by Fiona Keane
“I understand.” He nodded, smiling at me. “And what are your plans once you get to Vancouver? Agent Danford suggested that’s your final destination?”
He continued peering through the window at Soph while he spoke to me. Look at her one more time, creep, and you won’t have eyes left in your skull. Jesus. Where did that come from?
“She wants to look at UBC. It’s also our honeymoon. We want to drive to the mountains and head home.”
“And home is…” He sorted through the paperwork. “San Francisco?”
“Yes.” Thank you, Toby. I’d been there. I didn’t remember much, but I remembered enough.
“How long will you be in Canada?”
“Oh, gosh.” I laughed, trying to break the tension. “Maybe just a week? I have to get back for a job interview in two weeks, so I can’t imagine we’d be here longer than a week. It’s a long drive.”
“You’ve got quite the car, sir.”
I didn’t think he bought any of my scam. My heart was about to explode. Meanwhile, my girlfriend was passed out in the car and all I could think of was how everything that happened to us in the last week was fizzling away like a rope about to separate into its fraying, individual strings, and we were about to go to jail…or back to Florida…
“It’s a rental. I thought my wife would like it for this trip.”
He scanned the side of our car, his arm still pressing our paperwork against his chest while he spoke.
“Sir…” He coughed. “What’s going on here? Your wife is out. Your neck is bruised. You’re crossing the border.”
Oh, my God. Think. Think. My eyes narrowed, hoping to buy time while this guy examined me with critical, accusing eyes.
“Look…” I ran a hand through my hair, praying Soph wouldn’t wake to hear the next excuse. “My wife and I…we…like I told you, it was a long night. It’s been a long honeymoon. A really, really long honeymoon. We haven’t done much outside of our hotel room, sir.”
His face reddened as his throat cleared, assuming now that I was a pervert and he should probably just release me, although he might not have wanted me in his country. Great work, Jameson.
“Wel—” he stumbled while reaching for our paperwork. “Welcome to Canada, Mr. Black.”
I had never felt a release, the powerful intoxicating feeling over our paperwork pressing into my hands, offered a freedom that was incomparable to anything I had ever felt. Nodding, still pulling my mouth into a grin, I accepted the paper, accepted our future, and the monumental accomplishment, and settled back into the car.
“Oh my God,” I groaned out loud, shifting into gear and pulling back onto the highway. “Jesus. Crap. Shit. Oh, my God.”
A sea of profanities poured out of me as my mind attempted to de-escalate and vomit the emotions held so tightly during the border crossing.
“Hmm…” Sleeping Beauty mumbled, shifting again in her seat while slumber continued to consume her.
I told myself to just drive, keep moving, don’t stop for anything, but it was proving a challenge. I had come so close to losing it all, to allowing everything to become inconsequential, meaningless, as those agents held our future in their possession. Just drive.
My brain wasn’t capable of processing anything beyond involuntary bodily functions. I didn’t have the mental capacity to compute kilometers to miles. I had no clue how far we were from Vancouver. What is fifty kilometers?
My mind was lost, entirely focused on keeping my heart pumping and my lungs breathing. Soph was twisted in her seat, silently clinging to my arm while her mind continued to keep her heart in a state of coma. Her fingers wrapped around my bicep, clamping onto me while she dreamed.
“J…n…pl…” Pathetic sounds fluttered from her lips, barely audible.
I didn’t want to wake her yet. We weren’t to Vancouver. I needed to get there. She needed to get there.
Forty-five kilometers from Vancouver and my fuel light flashed across the screen. I didn’t need to speed as fast as I was. We were in Canada. We made it. However, my mind wouldn’t stop processing in the complete state of panic and fear that was instilled in us since Soph left me outside the Ritz.
