Unfiltered & Unsaved (2 page)

That clearly marked road map had been crumpled and then set on fire, and what was ahead of her looked more like a bleak, leaden wilderness now with no roads, no map, no plan on how to make her way through it. No light at the end of her personal tunnel, just more tunnel, and the distant rumble of a train heading her way.

Elijah was nodding in agreement. “Yeah, that’s my plan, too—save money on undergrad, spend it on post-grad. The first school counts, but the second one is what they’ll really see on the job application. I’d rather not spend my whole life paying off the student loans. Just half of it, like everybody else.”

“What’s your major? I mean, what would it be if you do come here?” Even as she said it, she felt cheap and stupid; it was the opening gambit in just about every college conversation at a party, and here she was parroting it back. But he just gave her another smile, with those luscious dimples, and the understanding in it made her feel warm and comfortable for the first time in what seemed like … days. He tried the tea. It must have been less than lava-temperature now, because he sipped carefully.

“I’m undecided,” he said, which was definitely a normal answer, especially at ASU-RV. The place was full of undecideds. It was probably the majority of the student body. “Kind of thinking about Liberal Arts with a focus in English Literature. Not nearly as much … math.” He said that with the same dread most people reserved for public speaking.

That made her laugh a little. “I’m a math geek,” she admitted. “I love calculus.”

“Huh, I guess somebody must, but I always thought they were aliens in disguise. Yours is perfect, by the way. So, how is the weather on your planet back home?”

“Cooler,” she said. “One thing I’ll never get used to here is the summers. It’s like living in a toaster oven.”

She was, she realized, actually
chatting,
as if she knew Elijah. As if they were friends. He had an easy, calm, gentle way about him—charming without being overbearing. He seemed to
like
to talk to her … not like most of Brittany’s boy-toys who couldn’t care less what a woman had to say, especially if it wasn’t
oh yes faster
or
ride me like a rented pony.

She hadn’t been intending to think of him like that, but the train of thought led to a split-second speculation about what his chest looked like under that neatly buttoned, pressed shirt. Well built, she thought. Solid. Strong. His skin looked velvet-soft over the muscles, and his hands were beautiful. A few scars on them, as if he’d worked in carpentry or some mechanical field, but the shape of them reminded her of pianos and paintings. They looked like expert hands that would be gentle and precise in their touch, just exactly where they needed to be. She could almost feel them on her, and the brief, intense fantasy left her a little flushed and short of breath.

“What other schools are you considering?” she asked him, when the silence stretched a little too long. He was shuffling through the papers he’d brought out, and now he looked up with an apologetic grin.

“Sorry, got distracted. I guess I’m drifting, more or less. Making my way across the country and stopping in at a bunch of campuses. Started out in Florida, heading for California. Then I’ll make my choice, I suppose. But right now, ASU Rio Verde’s looking pretty good.” He managed to make that sound flirtatious but not obvious, somehow. Maybe it was the very subtle lift of his eyebrow, the shape of his lips (they were, she had to admit, really nice lips). “Although of course there’s the money issue. Got to figure out how I’m paying for all of it.”

“I hear that. I had to work a lot of part time jobs to save up, and ASU-RV isn’t exactly pricey.”

“Yeah.” He sighed and looked at the paperwork in front of him again. “I’m working a part time job right now. That’s part of why I’m moving around so much. You know?”

“Really? What are you doing?”

“Selling.” He pushed the papers across to her, and she automatically reached out to take them. He laughed in a ruefully charming way. “Magazines. I know, I know, who reads print magazines anymore? But the truth is, we get bonuses for signing up three people a day, and I’ve already got two for today. You could really help me out if you just take one. Plus, you get entered into a drawing.”

“For money?” She probably sounded disappointed, because she was. So he hadn’t talked to her because he was nice … only because he wanted to sell her something. Besides, she didn’t want money. She wanted something else. Peace of mind, which probably wasn’t included in the raffle.

“Sorry, no, not cash. A paid vacation to Hawaii. Two weeks including airfare, hotel, meals, everything. They even throw in your own private driver.”

She stared hard enough to make her eyes burn. “Seriously?”

