Hallie
Greyhound stations always smell like spilled coffee and sour rain.
I sit on my duffel and hug my knees. The action does nothing to keep my body from shaking. Still, I try to force steadiness into my limbs.
The vending machine next to me hums and clunks as a fluorescent light stutters. Somewhere, a man coughs into his sleeve, and the automatic door keeps opening to allow more travelers entry, letting in cold air and spitting it straight at my bare shins.
I shouldn’t have gone to my academic probation meeting still half-drunk from the night before. I shouldn’t have dropped out.
But, the biggest of all is I shouldn’t have called him.
God… Why did I call him?
But I know why. I ran out of options. There wasn’t anywhere else for me to go. I turned the word home into a gaping wound, untouched and left to fester.
My phone sits black in my palm, betraying no notifications nor music. The only thing it shows is my reflection on the screen. A girl with mascara ghosts under her blue eyes and a mouth that never knows when to stop.
He’s not coming.
What do I do? Take up residence in the stinky women’s bathroom at the Greyhound station? The handicap stall is spacious. I could make it work.
Headlights sweep the glass and my heart kicks up. A bus grinds past, rattling the entire building, spewing diesel fumes into the air. When it goes, I’m left with silence again and the humiliation of wanting something I don’t deserve.
And then I hear it.
The sound… That engine… A roar that fills the air instead of cutting it.
A tall black pickup with rain sliding off it in long streaks pulls up slowly. It’s almost like the night itself decided to stop for me.
My heartbeat stutters so hard my breath feels like a soft-ball lodged in my throat. Then, he steps out. The whole world narrows to a single point. Him.
The first thought is God, he’s bigger.
The second, coming in just as fast, is don’t stare.
The third, which is uninvited and unwanted, is a pulse of heat that starts low and spreads through me. My skin doesn’t fit right, and my bones vibrate.
He’s broader and harder somehow, like a storm built out of muscle. The air changes around him. It’s heavier, feeling like the calm before a summer storm.
I hate that my body reacts before my brain does. My stomach clenches. My thighs press together. My hands start shaking. It’s not from fear, not exactly, but from a hunger so strong that I think it belongs to someone else.
I shouldn’t want him. Not this man. Not him.
He’s shared a bed with my mother since I was…God, nine? I’m so bad. So, so bad.
But my desire doesn’t care about the rules. It only knows the shape of his shoulders. The sound of his boots on wet asphalt as he approaches the spot I’ve claimed as my own.
He doesn’t say a word when he stops in front of me. All he does is stand there, looking at me the way a man looks at something he intends to fix or break. I don’t know which one I’d rather have.
“Get up.”
It’s quiet and rough. His command is threaded through calm. It’s just how I remember, that voice that he’d use when I was breaking the rules.
I didn’t expect a big bear hug, but I guess the little girl in me didn’t expect the severity I see in his black eyes.
Jackson Cartright. My mother’s second husband. My step-father.
He read at least a hundred of The Babysitter’s Club books to me. He taught me how to swim. How to make the world’s best pancakes.
He taught me that good men are still a thing. My little girl crush on my mother’s brooding, sexy husband started the day I met him and secret of secrets, has never ended.
I stand too fast, the motion making me dizzy. I nearly topple over when I hoist my bag from the ground. My duffel strap cuts into my shoulder. I clutch it like it can keep me upright, but it might be doing the opposite.
He moves closer, close enough that I catch the scent of the spicy pine scented soap he always used. The smell hits something behind my ribs. I can’t breathe right.
“Come on,” he says through clenched teeth, the muscle in his jaw turning to stone.
It’s been a year since I saw him. A year since my mother blocked his number on my phone and told me if I reached out to him, tried to communicate with him in any way, I was dead to her.
What she didn’t know is I had a secret file of his photos hidden on my phone.
I don’t even like to admit to myself how many times I touched myself looking at them.
And I never forgot his phone number. Even though my mother made sure it was deleted from my phone, I kept it in my head where she could never touch it.
Jackson takes the bag from my shoulder, one-handed, and turns toward the truck. He doesn’t even look back to make sure I’m coming. But, he knows I am.
Seeing him walk away is enough to make my stomach clench.
