Blackout (2 page)

A flash of light peeking through the dense canopy of trees temporarily blinds me. Another flash sparks in my eyes—only this time it’s filled with splashes of images—a palmetto fan, a water lily, a dragonfly, and blood oozing from the muddy banks of a pond concealed by scum the color of sour apples. My foot searches for the brakes before I succumb to the blackout. My mind and foot do not connect.

A river of cold chills snakes along my arms. The sweat percolates into a steady stream and runs into my eyes, burning them.

I gulp in air, swallowing so much oxygen my head spins. I try to slow my breathing. No, no, please no. This can’t happen, not now. More nonsensical images jumble together in my vision along with sounds, a high-pitched whine and a razor buzz that bristles the hair on my arms, and smells, the rotting bog and the burn of a cigarette.

My heart jackhammers in my chest. Sweat rolls off me in waves. Those horrid black spots cloud my vision. The darkness searches for me. This can’t be happening. The doctors promised it wouldn’t. Before my foot finds the brakes, the void takes and blankets me.

When I come to, warm, sticky blood dribbles down my forehead and into my eyes, and my world is tilted sideways. The SUV leans on its side—the driver seat barely jutting out of the green-scummy bog.

My sunglasses have shattered, and the plastic has embedded into my eyelids. In fact the whole front windshield has fallen into my lap and the front bucket seats. I rotate my sore neck to the side—make that one bucket seat. The passenger side is crushed beyond recognition by a several hundred-year-old black gum tree almost as thick around as the SUV once was.

Swamp juice pours in through that side, soaking me up to my waist. My left arm is wrenched at an unnatural angle behind me. Pain spikes into it.

The stench of gasoline, smoke, and damp swamp fill my nose, causing me to choke. The mud and peat suck on the SUV, drawing it down.

It’s happened again, and the last shrink said it wouldn’t. He swore it wouldn’t. I’m supposed to be cured. My lungs gasp for air as I try to squash another panic attack where the dark walls close in to smother me, probably even sooner than the swamp will.

If I don’t want to die slurping on mud, I need to escape the Rover. Now. My good arm claws at the seatbelt to undo it. When I rotate, I twist my broken arm and cry out.

A pathetic “Help” escapes my lips. This is a well-traveled road, so someone should be by any minute, even if it’s only six o’clock in the morning. But will anyone see me?

The muck sucks harder on the Land Rover. The water rises up another couple inches. The bog can swallow whole trucks so that they’re never seen again.

“Help,” I scream louder this time. My arm hurts like hell.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to keep losing my mind. I struggle with the buckle, wrenching my bad arm further. My fingers fumble with the belt latch. “Dammit, come on.”

I twist to see my arm better. Jagged edges of bone poke through the skin. Nausea scrabbles up my throat, so I push the bitterness back down and continue fiddling with the buckle. It’s been smashed. I jam my thumb down harder.

Bending my arm, I grit my teeth to endure the pain and struggle with the seatbelt. This time, I slam the heel of my palm down onto the release. It doesn’t give, but the SUV sinks further into the muck with that same sickening, gulping sound.

The low rumble of a muscle car slows, stopping somewhere behind me. A car door opens and slams shut.

“There’s a black Range Rover on its side in the swamp,” a deep, whiskey voice rumbles. “About a mile or two to the causeway. Need an ambulance and a tow truck.”

“I’m over here,” I cry out. I crane my neck, but the only things I see are khaki-covered legs and a pair of work boots that tromp toward me.

“What’s hurt?” he asks, his gravelly voice branding me.

It oddly comforts me, and the panicked hyperventilation eases. I want to see his face, but I can’t from the awkward angle my body is wedged into the car.

“My arm’s broken.” I stretch my neck and wiggle my butt. My back must be all right. “My forehead hit the windshield or it hit me.”

He laughs huskily.

“That wasn’t meant to be funny,” I hiss.

“But it was,” he says.

When the swamp makes the sickening gulping sound, I claw at his arm.

“We can’t wait on the tow truck,” he says. “In another few minutes, your Range Rover could go under. I’m getting you out.”

“The sooner the better,” I say testily.

“Don’t get your panties all bunched up, girl.” His southern drawl settles on my tongue like the taste of sweet tea. “I’ll get you out.”

