Brightest As We Fall

by Cleo Peitsche

  They slammed to a stop. Jason had to straight-arm against the dashboard to stay in his seat. The strap on the duffel bag snapped tight around his wrist. Jason unwound the strap, then tossed the bag into the rear seat.

  DeeAnn unclenched her fingers from around the steering wheel—they hadn’t budged from that prim earlier position—and lifted them several inches.

  “Holy crap,” she said. “My hands can’t stop shaking. It’s like there’s an earthquake.”

  “You were amazing,” Jason told her as he reached over and shifted the car into park.

  He knew from experience that talking about what had happened was often a good cure for the shock of having done or seen something traumatic, but he couldn’t afford to play therapist at the moment.

  “I’m gonna walk around, and you slide over,” he said.

  They switched places. DeeAnn buckled her seatbelt; Jason supposed it made her feel more secure. She didn’t tell Jason to buckle his, but after a moment, he did.

  He stomped the gas and the car took off, spraying gravel.

  Hognose would have spread a description of the car by now. Every Jack Rebel in the area would be looking for them. Jason needed traffic to blend into. He drove as fast as was safe, maybe even a little faster.

  The paved road seemed to come out of nowhere. He swung left, tires screeching. It soon fed into an actual street with lampposts and small houses.

  Jason switched on the headlights. This wasn’t the way they’d arrived, and he wasn’t sure where he’d missed the turn. If he heard motorcycles, he could pull into a driveway and cut the engine.

  So far, everything remained quiet.

  A night bus heading for the L-Street terminal rolled through a stop sign. Jason followed it. A few blocks later, he caught the name of a street he recognized from earlier. It was enough to orient him.

  He spared a glance at DeeAnn.

  Jason’d had his fair share of girlfriends. He’d never cheated on them. Well, there had been some misunderstandings, women who thought that when he said “I want to see other people,” he really meant “Let’s talk about seeing other people.”

  Despite that, he’d never had a bad breakup. No woman had ever stormed into his bedroom to drag his clothing into the street, to douse the lot in kerosene. Things tended to taper off. Messages went unanswered, then unread. He didn’t give false hope. Hookups were fun. Less fun, lately, but better than the alternative, the headache and drama.

  DeeAnn struck him as the kerosene type. The way she’d talked back to the man at the farm. Just now, with the Jack Rebels. Where the hell did that fire come from? It intrigued him. Not that he planned to find out, because more drama was the one thing he absolutely didn’t need.

  “Almost home free,” he said, sensing that DeeAnn could use reassurance.

  He merged onto the highway. Now they were anonymous. Invisible.

  Jason laughed and slapped the steering wheel. He’d spanked the Jack Rebels twice in a day.

  “Don’t get hysterical on me,” DeeAnn said, and she sounded steadier. “I don’t want to slap you while you’re driving. Good thing you knew Leo, huh?”

  “I don’t really know him. He went to school with AJ, but he’s not a mole,” Jason said. “I made that up.”

  “Unbelievable.” DeeAnn shook her head. “How did you know it would work?”

  “It was a guess. The Jack Rebels are paranoid. It’s part of their culture. Their meetinghouses are bugged.”

  “Bugged? By the cops?”

  “By Big Dax. The leader of the Jack Rebels. His spying is an open secret, but don’t tell anyone.” Jason winked.

  She snorted.

  “I’ve only got one regret about tonight.”

  DeeAnn’s eyebrow went up. Jason didn’t see how high it got because he had to keep his attention on the traffic.

  “One regret about how things turned out,” he clarified. “Big Dax now knows I have the money. Doubt he knows who you are, but he’ll have remedied that by tomorrow morning. And it won’t be long before AJ finds out what happened and assumes I double-crossed him.” Or whatever you call it when the person you tried to murder got away and took your money as a consolation prize.

  She inhaled. When she spoke, her voice was tense. “Are you thinking about going to AJ with the money?”

