by Noelle Adams
Ashley and Ethan had been sitting in silence for a while—she was feeling drowsy, content, and kind of sweet—so Ashley realized it was time to start another fight.
“Can we stop for lunch soon?”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “It’s not even 11:00 yet.”
“We didn’t have any breakfast. I need sustenance.”
“Do you see any restaurants around?”
They both scanned the scene around them—nothing but grass, rolling hills, and trees. “Do we have any more chips left?” she asked.
Ethan made a throaty noise of irritation. “They’re in the back.”
“I’m hungry,” she demanded, peering at him insistently, trying not to find his exasperated expression appealing.
Ethan kept driving, clenched his jaw, didn’t respond.
Ashley continued staring at him, tapping her fingers on her thigh.
Finally, Ethan let out a loud exhalation of disgust and pulled to the side of the road. Put the truck into park. Turned his head to glower at her. “Go get them. Hurry up.”
So Ashley, having won a battle she didn’t care about, had to get out and retrieve the chips from the back of the truck. She grabbed a bottle of water too.
When she got back in her seat, she gave a long sigh of satisfaction and made a great show of crinkling the chip bag—merely for Ethan’s benefit.
He looked like he wanted to strangle something (someone?), but he silently put the truck back into drive. Hit the gas.
The truck made a couple of jerks, then sputtered a few times. Wheezed into dead silence.
Both Ashley and Ethan just sat there in shock.
Finally, she breathed, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What did I ever do?” Ethan whispered, almost as if he were praying. “What horrible sin did I commit to make me deserve this kind of suffering?”
Clearly he wasn’t talking to her. Ashley would have been perfectly happy to list an endless number of his sins for him, if he happened to have forgotten some of them.
“What could have happened?” she asked. The engine had gone totally dead.
Ethan sighed. “With our luck? How can you even ask? Pretty soon, the truck will probably just explode.”
Ashley randomly glanced at the gauges behind the steering wheel. “We ran out of gas!”
“We did not.”
She reached over his body and tapped on the gas gauge. “Empty. I can’t believe you let us run out of gas.”
Ethan had turned to study the gas gauge, which was clearly displaying an empty tank. He made a strange choking sound. “It’s impossible. I checked the gauge twenty minutes ago. It was just under half a tank.”
“No use making up excuses now.”
“Damn it, Ashley,” Ethan snarled, fisting his hands over the steering wheel. “I’m telling you there’s something wrong with the gauge.”
Since Ashley was quite sure he was telling the truth, she didn’t follow up on that line of argument. “Well, what are we going to do now? There’s nothing around for miles. And no cars to ask for help.”
Ethan sat silently, his face shifting into his focused, intent expression—the one that revealed he was concocting a plan.
She finally asked, “Can we call for help?”
“We can if we have to, but it will give away our location.”
He pulled out his phone, which had been turned off all this time, and was looking at it when Ashley heard a familiar, beautiful sound on the road behind them.
She jumped out of the truck and started waving her arms wildly. Relaxed in relief when the driver of red pickup truck pulled over behind their dead vehicle.
The oldest lady Ashley had ever seen still functioning was sitting behind the wheel. She rolled down the passenger window and called out, “Need some help, hon?”
“We ran out of gas,” Ashley explained, as Ethan got out of the truck as well.
The lady grinned—she was missing two of her teeth. “Hop in. There’s a gas station about ten miles up. Then I’ll drive you back so you can get your truck going again.”
They thanked her and got into the passenger side of her pickup. Ashley was in the middle, and purely out of courtesy, she stayed closer to Ethan than to their ancient Good Samaritan.
So her thigh and Ethan’s were pressed up next to each other. Ashley wasn’t at all comfortable with the feeling. She was even less comfortable when Ethan draped his arm over the back of the seat to give her more room because now it felt like he had his arm around her.
“Got to be careful,” the lady, who had introduced herself as Mabel, was saying. “Don’t want to get stuck in these parts. Nothing around for miles.”
