by Fiona Keane
I did.
I missed.
“Again, Sophia!” Jameson called, his head thrusting backward as Simon squeezed his jaw.
Nothing. One bullet. The bastard had one bullet meant for Jameson.
“It isn’t working!”
“Get the knife, Soph!”
I ran back to the kitchen, pulling the same knife I had used to free my shackles, and returned to Jameson and Simon. He was mounted on Simon, punching him violently while Simon gasped for air. Jameson’s tanned arms were soiled with blood, darkening against the caramel of his skin.
I slipped on the wet floor, my face slamming hard against it. I’m lying just where I did on that day, pretending to be dead, hoping to save my life. My shaking hands pathetically pushed the knife to Jameson, but he just looked at me, his eyes wild and unfamiliar.
Slowly, Jameson’s head turned back to Simon, watching his body quiver and pulsate violently as he struggled to catch his breath. Jameson wobbled as he tried to stand, drained of energy. He hovered over Simon’s limp figure, his fists dripping a crimson stain, while I clung to my face on the cold, ash-covered floor of the kitchen.
“Soph…” His pant was a whisper that refused to pull me from the delusion that Simon was dead.
I could barely hear it over the throb in my head. I felt my brain melt, bleeding inside of my skull in a manner that ceased all existence around me. Each aggressive pound within the walls of my skull forced tears from my eyes as I pressed into myself, cowering in pain. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to scream. I couldn’t do anything.
“Sophia!”
“No. No. No. No.”
“Sophia.” He picked me up, pulling me into his lap and pressing me against his filthy, wet chest. “Sophia. I’m here. It’s you and me. You’re safe. I’m safe.”
“No,” I sobbed, clinging to the collar of his shirt, holding onto it to remind me that Jameson was real.
I needed to remind myself we were real and that we were alive; we were free. His hand held my face against him, letting me sob mercilessly into his shirt. I barely felt his lips against my head as he kissed me. The pounding inside was too much.
“He’s gone.”
“You…k…”
“I killed him.”
I looked up at Jameson, searching through my own panic to see the emptiness in his eyes. I pushed Jameson away, watching him still in my periphery as I cautiously stepped toward Simon.
“You piece of shit.” I kicked his bloated stomach, receiving silence in response. “You tried to kill me! You tried to kill the man I love! You piece of shit! I trusted you. I trusted you, Simon. I hope you rot.”
I kicked him again and again, releasing what rage I had left into the corpse.
“Sophia.” Jameson held my flailing wrists, drawing me back into him. “We need to do something with him. We need to get rid of him.”
I couldn’t reply. My body was frozen, paralyzed with fear and the reality of what happened. My feet were sealed to the ground, adhered to the space beneath me.
“So-phi-a,” Jameson loudly mouthed each syllable of my name. “We need to do this.”
“Do…this…?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Hey. Look at me. Soph. Hey!”
“Huh?”
“Look at me.” And so I did. In that moment, all I saw through the rain, through the blood, through the freedom of this grief, was Jameson.
“There…there’s a cliff. Off the yard…we can…we can throw him over?”
Jameson’s head shook. “No. That’s too easy. Is there any part of this house that isn’t wet? Do you have a room that didn’t lose the ceiling?”
Nodding, I knew exactly where to go. “My mom’s bedroom. It’s at the front of the house, to the left of the door.”
“The gas is turned off,” Jameson thought out loud, his head shaking in realization. “We can’t start the place on fire. Soph, we need to go. We need to leave.”
“Yes.”
“Soph?”
“What?”
His fingers tightened around my wrists. “You saved me.”
“I love you,” I told him, my brain reforming from the melted puddle while we stood in the rain, beneath the exposed sky in my mother’s kitchen.
His hair was matted, formed against his filthy face. Jameson was soiled in blood. The rain fell against his face, leaving trails of thick crimson dribbling from his skin. Without another thought, I was in his arms, my face held tightly in his hands while his mouth devoured mine.