When his head pokes into the open driver side window, I tense. That wild thatch of dark hair and hazel eyes remind me of my childhood, frog gigging, fishing, and teasing gators. It wasn’t the smartest of pastimes, but they belonged to us.

His eyes are bloodshot, like he’s been out all night partying.

“Dare?” I say meekly. It’s been almost ten years. Is it really him?

“Nobody calls me that anymore.” He sounds taut now, edgy. Darius is stitched onto his work shirt pocket.

“Okay.” We haven’t spoken in so long. What do I say?

He doesn’t look at me but wrenches the SUV driver side door open and reaches around my waist to unbuckle my seatbelt. Grease permanently stains the fingernail quick and tips. Even though he loves cars, he told me he’d never work for his dad at his auto repair shop. Its logo is sewn onto the back of his shirt. What changed his mind?

One thick leather band, two seashell bracelets, one plastic, and two woven bands circle his left wrist. The pink plastic one memorializes his mother’s lost battle with breast cancer. His many close friends gave him the rest. The girl of his dreams, Lisa Skittleharp, gave him the one made from cowry shells. I always wanted a shell bracelet, like the one he strung together for her.

“Goddammit, the buckle’s jammed.” He looks at me, not with the teasing expression he gave me when I was a kid trying to keep up with his long, solid legs. For the first time ever, he notices that I’m a girl. His gaze rakes over me, sending rivulets of chills into my chest or that could be shock from my broken arm, staking its claim on me.

He stares at my face for what feels like minutes but is only seconds. “Shit. Teal Covington?” He studies me, like the old me is somewhere in there.

My hair is long now and copper-colored. When I was eight, it was bobbed and bleached white from the sun.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he says as if a doubled-edged sword lies between us, promising to slice us both if either of us budges an inch.

Would he really leave me stuck here? “So you’re just going to let the mud suck me under so I suffocate?”

His brow narrows. “I probably should.”

Besides the pain in my arm, his words bite, so I blink back tears. We used to be friends. “Why? What did I do?” I’m the one with the messed up head.

His head withdraws from my SUV coffin, and he jogs away.

“Dare, please don’t leave me.” I struggle with the belt buckle holding me captive.

The swamp gulps down the whole hood of the SUV. “Dare,” I scream at the top of my lungs. Terror stands with both feet on my chest. “Darius Arlen Tucker, don’t you dare leave me.”

I scoot down in the seat in an attempt to escape the restraint. It’s too snug across my chest for me to escape. Panic ripples through me. Don’t let me black out.

Dare returns with a toolbox, fishes out a box cutter, and leans over me. He snorts out a laugh. “You actually thought I’d leave you here. Though it would serve you right, I won’t let the gators gnaw on you for breakfast, Teal Elizabeth Covington.” Disgust plasters his face. “I may hate you, but I would never hurt you.”

Hurt crinkles the skin around my eyes. He’s grown as mean as his older brothers. His oldest brother Sam is the best-looking Tucker, though he’s as ornery as the hungry red wolves wandering the swamp. Dare now closely resembles Sam with that same sneer permanently slanting his lips.

When I was eight, I so wanted his older brothers not to call me Dare’s Tagalong. I wanted them to notice me because Dare always stared stupidly at Lisa. That girl had boobs at age eleven.

Dare’s firm chest presses against mine as he saws through the belt. None of the boys my age in France are built like this, so it only slightly explains the electricity firing in my nerves and the warmth surging in my blood.

“I have to move your arm, and it’s going to hurt like a mother,” he says.

“I thought you’d never hurt me.”

“You can go down with the SUV if you’d like. Pick your poison.”

He straightens my arm, and pain shoots into it, like a gator ripped it from the socket. I cry out.

“Look at me.” Dare leans his head against mine. “You’re going to be okay.”

His eyes stare into mine, causing turmoil in my stomach.

His gaze darts away as he crushes my chest with his. Heat flares in my breasts and cheeks. I’ve had guys feel me up, slept with my boyfriend Henri in France, though I don’t remember it. I blacked out shortly after we were curled together on his bed and he told me he loved me. Your first time is supposed to be special—mine was anything but. I woke up sore between my legs and a headache from drinking red wine.

The swamp eats another few inches of the SUV. One well-muscled and heavily tattooed arm slips under my thighs. A hammerhead in colorful ink chases a parrotfish around his solid forearm. He told me he’d never suffer through being inked like his older brothers had. Liar.