Since they were already well aware of that fact, they made polite noises of acquiescence.
“Young man,” Mabel continued, “You should take better care of your sweetheart here. It might have been hours before anyone happened along. Got to be careful with such precious cargo.”
The precious cargo tried not to giggle, and Ethan made some sort of incoherent mumble in reply. But the look he aimed at Ashley was not one a man would give to his sweetheart.
Deciding teasing him was too much fun to pass up, Ashley leaned over and kissed him on his temple. “He takes real good care of me. He’s my hero, really. But even heroes slip up occasionally and forget to put gas in the tank.”
Mabel seemed to appreciate this display of affection. “I’m sure glad to hear that, missy. Young men these days...they’ve forgotten how to woo a girl. They’ll only do what they have to do to get into a girl’s pants. All about fucking now. No romance anymore.”
Both Ashley and Ethan choked a little at Mabel’s choice of language. Those particular words and that sweet-looking old woman didn’t match at all.
“So don’t make that mistake,” Mabel continued, patting Ashley’s arm. “Don’t give him your body unless he offers the whole package. His heart better be part of the deal.”
Silently, Ashley admitted to herself that that was what she wanted. It was what she’d been waiting for. Even before she’d resolved to go out of her way to be good, she’d always wanted an old-fashioned love.
But Ethan was looking a little irritated at Mabel’s assumptions about him, so Ashley wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to take advantage of that. “To tell you the truth,” she murmured to Mabel, as if in confidence—although she knew quite well that Ethan could hear her. “He’s been making...advances.” She had to swallow over her amusement when she heard Ethan’s grunt of surprise. “But I told him…” Ashley started shaking her finger at Ethan as if she were chiding him. “That without a ring on my finger he’d get nothing from me but a kiss.”
Ethan had his lips pressed together in a delicious expression of repressed rage, so to drive her point home, she leaned over and kissed him again. On the cheek this time. She loved how he tensed up when her lips touched his skin—controlling his annoyance, no doubt.
“Very wise, hon,” Mabel said with an approving nod. “Don’t know what girls are thinking nowadays. Sure, an occasional orgasm is awfully nice.” She seemed completely oblivious to Ethan and Ashley’s dropped jaws. “But an orgasm won’t take care of you when you’re hurt or in trouble, or hold you close when you’re scared at night, or stand by you when no one else will. All an orgasm can do is give you a few seconds of pleasure. Wouldn’t say no to one myself, but want a bit more to go with it.”
Ashley was speechless, stared at Mabel with wide eyes. Tried to think of something else to say that would infuriate Ethan more, but couldn’t seem to get her mind to work. Couldn’t think of anything but Mabel’s eccentric speech.
They were almost to the gas station anyway. As they pulled into the parking lot, for some reason, Ashley felt a heavy poignancy that wouldn’t seem to lift.
***
Now with a tank full of gas, they were soon approaching Indianapolis. It had taken them five days to get there, when it should have taken them about eight hours. Because they were avoidin
g the interstates, they came into the city on the surface roads. And because Gus’s map had only been of Kentucky, they didn’t really know where they were going anymore.
They got really, really lost. Yelled at each other a lot.
They stopped an hour later, and Ashley jumped out to ask for directions. But the directions were so confusing that it took them another hour to figure out how to follow them. They stopped twice more for directions, but no one they talked to seemed to understand how to explain a clear route.
They had stumbled into a less desirable part of town, and Ethan was so frustrated he was gripping the steering wheel like he might rip it off.
“We should have turned right,” Ashley told him, on the verge of either screaming or bursting into tears. It felt like they’d never get out of this horrible maze of a city.
“Right will take us south,” Ethan said coldly. “We don’t want to go south.”
Ashley, who never thought in directions, scoffed, “I don’t care if it’s south. We should have gone right. I’m the one who heard the directions. Maybe we should ask someone else for help.”