“I love you, Sophia. I love you so much,” he whispered against my teeth. “We need to get out of here. We have to run. There’s nothing we can do with Simon’s body in this rain.”
“We’re just going to leave him?”
“We have to, Soph. Listen. Nobody’s been here since you left. You can tell by the busted police tape. If someone comes, we’ll be well over the border and safe.”
“Safe,” I repeated his word, testing the way it tasted against my heart. “Jameson?”
“Yes?” His hands were pulling my wrists, tearing me from that place and the eternal pain stored within its walls. I followed, without question, as I had always done.
“Please, just drive.”
We stood outside of the car, my limbs numb and aching to be away from that house. It no longer calmed me. The memory of my mom had long since left it. It was a shell, holding fury and trauma. I hated it. I hated that place. With one nod, Jameson left my side and we both climbed into the car, our destroyed bodies molding into the expensive leather upholstery.
“Just drive,” he repeated, reaching for my knee. I glanced at him, out of breath, out of life, and let the glow of hazel draw me back into him.
I had never been in a car driving as fast as Jameson sped along the I-5. My vision blurred beyond its already damaged view, growing nauseated by the rush of green as we hastily left Oregon. I couldn’t tell where we were. All I knew was Jameson just killed Simon. We just killed Simon.
“Soph!” Jameson bolted up from his seat, veering off to the emergency lane as I bent over and lost my insides on the floor of the car.
Coming to a stop along the I-5, again in a state of panic, my mind regressed. I fell back into the trauma, letting it suffocate and consume me. I think he was there, squatting at my side with my door swinging open behind him in the rain.
“Soph…” His voice was soft, like my mom’s. It was peaceful, lacking the similar disturbing undertone that my throat so violently expelled each time I attempted to inhale.
“I’m sorry.” His bloodied hand reached for my shoulder while I was bent over. “Sophia, I am so sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I…I don’t know how to fix this…” Fix this. Fix it. Take it away. Make it stop.
I felt Jameson pull my hair behind my shoulders, holding it away from my face while I continued to vomit and sob into the expensive floor of his dream car. One of his hands began spinning in circles along my back while the other gently restrained my hair. My heart pounded into my knees, burning the inside of my ribs with each throb. I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn’t see through the blur of tears.
“Soph.” I felt his bloodied lips against my hair, pulling me back into the present, returning me to it all.
“Don’t go,” he whispered above my ear, chilling my skin. “Stay with me. We’re almost done. We’re almost there.”
Jameson’s voice cracked, a broken sound that hurt. It physically hurt to hear the strength leave his heart, his soul wavering just like mine. We just killed someone.
“Please.” His sob fell against my shoulder.
The slow tremble of Jameson’s body while he held me radiated throughout my core, bringing me to the surface with a gasping breath of air. Don’t drown, Sophia. I tried to straighten my body, but his weight was too heavy, too perfectly heavy.
“Jameson,” I muttered, wiggling around to face him while he continued to kneel against the pavement.
I let my fingers lift, coursing through his messy hair
. It was hostile, wild, and crusted with blood, desperate to be washed of this moment. His face met mine, frantically searching the depth of my eyes as I scoured his hauntingly vacant pools of honey and gold. His hands were dry, sheathed in sweat and blood, while they cupped my face, forbidding me to look away.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I confirmed, my tone recovering from moments prior when I couldn’t move, vomiting on the floor of our rented BMW.
Jameson held me, the soiled tips of his fingers pressing into my jaw while refusing to create any distance between us.
“I’m so sorry, Soph,” he cried through a pained whisper. “I shouldn’t have made you go there. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for me.”
“That’s not true,” I held his wrists while he clung to my face.
The rain was incessant, refusing to break and allow our drowning souls to breathe, but those same souls desperately needed to be washed, freed from the stain of that day.
“If I hadn’t made you go, we wouldn’t have just killed someone.”
“That someone was there, waiting for us like we were bait, Jameson. Don’t you dare think for one second this is your fault. He tried to kill us. He tried to kill you.”
