by Holley Trent
Ariel would assure her she had, and that she was, then they’d both sign off.
She was vigilant. She locked her car doors, even for short drives. She didn’t go to ATMs in the middle of the night. She didn’t pick up hitchhikers.
He faded from her view as she turned off into a rest station’s parking lot.
“Oh well.”
A moment of fantasy never hurt anyone, so before debarking the car, she closed her eyes and let her mind stray. Why not do something risky for once? Something so out of character, even if she told her friends, they wouldn’t believe her. She giggled and grabbed her purse. “Yeah, me picking up a hitchhiker? I should go ahead and hand in my rape whistle for even thinking it.”
After plugging the gas nozzle into her tank and locking the lever in place, she left her car. Wandering the aisles of the store with a large hazelnut coffee, she knew she was really just stalling.
Maybe I should pee again.
She consulted her bladder. No pee there.
Get on with it, chick.
She sighed and approached the checkout, grabbing an armful of junk food on the way. It didn’t matter what it was. It was less for taste and more to have something to do with her hands while she drove. A little prickle of excitement coursed through her when she realized the peanuts she picked up were barbecue flavor, however. She loved novelty snack items. Having grown up near a little mom and pop gas station owned by a baby boomer, during her youth she became acquainted with all sorts of Southern delicacies. Nabs. Moon Pies. Lance honey buns. Jimbo Jumbo peanuts. She used to walk to the store after church on some Sundays when she had some change left over, and would come out with a big brown bag full of goodies. That’s exactly why the very first thing she’d installed in her cubicle desk’s drawer was a pile of junk.
She thought she felt a little tingle of happiness over the memory as she moved up the line, but her sinking gut told her it wasn’t that. It was her proximity alert. The fine hairs on her neck stood on end as someone walked behind her, and he had to be someone paying attention, otherwise he may have well have been a statue. She was so finely tuned in to strangers around her because of her granny’s frequent admonitions to be aware. Now, she couldn’t turn it off. Her friends had teased her about it. Called her paranoid.
Maybe I am.
All the same, she turned her head and caught a glimpse of the scruffy hitchhiker in her periphery.
No way. Maybe I’m just projecting.
She blinked several times to clear the film from her contact lenses, and turned her head to stare at him dead-on.
Yep. Same guy. He was in the process of switching his knapsack to his other shoulder as he trekked toward the restrooms. He didn’t disappear into the lavatory, however, but stopped at the water fountain and unclipped the aluminum bottle attached to his pack.
She watched, slack jawed, as he put his lips into the arcing stream of water.
Pretty. He was like some expensive bauble in a jewelry store circular. Nice to ogle, but generally beyond her reach. But then again, he was a bum, so what did she know?
He set his backpack on the floor and as he twisted the lid off his water bottle, he turned, likely ensuring he wasn’t holding up the line. There wasn’t one. Everyone else in the store was buying their water.
His gaze landed on Ariel, and it was like the air had been vacuumed out of the room. She couldn’t remember how to breathe, nor did she have the good sense to look away. She understood, suddenly, how Medusa had managed to turn so many gaping idiots into stone.
He let go of the fountain handle and stood, grinning at her. A swath of sun-bleached blond hair fell over his eyes and as if he could hear her willing him to do so, he pushed it behind his ears. His expression said, “Better now?”
Yes, sir.
She offered a tiny smile and tore her gaze away. It was her turn to pay. She went through the motions of swiping her card and pressing the Debit button on the keypad, but her awareness of him never dimmed. Even as she meditated on the clerk’s repetitive motions — pick up item, bag item, pick up item, bag item — she could tell when the man walked past.
That same electric feeling from before settled into her, dancing down her spine and wracking her body with a shudder. She forced a hiss through her clenched teeth as she punched her debit card’s PIN into the machine.
All this solo driving must be making me delirious. Maybe I should call Momma. Would help to hear a familiar voice on the road.
Yes, she assured herself. That’s all it was. A little asphalt-induced insanity. Maybe he wasn’t even real. He was just a goddamned mirage. Had to be. No one else in the store had even turned their heads in his direction.
She picked up her coffee, grabbed her bag, and walked through the automatic doors. After twisting her gas cap back on and securing her snacks in the front passenger seat, she reconfigured her GPS software and headed toward the highway on-ramp.
“He’s just a mirage,” she told herself as she passed the gorgeous hobo on the service road. She couldn’t be sure at the speed she was going, but the grin he wore seemed far too knowing. Too prescient. He seemed to be daring her to stop. To play.
Odd.
“Okay, phone. Phone … where’s my phone. I just need to hear Momma’s voice. I need a reminder to be safe on the road.”
He was a dot in her rear-view mirror. A blond speck in blue jeans.
She thumbed Momma’s number into her keypad and shifted the phone to her left hand.
“If you’ve got my number, you know who I am. Tell me what you want. I might call you back. BEEP.”