  “No way.” Jason shook his head hard. “I’m fucked. I can’t go back.”

  “How worried should I be?”

  “We just have to be careful,” he said, trying to reassure them both. “I wish I could have killed everyone out there tonight.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jason didn’t think she understood that he meant it literally. Or maybe she did but wasn’t in the mood to think on it. Couldn’t blame her for that.

  “What’s next?” she asked.

  He glanced at the dashboard. “We’ve got a quarter tank of gas. We fill up and drive. When the sun comes up, we’ll ditch the car somewhere convenient, wipe it down.”

  “I need a cell phone.”

  “That’s not a good idea. If you call someone you know, you could be putting them in jeopardy.”

  “There isn’t anyone,” she said flatly. “I want it for the data connection. I wanna get online, see what turns up about the shootout. And to see what I can find out about the stolen car.”

  She thought a stolen piece-of-shit car would make the news?

  “All right. Next rest stop. I could use a coffee.”

  “I dropped some stuff on the floor over there,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure what she meant until she leaned toward him and began groping around in the footwell. The position brought her face close enough to his cock—quickly hardening cock, to be accurate—to make him uncomfortable.

  DeeAnn grunted, and her warm, humid breath trickled through the denim of his jeans. It was only his knee, and Jason wouldn’t have called anything about the situation erotic, but his cock was stiff, and his balls ached. Blame the excitement. All that adrenaline, the rush of the moment.

  He supposed DeeAnn had never given a blow job doing seventy-five down the highway.

  Much to Jason’s disappointment, DeeAnn sat up. “Keys, wallet, phone.”

  His heart thudded, nothing to do with sex. “Throw that thing out the window. Immediately. It can be tracked by the owner.”

  “I was thinking something a little different. Any messages that come in, we’ll be able to read them. Or part of them.”

  “No self-respecting criminal allows message previews on the lock screen. Throw it out the window. End of discussion.”

  A truck rattled past, heading the other direction. Jason had started to roll down DeeAnn’s window, but he stopped.

  “Hold up.” He had a better idea.

  He exited at the first bidirectional rest stop. Finding a pickup heading back the way they’d come was easy.

  Tossing the phone into the pickup bed without DeeAnn seeing? Difficulty level plus a thousand.

  In the end, he tasked her with buying two burner phones, one for each of them. Jason still had his old phone. He was keeping it for the contacts, in case of an extreme emergency. But he also wanted to call AJ at some point. Ask him why he’d done it. Try to get information.

  But not before Jason was far, far away.

  “These phones suck,” DeeAnn said. They were on the highway again. “I can’t believe how slow the network is.”

  “You get what you pay for. We’ll upgrade in a couple of days if need be.” Man, he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  In a couple of days, he planned to be well on his way to a mountain range on the other side of the country. He hadn’t yet decided exactly where.

  “So… The good news is that Timothy Swinton has a Twitter account.”

  Swinton. Oh, the name from the car registration. “You and I have very different definitions of good news. Who cares? What’s the bad news?”

  “He’s upset about the ‘assholes’ who stole his car.”

  “After you l
eft him money? Fuck that guy.” Jason couldn’t keep a straight face.

  “Maybe he didn’t find the money yet.” She chewed her lower lip. “Or maybe he didn’t appreciate someone stealing his car.”

  DeeAnn typed furiously on the phone for several minutes. Jason was curious. He wasn’t going to ask, though—if they started down the road of sharing stuff, it wouldn’t end anywhere good.

  But maybe she was doing something dangerous. Jason couldn’t think of what that might be, but DeeAnn was nothing if not inventive.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Setting up a new Twitter profile.”

  “That’s your priority?” he asked, incredulous. He’d never seen the appeal of social media. It was like self-imposed homework.

  “Don’t judge.” Her tone was slightly testy. “Anyway, I sent Timothy a message, letting him know to check the pocket of his suitcase.”

  Jason was speechless.