I watched his gaze fall to my wrists and he pulled away, examining the raw skin burned by the ropes with which I had been restrained. Delicately, Jameson’s filthy hands lifted my arms to his mouth, his lips gently resting a restorative kiss against each inside of my wrist, healing me.
“Let me take you home,” he whispered, watching me again. I nodded, falling into his embrace while he knelt outside of the car.
“Where are we?” I pulled away, looking at his soiled face. Ruined, blistered and bleeding, he was beautiful.
Jameson tucked some hair behind my ear, his knuckles lingering against my cheek while he tugged on my earlobe. “Just north of the state border.”
“Already?”
“Yes.”
“We were sitting in silence for over four hours,” I gaped, feeling as though we had just left the driveway. “Four hours.”
“It was deafening, Sophia.”
“Let me drive.” I pushed him away, climbing out into the rain.
His body was slow to rise, aching inside and out, but he was without objection as he slithered into my seat. He leaned forward, painfully removing his shirt and dropping it over the puddle of my insides on the floor between his feet. My mouth hung, widening in tragic awe at Jameson’s body. Each muscle, every piece, was marred. I gasped as he winced while leaning back into the soft leather seat.
“I’m fine,” he groaned, trying to smile at me. “Just sore. Come on, Soph.”
“Your…bruises…are you…”
He took my hand. “It’s just skin. It’s going to heal. I’m going to be fine because I have you. I’d be a walking bruise forever as long as you’re alive and with me, Soph.”
With a shaking nod, I stepped around to the driver’s side and fell into the seat. It took a minute to adjust the settings because my legs weren’t nearly as long as Jameson’s. He winced again, his hand flying to his abdomen.
“Jameson?”
“Drive, Soph. I’m just sore. I didn’t realize how sore until I stopped just now.”
His face turned, looking at me with a lopsided smile that was forced through pain. He lifted my hand from the gearshift and pressed my knuckles against his mouth, reassuring me. And with that, I pulled us back onto I-5 and headed toward our future, my heart screaming with delight for the first time in its existence, to be leaving Oregon forever.
I had been in control, carrying us deeper into the promise of running away for hours. We had pulled over at two remote gas stations over the expanse of Oregon and Washington, places where nobody would question the mess I appeared alongside my shirtless and bruised boyfriend, and were able to quickly use the restroom and buy poor excuses for snacks while filling up the gas tank. We were running on the fumes of our past lives; there wasn’t time to stop for anything else so soon.
The car was filled with silence, but it was peaceful because Jameson had been sleeping for most of my drive. His hand clung to my thigh, but his body and mind were fast asleep. I followed each highway sign, calculating the miles into time to keep myself awake and focused. Ninety minutes until the border. I glanced sideways, quickly studying Jameson’s sleeping figure. His face was turned toward his window, but his head hung over his chest limply. We were ninety minutes from Canada, both destroyed and covered in blood.
“Jameson.” I tapped his bare shoulder. “Wake up.”
He silently groaned in reply, only his head rolling to the other side.
“Jameson, wake up.”
“Hmm?”
“We have to stop,” I told him, switching lanes as we approached an exit for Everett. “We can’t cross the border looking like this. Someone is going to ask questions.”
“Right.” His posture adjusted as he woke. “Pull off at that gas station. We can clean up there.”
He pointed at the series of buildings just off the exit ramp. When I parked the car and pulled the key from the ignition, his hand was quick to clamp mine. I turned, slowly filling with worry.
“Wha—”
“I love you, Soph.” He leaned over the gearshift, holding my head in his hands, possessing my mouth.
I responded, my body wild with emotion, realizing how desperately I had craved Jameson in the terrified silence of our drive. I almost lost him forever. While he deepened our kiss, demanding more of my oxygen, I felt his hands graze my arms, traveling toward my hips. My knees dragged along the gearshift, mindlessly floating to his seat, my legs straddling his lap in the awkwardly small space of the passenger seat.
