Chapter Twelve
Phoenix
My heart is pounding and the inside of my mouth feels tacky and dry.
I can’t believe fucking Tattooed American Guy made me do four takes before he was satisfied with how I sounded in the goddamn video. He then took his sweet-ass time loading the video from the tablet to his boxy, strange-looking laptop. Once he waved me over and let me get my hands on it, at least it didn’t take me very long to log into my ultra-personal email account—the one that I use to send shit to only a few important people. My parents. A handful of friends from high school and college. One guy that almost made boyfriend status but, instead, landed best friend status even if he did end up abandoning me for a glamour job off in London—and then attach the video to an email to Dad and send it off.
But it’s done. Done, done, done. And now… Hopefully, once Tattooed American Guy is done prodding me back down the hallway to the bedroom I was in previously, he’ll be off to finally get Jackson out of the back of a sweltering cargo truck.
A woman’s voice—presumably that of the lone female kidnapper of this bunch—calls out, “Jones! Need to talk, Jones. Now!” and Tattooed American Guy roughly shoves open the flimsy wooden door and pushes me into the bedroom. As I stumble, off-balance, I hear him slam the door back shut and then there’s a metallic squeal and heavy thunking click as he presumably locks me in.
Whatever. It’s nothing I’m not expecting. And frankly, my worries are more with Jackson’s circumstances than my own right now. I’d done it, tacked on a ransom amount for Jackson to my own. And I’m confident the money will come through. But before he can make it to safety and freedom with me, he needs to be secure and healthy here. With me.
Damn it. How long will I have to wait before—
“Phoenix? That you? Or…”
Oh, Jesus. That low, sweet drawl, softer and weaker than I’ve heard it so far.
“Jackson? Jackson!”
Yes. There it is. There he is. Taking up a considerable amount of the far corner of this small, dreary bedroom. It’s a box. A fairly good-sized box, the sides made of worn, beat-up wooden planks. At least, at just over four feet tall and wide, the box is one I’d normally consider decently large. But not knowing that there is a fully grown, adult man stuffed inside it. With that knowledge, I can only despair at how cramped and claustrophobic he must feel.
“Ah. Thank the heavens. I was so worried about you.”
Me? Jackson had been worried about me? I suppose… Last he’d seen or heard me had been when Brazilian Guy had released me and led me away from the room Jackson and I had been sharing.
And by the tone of his voice, Jackson is just as relieved as I am that we’re both together again.
Slender, dirt-streaked fingertips poke out from between a narrow gap between two of the boards of Jackson’s box. I practically trip and fall in my haste to cross the room and kneel on the floor next to the box. I pause for the briefest of moments and then slowly reach up to slide the tips of my fingers against his.
Jackson’s fingers tremble and I start to panic, questioning my actions and fearing that I’ve greatly misinterpreted his silent request. But then I hear it. A quiet whimper. And the sweetest, dearest, most wonderful sound I’ve ever heard. My name, whispered in Jackson’s dulcet accent. The curl of the consonants and vowels on his tongue is a gentle auditory caress that plucks and strums at the emotional strings of my heart.
“Phoenix. You’re here.”
His fingers twitch in the air, clearly seeking me out again. And when the dry, rough skin on his digits make contact once more with the dry, rough skin on mine, his trembling calms and he sighs loudly.
“That’s right, I’m here. I’m here, sweetheart.”
I’m not sure why the term of affection slips out. I don’t even have the first idea of where Jackson falls on the sexuality scale or how he’d feel about another man calling him sweetheart. Personally, I’ve always landed on the as long as everybody involved is legal and consenting, it’s good to go end of sexual involvement. I do tend to veer more toward being attracted to men, but I’ve been known to dip my tongue—and dick—into a willing and attractive female or two, or a dozen, before. So, it wouldn’t bother me. But that’s me. I know not everyone would be as unconcerned with that sort of thing as I am.
It should also feel odd to use that sort of endearment with a man I still haven’t actually seen. It should. But it doesn’t. The fact that I have no idea what Jackson looks like or if I’d even be physically attracted to him doesn’t faze me at all. Something about him calls to me. It snuck right past my initial distrust of him. It battered down the illogical reality that I barely know this man, that we met under highly unusual and stressful circumstances. And it lodged itself firmly within me. So that, yes…my heart and soul has claimed this man as mine. And I’m good with that.