“Would you like to ask the nice drug dealer on the corner there?” Ethan asked silkily. “I’m sure the gentleman would be very happy to talk to you.”
She hated it when he spoke in that tone of voice. She much preferred his roars of rage. She tried to keep her tone equally biting as she said, “Maybe you should talk to him instead. He’s your kind of guy, after all. Trading in illegal substances.” Wow! It sounded even meaner than she had intended.
Ethan didn’t respond right away. Then asked gruffly, “What the hell is going on with you today?”
Ashley turned and stared at him. Suddenly got tense. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what happened overnight? Why do you seem to hate me again today?” They were stopped at a red light, so he was studying her carefully.
“What makes you think I ever stopped hating you?”
“All right, let’s just say you seemed to hate me less in the last few days. But today, we’ve suddenly become enemies.” He reached out and tipped her chin up with his fingers. “I want to know why.”
There was no way that Ashley could tell him. She had to defend herself. Couldn’t start feeling mushy or swoony or weak. She would be hurt if she let her feelings grow any stronger.
This was self-preservation. And, for that, you sometimes had to fight dirty. So she said something she knew was absurd, but that she was sure would get him off of her back. “I was starting to think that you might be getting...too interested, so I was trying to subtly give you a hint that I could never have feelings for someone like you.”
Ethan made a strange noise. Ashley couldn’t interpret it. She peered at his face, but it was as hard and unyielding as concrete. “Is that what you thought?” he asked softly. His eyes were totally blank.
She felt horrible. Would give anything to take her words back.
She tried to ease their way out of the situation by saying, “So I was wrong. I just misread things. Clearly you aren’t interested.” This much at least was the truth. “So I’m sorry I was crabby. Can we forget the whole stupid thing?” Her voice was almost natural, quavering only a little bit.
“Of course,” Ethan replied, in his cool, detached tone. The one she hated the absolute most. “It’s forgotten.”
The light had turned green, so he was looking at the road in front of him. Ashley couldn’t see his eyes. Couldn’t read his expression. Had a feeling things weren’t really forgotten.
She wouldn’t forget them anyway.
They eventually found their way through Indianapolis and started taking country roads once more. They stopped at a little local restaurant—nothing more than hole in the wall—to eat supper, and then kept going, trying to get as far as they could before dark.
Their truck seemed to be holding up well. They hadn’t had any further delays. Empty roads were waiting before them. Everything was going smoothly for once.
Except they had barely spoken ten words to each other since they’d left Indianapolis.
When the silence threatened to suffocate her, Ashley said the only thing she could think of. “At least the truck seems to be making it.”
Ethan didn’t look over at her. Stared at the horizon, at the shifting colors in the dusk. “The truck’s a keeper.” The same words he’d said last night. But for some reason they sounded almost bittersweet now.
Ashley felt a tear leak out of her eye and hoped the growing dark would help to hide it. This was all wrong. Everything had changed between them. And it was because of her own cruel words. “Someone like you,” she had said to Ethan. She knew how he’d interpret it. Someone dark, dubious, dangerous—somebody bad...like him.
She had hurt him. Hit him where he was the most vulnerable. She’d known how to strike out against him and used her knowledge of his nature to her advantage.
It was self-preservation, and maybe one day she’d be glad for what she’d done. But right now it was all she could do to keep her composure. She pretended to scratch her forehead and surreptitiously brushed away the tear.
He hadn’t looked at her in over an hour, so she was pretty sure that he didn’t notice.
She had done what she needed to do to keep her heart from being broken.
Screw it all. Anything was better than this. “Ethan,” she began, embarrassed at the painful crack in her voice.
He turned quickly to look at her. Opened his mouth to speak. But before any words came out, headlights approached them from behind, so quickly that Ashley gasped from sudden terror.
Ethan stepped on the gas as a familiar dark sedan roared up on their tail.
