouldn’t joke about something like this,” he says. “I really want to start a family with you, Emma. It’s crazy how much more I love you with every passing day.”
I kiss him and feel his tongue against mine. He pulls back and feels me. He smiles and spreads my wetness all around his massive cock. He’s warm. He’s so fucking warm. His scent washes over me and I’m transfixed by him. Whatever he wants to do, he can do. I want him forever.
He slides his cock inside of me, pushing the whole of his body against me. I’m wide awake now. “Promise me you’ll fuck me like this forever.”
“Until we’re both old and sagging, strawberry,” he says, kissing me again.
It’s the kind of passionate fuck that feels frantic and hurried, yet is slow and hard as can be. When he thrusts inside me, he holds himself there and looks into my eyes. His hands hold my waist and thighs upward as I claw against his hips.