The cold nips at my skin when I step outside, but my blood feels hot. The rain plasters my shirt to my chest. When he opens the passenger door, the interior light spills over him, catching on the sharpness of his jaw, softening on his mouth.
I want to look away. I can’t.
My thighs brush the seat when I climb in, the leather cool against the backs of my legs. I pull my skirt down and tell myself not to feel this nervous, not to feel anything.
He tosses the duffel into the crew-cab seats, then shuts the door without a word or one of the hugs I remember from the years before I turned into an adolescent brat.
He rounds the hood, rain making him shine reminding me of Robert Pattinson in that stupid Twilight scene.
Every step he takes loaded and unhurried. When he slides into the driver’s seat, the truck dips and my whole body does too. The cab fills with his presence, like the air bends around him.
We don’t move.
His hands rest on the wheel. They’re huge, wet and his fingers are entrancing. I imagine them under my chin, running down my sides. Then, I realize I’m staring and shift my gaze to my lap.
“Seatbelt,” he says, gruff and yet concerned.
I fumble for it with clumsy fingers. When it clicks, I flinch and say, “Sorry.”
His jaw tightens. “Don’t apologize. Not unless you’ve broken a rule of mine.”
I press my lips together swallowing around the lump in my throat.
A rule of his? He used to give me rules when I was little. Small ones that were practical. Most of them were about my safety.
But, when I hit thirteen and my mother started staying out later, being gone more, and yelling at Jackson for the stupidest things, something in me changed.
Maybe it was fear, that’s what the school counselor said.
I was acting out because I didn’t feel safe somehow.
But, it wasn’t Jackson that made me feel unsafe but he was the one I took out my fear or frustration on every time, pushing against the restrictions he put in place that got more and more firm.
Conflict punched at my belly when my mother finally kicked him out for, shocker, telling her if he ever found out she was behind the wheel after drinking again, he would call the cops on her himself.
He pulls onto the street, his headlights cutting through the sheets of water. The world outside becomes a blur of neon smeared by the rain. Inside the truck, it’s too warm. We’re too close.
I can feel him without looking, and I have to fight the urge to squirm under his gaze. The weight of him beside me on the bench, the heat coming off his leg, and the rhythm of his breathing that somehow pulls mine into sync makes me dizzy.
“Hallie.”
He says my name like he’s been keeping it somewhere safe during the year since we last saw one another.
“Yeah,” I say. My voice comes out thin. “Thanks for coming.”
The silence stretches between us, engulfing us. The wipers drag across the windshield, slapping back and forth, back and forth, and I count the seconds between each pass, trying to calm my pulse. I want to say something, but nothing comes to mind.
“What happened?” He finally breaks the silence, glancing my way before turning his eyes back to the dark road.
“Which part?” I reply. I mean for it to sound light, but it comes out snippy, bratty.
The corner of his mouth twitches. When he speaks, it’s a mixture of frustration and amusement. “Start with why you were sitting at a bus station at midnight with no coat.”
“I have one,” I say even though I don’t.
“I… left school because it wasn’t working out.
I called Mom, she said…” My throat tightens, choking out the rest of the sentence.
I cough, my face hot. “She said she was on her way out of town and if I was old enough to decide to leave school, I was old enough to have a plan of where to go.”
He exhales slowly. The muscles in his forearm shift as he grips the wheel tighter. I watch the motion for too long and have to look away, hoping I can hide the flush creeping up my neck.
His gaze flicks to me, just once, and my heart stumbles. I can’t quite read the emotion in his tone when he says, “And you called me.”
“I didn’t think you’d come,” I admit softly.
“I always come,” he rolls his head in a semi-circle and I hear the bones in his neck snap. “That’s what a father does.”
Father.
Something hot sparks under my skin. I cross my legs, pretending to stretch as I try to give myself a little bit of friction. “You’re not my dad.”
The air changes. He looks at me, steadily in the glow of the dash.
“I’m the man who showed up,” he says, speaking each word slowly, low and firm. “You’ll live under my roof, you live by my rules.”
The words make something deep inside me tense and tremble. It shouldn’t sound like safety, not when I left because I didn’t want control. It shouldn’t imbue me with intense want. But it does.
“Live? Rules?” I echo, aiming for sarcasm, but like muscle memory, it comes out standoffish, childish.