I pulled off at the nearest gas station, sliding into a spot at an empty pump. Turning off the car, I just sat there, my hands clinging to the keys while they dangled from the ignition. My head and back slouched farther into the seat, letting the leather upholstery adhere its warm cushion around me. I don’t know how long I was sitting there, my white knuckles folding around the keys, while my eyes glossed over in an unconscious stare beyond the hood of the car.
I didn’t care how long it was.
We weren’t running anymore.
My head rolled toward the right, my eyes stuck on Soph. She was fast asleep, her arms still clinging around me. My left hand lifted from the steering wheel, reaching for the strands of hair invading her face and tucking them behind her ear. Her nose scrunched in response, sniffling as she stirred.
It was while my knuckles traced the soft skin of her jaw that inconsolable tears poured from my eyes, falling like a monsoon around me. I fell into myself, violently slamming my head against the steering wheel, jerking myself from Soph, completely unable to stop. I knew I was shaking, my heaving gasps for air sucking every particle of oxygen from our car, still unable to breathe.
“Jame—Oh, my God, Jameson.” Soph was on her knees, reaching across the gearshift for my convulsing body.
I felt her hands around my back, pulling me from the seat, but I couldn’t lift my head. I couldn’t move. Her hands were tugging my hair, trying to pry my face from my lap and my body complied, overcome by her gentle touch. Soph reached across my body, pushing the button to move my seat away from the steering wheel, but I couldn’t look at her.
She climbed onto my lap, holding my face in her hands while she stared at me, but I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t want to see her look at me while I was unable to compose myself. I didn’t want Soph to worry. But I couldn’t help it. My body was releasing everything that had so strictly been strangled, chained, within my soul for the last week. My body was letting go. My soul was now grieving the past. All of it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sophia
“Jameson.” I repeated his name, this time pulling his face up toward mine and kissing his forehead.
He was a disaster. I had never seen him like that, nor had I assumed he could ever crumble apart. He was shattering into a million pieces beneath me, fragments of his heart spilling against my arms with each tear.
“Jameson,” I whispered, squeezing his cheeks between my palms. “Talk to me.”
In a heartbeat, a minuscule moment, our roles had reversed. Jameson carried the weight of our nomadic journey, the emotions and trauma we both held. He mounted it against his soul, selflessly holding it so I could survive.
“Where are we?” I asked, wiping his tears with the tips of my index fingers.
He wouldn’t reply. Couldn’t reply. I imagined that was what he felt like so often as I lay beneath him, falling to pieces with only his love being the proper adhesive to connect my heart and soul. Jameson had been so incredibly strong, and not just for me, not just in the last month, but for his entire life.
His head resisted my hold, gravity and guilt pulling it back toward his lap, but I refused to let go of him, just as he so often refused to release me. He was having a panic attack, he was letting go, and everything was consuming and overwhelming him.
It was beyond consoling him; Jameson’s heart was breaking, no matter how tightly I held it, and all I could do was help him heal after the fact. It would have been wrong of me to prevent him from feeling, from processing all the baggage tied to his heart and mind. It would have been cruel for me to stop his heart from breaking when I needed to be there for it to heal. I could do what he has done for me, I could protect him, but I couldn’t protect him from the hurt.
We needed to feel that together. We needed to break before we could thri
ve.
His sobs took over the car, filling the interior with breathtaking gasps that shook my core. With his head hanging and me still in his lap, I slowly lifted my fingers through his hair, stroking the loose waves and twirling them around my fingers. I drifted, mindlessly, into a daze, lost in the feeling of his twisting hair between my fingers.
“Je t’aime. Ca ira. Nous avons l’autre. Tu m’as. Je t’ai. Je t’aime. Nous l’avons fait.”
While my fingers twirled, delighting in the calming feeling of his soft hair, my mother sang to me in my own thoughts, and her words became my own. The French slipped from my lips, almost singing to him in a whisper, my heart hoping to reassure him.
“Je t’aime.” His sobs softened, slowly sifting air back into his lungs so his voice could overpower the battle in his throat. “Je t’aime.” I pulled my head away, lifting his face to examine the damp hazel that had faded before me.