His other arm slides under my broken wing.

“Would you grab my purse? It should be on the front seat.” That no longer exists.

He pulls me out and gently sets me down onto the tall grasses crushed by the SUV’s route into the swamp. He returns to the SUV where his hand plunges into the goo, rummaging around until he fishes out my Louis Vuitton bag I bought in Paris. It’s no longer gold but a sickly green.

Dare sets the bag onto my lap and carries me to the restored Shelby. I’d heard from my best friend Kami he’d bought the rust bucket for a song four years after my dad put a restraining order on him. That was the only time in eight years she ever mentioned him.

Dare’s about to put me in his car, when I snap, “Don’t get your car all dirty. Put me on the ground.”

We’re both covered in swamp cider, so he carefully props me up against the Shelby on the shoulder of the road. “Have it your way.”

He holds my broken arm. “Look away.”

“Why?”

“Just do it Teal.” His brow scrunches up. “When you were a kid, you never argued with me.”

That’s because I kissed the ground he walked on. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m no longer a child.”

He smirks while his gaze glosses over my soaked blouse, completely see-through now. “That’s true.”

I smack him with my good arm. “I have a face.”

Dare laughs, gets up, and opens his car. He pulls out a light jacket and drapes it on my shoulders. “I forget how you like to cover up.”

I hide my soaked shirt. I hate feeling exposed.

A memory surfaces. That day in the swamp, I wore the shorts and top so Dare would see how differently I dressed. What an odd memory.

He points at the road leading out of the swamp. “Now look over there.”

When I turn my head, the sound of bone against bone scrapes in my ear. I scream and clamp onto him with my good hand, spinning back around. “What the hell?”

“Ow,” he says, unclasping my hand from his arm.

The bone is no longer poking out.

“I had to set the bone to stop the bleeding.” He douses my arm with hydrogen peroxide, presses a sterile pad on my arm, then wraps it with tape.

“So now you’re a doctor?” When we were kids, he wanted to be a vet. Dare loves animals and cars and Lisa Skittleharp, prettiest girl in the county and just as sugary as the candy. Everybody loves her. She was even nice to me, patting me on the head, like I was Dare’s pet. I didn’t really like that.

“Thanks to you, I’ll never be one.” He takes another bandage to slow the bleeding on my forehead.

“I didn’t do anything to you.”

Dare flashes and narrows his eyes shadowed by thick lashes. “You really haven’t grown up, have you?”

“What are you saying?” I have boobs now. I look down to make sure. They aren’t huge like Lisa’s, but they’re nice.

“You just never grew up—mentally that is.”

“Screw you.”

“It’d be the best night of your miserable life. I should’ve let the swamp bury you.”

Damn him. I stare at the Shelby and not at him. At age eight, I kowtowed before him, while I secretly pined over Sam who mercilessly picked on Dare and sometimes me.

Dare examines my broken arm, spotting the long, thin white scar on the inside of my wrist. “What the hell? Why would you do this?”

My face and neck light up. He doesn’t need to know. “Why do you talk like some backwater boy?”

“Cuz I am one.” His gaze bores into me. “So that bothers the privileged beach girl’s sensitive ears.”

Some of the boys called the girls who lived on the beach high maintenance bitches. Dare must think like the rest of his kind now.

“Your car is beautiful,” I say, changing the subject. He did save me from a horrible death.

The car is how I imagined it with a pair of gold stripes that race up and over the black hood, just like the car magazines we drooled over until Lisa would pull him away, then I’d vie for his older brothers’ attentions, and that never worked.

His chiseled jaw draws up in a half grin before it completely fades. “I shouldn’t be here.”

Do I tell him that my dad renewed the restraining order on him or does he already know?

“I have to go.” He gets up. “The ambulance should be here any minute.”

“Relax. You saved me.” I don’t want to be left alone in the swamp. It may still gobble me up.

The flash of red lights approaches us. I want to say more, to apologize for my dad, but the words tangle on my tongue.

Two paramedics dash out of the ambulance, and the blonde bitch Nan checks my vitals.

Her straw-colored ponytail bounces off one shoulder. She’s a few years older than Dare and was the head cheerleader before Lisa went to the county school.