  DeeAnn resumed tapping on the phone.

  “Stop,” he said. “You are the worst criminal I’ve ever met.”

  “Because I’m not a criminal. And might I remind you that I saved your life.”

  “You didn’t. I would have escaped. They never could have caught me in the woods.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  “Because I know.” He shot her an irritated glance. “Is there anything you won’t argue about?”

  “I only argue when I’m right.”

  Jason exhaled loudly.

  He’d never met anyone like DeeAnn before. Probably there was no one else like her in the world. Thank goodness.

  He zoned out, replaying what had happened with the Jack Rebels. Talk about a mix of extreme good luck and extreme bad luck.

  “Hey,” he said, realizing something. “How did you get away from Leo?”

  “He hit me.” Her tone was casual, like it was no big deal. “I introduced my knee to the family jewels.”

  Jason winced. “Good play,” he said. Then, even though she seemed more than fine, he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “When he bent over, I kneed him in the chin, and he passed out.”

  “Good.” It was the equivalent of an uppercut to the jaw. But DeeAnn hadn’t answered his question. “How are you holding up?”

  “Exhausted. Sore. I guess I’ll have bruises.”

  And Jason guessed anyone who saw them together would assume he was responsible. Those kinds of suspicions went along with being a big, tattooed guy.

  “Oh!”

  Jason almost swerved. “Don’t scream for no reason.”

  “I didn’t scream. Timmy wrote back to say he would check the suitcase.” She tapped on the phone. “He found the money and… Oh.” She sighed.

  “And what?”

  “He’d already called the police about the stolen car. He says we overpaid him.”

  “Woman, you can’t know how surreal this is becoming.”

  “He says there’s a hotel loyalty card in the glove box, and it’s got two nights’ free stay loaded on it. We’re welcome to—”

  “Ain’t happening. Even you can’t be that illogical.”

  “Ignoring the childish insult—”

  “You don’t have to ignore it.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said loudly, talking over him. “I’ll tell Timmy it’s not necessary. We’d better ditch this car, huh?”

  Jason nodded.

  “After we’re safely away, I’ll tell him where it is. That way he can pick it up.”

  “Perfect. He can CashOut my money back.”

  “I don’t respond to grumpiness,” DeeAnn said primly. “And you decided it’s coming out of my cut, so why do you care?”

  “Let’s play a game. Let’s see who can be quiet the longest.” As soon as the words left Jason’s mouth, his guts knotted. Sadness wrapped around him. It wasn’t until several miles later that he realized why. The “keep quiet game” was something his parents used to do on long car trips, when he and Katie wouldn’t stop bickering.

  He didn’t like how all these memories kept rising to the surface. Some things were better left buried.

  “Tell me about yourself,” DeeAnn said, yanking him back through the years.

  Jason would have ignored her, but now his thoughts were jumbled, his defenses lowered as he struggled against the unwanted memories. His instinct was to say something mildly amusing and then change the subject, but he found himself asking, “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. What made you decide to be a criminal?”

  That wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to think about. He grunted instead of answering.

  “When you were five, did you insist on being the one to hold up the bank when you played cops and robbers?”

  So it was going to be like that. “Next question.”

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  “Next question.”

  “Um… Do you prefer doggy style or girl-on-top?”

  He felt his eyebrows shoot up. When he glanced over, DeeAnn was grinning.

  Damn. Maybe she would have been a good prostitute after all. His mood darkened at the thought of her performing sex acts out of desperation. How long before her sweet-tinged and strangely optimistic cynicism gave way to bitterness, blackness, and distrust?

  “I don’t like this game,” he said.

  “It’s not a game. We’re stuck with each other for a few days, and I’d like to know a bit more about you.”

  “And my favorite sexual position made the list?”

  “You weren’t answering my other questions.”

  “What made you decide to be a criminal?” he asked.

  “A criminal?”

  “Prostitution is illegal. Or didn’t you know?”

