Wanderlust (8 page)

I stumbled out of the leaves-strewn
ground, allowing myself to be tugged toward the road. Suddenly he
stopped, and I ran right into his side. He yanked at my wrist,
pulling me behind him.

Startled, I peeked around him to see a
large cat with black and orange stripes.

A very large cat.

“
Is that…?”

“
A tiger.
Yeah.”

Though the size was abnormal for a
regular housecat, it was the eyes that were different. Both more
beautiful and colder. Crueler. A predator who was considering her
attack. On the one hand, it seemed silly to worry over an animal
physically smaller than us. On the other hand, I felt her ferocity
in her stare, her stance, and I had no doubt she could cause either
one of us considerable damage if she wanted to attack.

She hadn’t moved a single paw since
we’d arrived in her clearing. Only her whiskers twitched, gathering
data from the wind.

I whispered. “Should we—”

“
We’re just going to walk
real slow around her. She won’t attack unless she feels
threatened.”

“
Right, but—“

“
Just move. Nice and
easy.”

We shuffled around her. In a shocking
act of chivalry, Hunter was careful to always stay between the cat
and my body.

When we’d made it to the other side, I
quickened my step and snapped a twig. The cat’s ears flicked. She
lowered her head.

“
Easy,” he said sharply.
Then softer, “Go easy. Nice and slow all the way back.”

We shuffled in a sort of dance back
into the rest stop where the truck was parked, continuing to move
slowly and keep facing the woods until we reached the
cab.

He opened the passenger door, and
instead of waiting for me to climb in the tall steps, practically
threw me inside. He circled the truck and got in.

“
Shit,” he
said.

I swallowed. “She was
gorgeous.”

“
Yeah. Good thing I didn’t
have to kill her.”

My face scrunched up. “Could you have?
I mean, if she had attacked?”

“
A tiger’s pretty vicious
when they want to be, even a little undergrown thing like that one.
But a gun is better.”

I gasped, eyeing him up and down.
“Where?”

“
My boot. Don’t leave home
without it.”

“
So wait. Why didn’t you
get it out then? We could have died.”

“
Nah, probably not. She’d
have launched herself, I’d have blocked, and she’d have caught my
arm. It would’ve got torn up pretty bad, but that’s it. She was too
malnourished to do much. That’s why she’s so close to a rest stop.
Must be near to starving to chance it.”

I tried to calm myself
though inside I felt shivery, bordering on hysterical. “Okay.
Here’s a question. Why was there a tiger in the woods? In
Texas
.”

“
There’s more tigers in
Texas than in India. The old travelling circuses let them loose
when they disbanded, and since then they’ve maintained a steady
population.” He reached back and rustled in some bags behind the
seats. “Most people think they’re large cats. I’ve seen them before
but never that close.”

He tossed big slabs of jerky packaged
in shrink wrap onto my lap.

“
Open those
up.”

Without a word, I tugged at the little
slit in the corner and pulled out the savory meat.

He drove up to where we’d reenter the
freeway but rolled a little ways onto the grass. He hit the button
and rolled down the window.

“
Throw it out there. Far
as you can.”

I stared at him for a minute, but he
just waited. Sighing, I turned and tossed one of the pieces of meat
onto the grass.

His exhalation was derisive. “That as
far as you can get it?”

I scowled at him, then reached back
and threw the next piece. It landed a few feet farther. I unlatched
the seatbelt so I could turn my whole body. The rest of the pieces
landed only a few feet from the treeline.

The meat rested there, small pockets
of brown amid the grass.

I glanced back. “Will she find
it?”

He chuckled. “Oh, she’ll find it.
She’s just wishing we’d get the hell out of here.”

With that, he gunned the engine and we
sped back onto the freeway. He used his radio to tell someone about
the tiger and they messaged him back something about a wildlife
rescue organization going out to set a trap.

Only as the minutes ticked away did
the events fall in order for me. The way he’d protected me, yes.
Even more interesting, the way he’d protected the tiger. He could
have shot her and been done with her. Instead he’d risked his own
life for hers, he’d fed her, he’d sent help for her.

And maybe most shocking of all: I was
riding up front.

He glanced over, seeming to follow my
train of thought. “Cat got your tongue?”

“
Are you going to make me
go back there?”

After a moment, he shook his head.
“Good girls get to ride up front.”

The words were humiliating but stirred
something inside me. I was beginning to recognize that tension as
lust. Dirty, wrong, but undeniable. It was spacious in here. The
seats were a soft black leather. Like the waitress had said, very
comfortable.

I huddled against the door, staring
straight ahead. My exhilaration from the encounter with the tiger
morphed into excitement. I was in the truck! Inside the truck. I
didn’t want to mess this up. And maybe I would have been excited
even without the kidnapping. This was like an adventure. A slightly
perverted adventure of questionable consent, but beggars like me
couldn’t be choosers.

As the truck rumbled forward, I
noticed the swaying of a necklace roped around the rearview mirror.
No. I looked closer and realized it was a rosary. Pale cream beads
and a silver cross. I wondered if it had belonged to someone he
loved, like maybe his mother. It humanized him a little bit. There
must have been someone he loved, before he had turned into this, a
man who had to force women into staying with him.

We drove for several minutes in
silence. I stared out the window, watching the farmland rush by.
The sky was a brilliant green-blue like I imagined the sea would
look, though I had never been. I blinked up at the clouds that
seemed to hang above us, even as we sped eighty miles per hour down
the highway, even as the clouds themselves must be floating along
in a different direction.

