Wanderlust (11 page)

No.

I fought in a wild clash of soft
punches and hopelessness. I heard laughing and a curse when I
caught something soft beneath my fingernail. Thick fingers grabbed
my arms, wrenching them above my head as I was twisted to the
ground.

“
Let me go.” It felt like
a whisper, low and grating the walls of my throat, but through the
melee, they heard me.

“
Now why would I do that
when the fun’s only started?”

“
He’ll make you pay,” I
said, and knew then that it was true.

The men just laughed.

One of them knelt between my thighs,
unbuckling his belt. I closed my eyes against the sight of his
thin, glistening erection. Rough hands yanked at my hem, pulling it
up. The air felt cool against my heated skin before they grabbed my
nipples and twisted.

Something slick poked around my
thighs, sliding through the folds of my sex. He was trying to find
his way inside. It felt like being violated with a fish. I was
going to vomit, and the way they were holding me down, I would
probably choke on it.

An unholy sound rent the air, sending
chills along my exposed skin. It sounded like death. Was it me? But
no, I was still on the ground. It was the man between my legs who
had moved. Pain shot through my limbs as I curled in on myself,
rolling to my side though one person still held my arm.

There was a shout, and the hand
holding down my right arm was lifted. I flailed, hitting and
scratching, though it didn’t move them. Dimly, I registered the
sounds of flesh on flesh—not mine though.

The sound of flesh hitting flesh was
punctuated by grunts. My vision cleared. Hunter was poised over one
of the guys at his feet, raining down blows onto a man. As I
watched in horror, the man twitched and then laid still, his face
already too bloody to be recognizable.

Hunter looked like some kind of
avenging angel, but an angel would never pull a knife from his shoe
with a glint in his eye. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what
happened next. I heard it instead, just the whisper of sound as
sharp metal sliced through the air, its abrupt quieting as it met
some solid object, and the thud of a body as it was
dropped.

The final man was pulled off me,
practically lifted into the air above me before being thrown a few
feet in a spray of gravel. The man fought back, but he was no match
for Hunter, who pummeled him until his head fell with a
thud.

I sat there, open-mouthed with shock,
my body still lewdly exposed. Hunter came to stand over me,
breathing hard, his face a grotesque mask of violence. His hands
were covered in blood and bruises. Not an angel—a demon, and
somehow sweeter that a beast so savage had saved me.

“
I told you not to start
trouble,” he ground out, his broad chest heaving.

Tears slid down his throat. Would he
hurt me now? If he hit me like he’d just beaten them, I’d die. In
fact, I thought for a minute that they were dead, but low groans in
the air proved otherwise.

He pulled me up, keeping my dress
raised and running his hands along my body. “Are you
hurt?”

It hurt everywhere, but I was too numb
to feel it—a strange and contradictory feeling.

I shuddered beneath his
hands.

He released me. “Get back to the
truck. I need to clean up here.”

Clean up? What did that mean? I ran
around the diner. His truck gleamed in the sunlight, blinding me.
If I got in the back of that truck, would he touch me again? Did I
want him to?

Yes,
something inside me whispered.
Wash
them away, make me clean.

Instead I ran toward the road. I
couldn’t see any other buildings nearby, but the hill crested just
up ahead, blocking my sight to anything beyond. I was running on
fumes after the interrupted meal and my fight with the
men.

I glanced back. The truck sat exactly
where I’d left. He must still have been cleaning up, whatever that
meant. My muscles felt nebulous and insubstantial, but somehow they
managed to drag me up the road.

At the top of the hill, the scene
spread out before me with depressing majesty, a blank canvas of
farmland and sky—not a building in sight. My feet slowed to a trod
but didn’t stop altogether. There was nowhere to run to.

Gravel crunched beneath my feet. Then
louder as the truck rolled up beside me. A hiss as the brakes
halted its motion, then the door opened.

“
Get in the
truck.”

I glanced up at him. He didn’t sound
mad, even though I’d clearly disobeyed. He even looked handsome if
intimidating up high in the cab, those intense eyes. Maybe the
creepiest part was how unaffected he seemed after beating up grown
men, almost killing them.

Maybe he had killed them. Maybe that
was what cleaning up meant.

I kept walking. With a shudder, the
truck rolled forward to catch up with me.

“
Get in the fucking truck,
Evie.”

I stood still, thinking. It felt
important, that moment. Even though I didn’t have a choice, there
was a pull toward him or away. At some point those men should have
walked away from me—from him. But they didn’t and they’d lost. Was
that me? Fighting a fight I couldn’t win, only to get bloodied from
my efforts?

Though if I imagined myself the loser,
the one wielding the punches was just life, just fear. If I looked
at it from just the right angle, it seemed like Hunter could be my
defense. He’d certainly figured out how to combat the
inevitable.

Swallowing hard, I walked to the back,
waiting for him to open the heavy back door. I just knew he’d put
me back there as punishment, and I wanted it. I wanted to crawl
onto the thin mattress and sob.

Instead he opened the passenger side
door to the cab and gestured me inside.

With my arms wrapped tightly around my
middle, I walked to the front. Climbing inside exposed all sorts of
new hurts in places that had been too blank with shock. I shivered
in the seat, feeling cold and dirty and alone. Worst of all and
completely irrational, the hurt of betrayal panged in my gut. As if
he should have protected me from them. From myself.

He got in the driver’s side and
started the truck without looking at me. We’d gone fifteen minutes
before the tears began falling in earnest. Another five before
broken cries tore from my chest, unstoppable. I hated him for not
putting me in the back, where he wouldn’t bear witness to my
pain.

