At the last second, I remained in the same lane and watched helplessly as the exit ramp flew past my car.
“Elias?” Bray said from the passenger’s seat, her voice filled with fear.
“Elias, huh?” Anthony probed. I saw him push the gun against her head harder. She closed her eyes momentarily. I was white-knuckling the steering wheel. “Thought your name was John.”
“What does it matter?” I asked. “What the hell is this?”
“What the fuck do you think it is?” Anthony said, laughing.
Cristina was still passed out against her door.
“Look, man, I know how this goes,” I said, but I could hardly look at him. I was far too preoccupied with the gun against Bray’s head. “I’ve got cash on me. Whatever you want. Just please don’t hurt her.”
Bray’s lips were trembling, the only part of her stiff body that was moving. I wanted to pummel this motherfucker to death.
“Pull over up there,” Anthony demanded with the nod of his head, indicating the side of the road.
“All right. All right.” I tried to keep calm. It took everything in me, but I had to keep my head clear. Hopefully he planned to rob us and run off into the woods. But if I even for a moment got the feeling that he was going to shoot us down, I would make a last, desperate attempt. I wasn’t about to let this fucking lowlife shoot Bray without at least trying to stop him.
The car came to a stop and I put it into Park. And I waited.
I was hopeful when I saw headlights blazing toward us from behind, but the lone semi drove right past us, pushing wind against the car.
“Empty your pockets. Wallet. Anything you have on you. Put it on the dashboard.”
“I take it you don’t have a beach house?” I said sarcastically as I did what he told me to do.
“Fuck no,” he said and laughed. “And that car in the parking lot wasn’t mine, either.” He barely looked away from me long enough to say to Bray, “You too. Whatever you have put it on the dashboard.”
I thought about using that split second he looked away from me to grab for the gun, but I couldn’t risk it. It likely would’ve gone off and killed her right there next to me.
There was no saliva left in my mouth. My whole body was stiff and sweating. Aside from getting that gun away from Bray’s head, all I could think about was beating the fuck out of this guy. All I could see was red. I wanted so badly for him to slip up and give me the opportunity to take him down and cave his face in with my fists.
“Now get out,” he demanded, looking right at me.
My heart dropped into my feet then. Was he going to take off in the car with her in it?
“Take the fucking car,” I said, raising my hands up in front of me. “Just let her out.”
“Get. The. Fuck. Out.” He moved the gun to the back of my head now.
I only felt slightly better about that. At least it wasn’t on Bray anymore.
I placed my hand on the door handle carefully, popped it open and stepped out, keeping my hands raised up, my fingers level with the top of my head.
From my peripheral vision, I noticed another set of bright headlights coming toward us off in the distance. My eyes darted to and from it, then to Bray, still sitting in the front seat. Cars sped by on the other side of the freeway, but it was too dark for anyone in them to see what was going on.
“Let her out,” I said as I stepped around to the grass on the side of the road. “Please just fucking let her out.”
Cristina’s red-blonde head raised up from being pressed against the window. She rubbed her eyes and dragged the palms of her hands over her face and head like she was trying to wake herself up.
Then she noticed Anthony getting out of the backseat with the gun in his hand, pointed right at me.
“What—Anthony? What the hell are you doing?” Her voice began to rise with alarm as realization set in. “What the fuck! Anthony, no!”
“Shut up!” he yelled at her from outside the car, his eyes still on me as well as the gun. “Now get your girlfriend out. I don’t need more than one bitch flapping her fucking jaws at me the whole ride.”
Without a thought, I swung Bray’s car door open and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her out faster than she could get out herself. The car coming toward us was so close. I pulled Bray against me and then pushed her around behind me. I looked up as the car neared.
“Don’t even think about it,” Anthony said, pointing the gun at me through the side window.
And just like with the last exit ramp, I watched as our last hope for help sped by at seventy miles per hour. Bray was shaking behind me, her fingers digging into my ribs.
“Thanks for the ride, man!” Anthony said just before he jumped behind the wheel and sped away with Cristina screaming curses at him from the backseat.
I watched until what were once my brake lights became tiny red dots in the distance and then blinked out.
“Son of a fucking bitch!” I punched at the air in front of me, wishing it was more than air. Then I turned to Bray. “Oh shit!”
She stood there trembling with her face buried in her hands.
I dropped the anger and became the comfort she needed. “Baby, come here.” I tried to pull her toward me.
“Leave me the fuck alone!” she roared, her hands falling straight down at her sides. She took several steps back farther into the grass. I followed. Tears shot from her eyes. “Just… just leave me alone.”
I knew she wasn’t mad at me. She just needed a moment. She’d just had a goddamn gun pointed at the back of her head.
She sat down on the grass, her hands shaking as if she were freezing. I crouched in front of her and rested my hands on the tops of her knees.
“What the fuck are we doing, Elias?” She looked up into my eyes, tears glistened on her cheeks in the bluish dark. “What the fuck are we doing here?”
I sat down fully and held her hands. “We can go home if that’s what you want, Bray, all you have to do is say the word.”