“You speak French,” I whispered, smiling. “Mon protecteur.”
“No.” His lips twitched.
Jameson’s hands wiggled from between us, opening to envelop me in a hold that sucked the air from my lungs while filling my being with the promise each caress, touch, or thought of Jameson assured me.
“We made it,” he whispered against my ear, his breath warm as it fanned along my neck.
I tried to pull away, hoping to look at him, but his grasp tightened. His right hand pressed my head against his chest while his left held my back firmly against him. I hadn’t realized the throbbing in my knees from being folded over his lap in the uncomfortably small space of the car. It didn’t matter. That pain was insignificant, inconsequential at that point. Nothing would ever hurt like the agony of almost losing Jameson. Nothing. In that moment, my heart already knew he was my eternity, my purpose and my life—I knew. I knew he was my forever.
“Yes, Jameson,” I told him, my words muffled against his heaving chest.
His breaths were intense, relentless as he struggled to calm down. I felt his hand stop its pattern of strokes along my back.
“…What?”
“If you let me breathe.” An unfamiliar sound, a giggle, slipped from my lips. “I’ll tell you again.”
My body bounced around his lap while Jameson’s legs shifted beneath us. His left knee bent, pushing me up to his shoulder, and his left arm abandoned my body while he kicked open his door.
“I’m going to be sick, Soph.”
My back slammed against the steering wheel, my body tumbling over the gearshift while Jameson stumbled from the car. He was out of sight and the silence surrounding me in the small space was sickening. I glanced around, observing the beautiful landscape of deep emerald pines that dotted the horizon around the gas station. We’re stopped. He said…we made it.
“Jameson,” I called, while crawling across the interior to his open door. “Jamie?”
“Over here.”
I followed his voice, adjusting the hem of my shirt while climbing from the car. He was kneeling against the pavement, his right hand clutching the rear tire. His face was white, practically resembling my alabaster fairness, and his eyes were deceptively bright.
“Jameson.”
“Sophia.” His hand fell to his right knee while that leg lifted and his weight shifted to his right foot and left knee. “You deserve a proper proposal. I can’t ask you to marry me, to spend forever with me, when we’re traumatized and covered in another man’s blood. That was a horrible thing for me to do to you. I overwhelmed you. I know that. I’m so sorry, Soph. Please…please forgive me.”
“Stop.”
“I just lost it. All of it hit me just now. And the worst thing that crossed my mind, Soph, was how I couldn’t have done more in Oregon to protect you.”
“But I’m here.”
“You have absolutely no idea how much I am aware of that.” His eyes darkened while his hands reached for mine, grasping so tightly that my skin started to throb. “We made it. We’re here. Soph. We’re in Canada.”
“We made it.” Air left my lungs, my heart swelling in the open space. We made it.
“Where do we go now?” I knelt in front of him, our faces mirroring one another. The glow of his eyes radiated against me, burning into mine like the sun.
For the first time in my life, I loved the sun.
“We’re nomads.” Jameson lifted my hands to his mouth, pressing his lips securely against them. “We go where our love takes us now.”
“I told you…” My head shook. “I told you yes.”
“I heard you.” He grinned at me, his features returning to the mischievous young man I knew an eternity ago. “But I’m still going to do it right. You deserve it.”
“You’re not going to ruin me, you know,” I challenged, delighting in the smirk that spread along his lips while I nervously bit mine. “You could never ruin me.”
“Haven’t I?” His head tilted to the side, examining my face while his left thumb tugged at my bottom lip. “Won’t I?”
“You can ask me seven thousand times, Jameson, and my response is always going to be the same. You can take me to a fancy dinner that you know I won’t enjoy or you can ask me right now. You know my answer.”
“No fancy dinner.” His laugh shattered my heart, breaking mounds of angst from my core. “Noted.”
“So?”
