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Austin finally rears
back when I scream his name. Instantly, he darts up and turns and puts his
hands on my face.

“Did he hurt you?”
Austin asks, his chest heaving with adrenaline.

He grabs my arm to
inspect one scrape as I mumble something about being okay, something about my
camera, then start tearing up again. I babble about what I thought Bud was
going to do to me if he got me into the car.

Austin puts his
forehead against mine.
“
Shh
, Trina.
You’re safe. I’ve got you.”

This finally quiets me.
No one has ever made me feel as safe as my father did, except for Shane and
Austin.

It occurs to me that
Bud isn’t making any noise, and I peek around Austin’s shoulder. Orrin is
stretched out on the ground with red stripes across this broad face from his
broken nose and bloody lips.
Shit, please
don’t be dead
, I think, for Austin’s sake, not Bud’s.

Austin turns to follow
my gaze, and I watch the flush drain from his face. “Jesus, I’ve done it now.”
He approaches Bud hesitantly and bends over to check for a pulse. “He’s
breathing.” We both sag with relief, but it’s a fleeting moment.

Hands threading roughly
through his hair, Austin paces beside the patrol car. “I’m done. Assaulting an
officer, an Orrin, in this town? I’ll be lucky if I make it to prison. They’ll
just shoot me and claim I tried to escape, and no one will give a shit.”

I shake my head
vehemently. “No, I’ll tell them you were defending me.”

Austin comes to a
fidgety halt in front of me. “Trina,” he says, raising one brow pointedly. “I
just put down Bud
Orrin
.”

Bile rises in my
throat, because I know he’s right.

He lets his arms drop
to his side, defeated. “Shane’s been telling me we need to get out of here, go
someplace where people don’t spit at the name Sully. I guess this takes care of
that decision.” Austin’s gaze comes to rest on mine, and his brows dip over those
bright eyes. “Only thing I’m going to miss around here is our date…and you.”

“No, you don’t have
to…” I start to say, but the words fail me little by little. His best chance
really is to get as far away from this town as possible, someplace where the
name Orrin holds no weight and Sully isn’t instantly recognizable on a Most
Wanted list.

The idea of being left
alone here, without my parents, without Austin, without Shane, without even my
camera, makes me want to curl up into a ball and fade away.

Summoning all the weak
breath I have left, I rasp, “Take me with you.”

Austin grows still,
staring hard at me. “Trina, you don’t want—”

I throw myself against
Austin and grab the back of his head to bring his mouth down to mine. He lets
out a small gasp, and I trace my tongue along the soft, plump pout of his lips.
Then his warm tongue is moving against mine, out of his mouth, tasting of sweet
lemon iced tea, tasting me. With all the adrenaline pumping through us, we go
from zero to sixty in two seconds flat, devouring one another while whimpering
and sighing and groaning. His hands grasp first at the back of my shirt, then
move down to cup and squeeze my ass, his fingertips kneading bare flesh below
the hem of my shorts. Aching need blossoms in my chest and my cunt, and a
deluge of cream flows from my tingling pussy lips against the crotch of my
panties. A hard bulge forms in the front of Austin’s jeans more quickly than I
would have thought possible. I rub myself frantically against his hard-on,
experiencing firsthand how sexual the rush of chaos and adrenaline and violence
can be.

When I can’t breathe
anymore, I pull back from Austin just enough to
mew
,
“Please don’t leave me here all by myself. Mom is gone and Dad is gone, and
I’ve got nothing here. This place is going to kill me. And Bud, oh god, when he
wakes up—”

Austin puts his
forehead against mine again. “Trina,” he whispers against my mouth.
“Trina, baby, stop.
Shh
. I won’t
leave you.”

The hard, choking sob
working its way up my throat pauses, then begins to dissipate. “You won’t?”

“I promise, but we have
to get out of here before anyone sees this. Do you need anything out of the
diner?”

“Just
my purse.”

Austin nods.
 
“Let’s go.”

