by Lily White
If you go, I go...
I’d meant it all those years ago, and I still meant it today. I couldn’t live in a world that didn’t have her in it.
“It’s time, Noah. Gary is staring at us like he’s ready. You need to go before the sun starts to climb. It’s safer that way.”
While she spoke, a truck pulled up a few spaces down from us. A fisherman climbed out of the driver’s side door and moved to grab a few poles from the back bed.
I let out another long breath and got out to walk up to the boat. The fisherman beside us shot a glance my way, his brows tugging together when his stare locked on my face. He stilled in place when I turned to walk toward the boat, but then his voice called out behind me.
“Stop right there!”
My feet froze in place, every muscle tensing into stone because the way he’d yelled wasn’t a timid demand or a shaky request. I would know that tone of voice anywhere. I’d been in prison long enough to recognize the sound of a corrections officer or a cop.
My eyes locked on Gary as he turned to walk onto the boat. He was smart to act like he had nothing to do with me.
Spinning on a heel, I caught sight of the gun pointed at me first, my eyes dragging up to see the angry glare on the fisherman’s face. He must have been there for a day off from work and wasn’t a professional mariner like the guys in Gary’s boat.
“Raise your fucking hands. Keep them where I can see them.”
He was still positioned near the bed of his truck, so I knew he hadn’t been able to call someone or announce my presence to more cops.
Now that I was staring at him, I could see he was a younger man, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties. Most likely a rookie who had the good fortune of stumbling on a wanted escaped convict.
He could make his name by bringing me in.
His hands didn’t shake though, not like Tammy’s had when she’d aimed her gun at me.
Slowly raising my arms at my sides, I felt desperation swell within me.
Prison wasn’t somewhere I wanted to go. It wasn’t how I wanted my life to end, and I refused to be locked into another cage until the day I died.
A person has to make a decision when faced with a life lived behind bars or the freedom of death. And I wasn’t sure mine would see me living past this day, this hour, this minute.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to live without Ensley there beside me.
Maybe this was the end I was seeking. Not some fake life lived under an assumed name in South America. Not some lonely existence where I couldn’t lay my head down at night without thinking of the woman I would never see again.
Maybe this was the universe’s way of giving me an out from the years of suffering I would endure tucked away in a country where I couldn’t get to Ens and remind her why life wasn’t worth living if we weren’t together anymore.
“You stay right there. You hear me? Don’t take one fucking step or I’ll shoot.”
The rookie scooted right to get to his driver side door, no doubt wanting to call for backup to bring an ex-con in. But I had already made the decision to rush forward before he had the chance to bring an entire squad down on me and drag me back to prison.
Lifting a foot from the ground, I took that first step, his eyes locking with mine just as another car pulled up, its tires squealing over the ground when it came to a stop.
A familiar voice called out to me because she hadn’t seen the full picture of the predicament I was in.
My head spun left to see Ensley running my direction, her full attention on me as she shouted my name. She didn’t even hear the cop scream for her to stop. She was so focused on getting to me that she never stood a chance.
When the gun fired and her body jerked back, it was like time stood still, everything moving in slow motion as her arms flew out at her sides and her eyes opened wide, her lips falling apart as time snapped back into place, and she fell back to crumble against the ground.
“Ensley!”
My voice was a roar that was somehow louder than the crack of the cop’s gun, but it wasn’t her I was running to.
It was him.
His hands were shaking now as he realized he’d just shot a woman everybody assumed was a victim, his eyes locked on where her body had fallen, shock rendering him still. I took advantage of the split second confusion and rushed toward him, my hand knocking the gun from his while my arm wrapped around his neck.
I didn’t kill him, just knocked him out. But only because I didn’t need the extra problem of a hundred cops swarming this place while I did what needed to be done.
When I dropped his body to the ground, I grabbed his gun and turned to find Ensley still in the same place. Susan and Melinda knelt beside her, tears streaming down their cheeks as Melinda whispered softly.
I was by her side within seconds, my hand reaching for Ensley’s face as the light faded in her eyes and her body jerked in place.
It reminded me of the final moments of her mother.
That slow motion death.
The suffering that Ensley didn’t deserve.
“Don’t you do it,” I warned. “Don’t you dare leave me. I wasn’t fucking joking, Ens. I will die right here beside you if you stop breathing.”
But it wasn’t like she could make a choice whether to live or die. The cop had made it for her.
He’d made it for us.
If you go, I go...
I watched her eyes close as my hand gripped the officer’s gun.
Perhaps this was how it was meant to be all along.
EPILOGUE
There’s a field that runs along a long stretch of road in a rural area that is mostly abandoned. Every so often a car will pass by traveling from one town to another, dirt and dust kicked up by its tires that is left to follow the winds that blow in whatever direction they happen to be going.
