by Lily White
Quieting down, he swatted at another bug before flicking a pebble at me.
“You don’t have to come out here if you don’t want.”
“I like it out here.”
“There’s bugs.”
Noah wasn’t wrong. Every time I came out, I returned home with bites all over. But it was still better than what I dealt with at that house. It was better than my mind being so full of my mother’s voice that I wanted to scream right along with her. We could get it all out. Throw ourselves on the ground like Lena when she didn’t get her way. We could bang our hands on the floor and kick our legs and scream and scream and SCREAM!
But what good would it do? It wouldn’t change anything. Daddy would still be gone, and I would still have three kids to look after.
“Where else am I supposed to go?” I wasn’t really asking the question with the hope for an answer. It was more a question I asked myself, a question that had run so many times through my head that it had carved a canyon through my thoughts, echoing over and over and over. Where will I go? What will I do? How can she do this to a kid?
“Run to me, Ensley.”
My eyes lifted to his.
Hunched over himself, Noah had his hands stuffed in his pockets, his legs still bent in front of his chest. It made him look smaller than I knew he was.
“I’m serious. If you need somewhere to go, you can run to me. Even if just for an hour. I’ll leave my window open and turn the lamp on when my mother isn’t home. That way you know we won’t get in trouble.”
My brows pulled together. “Why would I do that?”
Fidgeting where he sat, Noah looked away, his eyes tracking the stream where it bubbled over rocks. He sounded so sad when he finally answered, so insecure.
I didn’t think he was looking out for me as much as he was begging someone to look out for him. It was like his skin split in that moment and I was allowed to peer inside at the words written on his bones.
Noah wasn’t chasing me because he felt sorry for the poor neighbor girl whose mom was always yelling; he was chasing me because he needed someone to stop for just one moment and see how miserable his life had been.
We were the same, in different ways and for different reasons, but not in what we felt.
“So neither of us have to be alone anymore,” he admitted. “I’m just tired of being alone.”
I flicked another pebble, and it bounced twice before rolling off the side of the rock where we sat. An owl gave a haunting call in the tree above us, and something shuffled in a patch of grass in the distance. We were all alone, every creature out here, yet only one was brave enough to admit it.
Noah was brave because he reached for people when he was sad. But I wasn’t because I ran away and cried my tears while hiding.
I wanted to be brave.
“Okay, Noah. I’ll come to your house from now on.”
He didn’t answer, didn’t look back at me with those big blue eyes. But even though he tried to hide his face in the thick shadow that surrounded us, I know I saw him smile.
CHAPTER NINE
Noah
Present
I lost my dad when I was four years old. Maybe lose is the wrong word, you don’t lose something when it purposely runs off, which meant I never had him in the first place. Not that I wanted him. What kind of man knocks up a sixteen year old girl and then leaves her when she’s twenty?
Mom didn’t have any work experience. She didn’t finish school. Her parents never spoke to her again after I let out my first infant cry. She was abandoned by the world with only me as her companion. The woman’s luck was shitty. Not as shitty as Ensley’s in the end, but bad enough that raising me hadn’t been easy.
For four years, we lived on the streets and in family homeless shelters. She managed to find a job after a while, then a second and a third.
Renting that house next to Ensley’s family had been a moment of pride for my mom. Her face beamed while we pulled our few possessions off the truck she’d rented, had beamed when she laid out the clothes for my first day in a school I could attend longer than a month. She practically killed herself working ridiculous hours to make sure I had what I needed.
That’s what parents do, they sacrifice, they scrounge, they make decisions that can’t be good for them just as long as their kids are taken care of. That’s what my mother did.
Not Ensley’s.
Her mother was a demon dressed in pretty skin, a nightmare that deserved to die after everything she did. Not even a pinch of pity flickered inside me at the sight of her busted head.
I’d stared down at her that night, wanted to laugh, wanted to kick at her body and dance all across it, stomping her miserable bones into dust.
She deserved what she got. It didn’t matter that the courts called her a ‘victim’ while convicting me. Didn’t matter that the prosecution found a few witnesses to cry for her memory when I was sentenced. That woman deserved to die.
They didn’t know the truth of Ensley’s mother, but I did. I refused to feel anything for how she died except the regret that her death hadn’t been slower.
If it hadn’t been for that bitch and her fucked up husband, I wouldn’t be on the run right now with Ensley tied up in back. But what can be done about it, right?
The past is the past and all I can do is shuffle headlong into the future. Even if it means smuggling a bound woman in my back seat. Even if it means having to listen to Ensley’s screeching, out of tune voice singing whatever annoying song she could think of, one after the other.
“Would you please shut the hell up? I’m about to beat your ass.”
She was on her third rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody by the time we hit Northern Georgia, and I was about to pull over and gag her again just so I could get a little peace and quiet.
But I knew Ensley. God, how I fucking knew her.