“Well, there’s a take-it-in-cash option if you win, but honestly, I don’t recommend it, they’ll short you. The vacation’s really nice—luxury resort and everything.” He reached into his backpack and dug out something else—a brochure. “Here. Take a look.” It
was
nice. A Hilton, right on the beach. The suite looked bigger than the house Hope had grown up in. “So what do you think? Save my life? We’ve got some inspirational magazines in there too if that’s what you’re looking for.”

She nodded, not really listening, because a picture of a blond woman about her age captivated her. The woman relaxed on the beach in a bikini, looking happy and at peace. She could imagine herself there, imagine the warm press of the sand beneath her, the tropical sun, the cool ocean spray.

It looked like … escape. And she so desperately wanted to escape from the wasteland, into the light
.

Elijah had stopped talking, and was looking at her as if he’d asked her a question. She raised her eyebrows. “Um … sorry?”

“I was just wondering if you had plans later,” he said. “Maybe for dinner.”

“That’s fast.” She tried to pass it off with a laugh. “From
ow, my hand’s burning
to dinner in under five minutes.” It was, she had to admit, a vast improvement over the come-ons Brittany’s hookups used on her, but she struggled with the concept. It wasn’t him, it was the idea that she still had some kind of real life, some kind of actual schedule into which he would fit. Dinner. She didn’t remember what a dinner looked like, especially one spent with a boy. No, a
man
. Young, but clearly every bit his own person. “So, you’re saying I’m saving your life if I order a magazine? Really?”

For a split second, she could have sworn that there was something dark that flashed through his eyes … something that seemed completely wrong for his calm, easy exterior. But then he shook his head and smiled again. “I just mean you’ll save me from having to get written up for not making quota. What are they going to do, shoot me?”

And just like that, she flashed back to …

The taste of the coffee with too much cream heavy in her mouth, and the shouts, and the crushing panic when she’d realized that it was happening, really happening, and the look on the other faces in the room at the moment the gunshot exploded
…
and the blood
…

Hope jerked as if she’d saved herself from falling off a steep drop, and gasped for breath. She felt cold, suddenly. Her hands were shaking and her skin looked pale, and when she tried to pick up her water bottle she almost turned it over instead.

Elijah was looking concerned. “Hope? Are you okay?”

No. No she was
not
okay, but she couldn’t explain that, couldn’t explain anything even to herself and certainly not to him. She found herself reaching down and putting a hand on her heavy, stuffed backpack, just to remind herself it was still there.

“I’m fine,” she lied, and picked up his magazine form. She scanned the images blindly, and picked one at random. “I’ll take that one.”

His eyebrows rose. “You want …
Fit Pregnancy
?”

“No!” She almost knocked over her drink again trying to look more closely at the choices. “I mean … I mean
Scientific American.
You can stop laughing now.”

“I’m not,” he said, deadpan, but spoiled it by the crinkles around his eyes as he tried to suppress the smile. Then he burst out with a half-smothered guffaw. She laughed, too, not even meaning to, and felt tears stinging her eyes at the same time. She felt hot and cold and embarrassed and foolish and scared and lost and
alone
, and she wanted … wanted …

“I’m sorry,” Elijah said, and got his laughter choked down to a few aftershock chuckles. “But it was too perfect. Sorry, Hope. I’ll put you down for
SA.
It’s forty dollars a year, is that okay?”

“Sure,” she said. She took some deep breaths, until she was sure all of her emotions were bottled back up again (though she could feel the pressure pushing at those corks, all the time) before she unzipped the front of her backpack and took out her wallet.

Crap.
Somehow she’d failed to put anything in it. “Um … do you take credit cards?”

“Nope, I’m sorry,” he said, and he seemed genuinely sorry about it. “Cash. I keep telling them we need those card reader things for our phones, but …”

“Oh.”
Just tell him no. Tell him to go away. Better yet, walk away yourself.
The sensible side of her was preaching, but she felt so cold and so alone, and the sensible Hope, the one with the road map and the certainty that everything in life was good and clean—that Hope wasn’t any kind of company on this darker path. She couldn’t face sending Elijah away. Not quite yet. Wasn’t it worth a small risk, to make someone else happy, even if just for a moment?
You’re not thinking of him,
Sensible Hope warned her.
You’re thinking of yourself. Of how you want him to stay. How you want to go out to dinner with him and forget what happened and be normal again.