Most of the time, it’s so hot that the road is washed out by the heat of the sun, a mirage of water vapor in the distance that makes the cement look like water receding into the horizon, a veritable river that no car would be able to pass, at least from my vantage point.
There was nothing remarkable about this place, nothing that would draw the eye and make a person take notice, but farther back, if you squinted your eyes hard enough, you would see a splash of color.
Wildflowers grew in the field in all different shades. Reds bled into orange. Purples transitioned into blue. Every so often, a patch of yellow or white or pink would break through the sea of pigments, all different heights and shapes of blooms, verdant green lining the ground beneath it, a spectacle of life now that the storms had passed and watered the earth.
It was a place built to disguise a secret.
A place where messages were buried and a story was told beneath a marker that not many people had ever noticed from driving down that road.
But then...it was never intended to be noticed.
Walking up to the marker, I ran my hand over the carved surface. The wood was getting old and giving into the elements. In a few years time, another would have to be made to mark this space within the flowers.
Only two names were visible without the day they were born or the day they died. Just two names that would one day be forgotten by a world that had never offered them more than the secrets they had buried in the ground.
It wasn’t fair when you stopped to think about it, but then life never really is.
Why are some people born into enchantment while being handed the world on a platter? Yet others are never given a chance? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I had to tend this marker to ensure it never fell apart, to make sure that at least one place still carried the memory of a million secrets never told.
Noah Mason Carter and Ensley Aimee Bennett.
Their names were nothing more than a story now that existed among the flowers.
At least here they would always see the beauty they’d intended when planting their garden. While deep in the ground, the last pieces of them w
ould feed the life above.
I shook my head where I was kneeling, my mind barely able to understand how they’d run so far just to run out of space.
It didn’t matter how many times this marker crumpled under the relentless sun and driving rains, it didn’t matter how many times it aged with the years that flew by. I would continue building others until I couldn’t carve them any longer. Would continue marking this place.
Even if nobody knew its significance.
Even if people didn’t realize what was buried in the ground beneath it.
Above my head, clouds rolled in as the wind picked up around me. Flowers shivered at my feet, their thin stalks bending in one direction or another, the sea of color rolling in waves along the once barren stretch of land.
On the road, I could hear a car pass by, a quick rush of music blaring from open windows, there and then gone as the car sped along, the driver ignorant of the man walking up through a sea of flowers on his way home.
My house was across that stretch of highway, a hidden oasis just outside of a small town, a place where I could lay my head at night and stare up at the stars and constellations that were never visible in larger cities.
Pausing at the road, I held a hand above my eyes to shield the sun, my lips curving into a grin to see laundry flapping against the strong winds and to watch the woman who hurried to collect them before the sky opened up and soaked them with rain.
Brown hair was a wild mess around her head. The length brushing her hips while the tangles were untamed. She didn’t care to do much with it anymore. It was just another part of her that was natural in its beauty and free of restraints.
She turned as I crossed the road and ran up a long dirt driveway toward the house, her hand lifting up to wave at me while a scowl pulled at her lips.
“Will you help me with this? The freaking rain is going to ruin everything, and I just got it all done this morning.”
There wasn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for her.
She didn’t have to ask.
We rushed to remove the clothes from the lines, both of us barely making it inside the house when the rain finally poured down in sheets around the house, the road and marker forgotten, the flowers getting the water they needed to keep blooming for the rest of the summer.
Layla dropped a basket on the ground and turned to me to take the second basket from my hands, her grey eyes meeting mine with such clarity, a beam of light behind them. The only clouds I saw anymore were the ones that rolled outside.
Stepping up to her, I swept her hair back and placed soft kisses on her neck, my fingers stroking over a mess of scars from a lifetime lived before this one.
“I love you, Layla Parker.”
She grinned, swatted at my hand and rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, I love you too, Jonathan.”
Her mouthed screwed into a disgusted pout before she burst out in laughter.
“I’m never going to get used to that. I’m not using that damn name when we’re alone. There’s no freaking point.”
Arching a brow, I slid my fingers around her neck, spun her around and pulled her back to my chest. Squeezing just enough to be a threat, I said, “Then say my name the way you like it.”
She melted against me.
“I love you too, Noah.”
I grinned and turned my face into her hair to breathe in the scent of jasmine shampoo.
I couldn’t believe we’d somehow ended up here.
In this place.
After everything.
After she’d taken a shaky breath and I’d thought she would die right in front of me.
The tips of my fingers rubbed at the scar that ran the other side of her shoulder.
“I hate this mark. Hate that you were shot because of me.”
Ensley smiled. “Yeah, well it all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”
“It wouldn’t have if Susan wasn’t a nurse.”
“Sarah.”
“What?”
She spun on me and met my eyes with hers.
“The woman’s name was Sarah. Why do you still get that wrong?”
