81. Chapter 81
“We’re not going to die, at least.” Jase nodded up the road at a gas station Lindsey hoped wasn’t a metal mirage in the swirling heat. She shielded her eyes from the sun and to keep from staring at Jase’s penis that he wasn’t careful about shielding while he peed into the ditch.
“No one has service.” Graham waved his phone above his head as if hoping to catch cell service in the wind. “When’s the last time we saw a car?”
“Five miles.” Jase sounded unsure. “Fifty miles?”
He zipped his pants and the ordinary motion of his shoulders slightly bunching reminded Lindsey of Austin, watching him put on the first condom.
Stop. Stop. She leaned on the side of the car—then immediately stood when the metal scorched her through her jean shorts—and resumed the painstaking task of scrubbing her phone of all traces of Graham, distracting her from everything that happened last night.
And everything that didn’t.
Spending the night in the car with Jase after showing up at his hotel room and basically asking him to have sex with her, she knew he wouldn’t test her rule no matter what she said, did, or wore to provoke him.
At a café for breakfast, they’d laughed about skunky beer and the hot, smelly car and their hot, smelly bodies, and Lindsey relaxed into the truth.
Jase needed a friend more than he needed a hookup, and she could be a friend until the end of the last map when she’d be out of his life forever.
The first step in a future free of any Young men was to scrub them from her digital memories.
Scrolling through her picture gallery, a year’s worth of vacant smiles told a different story than the lies she used to tell herself, when she wanted to believe Graham’s indifference on film didn’t mean indifference towards her.
It was there all along. Not a kiss she didn’t have to beg for or a smile he didn’t fake.
All the evidence she ever needed that their relationship, if it ever had a pulse, had been dead long before Austin.
With nothing worth saving, she deleted the images one at a time. Coming to a shot of Graham feeding baby goats at a petting zoo, she laughed remembering how disgusted he was by their tongues licking pellets from his hands.
“Something funny?”
She laughed even harder at a short video of Graham attempting to mount a horse.
“Did you hear me?” Helen asked.
“Sorry, what?” Lindsey sent the video to the digital trash can and was surprised to find Graham’s fiancée standing two feet in front of her.
“She has service,” Helen said over her shoulder, glaring at Lindsey.
“What are you talking about?” Lindsey asked.
“Don’t play with me,” Helen said.
Lindsey looked around for Graham, who was too far down the road to notice Helen’s advance, and asked, “What’s your problem?”
“Give me your phone,” Helen demanded.
“What? No. Why are you even talking to me?”
“I want to know what you’re doing.”
Helen reached for the phone Lindsey clutched to her chest. “None of your business, that’s what.”
“If it’s about Graham, then it is my business.”
“Graham, a little help here,” Lindsey hollered. “Your fiancée is getting out of hand.”
“What’s going on?” Graham stomped back to the car. “Can’t you see we have bigger problems?”
“Tell her to stay away from me,” Lindsey said.
“Trust me, I get no pleasure from speaking to you,” Helen said. “If you have nothing to hide, let me see it.”
“What will that prove?”
“That you’re still in love with him.”
The accusation was such a shock, Helen easily snatched the cell from Lindsey’s hand.
“Ha! See?” Helen showed Graham. “It’s all pictures of you.”
“Yeah, and I was deleting them,” Lindsey said.
“What are you doing?” It wasn’t clear which woman Graham was asking.
“Helen,” Jase said in a flat tone Lindsey hadn’t heard before. She felt him step up to her back. “Give her the phone.”
“Oh please, you’re half the problem,” Helen said. “Pandering to her all the time. It’s pathetic.”
“You’re worried about some pictures on my phone,” Lindsey said. “It doesn’t get any more pathetic than that.”
“You act like you’re so innocent. I’m sick of having to walk on eggshells so you don’t get upset. You’re just a lying, manipulative bit—”
“Hey, watch it,” Jase warned.
“She’s playing you too. If you weren’t so busy trying to hook up with her, you’d see it.”
Lindsey’s voice rose to a new level of shrill as she swiped at her phone. “Give it back.”
“Not until you admit it.”
“Admit what? That you’re out of your mind? We can all see it.”
“Admit you’re still in love with him.”
“Okay, cool it. We’re done,” Graham said.
“Sure,” Lindsey shot back. “If you admit you’re afraid of getting left on the side of the road just like I did!”
“Fucking bitch,” Helen growled, slamming the phone to the ground and throwing a punch that knocked Lindsey’s head to the side.
The searing pain slicing through her left eye and cheekbone gave Graham the opening to step between them, so when Lindsey swung for Helen, it was Graham’s jaw that—for the second time this week—she connected with instead.
“Hey, hey!” Jase took Lindsey by the arm and dragged her away.
Graham spat, his blood sizzling on the yellow line, and flung himself into his brother’s chest. Jase grabbed him by the collar with his free hand and shoved him across the road.
“Cool the fuck off.”
“Motherfucker.” Graham wiped blood from his mouth and cussed. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Fuck you, Graham!” Lindsey screamed. “Fuck you and that fucking bitch you’re marrying.”
“Hey, leave it. Let’s go,” Jase said, pulling her across the road. “Come on!”
“Let go of me.”
“Hey, enough. All right?”
“Jase.” She spun in his grip, ready to defend her right to defend herself, but his eyes were narrow with concern, not anger. He brushed his thumb over her wrist.
“All right?” he asked again. The gentle touch of his rough hand slowed her pulse, and her arm went slack in his grip. “Let me get a look at you.”
He opened the driver’s door and set her in the seat. Kneeling in front of her, Jase turned her chin to examine her face. The inspection, the sharpness of his attention, seared her already sunbaked skin.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“No,” she lied.
Sweat had beaded on his forehead, cheeks, and above his perfect lips that quirked. “You’re going to have a black eye. I’ve seen worse, though.”
“I can’t believe she hit me. I can’t believe she actually thinks…”
The idea of her still being in love with Graham—if she ever had been—was too ridiculous to repeat. Jase grabbed a water bottle from the back seat, and she slugged it down without taking a breath.
“Did you see the look on his face when you hit him?” Jase grinned. “Priceless.”
“He wasn’t where I was aiming.”
“Still must’ve felt good.”
She cracked a smile. “Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“Sure,” she breathed.
He frowned at the bruise she felt blooming. “Stay here. I mean it.”
She offered a half-hearted salute and he left her to scrape her phone off the road. Even from her perch she saw the screen was a spider web of shattered glass. With a quick glance back at her, Jase approached his brother squatting in the center of the road.
“You good, man?”
“What do you think?” Graham spat another red, sizzling glob. “I’m tired of getting punched in the face.”
He was palming his sternum, not his jaw. Helen offered her hand to help him stand.
“I’m going to try to get the car started. Can you pull it together long enough to get up the road?” Jase pointed west, the direction they and the sun were headed. “We need to try to make it to the gas station.”
“How?”
“Pour whatever water we have in the radiator. It should get us there. We can’t stay here.”
Graham met Lindsey’s eyes, smoothed his shirt, and nodded. “Yeah.”