He pulled over and shut off the
engine, magnifying the gasping sobs I couldn’t hold in.

“
Are you hurt?” he asked
hoarsely. “Do you need to go to a hospital?”

“
As if you would take me,”
I spat.

“
Do you need a
doctor?”

A doctor? Sure, I needed a
psychiatrist. I’d probably need daily sessions for the next ten
years just to make sense of everything that had happened to me with
Hunter, then another ten years for everything that had happened
before.

I shook my head tightly. A hospital
wouldn’t help anything. I didn’t even care about getting away
anymore. It was all a big joke, freedom. Trapped at home or trapped
out in the world. Would it help to get strapped to a hospital bed?
Not at all.

The sobs threatened to tear me apart.
I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on this way. I wasn’t sure
I’d ever stop. I wrapped my arms around my waist as if holding
myself in.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “I’m sorry
I…I’m sorry I let them touch you. I should have been there. Should
have known you’d try to run.”

A cry hitched in my throat. He’d
caught onto the same perverse responsibility that I had, the
implication that he should protect me even while we both knew he
could hurt me.

Incredulity had a calming effect.
“Don’t you see how messed up this is?”

No, I didn’t need to be afraid
anymore. The worst had already happened—almost happened. And the
truth had become clear when those men were on top of me.

I trusted him.

So I rephrased the
question. “Don’t you see how
fucked
up
this is? That you beat up those guys
for…for…” Here my courage deserted me. “For what you did,” I finish
lamely.

I saw the ripple in his throat as he
swallowed. He looked less menacing in a side profile. Or maybe that
was just the grief in his eyes. It didn’t look new. It looked
ancient, as if it had always been there. In fact, I thought it had
been, and I’d been too wrapped up in my own sadness to notice
his.

“
So what do you want?” he
asked. “You want me to let you go?”

I said nothing.

He gestured angrily out my window. “So
leave. Get the fuck out.”

Tears sprang in my eyes. Wasn’t this
what I wanted? Okay, in my fantasies I was dropped off closer to
civilization. But even barring that, I wasn’t sure I could get by
without him. I hated the helplessness, but in this moment, with my
flesh still warm from cruel hands, I hated even more the thought of
wandering.

What was the point? Niagara Falls
wasn’t a person. It was just another place to be alone.

He sighed. “Let me keep you a little
bit longer. You can take some time to recover. Then we can talk
about what to do next.”

“
Are you giving me a
choice to leave?”

He frowned. No, he wasn’t. “I’m just
asking you not to fight me anymore. Don’t run from me. And in
return I’ll show you new places. I’ll even let you sit up
front.”

He said the last wryly, and I puffed a
laugh.

“
I guess I don’t have a
choice.”

“
You do. More than you
realize. But I want to…I want to keep you a little longer. I’ll
make it good for you. Okay?”

God, he was so messed up. This was his
way of asking for a relationship.

And I was so messed up too.

“
Okay.”

CHAPTER NINE

The Niagara River flows at
approximately 35 miles per hour.

“Where are we going?” I asked,
climbing down from the truck.

He grinned, a mischievous twinkle in
his eyes. “Wait and see, sunshine.”

Hunter had pulled off a wide dirt
road. Parking was always a challenge anyplace but a truck stop, so
we stopped in some grass. It was surely illegal but no one seemed
to be around. We were in the middle of nowhere, and the thought
occurred to me that he could dump my body easily.

But I wasn’t afraid.

He was just too…cheerful, almost.
Brimming with anticipation to show me something. Like a
kid.

Silly thought.

We hiked along a trail and
reached a tall metal marker:
Enchanted
Falls, 1 mile.

I froze, mouth open. “We’re going to
see waterfalls?”

He suddenly seemed bashful. “Figured
since we were passing through.”

Squealing, I threw my arms
around his neck. He caught me with a small
oomph
of surprise but after a
second, he pulled me to him in a bear hug. It had only been on
impulse, but he embraced me as tightly as if he’d been waiting just
for this, as if it meant something when it couldn’t.

I backed up, blushing. He cleared his
throat and ducked his head, so that despite his foot and a half on
me, I was looking at his profile from the top of his head. His hair
was curly, I realized in the yellow-bright sun. It was cut short,
but light reflected blond strands pulled through the darker
brown.

He seemed more human in the light—less
sinister. I imagined him in some innocuous setting. We could have
met on a trail like this, just two people enjoying the beautiful
setting, the smell of pine and gentle sound of water in the
distance.

“
It’s not too far,” he
said gruffly.

We continued along the path. It wasn’t
too uneven which was a good thing, considering my shoes were
basically ballet flats. I felt the shape of each pebble and twig
beneath my feet almost as if I were barefoot, although less
sharply. The path turned rockier as we approached, the sound rising
to a roar in my ears before it even came into view.

Eager, I quickened my pace. The trail
continued at its full width forward, but I heard the waterfall to
my right. I began to round a small bend obscured by the trees when
Hunter yanked me back.

“
Careful,” he
warned.

Curious, I cocked my head then turned
back to the path. We crept forward together, and I understood his
warning. The trail ended on a bluff overlooking the waterfall. We
weren’t at the bottom of the waterfall but at the top.

My heart squeezed at the sight. Water
streamed down in rushes too fast for the eye to process. Mist rose
up like tendrils of steam, the wetness kissing my face as I stood
there.

A tall wooden fence, rotting, was all
that separated us from a downward hill that met up with the shore
far below.