His fingers lace with
mine, and we sprint across the street and into the diner. Every muscle in my
body shivers with nerves, from our panicked flight but also from the idea that
I’m running away with Austin. The cook is chopping the meat for tonight. I can
hear the whack of his cleaver against the butcher block in the kitchen. Nora is
still in the storeroom. I don’t need any questions from them, so I say nothing
as I hurry inside and collect my bag from under the counter.

At the garage, we skirt
the entrance and head around back to the alley where Austin parks his old black
Mustang while he’s at work. We streak down the alley without telling his boss
or the other mechanic we’re going. I feel every second ticking, wondering if
Bud has woken up yet. Has he called in for help? Are the other half-dozen
officers in town already looking for us?

“Give me fifteen
minutes to get a few things together at my apartment,” I beg as we squeal into
a turn and onto the main drag. The few cars that constitute late day traffic
around here have emerged into the afternoon heat. Austin slows down to a mere
ten miles an hour over the speed limit, which is normal enough for him.

“Make it ten minutes,”
he says, then pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and hits a speed dial
button.

After a couple of
rings, I hear the line pick up, and a male voice I recognize all too well
answers. Shane. It occurs to me only then that I’m not just running away with
Austin. Shane will be with us. I haven’t seen him for three years, since he got
sick of losing jobs and always being the first suspect anytime someone stole or
vandalized something in town. He took off on that beast of a motorcycle of his,
and I was sure he’d never be back. That was part of the reason I left town
myself. It wasn’t the same around here after…after Shane and I broke up, after
he dropped out of school and started avoiding me, after I watched him screw his
way through every easy lay in town knowing he was breaking my heart, after
everything.

A sudden wash of guilt
floods my chest, as I look over at Austin, his fingers drumming anxiously
against the steering wheel as we speed down the small side streets. A few
minutes ago, I stood on the sidewalk and begged him not to leave me alone here,
but almost three years ago that’s exactly what I did to him. We hadn’t been
dating or anything, but no one was closer to me at the time. We’ve got a lot of
history, me and Shane and Austin, from the fights they got into in grade school
with anyone who tried to pick on me, to late nights sneaking out together to
drink and dance at one of the roadhouses that didn’t look too closely at fake
IDs.

I can’t help myself,
overcome abruptly with affection and need. I slide over in the seat and press
myself to Austin, my face turned against his shoulder and one hand reaching
down between his legs to hold and rub and squeeze his hard-on. His cock feels
iron-hard and huge inside those jeans. A small, reckless part of me wants to
beg him to pull into an alley and put his dick deep in my pussy, to hold me
down in the backseat and fuck me fast and rough and tell me I’m never leaving
him behind again.

“Christ, Trina,” Austin
groans and swallows hard. One hand leaves the wheel and closes over mine,
squeezing harder. I reach lower, massaging his balls through the thick denim,
tempted to unzip his pants and free his hard cock. For a few seconds, his hips
nudge against my palm, and my pussy throbs with anticipation. Then he huffs out
a hard breath and reluctantly peels my fingers away from his crotch. “I know we
both want it, baby.
Any time but now.”

I nuzzle his shoulder
and scrape my light pink fingernails along his inseam.

Austin shakes his head,
and a tense, frustrated chuckle rumbles under his breath. “Don’t tease,
Katrina,” he says, knowing my father always used my full name when I was in
trouble. “Teases get spanked.”

A shiver darts up my
spine, and I slide my dark gaze up to Austin’s little-boy-handsome face.
Everything I know about Shane’s lovemaking, everything I’ve heard about Austin,
floats through my mind in tantalizing snippets. I wait until Austin glances
over into my eyes and say, “Maybe I’d like that.”

Austin stares at me at
least a full second longer than he should really have his eyes off the road,
then shakes his head again. “I hope you know what you’re asking for, Trina.
There’s no taking that back. It’s been too long coming.”