Doesn’t mean I don’t want to take the opportunity to see if I can catch a glimpse of this man who’d so effortlessly captured my allegiance though.
I continue to slide my fingers against Jackson’s in a tender caress. For as innocent as the action is, it has my heart thundering in my chest and the area behind the zipper of my chino shorts feeling surprisingly snug. While I’m doing that, I also visually inspect the exterior of Jackson’s box, looking for any larger gaps than the one he’s extending his fingers through that I might be able to use to peek inside of it and catch any sort of glimpse of my Jackson.
Most of the boards butt up close to each other, with only a narrow fraction of an inch sliver of space between them. But the wood is old and starting to warp and crack in places. Plus there are other spots, where strips and chunks have broken off the edges of the boards. These effects of age and use have resulted in larger openings between the wood, much like the one Jackson is utilizing right now to initiate our first physical contact with each other. But there are only a few places on the portion of the box I can see at the moment that hold the possibility of giving me a decent view into the interior of the box.
One such possible hole is roughly shoulder height to me, from where I’m kneeling on the floor. But it’s blocked and covered by a metal hatch, attached to the box with hinges and secured with a hefty lock woven through a large U-bolt that extends out from the box and through the metal plate. That’s probably the access point our kidnappers have used to get food and water to Jackson throughout his captivity, but without a key to open the lock holding it closed, that opening won’t be of much use to me.
Further down the box, perhaps about a foot to the right of my thigh, a missing section of board has left a decent-sized hole in the side of the box, a jagged rectangular gap of around four by six inches.
A zing of excitement blasts through me as Jackson weaves his fingers with mine. My gaze locks back on to the touch of our hands together and I watch, enthralled, as Jackson presses his hand forward until his palm sweetly dances along mine in a soft skin-to-skin kiss. My hand feels damp and cool compared to the dry, fever-tinged heat of his and I can only hope that Jackson finds pleasure and relief from my touch.
Our interlocked fingers look so strange, but yet so right, together. We are both filthy, our hands liberally coated with streaks of dirt, and I have thick, dark lines of gunk embedded under the edges of my nails. My manicure has definitely seen better days; the nail on my thumb in particular having borne the brunt of the abuse of my gouging daily tally marks into the plywood floor of my cage. But at least I have some semblance of nails left for dirt to get trapped under; Jackson’s are all uniformly bitten down to the quick. His slender fingers should look more delicate than my broader, blunter digits. But with numerous calluses, scars from healed-over wounds, and plentiful nicks and scratches, there’s little doubt as to which of the two of us tends to do more menial and physical tasks.
The slow drag of skin on skin as Jackson disentangles his fingers from mine is an erotic seduction, millimeter by millimeter. The connection between our hands is severed for only the barest of split seconds as Jackson rotates his wrist, bringing the back of his hands to rest in the welcoming cradle of my palm. Gently, I move my hand, caressing and tracing this extremity so trustingly nestled against me, so that I can get a full tactile appreciation for the bumps and ridges of veining and fragile bones lining the back of Jackson’s hand.
“I can’t believe we’re back together again,” Jackson says. “And here I was thinking I’d never get to see you again. Er, so to speak.” His tone is wry, the unspoken acknowledgement that we haven’t actually set eyes on each other yet lacing his words. “But how is it that you’re able to touch me? Why aren’t you...you know...” He cuts himself off, clearly unwilling to bring up the issue of why I’m not stuck in my cage anymore, even though he’s still in his box.
“I’m sorry.” It doesn’t seem fair to me that our kidnappers had left Jackson stuck in his box when they’d relocated us but hadn’t gone through the same effort to move my enclosure. Not that I’m upset to no longer be stuck in that fucking cage, but I do feel guilty. “I wish…”
“Shh. I know you do.” How is it that Jackson is the one consoling me? But there’s no doubt that’s what he’s doing, his voice soothing and sure as he states, “But I’m sure it won’t be much longer before I’ll be out of this box and we can finally meet each other properly, face-to-face.”