She would just mumble the songs and start kicking the seats in time with the beat of the music. The word aggravating had nothing on this woman, but there was nothing better to describe her.
“Un-fucking-tie me and I’ll stop singing. This is bullshit, Noah. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. My wrists and ankles are on fire, and I’ve had an itch in the middle of my back for the past hour that is only getting more annoying. It’s driving me crazy.”
“You already are crazy,” I yelled.
She got quiet for only a second before saying, “Yeah, well, crazier, asshole. You can’t keep me tied up forever. At some point, you have to let me go.”
No, I didn’t.
She wasn’t going anywhere until she faced the truth of her life. I was risking everything to be the one to show her, but it didn’t matter. Too much time had passed, and this woman - this stubborn ass woman - still hadn’t moved on.
It was the only thought in my mind when they hauled me off to prison, my hands shackled in metal cuffs with chains slipping down to the cuffs on my ankles, I thought She’ll snap out of it if given enough time. There is no possible way she’ll forget. But she did, and whether that was intentional or not, I wasn’t sure, but the years raced by regardless.
And now here she was driving me insane with these songs from our past and her constant question What time is it?
Although, that wasn’t entirely her fault, and I’d be a bastard to blame her.
Ensley has always been the type to watch the clock and for several different reasons, none of which were healthy for any person’s head. Just like everything in her screwed up life, an annoying habit turned into obsession.
“How do I know you won’t try to escape? How do I know you won’t try to wave for help, or open the door and fling yourself onto the interstate?”
She took a minute to think it over.
“That would be an awful way to die. If I died at all. It’s not worth the risk of being stuck in place for the rest of my life, being carted around on the whims of others.”
The answer was just like her.
Ensley had collected wa
ys to die like trading cards when we were kids. Instead of athletes in uniforms with their team name emblazoned on the front and position stats in fine print on the back, Ens had fashioned a binder of morbid possibilities in her head detailing the gruesome facts and figures of how a person could exit this life. We couldn’t flip through channels on television and pass a news broadcast without her fingers gripping my wrist. Did you hear that? He was attacked by an exotic pet. Took him fourteen minutes to die. I could almost hear her slip that card into the plastic divider, the metal loops in the binder snapping closed.
The memory only made my heart hurt, chilling as it was. I felt more for Ensley than I’d ever felt for anything, which was why we were on this trip to begin with.
At some point, I had to trust her. It wasn’t like I could drag her in Sadie’s house with ropes around her wrists and ankles.
My shoulders tensed as a rest stop rolled up, and I took the exit to reach it. Ensley didn’t say a word until the car came to a full stop.
“About time.”
“For you to shut up? I agree.” I practically growled the words while throwing open my door and slamming it closed.
I paced the length of the car a few times willing myself to calm down and get my head together.
There was no telling what she would try when I cut her loose, and I knew better than to dive on in there without preparing myself for the coming battle.
Most people would look at Ens and see a traumatized woman as delicate as a newborn’s skin, but I knew better.
She was slick, this woman, as slick as a fish and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, try catching one with your hands. They slither out of your grip after flapping and fighting, kicking up clouds of muck so fast that you can’t even see them to try again.
That was Ensley.
She’d been doing it since we were kids.
I couldn’t hold it against her, though. She needed to be that way in order to survive.
My nostrils flared, and I rolled my shoulders ready to take her on.
Pulling open her door, I stared down at the tiny bundle squirming beneath the blanket, wondering how it was possible somebody so small could be such a pain in the ass. The parking lot around us was empty, which was good for the lack of witnesses, but bad because it gave her plenty of room to run.
“Can I trust you?”
“Yes.”
She was lying. I always knew when she was lying.
We would have to go about this intelligently. At least until I knew I could trust her.
“Flop over on your stomach. I’ll untie your feet but not your hands.”
I could picture her eyes rolling, but she did as instructed, her body shifting beneath a worn, grey utility blanket Melinda had handed me from her trunk.
Once Ens was in place, I yanked the blanket aside and grabbed her ankles. She flinched, her entire body going rigid the instant our skin met.
“Does it hurt?”
Tugging at the rope, I was careful to unwrap it. Her pale skin was red from irritation, but not torn, no blood leaking out to dot the seat beneath her.
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“Then why did you flinch?”
Silence and then, “Probably because I don’t like being touched by the man who killed my family.” Sweet as syrup, that voice. She was planning to run.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I willed myself not to react. Ensley would eventually see the truth of what happened that night, the decisions and mistakes made by both of us.
Just as soon as I forced her to do it.
Grabbing her ankles, I yanked her down the seat and reached beneath her stomach to get to her hands. She jerked away, body rigid again, but allowed me to untie her hands from the front so I could bind them behind her back.
I pulled her out, balanced her on her feet and allowed her to stretch her neck over beleaguered shoulders, my eyes dropping to watch slices of her scars peek out from beneath thick, brown hair.
It was next to impossible not to bite that skin when I leaned down to whisper to her, not to catch it between my teeth when goosebumps raced down her neck and shoulder.