“So what?” His grin was absurd, entirely ridiculous and wide, calling to the pieces of my core that screamed for his touch.
“So ask me again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jameson
“No.” I smiled at her, my grin spreading up to my eyes.
The sensation that such delight brought to me after everything we had been through, after just panicking in the car and almost losing the entire journey at the border, was intoxicating. Soph was watching me with disappointment evident on her perfect porcelain face.
“Then I won’t answer you again.”
“You will.”
“Don’t be so smug.” She pulled her hands from me, crossing her arms tightly. “Are we really in Canada?”
“You bet,” I groaned while lifting up from my knee, my body aware of how tightly I had held my emotions while crossing the border, as well as the amount of pain finally settling into my skin from Oregon. “We made it. I promised you we would.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” Her gaze followed me as I stood. “When we crossed the border…why’d you let me sleep?”
“Why would I make you go through that?” My head shook before I held her shoulders, studying each glorious detail of her face. She was so angry with me and it was absolutely adorable.
“Tell me what happened,” Soph demanded, her right foot tapping against the pavement.
Licking my lips in thought, I scratched my fingers through my hair. She doesn’t need to know that. Not now. I need to get gas and we need to get to Vancouver.
“Kilometers and miles aren’t that different, right? I didn’t pay attention to that unit in math.” I laughed, beginning to walk around to the gas tank door, lifting it from the car. “So we’re like half an hour from Vancouver.”
“Jeremy Black,” Soph’s voice raised as she approached me from behind, her fists pounding into my aching shoulders. “Talk to me! You just lost it in the car! We went through literal hell to be standing at this gas station, Jameson. Hell! Stop distracting me and start communicating with me.”
She spun me around, tugging on my arms while I tried to feed the gas tank, spraying droplets of gas along the pavement. Her hands were pressed against my chest, the fabric of my shirt twisting beneath her hold.
“Talk to me.”
My eyes closed, forcing composure. “I broke down. It was terrifying. I’m not ready to talk about it. I can tell you that the second we get settled, the absolute instant we are ready, I am proposing to you the way you deserve. I am going to marry you, promise myself to you forever, and love you. I will protect you even long after I am gone. The second we’re there, it will beg
in. I’m going to marry you, Sophia, whether you accept that plan or not. Now, if you’d let me finish pumping this gas, I’m slightly eager to get you to Vancouver so I can, you know, marry you…or at least provide you with a proper proposal.”
Soph’s head crashed into me while she moaned with irritation. I couldn’t help the laughter that chuckled from my throat in response. I loved her so much that my heart throbbed, aching at the mere idea of her.
“You are infuriating, Jameson.”
I kissed the top of her head, holding her body against mine with my free hand.
“I love you too.” My heart was high, intoxicated. “Now, get in the car.”
She groaned, refusing to separate her beautiful soul from mine so…naturally, I slapped her bum, eliciting a delightful giggle from Soph.
“What the hell!” She laughed, pulling away from me. “Don’t ever do that again.”
“Oops.” I grinned, returning my eyes to the pump while Soph reluctantly climbed back into the car.
As I finished filling the tank, I looked into her side-view mirror, noticing she was braiding her hair along her right shoulder, her eyes lost in a daydream. I would have watched her forever if that hadn’t threatened to delay our arrival in Vancouver. I screwed on the gas cap and closed the tank door, stepping over the liquid reminder of my panic attack politely displayed along the pavement, and returned to the car after quickly sliding my card.
“So,” she sighed, turning toward me as I buckled my seatbelt and turned the ignition. “Mrs. Black, huh?”
“I hope so.”
I pulled out of the gas station, merging back onto I-5, speeding through traffic toward Vancouver. Soph shifted in her seat, dropping the braid against her chest and staring out the window.
“D-Do you feel okay?”
My gaze tore from the road, flashing back at Soph while her apprehensive words filled my mind. “No.”
“I’ve never wanted a bath so badly. Even after the hurricane.”