Jackson rotates his hand back around and his fingertips glide over my palm and down to brush silken caresses against the tender skin of my inner wrist. The gentle touch is one of the most unintentionally sensual sensations I’ve ever experienced. There’s no way Jackson could’ve known that each slim fingertip brushing along my skin would cause me to break out in goosebumps and for my pulse to speed up. I’m not sure if he’s able to feel the former, but surely, he can feel the latter as his fingers come to rest right over the sped-up flutter of my veins.
Face-to-face. Yes. I’m not sure how much of a difference it’ll make. I already feel connected to this man, will finally being able to look each other in the eyes really make that big of an impact on my feelings toward him? I just don’t know. What I do know…I want to know what Jackson looks like. I want to have a face to go with the voice that’s been my hope and comfort throughout the long week of this ordeal. And…
“Maybe we won’t have to wait,” I tell him, eyeing up the hole in his box so near to where I’m kneeling.
“What do you— Hey. Wait. Where are you going?” Jackson asks as I break the contact between our hands. “Come back. Phoenix?”
This time I’m the one gently shushing him. “Shh. Just a second. I’m not going anywhere. Not really.”
Laying down on my side, I angle my body so that my face is directly in front of the opening in the box. The bedroom isn’t very well lit—there aren’t any lamps in it and the only light fixture, the one mounted just off to the center of the ceiling, is broken and dangling in chunks from its wiring. The only thing keeping the room from complete darkness is the faint amount of light bleeding in from the narrow gaps around the door and along the edges of the boards over the window. The interior of the box is even darker. Squinting through the grayish gloom, I can just barely make out the outline of Jackson’s kneeling form, his body crowded close to the side of the box, his right hand pressed flat against the wooden boards. His left hand is still stuck through the gap between boards in front of him, which is so narrow that not even a sliver of light is showing anywhere around Jackson’s worryingly skinny forearm.
“Phoenix?”
“I’m here,” I reassure him. “I want you to do something, okay?”
“Of course,” he replies. “Anything.”
“Down toward the bottom of this box, about…a foot-and-a-half to your left? There’s a bigger hole. Can you lay down and find it?” I’m confident that, even blindfolded, Jackson should easily be able to locate the hole by touch. I’m more concerned with how well he’ll be able to scrunch his body up to be able to get his head and face in front of the hole the way I’d like.
“Oh. Yeah. I think I know…”
Jackson hmm s, and I watch as he tugs and wriggles his left arm and wrist until he’s able to pull his hand free. He rotates his wrist and wiggles his fingers a few times, making me wonder just how much discomfort he’d been in, all so he could make physical contact with me.
Moving from kneeling to sitting with his knees folded up in front of him doesn’t look very difficult, but I can’t help but wince in sympathy as Jackson has to use his hands to help raise his bent legs. With them propped up, resting against the far side of the box, Jackson is able to lay his upper half along the bottom of the box and soon I find my face separated only a few inches from his.
The splintered and jagged end of the broken board that created this hole is too close for comfort for me to where Jackson’s right eye is behind his blindfold, but there’s no way I’m going to encourage him to move back. Not until I get my fill of looking at and memorizing each feature of his face.
“There you are.” My words are soft and reverent with this first look at my Jackson.
A hesitant and shy smile trembles on lips that are thin and wide and, in this light, nearly colorless. “I found it then? The hole?”
“You did. I knew you would, sweetheart.”
“Yeah. I knew it was there. Well, sorta. I didn’t know which side of the box I was facing,” he added, “but I knew about this hole. I’ve had plenty of time to explore just about every square inch of this fucking box. And the guy who brings us our food?”
“Silva?”
“Oh. Is that his name? I’ve overheard a few of them using each other’s names a couple of times, but I’ve only picked up on a couple of names and I couldn’t be sure which name went with who. Anyway, I think he’s used this hole a few times to deliver my food to me when he was feeling too lazy to bother with the lock on the little metal door.”
The only reaction I can muster up for this little tidbit of information that he offered up was a soft grunt to acknowledge that I’d heard him. Frankly, I can’t even find the interest to think about what sort of information Jackson has about our kidnappers and how we should compare notes on what he’s discovered or figured out and what I was able to learn during my short, but memorable, time in a room with all four of them. Nope, all my attention, all my focus, is on the man in front of me, and taking the time to catalogue his features.