On Earth, it was much more dismal. The
farmland was brown and flat. Even someone as clueless as I knew
that was a bad sign in terms of producing crops. And there were no
houses, no people. Not that I could jump out of a moving vehicle
even if I saw someone. We were so high off the ground, almost
flying, with a tint strong enough that no one would see me wave for
help.

I had traded one prison for another,
this one mobile but absolute. Inescapable even as it sliced through
the countryside. Neither my mother’s home nor this eighteen-wheeler
were gilded, but I preferred the view in this cage.

Except to the left of me, where Hunter
sat, tapping the wide steering wheel in a restless beat. His legs
were long, reaching leisurely to the floor. His whole body was
slouched slightly, clearly quite comfortable. In contrast, my own
knees were pressed together, my fists balled together right on
top.

“
So tell me about
yourself, sunshine.”

Tell him…about me? He couldn’t really
care, and I couldn’t really want to tell him—could I? Sadly, I
wasn’t so sure. I had spent most of my twenty years with one
person. Here was a new one. The novelty was too much to
resist.

“
I’m not sure what there
is to tell. I’m not…anyone special.”

His insouciant expression slipped
slightly as he looked at me. “How about you let me judge that? Tell
me what you do. You in college?”

He kept that gaze trained on me, even
though we were hurtling over the road. Nervous, I glanced ahead. We
were still in the lane, still steady, and he seemed
unconcerned.

“
Um, not anymore. I
graduated…but just with an associate’s degree. In graphic
design.”

“
Oh yeah, you an
artist?”

“
No, it was just something
good to do from home, because…” Because I was a loser who had
listened to my mother for far too long. And I had stopped listening
at the one moment I should have heeded her safety advice. I
couldn’t seem to win.

I stared at the rushing pavement as it
slid under the truck. “But I was moving out. I was going to Little
Rock, Arkansas. I had a job there at a camera shop.”

My voice had lilted up at
the end in a small challenge. We both knew why I was no longer on
my way to Little Rock. I didn’t even know where we were anymore,
but I wasn’t on track to Niagara because of him. Bringing it up had
almost been an accusation, the closest I could come to things
better left unsaid:
Why did you take me?
When will you let me go? How could you do this to me when I had
finally broken free?

Terrified of his anger or retribution
to my impertinence, I slid my gaze over to him. He didn’t look mad,
just thoughtful.

“
A camera shop, huh? You
ever been there before?”

“
No.”

“
You know anyone who works
there?”

“
No.”

“
You like
cameras?”

Despite my fears, a small smile played
at my lips. I liked scenery and majesty. I liked angles and
lighting. I liked seeing in a photo what I yearned to see for real.
I wanted to take a picture of Niagara Falls.

“
Yeah,” I said. “I like
cameras.”

“
Yours looks pretty fancy.
Heavy, too.”

My eyebrows snapped up. Had he looked
through my stuff back at the hotel? Of course he had. And he must
have been disappointed to find less than a hundred bucks. What did
he think of my book?

“
Where are we going?” I
asked.

“
Got no
destination.”

I blinked. I had expected him to have
some delivery or route or something. Wasn’t that the point of an
eighteen-wheeler, to transport things?

He chuckled. “I like to drive.
Sometimes I do jobs, but in between them, I keep
driving.”

It seemed…well, inefficient. It also
seemed wonderful, like a ball without friction, with nothing to
slow it down, just rolling around, seeing everything in every
direction but not having to participate. Not really being able to
join in, always separate.

How lonely that must be. Almost as
lonely as I had been, locked up in my mother’s house. That was when
I realized—if this was a cage, then he was caged too. Even though
he could go wherever he wanted, he couldn’t escape these steel
walls. My mother was trapped too, even if it was by her own
fears.

Maybe we were all held captive by
something.

“
What’s wrong?” he
asked.

“
I was just thinking…” I
paused, wondering if it was wise to speak so openly with him. He
didn’t seem to get angry with me when I did, but it could be I
exposed myself this way, made myself weaker by my own speculation.
“I was thinking it seemed a little lonely.”

He was quiet so long I thought he
wouldn’t answer. Then he said, “Sometimes we do things only because
they are better than the alternative.”

“
The lesser of two
evils?”

He grinned. “Exactly.”

And I thought,
what could have been so bad to make him avoid all
human contact?

He was not so unlike my mother, and
that thought should have made me hate him, but instead just made me
sad.

“
It’s not as bad as all
that,” he continued. “I know a lot of people. People who live along
some of the main lines. I’ll stop by for dinner or even overnight.
I know the other truckers, and I can talk to them over the radio or
my cell phone, if I wanted to.”

My heart beat a little faster,
although I struggled to hide it. A radio? A cell phone? Methods of
communication, means of escape. There was no obvious device on his
dashboard, just a high-tech panel of flat screens, currently black,
and buttons. Where would he keep his cell phone? His pocket?
Somewhere else? Luckily he didn’t seem to notice my frantic
plotting.

“
Besides, I have you to
keep me company now.”

Something about the extra
emphasis on the word
company
raised the hairs on the back of my neck. He
grinned, and I closed my eyes against the lust that glimmered
there. But even with my eyes closed, I could feel the charge in the
air, setting off little sparks against my skin, strumming awareness
into body parts that had been well handled recently.

“
If you’re going to stay
up here, you might as well make yourself useful and keep me awake.
Tell me something new about you.”