Sensible Hope made her mad. “Hang on,” she told E.J. She hesitated a long moment, then ducked down and slowly, carefully unzipped the middle part of her bag. It was in the shadow of the table, tucked tightly against her leg, but she still cast a glance around to be sure nobody was watching. Paranoia tightened its grip on the back of her neck.

She eased the zipper open just enough to see the money.

The sight of the tight-fitting stacks of bills made her feel sick and lightheaded, and she stuck her hand into the opening and blindly tugged two bills free. She slid them across the table to Elijah, then quickly zipped the bag shut again.

Tried, anyway. The teeth stuck, and as she tried to pull harder with panic bubbling in her blood, the metal zipper tag broke loose and fell to the floor.

No. No, no, no
… She stared at it in frozen horror, lips parted and throat locked on a scream that she managed to throttle, somehow.
Close it! Just get it shut!
But she couldn’t. The zipper was slowly, inexorably widening under the pressure from the contents. She sucked in a fast breath and remembered that there was a paper clip fastening together the papers that Elijah had handed her. She grabbed for it, and threaded it through the zipper’s tag hole with fingers that were surprisingly steady. One try. Then she pulled, and everything fastened up tight, all her sins and traumas hidden away behind a thick, durable, waterproof layer of canvas.

“Everything okay?”

She looked up. Elijah was standing now, leaning on the table with both hands as he tried to see what she was doing.
Had he seen?
Oh God, she couldn’t tell.

Hope forced a smile onto her cold, numbed lips. “Fine,” she said. “Sorry. Zipper broke on my backpack. I guess I need a new bag. Hope you don’t mind that I stole your paper clip.”

He shrugged, reached for the cash, and then did a double take. “Um … I don’t have change,” he said. “And that’s way too much unless you’re signing up for a lifetime subscription.”

She realized, too late, that the bills she’d pulled hadn’t been twenties. They’d been old, worn, well-faded
hundreds
. “Oh,” she said numbly. She didn’t want to open the backpack again. It was like Pandora’s Box, and all the awful things in it could spill out. “Just … keep it. Call it a tip.”

Elijah gave her a long look, but then he pulled the paperwork back, hesitated over the two hundred, and then slid one of the bills back to her. “Thanks for that, Hope. You’re really way too nice, and I can’t keep that. I will keep the change, if you insist—that means a lot to me. And I’ll be happy to sign you up for the magazine,” he said. “But you’ll have to give me your mailing address and phone number, okay? Promise to keep it in strict confidence.” He said it with another of those curious expressions … almost flirtatious, not enough to be creepy, mixed with a little self-aware irony. In other circumstances, she’d have found it charming. Cute, even.

She grabbed her water, cracked the seal and drank it down; it was just something to do while her mind and body calmed themselves a little. Then she recited her dorm address and her cell number, but her brain was off somewhere else, not even really listening. She could have been giving him her bra size for all she knew, because it was starting to hit her,
really
hit her, that she was carrying around enough money in her pack to make people willing to kill her for it.

Especially strangers.
And you just gave him your address.
It hit her with an icy shock that she’d just made a tremendous, stupid mistake. What if he’d seen what was in her bag? What if he’d known all along, and targeted her because he just wanted to find out where she lived?
For God’s sake, Hope!

She stood up suddenly, hoisting the heavy bag. “I—I have to go,” she blurted out. “I have classes. I’m sorry.”

Elijah looked at her with such surprise she felt a twinge of guilt, and then his face smoothed into a bland mask. “Sure,” he said. “I understand.” The smile he gave her this time didn’t seem nearly as real as the others. Or maybe she’d never understood that the others had been false all along. He’d made her feel comfortable, safe, but she didn’t know him. Couldn’t know him.

Couldn’t trust him. Couldn’t trust
anyone.

She bolted.

Lack of sleep and too much stress made her clumsy, and she almost tripped on the steps heading up to the exit. She looked back once she’d made it to the top, but Elijah Crane was still sitting just where she’d left him, calmly gathering his papers and putting them away, and then sipping his hot tea.