  DeeAnn shifted toward the window. “I guess I didn’t think about it like that. I was more worried about if I’d be able to go through with it.”

  “Could you have?”

  “Well, I think most little girls don’t fantasize about being prostitutes when they grow up. Something happens, and then it doesn’t seem like such a bad option.”

  “There are people who like it,” Jason said. “I don’t think you’re one of them.”

  “Why’s that?” She sounded miffed.

  “A hunch,” he said, “based on having known a lot of sex workers.”

  “Hm.” Her hand touched his thigh, the pressure so light that he didn’t even realize it until her fingers curved over the muscle above his knee and tightened.

  “What are you doing?” he asked huskily, trying to tamp down the arousal surging through him.

  Instead of answering, she slid her palm upward, slowly and smoothly inching toward his very awake cock. He blinked a few times to keep his eyes focused on the highway, on the other vehicles.

  “Do you like this?” DeeAnn asked. Her own voice had turned seductive, and despite the road noise, he heard the hitch in her throat. If he looked at her, he was certain he’d find her cheeks flushed, her pupils dilated.

  “Of course I like it,” he said. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “And what about this?” Her fingertips stroked little circles upward, then scratched lightly on the denim. Still too low.

  Or too damned high. They shouldn’t be doing this at all.

  But he didn’t tell her to stop, didn’t flinch away. He wanted to see how far she’d take it.

  Her fingers continued higher.

  Jason growled through his teeth. The road noise and DeeAnn’s teasing questions faded behind the pounding of his pulse in his ears. His jeans were too tight, and the angle was all wrong, but DeeAnn’s caress cast a magic spell. Each touch on his thigh felt like a stroke along his cock.

  “Can you tell?” she asked, pausing.

  He cleared his throat. “Tell what?”

  “If I’m faking it,” she said with a laugh of delight. “I guess not, since you can’t even follow this conversation.”

>   He dropped one hand to hers, tightened his fingers around her wrist. Not too tight; she could pull back if she wanted.

  “Normally, hand jobs don’t do much for me. But it’d be a shame to send you out there so clueless.”

  “Huh?”

  “My cock’s big, but it’s not thirteen inches down my thigh.”

  “Trust me, no one thinks it is.”

  “You’re really committed for someone who’s just proving a point,” Jason said, and released her arm. “Have you thought this through?”

  She inhaled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m telling you to be careful.”

  DeeAnn retreated to her side of the car. She must have heard the seriousness in his warning, must have understood that if she continued, things between them would change.

  “So… You’ve never paid for sex.”

  He glanced over and saw her hands folded tightly in her lap. One of her thumbs was stroking along the other, and he wondered if she even realized what she was doing.

  “No. As I already told you.”

  “Did you ever date a woman in that line of work?”

  “Did you?” he asked, frustrated.

  DeeAnn sighed. “Do you want to play I Spy?”

  “No.”

  “Great! I’ll go first. I spy, with my little eye, something grouchy.”

  “Either our next car will have a working radio, or I’ll gag you.”

  “Change of topic,” DeeAnn said. “Where are we going?”

  “Why? Will you jump out if you don’t like the destination? If so, that’s where we’re going.”

  “You’re being a dick.”

  Jason thought about that. She was right. “The Jack Rebels have chapters in almost every state, but they keep getting their asses kicked in southern Louisiana. Their presence there is nominal.”

  “Louisiana,” DeeAnn said, disappointed. “It’s so hot. Don’t they have alligators?”

  “You know what’s nice and cool and safe from gators? A shallow grave courtesy of the Jack Rebels. But you’re welcome to suggest a better plan.”

  She drifted asleep not long after. Jason wished he could stop soon, could find a place to buy a car for cash, get the ball rolling on fake identification. But it was after midnight, which wouldn’t have been a problem if he were at home.

  Jason had never felt compelled to play hero. Not even close. And DeeAnn was reminding him why. She needed him, but she slowed him down.