She shook her head no. She wasn’t sure of anything, just as I wasn’t. She asked me what we were doing here, but it was only a moment of realization. She knew that things were so much worse than getting robbed and left on the side of a freeway hundreds of miles away from home. I knew Anthony had little to do with what was going through her mind at that moment. He was just the messenger, a small and insignificant piece of a much larger picture that we were lucky enough to have forgotten all about for just a little while. This situation only brought back to reality the gravity of the bigger situation surrounding it.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said, raising her eyes. “I want to keep going. I just want to keep going.”
“Then that’s what we’re going to do,” I said.
I pulled her over into the throne of my lap and covered her with my arms.
“We have no car. No money. No phones. Fuck, we don’t even have any clothes!” She clutched my fingers, tangling them with hers. “We can’t call the cops. What are we going to do?”
“The beach isn’t far from here,” I said. “The exit we passed is probably about a ten-minute walk. We’ll go back the way we came and stop in at one of the gas stations there and I’ll call my father. I have money in the bank. I’ll have to risk that much at least. We can’t do this without money.”
She turned around halfway at the waist. “No,” she said. “We can’t get our families involved, you know that. They might already know by now why we ran. We can’t risk anything. I’m not going back.”
That look in her eyes told me she was terrified. Bray had been about as scared as one can be when I was with her back on that ridge. But this was a different kind of paralyzing fear. It was as if she had already made up her mind to believe that she was going to go to prison for Jana’s death, no matter what we did or how long we did it. I knew in this moment that I would never be able to talk her into turning back. She was going to run until things got worse, much worse, and until the day she died.
And like I vowed to her and to myself in the beginning, I was going to run with her. Because I fucking loved her. And love makes a person do crazy fucking things.
“I have an idea,” I said.
“What?” Her voice shuddered.
I got to my feet and took her hand, bringing her up with me.
“Come on,” I said and pulled her gently alongside me down the shoulder of the freeway.
We were exhausted by the time we got to the ocean nearly an hour later on foot. Neither one of us ever expected to be hiding out on a beach in Florida to get some sleep, hoping the cops didn’t shine their flashlights in our faces and run us off or haul us to jail.
“I don’t know if I like this,” Bray said, looking all around as we came upon the back of a beachfront hotel. “What if we get caught?”
“We won’t as long as we act like we belong here.”
The beach was empty at this hour, and the hotel was pretty much quiet except for a few of its guests sitting out on their balconies. Bray questioned me when we walked into the hotel and took the elevator up to the third floor and then came back down. I told her we needed a room number and she shrugged it off, not really understanding what for but accepting it. We passed by the pool and an outside shower, and we made our way down a wooden walkway and onto the beach. We lay down on the sand out in the wide open, and Bray curled up next to me.
Not ten minutes later a security officer found us and we got the damn flashlight in our eyes after all. “What are you doing out here?”
I raised myself up from the sand, partially shielding my eyes from the light.
“Just enjoying the ocean,” I said and then pointed at the hotel behind me. “We’re staying in room three forty. Vacationing from Missouri.”
He shone the light around the sand beside us.
“Where’s your room key?” he asked and I panicked a little inside.
I stood up and patted my cargo shorts back and front pretending to be searching for it and realizing it wasn’t there. Bray got up, too.
“Oh crap,” she said. “I probably dropped it by the pool. I’ll go look for it. Be right back.”
“Hurry up,” I called out to her, as she ran barefooted through the thick sand and back toward the hotel.
I had no idea how we were going to get out of this one. The only thing we could really do, I thought at that point, was run like hell. He was just a security guard, after all, and unlike a cop he probably wouldn’t care to chase us far. But I wanted to avoid a chase, even a short one, at all costs. We didn’t need any attention drawn to us. What we needed was a quiet night to ourselves so that we could think about what we were going to do next, because we had literally run out of options. We had nothing. No money. No car. Just the clothes on our backs and each other, and I was worried now more than ever about us being able to go any farther. Even if we got through this minor issue with the security guard, I still didn’t know how we were going to press on. I couldn’t tell Bray yet that I felt like we needed to go home. She was hell-bent on moving forward. She wouldn’t have accepted it. But I began to realize that something more was going on with Bray. Something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it left me with a sense of deeper responsibility, as if she was incapable of being fully responsible for herself. I didn’t want to believe that. Bray was a smart and confident girl, but I started to feel like her reckless decisions no longer mirrored my own. They weren’t based on fear and natural worry, constantly licked by the voice of reason, like mine had been. Her reckless decisions began to seem fueled by something far more dangerous, something devoid of rationality.
I started to think that I was hurting her more than I was helping her, but I wasn’t yet sure what else to do.
I carried on with the security guard, trying to play off my tourist act as smoothly as possible while I waited on Bray. Though waiting on her for what, I didn’t know.
“Where are you from in Missouri?” he asked me.
“Springfield,” I said. “We come here every year.”
He nodded and shone the flashlight around on the sand again, probably looking for evidence of alcohol or drug paraphernalia. He wasn’t a heavyset man, but he was a bit out of shape, with a small beer gut that hung somewhat over his pants. I noticed when he moved the flashlight around, the skin under his bicep jiggled.