“I love you,” he repeated, his fingertips pressing into my hips while my palms flattened against his chest.
“You saved me,” I whispered into his mouth, feeling his hands climbing along my back, holding my head and body against him. “You protected me.”
“Always.” I felt his mouth against my neck, his stained lips met the soiled skin without question.
“You protected me,” I whispered again, this time through a sob that choked my breath before his lips were again on mine. “I love you, Jameson.”
He held my head, hazel pouring into me. “Please…promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“Marry me.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jameson
It was as though my touch had drained everything from Soph. The way she looked at me, her blue eyes again filled with something unfamiliar as of late. Hope.
“Please,” I urged, kissing her once more, lingering on the salted taste of sweat and tears that had stained her lips.
She wasn’t answering me. Soph sat on my lap, her hands fisted into my hair, while she stared at me. Her eyes began to squint, the lines of her laughter appearing in a gorgeous halo around those beautiful blue circles, but her voice was mute.
“So—” She cut me off, swiftly piercing the skin of my bottom lip as she devoured my mouth while reaching behind me, before opening the car door and stumbling out. What the hell?
I struggled to climb out after her, tripping over myself as I toppled into the rain, watching Soph run into the gas station with my school bag wrapped around her body. She glanced back, her hair flowing wildly around her in the mist, flashing me her beautiful smile, calling me to follow. I need to put on a damn shirt. I reached into the small trunk, sorting through the bag and grabbing the first thing I could find. I didn’t even know if it was mine or Soph’s, but I pulled out a black t-shirt and yanked the keys from the ignition, locking the car while chasing after my girl.
The gas station had a truck stop attached to it, an entire wing devoted to wanderlusters, roadtrippers, truck drivers…and runaways. I flew into the space, frantically searching for Soph. I stood outside of the women’s restroom, tempted to storm in and grab her, but I still had morals and respected her privacy. Jesus. Christ. Where is she?
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“Jamie!” I heard her voice from behind another door, not the women’s restroom. Spinning around, I noticed Soph was leaning out from behind the door of a family restroom.
“Come on,” she urged, hiding from view while undoing her tangled hair before her head poked out again. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Shit. Me. Motherf—
She hadn’t answered me in the car. I was without a clue as to her response. Did she want to marry me? Our forever was cemented—what did it matter? It mattered. It mattered like nothing else.
My head slowly shook, struggling to resist her voice, failing to hold up my resolve. “Sophia.”
“Please?”
Her head poked out again, this time her hair was hanging well below her shoulders, a matted mess of tangle and blood. We almost died. Hours ago. Licking my chapped lips, I followed her into the restroom. It was crowded, a small eight-foot square with a toilet, shower, sink, and changing table. I felt like a stranger, some sort of criminal, watching Soph move throughout the small space. She dug through my school bag, pulling out a new outfit, delicately placing it on top of the bag, which rested securely on the opened changing table. My eyes flickered back and forth, between each space she encountered.
“My heart hurts, Jameson,” she whispered, reaching into the shower and starting the water. Her fingers danced while it fell, waiting for the temperature to change.
“I want to panic. My body wants to shut down, but my mind won’t let it.”
“That’s a good thing.” I swallowed, my voice shaking nervously while I stood like a fool, watching Soph step into the shower fully clothed.
She stood in the center, her head facing up, rinsing the first layer of trauma from her porcelain skin. The water pulled her clothes against her figure, tightening my own pants as every curve of Soph’s body came into view. My mouth was dry and my chest began to heave. She was standing there, motionlessly paralyzed while the water covered her. She is beautiful. Stunning.
It all flooded back to me—the moment I first saw her, when I went to her house to kidnap her, talking on the beach, our first kiss, always running after her…killing Simon with her. Shit. That snapped me out of it. My fingers painfully combed through my hair, stopping at my eyes to violently rub my hormones back to a level zero. Opening my eyes to the blurry view, I noticed Soph hadn’t moved. She was still staring up at the moldy ceiling while her clothed body weighed with the cold water.