Ariel blew a raspberry as she tossed the phone into the center console. She felt sick — a nagging, gnawing feeling in her gut like she always got when she travelled away from home for several days and thought she’d left the iron plugged in.
What did I forget? Her fingers drummed on the steering wheel rhythmically as she itemized. Got my wallet. Got my keys, obviously. Gas cap is on …
No, none of those things. It was more of an instinct like birds and fish got when they needed to travel home to their breeding grounds. It said, “Hey, you’re going the wrong way.” But, she wasn’t. She was certainly going east — toward North Carolina. Toward home, and away from the life she’d been making for the past four years.
Away from the ex-boyfriend who’d turned her into a laughingstock when the entire agency found out they’d been dating, because certainly she couldn’t have gotten that job based solely on talent, right? If a girl has tits and an okay face and maybe someone wants to date her, then she slept her way to her job. Didn’t matter how good her portfolio was.
No one at the agency said anything directly to her about it, but she knew they were all judging. Mocking. It was evident from their casual little slights when she sent company-wide emails and instead of getting legitimate feedback, people would say, “That’s so cute.” And worse, she was never included on new business pitches anymore. She did the same old grunt work, day in and day out.
Her boyfriend said she was just being sensitive. Then he’d laughed and told her the mock-up she’d done for a sunscreen ad was “sweet.” Not sweet in the slangy way, either. No. Her hard-ass, muscled lady beach volleyball player spiking the hell out of a ball was sweet.
Prick. She growled and cranked the stereo volume up. She hated even thinking about it, but she’d been squashing it in too much, and how would she ever work through it if she didn’t think the story through once or twice?
A headhunter saw her portfolio online and emailed her on one of those “cute” days, and Ariel had to pinch herself to not beg the man to take her away. Not only had the recruiter pegged her for a gig that would allow her to drop the “junior” from her art director title, but she was going home. Or close to it, anyway. Her granny would be within an hour’s drive, and she’d be back to the Sout
hern culture she knew so well. Southern comfort. Southern hospitality. Los Angeles had been sorely lacking in that.
When she told her ex she had put in her notice, his response had been something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s too bad. I’m going to have to get a studio artist to finish that suite, I guess.”
She’d just stared at him as he rubbed his chin, and when he didn’t get it — she told him to get the hell away from her cubicle. She also considered that their official break-up. He didn’t, judging by the way he’d shown up at her apartment later asking if she was ready to go out for dinner.
She put her foot on the brake and slung the car onto the next exit ramp.
“Fuck it. People are going to think I’m dumb, anyway, so let me do something that actually is for once.”
She looped all the way back around to the service station and got back on the highway.
The hitchhiker, still walking with his back to traffic, held out his thumb as if sensing her approach.
She pressed the brake and eased onto the shoulder ahead of him. “Dumb,” she said to her rear-view mirror as the mirage jogged up to meet her.
• • •
I can’t believe that worked. John approached the brunette’s sedan and wriggled his knapsack off his back.
Gulielmus had told him he could sort of psychically lasso his targets if he got close enough, which would — if he’d done it right — instill in them a temporary compulsion to seek him out. Gulielmus hadn’t been very clear about how such a thing was accomplished, but John figured he’d try it on the first pretty lady he saw, not expecting anything to come of it. He’d just gotten close to the woman in the store and thought I pick you before moving away. When he saw her pass him on the ramp, he figured it hadn’t worked, but … there she was.
He lowered his head into the open passenger window and tried for a friendly rather than seductive smile.
She, other the other hand, was very obviously struggling to keep terror off her face. He didn’t blame her. She was smiling, but her lips twitched at the corners, and her amber brown eyes were a touch too round. For a moment, he felt guilty for what he’d done — for hypnotizing her in a way — and considered sending her off alone. Just a moment, though, because regardless of how he’d snared her, she was breathtaking and that was without a stitch of make-up.
It wasn’t that John was averse to cosmetics. He just hadn’t grown up around them. He was used to seeing women in their purest forms, but none of those women at the compound had looked like her.
“Where are you headed?” she asked, her sweet voice quavering a bit as her fingers hovered over the door lock switch.
“East,” he said simply.
“How far?”
“As far as you’ll take me.”
“I’m going to North Carolina. I think that might be too far.”
Didn’t matter. He only needed her for a couple of hours, but he’d play along. “Maybe not. I’ve got some construction work lined up if I can get out there. As far as you could take me would be just fine.”
He watched a lump travel down her throat and then there was the sound of the locks popping up. He pulled the door latch and hesitated as she cleared items from the seat and repositioned them in the center console. She waited until he was in, with his knapsack at his feet and seatbelt pulled across his lap, before speaking again.
“I’ll probably stop for the night in a few hours.” She eased onto the road.
He nodded and worked the switch to ease his seat back and give his long legs some room. He was tall. As a kid, he’d always towered over all the other children at the compound. As a man, that trend hadn’t changed.
“That’s a couple hundred miles of favors you’re doing me. I’m really grateful. Hard getting around without a driver’s license.”