And it has. Since
Austin and I were seven and Shane was eight and I found them in the middle of
the night stealing tomatoes out of my dad’s garden in the backyard. I took
leftovers out of the fridge to feed them. They were rough, wiry, hard little
boys who had lost their father four months earlier, but I knew them from
school. I knew from watching them that they weren’t the troublemakers everyone
said they were, just boys from the poorest part of town. Trouble came looking
for them, and they earned their reputation putting trouble down.

At my apartment, Austin
keeps watch at the car while I run upstairs to pack a small duffle bag. On top
of a few pairs of jeans and t-shirts, my one nice dress, and a small photo
album, I place my mother’s red heels. I resist the urge to pause and run my
hands over the candy apple red patent leather, to flip through the album,
filled with images of my parents and of me with Shane and Austin.

I take the stairs two
at a time back down to the street, just as a motorcycle roars to an abrupt halt
in front of Austin’s Mustang. Coming out of the building entryway, I brace
myself for what I know I’m going to see. A dark blond man, wearing no helmet,
dismounts the hulking black motorcycle.
 
I don’t need to see his face. He’s not that he hasn’t changed. His back
is broader and more defined under his dark blue t-shirt. His hair is shorter.
His tight black leather pants hug thighs that are thicker and more muscled than
I remember. But he still carries himself like Shane Sully, like the biggest chip
in the world is permanently attached to his shoulder, like he’s been
hurt—inside—so many times that something in there doesn’t heal anymore.

Austin and Shane stand
beside the Mustang, muttering and gesturing anxiously, as I walk up. My hands
are twisting the strap on the duffle in nerves as I wait for Shane to turn. And
he does. Sky blue eyes that I used to see caressing
me, that
I still see in my dreams,
shift directly to my face. A fleeting look I
don’t understand, something like fear and sadness, passes over Shane’s brow.
Then it’s gone, and
a hardness
takes over his
expression.

“No,” he says, still
looking at me. Then he turns on Austin. “No, she’s not coming with us.”

I stand on the sidewalk
like an unwanted waif, part of me wanting to burst into tears at Shane’s
reaction to me after all this time, another part wanting to crawl over the hood
and hurl myself at him and beat him to an apologetic pulp.

“She’s coming,” Austin
tells his brother, calmly and flatly. That’s his way with Shane, and it usually
works. “I’m not leaving her behind.” He pauses, and a meaningful look passes
from younger to elder. “
We’re
not
leaving her behind.”

Nostrils flaring and
lips pinched into a hard frown, Shane shoots an angry look in my direction,
like I’ve somehow caused all this. I guess, in a way, I have.
If Austin hadn’t saved me from Bud…
But I can’t regret that.

Shane turns without
further discussion and stalks over to his motorcycle. Austin motions for me to
join him in the Mustang. We settle into the old leather and fabric seat, and
follow Shane’s bike as he leads us along back routes paralleling the
interstate, and I’m hugging the duffle to my chest and still twisting the
strap. My breath is an effort, like my chest is filled with dirt and rocks,
packed hard by a lifetime of footsteps.

“It’s going to be
alright, Trina. Settle down, baby.”

I avoid looking at
Austin, because I don’t want him to see the tears in my eyes. But then they’re
streaming down my cheeks anyway.

“I don’t understand
what I did to him,” I breathe in a small voice. “After he got arrested that
first time, and he walked out on his senior year of high school, he treated me
like I was nothing to him. He didn’t look at me the same. He didn’t touch me
anymore. And then.”
 
A sob shudders up
through my throat, choking me, and I pause to cough and sniffle and wipe my
tears with the back of one fist. “And then he was screwing his way through
every girl in town and throwing it in my face. Why? Why does he hate me so
much?”

Austin is clenching the
steering wheel in his fists, glancing at me as often as the uneven, crumbling
roadway will allow. “He doesn’t hate you, Trina. He couldn’t. It’s…” He trails
off and stares at the road, at Shane’s back, for a few seconds. “It’s the
opposite, Trina.”