“Walk in front of me so I can keep control of you.”
Her head turned just slightly, enough that I could catch her gaze out of the corner of her eye, enough that I could watch a familiar storm roll through the grey.
“Won’t that look funny?”
Grinning, I snapped my teeth together at her face, a tease and warning just the same.
“Just pretend you can’t get enough of my dick, and keep your hands down at my waist.”
Lips pursed, she looked ahead, refusing to answer, but walked exactly like I said, her knuckles brushing against my crotch, only aggravating me further because it had been two decades since I’d been with a woman. Two decades since I’d been with her.
Leading her into the bathroom, I tried not to think how easy it would be to make up for that stretch of time, how simple it would be to remind her how our bodies fit together as if she’d been built by nature specifically to be mine.
CHAPTER TEN
Ensley
Present
Over the past two decades, I’ve had a lot of time to think about my life. It’s always a careful process, my thinking, like tiptoeing through land mines strewn over an open, brightly lit field.
There were memories there that contained the warmth of the sun, comfortable blankets of heat I could wrap around me with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. When I found them, I would linger in place for a while, roll the taste of them on my tongue, breathe in the scent of them with eyelids fluttering because it was like a drug to have lived them.
Noah was in most of those memories, a boy who had known my heart, an influence who had pulled me back from the brink of disaster more times than I cared to count. Noah was my sun in many ways, but in others he was the land mines.
If I wasn’t careful where I stepped while traipsing through that field of recollection, I would ultimately step on the trigger of one bomb, a particularly nasty one, the first we’d buried in our garden. It would freeze me in place, a steady tickticktick warning me of the coming explosion.
But still, after being blown to bits and the days of therapy that would always follow, I’d find myself walking over that dangerous field again, plucking at memories of my childhood friend just because I so desperately missed him.
That night Noah asked me to run to him was a good memory. The first time I slept in his bed another.
The first time we had sex...
There were many nights I’d wondered if he still thinks of me, too, if it’s my body he imagines when he’s feeling needy. Because that was one of the things about the two of us: not just our minds understood each other, but our bodies did, too, a fact I hoped hadn’t changed.
I still had to get away from him, still had to escape, so I thought maybe I remembered a way.
Just pretend you can’t get enough of my dick...
Such an arrogant phrase, but it gave me the idea.
The minute he moved my hands in place, I got busy.
His dick responded to my touch instantly, a part of his body that remembered me as much as I remembered it.
My touch wasn’t a mistaken brush of the fingers, I assure you, but one made with the intention of turning him on. If I knew Noah, which I can promise you I did, I knew that he was an excitable man when it came to the flesh, the testosterone in him flowing strong.
Fucking idiot. He should have known better than to shove my hands between us, to joke around that I loved his cock, because it only gave me the bright idea that it would be difficult for a man to run with so much blood pooling between his legs, and it would be nearly impossible for him to say no.
My plan was solid, if not stomach turning, but I wasn’t the type to easily give up. Walking like the good little captive he was smart enough to know that I wasn’t, I decided that a quickie against a wall wouldn’t be too much to give up if it meant I could get hi
m to free my hands.
Oh, gee, Noah, how am I supposed to touch you there with my hands behind my back? I would do and say whatever it took just to convince him to untie my wrists so I could run like hell to get away from him.
The bathroom stunk like mold and old urine, an expected perfume of roadside rest stops bursting against my nose the second we walked in.
Used paper towels and clumps of toilet paper littered the floor, three urinals dotting the walls to the left of two lonely stalls. On the wall facing us, two steel sinks both listed to the side, the faucets dripping and the mirrors above them cracked and spotted with questionable residue.
This wasn’t the picture of a place any person would prefer to get it on, so I thought it fortunate that I wasn’t a prude.
I just had to get him to take the bait, just had to get his jeans around his ankles so I could get a head start. I thought about the last time I’d fucked someone to get what I wanted and cringed at the memory.
Dr. Peter Daniels.
My shrink.
The man I’d met when he was just a graduate student in college earning his degree by interning at my high school. Back then, it had been a game to see what it would take to corrupt every good man around me. As it turned out, Peter didn’t take much convincing. Three days in to our counseling sessions and he’d bent me over the desk to take his fill, his breath heavy behind me while I stared at the wall, counting down the minutes.
I was never into those men, just the game. After my family died, Peter never touched me again, but I was fine with it. I never touched myself, either. I was too dirty.
But I still knew the game well. Still knew how to be somewhere else in my head while playing it. I could endure a few minutes to earn my freedom.
Allowing Noah to lead me to stand against a wall near the urinals, I leaned my head back and waited for him to unzip his jeans and use the bathroom, my eyes slipping down as if on accident to take a quick peek at his package.
Head turning my direction, Noah caught my eye, his jaw working in a way that made the muscle jump. When he was done, he tucked himself in, but neglected to button his pants.