“How long are you here for this time?” he asked.
“We’re heading out tomorrow,” I said. “Been here since Wednesday.” I looked thoughtfully at him and added, “I didn’t see you around here last night. We laid out here for a while around this time.”
“I had two days off this week,” he said, and I was a little surprised at how well my improvising had played out. “But you should be careful out here at night. And you can’t be sleeping on the beach.”
“No sir,” I said. “That’s what we have the bed for.” I glanced back at the hotel.
Just then, I saw a figure shrouded by the shadows of the hotel’s massive pool deck, moving toward us. It was Bray and she was carrying something over one shoulder. As she got closer, kicking up sand behind her as she trudged through it, I saw that it was a see-thru mesh beach bag with what looked like a beach towel and other random items inside.
Where the hell did she get that?
I smiled—probably squeamishly—back at the security guard and then shoved my hands into my pockets.
“I’m surprised it didn’t get stolen,” she said.
She stopped next to me, somewhat winded, and reached inside the bag. “Here it is,” she said, holding up a card key to the security guard with the hotel’s name printed on it. “I’m glad you asked about it because I might’ve lost my whole bag over by the pool.”
The security guard shone his flashlight on the card key and then looked us over again.
My confidence in pulling this off shot up a few notches. We stood there in a long, stressful silence waiting on what the security guard would say next.
“Just be careful,” he finally said. “And remember what I said about sleeping out here.”
I smiled back at him. “Definitely.”
Bray and I let out our breath once he was out of earshot. We watched him until his dark figure disappeared around the side of the hotel building. We thought we were in the clear, at least for the time being. We sat down again, side-by-side in the sand, and looked out at the black ocean.
“So where did you get the bag?”
“Found it by the pool.” She laughed. “A serious stroke of luck. And we sure needed it, after everything that has gone wrong.”
Just as she said that, we heard voices approaching us from behind.
“That’s her!” a girl said.
Bray and I both knew the group of three were talking about us and coming right toward us. Even if we hadn’t been the only other two on the beach, we still would’ve known. I looked down at the bag and then our eyes met. We stood up together just as two girls and the tall tattooed guy walked up.
“There it is,” the blonde-haired girl said, pointing at the bag beside Bray’s feet. “That’s my bag.”
And that was how we met Tate Roth, part savior, part… something else.
Chapter Thirteen
Bray
I grabbed the bag from the sand and held it out to the girl. “Sorry about that,” I said. “I was just borrowing it.” Her hair was so damn long, tumbling like a blonde wave down her back and nearly past her waistline.
She snatched it from my hand and began digging inside to see if I’d stolen anything. The brown-haired girl standing next to her looked at me once unemotionally, but she never said anything. “Borrowing it?” the girl said with harshly narrowed eyes. “No, bitch, it’s called stealing.”
I stepped toward her in a challenging fashion and Elias put his arm between us.
“I didn’t steal it,” I said through my teeth. “We just… needed it.” She was completely in the right, but I couldn’t help but snap back after what she called me.
>
“Look, we apologize,” Elias said, surrendering. “Bray found it by the pool. The security guard was on our asses about being out here.”
The tattooed guy listened to all of us quietly, a faint smile resting in his hazel eyes. A part of me got the feeling he thought the whole thing was amusing.
“Don’t ever touch my shit—”
The guy hushed her by gently pushing her back a few steps with his muscular arm.
“It’s obvious what’s going on here,” he said in a pretend authoritative tone. “These two are trying to slum it on the beach.” He grinned and looked me over once before turning to Elias. “The question is why. Homeless or stranded with no other place to go. Or just looking to fuck in the sand. It is, after all, one of the things on the universal bucket list.”
“Tate, let’s just go before I beat this bitch’s ass,” the blonde-haired girl said.
I pushed my way past Elias’s arm and went toward her. “You can fuckin’ try,” I said mere inches from her face.
We were both dragged away from each other. Elias had his hands around my upper arms.
“Calm down, Jen,” the guy said, setting the blonde back on her feet. He laughed under his breath and added with his mouth on her ear, “Damn, baby, save it for me later.”
I yanked my arms out of Elias’s hands angrily, but I stood there rather than going after Jen again. Then Elias grabbed my hand and started walking with me away from them. I bent over at the last second to snatch my flip-flops from the sand.
“Hey, man, wait!” the guy said, and we stopped. “No harm done. Look, tell me what’s going on. Maybe we can help you out.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Elias said and started walking off again. “We’ve already been ‘helped’ by someone who relieved us of our car just over an hour ago.”
“No shit?” the tattooed guy said, coming around in front of us. We stopped. “Are you fuckin’ for real—someone stole your car?”
“Yeah,” Elias said. “So we’re fresh out of trust. But thanks anyway.”
“Help them?” Jen shouted from behind. “Tate, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me! They steal my stuff and now you want to help them?” She slung the bag over her shoulder, grabbed the quiet girl by the elbow and started tramping through the sand back toward the hotel. “Asshole!” She said and gave the guy the finger.
Song of the Fireflies Page 9