Her forehead furrowed. “How do you live out here without having a driver’s license? I mean, you look like sixteen is a good ways behind you.”
He chuckled. Should he tell the truth, something resembling it, or a flat-out lie? He decided to hedge. “Well, I’m twenty-eight, so you’re right about that. I just never really needed to get a license. I grew up in a very isolated community and only recently left it.”
“Oh. Are you going back?”
“No. Technically I got kicked out.”
Her grip on the steering wheel tightened.
He grinned. “Not what you’re thinking, probably. Where I come from, the folks kinda have their own religion. They considered me extraneous, so they tried to put me out a couple of months ago.”
“What do you mean tried to?” She stole a look away from the road and crooked one dark brown eyebrow up at him.
He scratched the palm of his left hand and stared at the dusty road ahead. “My mother is still there. Will probably never leave, truth be told. Anyhow, she hid me away until I could make other plans. It’s hard not having a formal education. I was only homeschooled up until age thirteen. I don’t exactly have a certificate or anything like that.”
“Yikes. Does the government even know you exist?”
“Of course. I’ve got a social security number and birth certificate. The most valuable things I own, I guess.”
“Identity is important, so, I could see that.”
She seemed to relax a bit and the set of her lips became less tight, so he decided to keep her talking.
“So, what’s waiting for you in North Carolina?”
“That’s home for me. I moved west four years ago after college for an internship that turned into a job. I decided recently it was time to move on.”
“What do you do?”
She opened her mouth, closed it, and furrowed her brow again. “That’s hard to explain in simple terms. I always struggle with telling people about it. I’m an art director.”
He wasn’t familiar with the term, which wasn’t saying much. He hadn’t been in the world that long. It was his first day on the job, really. “What do art directors do?”
“Uh … in advertising our job is to design the look of a campaign or create new elements to match the existing one. Mostly I do a lot of work in Photoshop, laying out magazine and Internet ads. That kind of thing. Technical stuff.”
“Oh. And people go to school for that or is it a natural talent kinda thing?”
It may have been idle chit-chat, but the more she talked, the more he cared. He was interested not only in her, but in all the things in the world he’d been missing out on — and it was a lot. If he had only three hours to glean all the interesting tidbits from her he could, he’d make the most of it.
She sighed. “I did some schooling for design, but you kind of have to have an eye. Whether or not your eye is any good … ” She shrugged. “That’s subjective.”
“Maybe you’re done something I’ve seen?”
Her cheeks flushed — a charming reddening that crept down into the neck of her coral-colored tank top and made her look quite a bit younger than she likely was.
“Probably not. I was a junior art director, and I worked on the stuff that was sort of low priority. Other people did the big-money stuff.”
“Sounds kind of political.”
A scoff. “No kidding.” She patted the console with her right hand, feeling around for something and finally wrapped her fingers around her coffee cup.
“I could never get into coffee,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “It’s the only vice I have left.”
“It smells great, but I guess I haven’t had enough of it. We were supposed to abstain from habit-forming excesses, so by the time I got around to trying it I couldn’t get past the bitterness.”
“Oh!” She perked up a bit and this time when the flush returned to her cheeks it was from her renewed energy and not shame. “Well, the trick is adding enough sugar to s
weeten it and giving it a hearty splash of half and half to cut the acid. It’s almost like a dessert that way, but I don’t even want to think of how many calories I’m drinking.” She made an ugh face.
“Don’t tell me you’re watching your weight.”
“Of course I am. The moment I stop watching it I end up with puffy cheeks, two chins, and a lard ass.”
“I don’t believe that.” He wasn’t just blowing smoke. She was definitely within the bounds of height-weight proportionate or even a bit thin. Nice curves, though. He’d noticed them when he passed behind her in the store. There was something to be said for a pair of fitted jeans and a clingy shirt. If the girls at the compound had dressed like that, he probably would have been turned out long before he was. The way a woman’s waist tapered and her body flared at the hips …
My god.
He adjusted the crotch of his jeans when she turned her gaze to the car passing them on the left.
“It’s true,” she said when she looked front once again. “I think I screwed up my metabolism. I used to be distance runner until I blew out my knee. Had sickeningly low body fat. I look back on the pictures now and wonder how I was able to hold my head on my neck. Then I went to college, started smoking and engaging in other bad habits, and my weight fluctuated a lot. I took up swimming and slimmed down a lot again, but couldn’t sustain it. Now, I get most of my exercise biking to work. Squeeze in a run when I can manage it.”
“You look great.”
She grinned. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”
That’s what I’m hoping.
“I’m Ariel, by the way.”
Ariel. Perfect name for a woman with a sweet voice and the face of an angel, he thought. He held out a hand for her to shake briefly. “You can call me Hitch.”
Her grin widened. “Why do I get the feeling you spend a lot of time begging rides, Hitch?”
He rolled down his window and let his hand catch the wind just outside. He didn’t respond.