Neither Ethan nor Ashley questioned who it was, for even a moment. They both realized that they’d finally been found.
Their truck picked up some speed as Ethan floored the gas pedal, but it was an old vehicle, and it could only go so fast.
There was no way they could outrun the sedan. No way to hide. No way to escape. The bad guys were going to get them.
But Ethan was still trying to accelerate as much as he could. When the sedan pulled up beside them, he tried to push it off the road by steering into it.
The cars impacted with a jerky thud, but both stayed on the road.
Then the man in the passenger seat—the cute one Ashley had seen yesterday—aimed a gun out of the window. Ashley had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. She huddled down into her seat as she heard the shots ring out, although he wasn’t aiming at her or at Ethan.
The truck swerved wildly as the cute guy shot out one of the tires. Ethan tried for a minute to hold it on the road as he gradually slowed the truck down, but as a few more bullets were fired into the dark, Ashley felt the truck veer off of the road.
They were still going too fast, and Ashley screamed as she saw a grove of trees directly in front of them. They couldn’t stop in time. Couldn’t turn. They just crashed into the trees.
Ashley’s neck snapped back as they finally jerked to a stop, her seat belt grabbing her painfully in the midsection.
“Ashley,” Ethan shouted. “Get out now. Run!” He opened his door and tumbled out onto the dirt.
She was suddenly panicked by his urgent tone. She tried to do as he instructed and fumbled with her seatbelt for way too long before she could get her fingers to unfasten it. When she pushed on her door, she was gasping with fear and effort.
It wouldn’t open. It had been crushed a bit by one of the trees, apparently too much to open easily.
“Ethan!” she screamed, heaving herself at the door with all of her might. “It’s stuck!”
She saw the headlights of the sedan as it came back around to where the pickup truck had crashed.
“Here,” he said, leaning into the driver’s side. “Come this way. Hurry.” He reached for her, and Ashley grabbed at him desperately. Ethan pulled her out through the driver’s side.
Then he dragged her by the arm and started sprinting away fro
m the truck. It was all Ashley could do to keep up. Her lungs were burning, she was dizzy, and she had no idea what was going on.
Until Gus’s old, reliable truck—that had stuck with them for two days—suddenly exploded in a deafening blaze of heat and light.
They were too close. Ashley could feel the furious heat from the explosion hit her like a wave, and it felt like something pushed her violently down from behind.
She fell on her face, tried to cover her ears and her eyes at the same time until the first mad rush was over.
It all felt like a nightmare. Or some kind of drug-induced vision. Ashley squeezed her eyes shut. Saw spots of yellow and red. Felt like she’d been burned. Her head was pounding so painfully she could hear it.
“Ashley,” she heard over the drumming in her head. “Ashley, honey, are you all right?”
Hands were on her. Touching her. Turning her over. But she couldn’t seem to open her eyes.
“Ashley,” the voice said again. She was sure she recognized it—if only she could get her mind to work. “Talk to me. Open your eyes. Ashley, don’t you dare be hurt.”
And the voice sounded so rough and terrified that she felt like it was only humane to let him know she was okay. She peeked through her lashes, saw Ethan’s face inches from hers. Thought she should probably try to relieve his anxiety.
“I mean it,” he said again, in that same raw voice. He was almost shaking her now. “Don’t you dare be hurt.”
“Not my fault if I am,” she croaked out, in an embarrassingly feeble voice. She managed to open her eyes all the way and was rewarded by seeing the fear in Ethan’s face transform into something like joy.
He pulled her into a hug. Which felt very, very nice.
They’d both momentarily forgotten about how they had gotten there.
“Very touching,” came a pleasant voice from behind them. “But we don’t have time for romantic love scenes. Stand up please.”
They turned and saw the two men in business suits, both holding guns. Ashley noticed that it had been Cute Guy who’d spoken. He sounded educated. Articulate. Not the way she would have expected a hired gun to sound.