Except…
My right hand trembles as I slowly extend it toward Jackson. It hovers, a breath away, just before I make contact with the dark fabric stretched across his eyes. “May I?”
Without even knowing what I’m asking permission to do, Jackson immediately responds, “Of course.”
When I let my fingers dance across the scratchy, coarse cloth, Jackson sucks in a swift breath, clearly being able to read what it is I’m about to do. I carefully work my fingers under the top edge of the blindfold, then I slowly, but surely, tug it upward.
An irritated and abraded swath of angry pink spans the expanse of Jackson’s skin around his eyes and over the bridge of his prominent, slightly large and bony nose. There are even splotchy patches of what looks like a rash gracing portions of his cheekbones and along his temples. But nothing… nothing …can detract from the glorious beauty of the pale, almost colorless, blue eyes that meet mine as his eyelashes flutter and then sweep open.
Objectively speaking, one might say that Jackson’s eyes were a touch on the small side, and maybe a bit too close together. Or maybe they just seem that way because of how much his nose dominates the landscape of his face. But Jesus, they’re the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen.
Those blue eyes widen and Jackson breathes out a tremulous and surprised “oh”, seemingly as affected as I am by that first glimpse of each other’s faces.
“See. Told you I was right here.” My smile hopefully tells Jackson that I’m teasing him. There’s no way I can’t smile at him, not here, not now, but the air is charged with so much emotion that I feel as though if I don’t do something to move the mood in a lighter direction, I’m liable to start bawling. There’s just too much coursing through me—relief, joy, hope, worry, fear, adoration, need. All of them fighting and squirming inside of me to see which will come out on top.
“Yep. There you are.” His narrow lips tip up in a smile that reveals a set of teeth that could use quite a bit of loving from both a dentist and an orthodontist, including a chipped incisor on the top and severely crowded and overlapping teeth on the bottom. Nevertheless, it’s a smile I never want to stop seeing. And one that makes mine grow bigger as Jackson playfully says, “Hi.”
“Hello, sweetheart.”
Jackson doesn’t comment on the endearment that continues to slip out of me. Obviously, he doesn’t know me well enough yet to know that isn’t the sort of thing I do regularly. Almost never, in fact. I can’t even recall the last person who would’ve prompted me to shower them with pet names. On the plus side, at least he doesn’t seem upset by it. A trifle bemused and uncertain, perhaps, with the way his eyelashes tip down to cover his eyes and with the faint pink blush creeping into his cheeks.
“It’s...I...” Jackson glances back up at me, his eyes meeting mine for a brief second before they bashfully look down again. “You look just how I imagined you would.”
“Oh, really. Just the sound of my voice told you I’m a sexy fucker, did it?”
My flirtation causes Jackson to blush and splutter. I can’t tell if it’s because he’s not used to guys flirting with him or if he just wasn’t expecting me to flirt so boldly with him. It’s not necessarily something that needs to be worked out just now though, not with the current circumstances still being what they are. I’ll hopefully have plenty of opportunities once we’re out of our kidnappers’ clutches to explore how receptive Jackson would be to any sort of overture from me.
Dropping the playful tone from my voice, I softly murmur, “There are so many different ways I pictured you looking. But all of them were wrong. I can’t even tell you how happy I am to finally know. Finally, I’ll have an image in my brain that I can draw upon whenever I think of you.”
“I don’t…” A bony, long-fingered hand comes into view as Jackson runs his fingers over the jutting ridge of his nose. Oh, God. That hand. The mirrored mate of the one that was so recently pressed up against my own hand. “You sure this is the kind of face you wanna be thinking about? I know what I look—"
“You look perfect,” I hastily interrupt. “Simply perfect. You’re you. And getting to see you …knowing what you look like… There are an awful lot of things I’d like right now. Freedom, for one. A hot shower. Edible food. Clean clothes. A clean, working toilet." I take a chance and bring my uninjured hand to the jagged edge of the hole in Jackson’s box. When Jackson doesn’t move, I tentatively extend my fingers past the opening and brush them along the crest of his cheekbone. “But getting to see you…to finally be face-to-face and able to look into your eyes. Your blue eyes. Makes all those things seem not so necessary. Not as long as I get you while I’m waiting.”