Laughing, I shrugged a shoulder.
“Probably because some crazy bitch scared the shit out of me that night doing crazy bitch things just before getting herself shot. It’s hard to remember all the details.”
Ens smiled.
“I’m not a crazy bitch anymore, remember?”
“Yeah, you are,” I reminded her, “but that’s okay. One of these days, I’ll forgive you.”
I winked, and she pushed up on her toes to peck my lips with hers. “I’m going to make dinner.”
It had been three years since that night at the marina, and I was thankful for every damn day I’d spent with Ensley.
Things had been a bit touch and go after she was shot, Susan - or Sarah - whoever she was, was quick to jump into action. A former trauma nurse that had tended soldiers in the military, she knew just what to do to tend to Ensley’s injury, and while I drove us away from that marina, she went to work in the back seat fighting to save a life.
We never did get on that boat, not after leaving a cop knocked out on the ground near where he’d found me.
Instead, we took off and allowed a network of women to move us around day after day, eventually getting us into Texas where another boat waited at another marina to shuttle us off in the dead of night.
A month and half later we found ourselves in South America with a questionable group of connections who helped us create fake identities and the documents that went with them so we could start over.
It still pissed me off to remember why Ensley had been late that night. Even now, as I stared across the room at her, I wanted to march over and ring her neck for being so stupid for what she’d done.
I couldn’t blame her.
Hell, I was more shocked than anything that she’d even managed it. But after we’d gotten her to another safe place and had managed to get the bullet out of her shoulder and stitch her up, she’d pointed at a bag I’d almost left in the parking lot at the spot where her body had fallen.
Thankfully, I’d grabbed it without really understanding why it mattered, but something had told me to be sure to bring it along.
Ensley told me to open it, the pain of her shoulder obvious in her expression even though a smile curled the corner of her lips.
I’d known what it was the instant my fingers wrapped over the glass.
She hadn’t come straight back that day. After killing her shrink, Ensley was too intent on finding the remaining piece of what had been our former life to think that her absence would cause anybody to worry.
But that was just like her.
When she set her mind to something nothing else mattered in the long run.
It had taken her six hours to dig up an entire stretch of yard to find the damn jar.
The fact that she hadn’t been caught by anybody who still lived in the neighborhood was surprising.
From what she told me, her house was no longer standing, while mine was vacant and falling apart, but those fences were still there, and that tiny strip of grass where wildflowers had once grown was still waiting with those secrets buried in the ground.
Six hours.
But she’d found the last of the notes, the ones about how much we loved each other, the ones I’d left buried in our garden of discontent.
Burying them again was the first thing we did after finding our new home here and establishing a life together.
Now that jar lay beneath a marker where Noah and Ensley’s life from before had ended, the memories trapped beneath a field of flowers that we’d planted when the first summer rains began.
It was the most beautiful part of us, those notes, the hope that one day the stars would align and we’d be freed from the pain of our childhood.
“Do you want frozen pizza or fish sticks?”
I rolled my eyes and grinned. She stocked the house with all the crap we would eat as kids and h
adn’t bothered to learn to cook anything worth a damn. It was just another way she manipulated me to get what she wanted.
It was fine with me, though, because when the day was over and the evening set in, I got to love on her body without the fights she’d always demanded.
I got to sleep by her each night without worry she’d be gone in the morning.
She was finally mine, and she wasn’t going anywhere ever the fuck again.
If that meant I had to cook dinner, then I’d cook every night for the rest of my life.
Stepping into the kitchen, I laughed to see she’d already jumped on the counter, knowing good and damn well that I would come marching in here to fix something more palatable than the frozen shit she always warmed up.
“You’re impossible,” I said, my head shaking as I walked up to push my body between her legs and wrap my arms around her.
Ensley smiled down at me with such happiness in her eyes that I couldn’t help but smile back.
We had a new phrase that we said to each other now, a replacement for the one I’d always used when our lives were nothing more than garbage.
She leaned down to press her forehead against mine, those perfect lips speaking in a whisper.
“Hey, Noah.”
“Yeah?”
She blinked, but then locked her eyes with mine. “If you stay...”
My smile widened as I answered her. “I stay.”
The End
Keep reading for a preview of my next release, The Vanity of Roses, coming March 25, 2020
THE VANITY OF ROSES
Callan Rose.
That hadn’t always been his name.
When we were children, he was nothing more than the servant boy in my family.
He was an amusement to me.
A nobody.
A weak soul who refused to fight back.
It had been so easy to take advantage.
But then my father died, and I was stolen away while the family moved on without me. Ten years later, and I was penniless with no place to go. Desperate. I returned to the Rose Estate without knowing Callan was now the head of the family.
He’d honed his body and temper in the underground fighting ring my family owned. The scars only made him more beautiful.