Abel
Rose is staring at me, her eyes wide and her mouth open, lips tilted up just a little once we stop for a second to catch our breath.
It isn’t just any kind of staring or the creepy kind that makes you feel uncomfortable. It’s the kind that makes you want to get up and conquer the motherfucking world. Like her happiness is based on mine or something.
And then we’re off again, making our way through the dense forest surrounding Silverwing, our socks sopping from the recent rain as we head toward the lights on the road ahead. I hate the squelch of each step but I wasn’t prepared to have something as small as fucking slip-on shoes be the reason we didn’t make it.
I glance over at her a few times, trying to see if she looks any different now that we’re free, but also trying to keep from busting my ass in front of her.
She turns her gaze away from me as we continue running, a little slower the farther we get from Silverwing. Her face is tipped to the sky as we finally make it to the clearing.
She soaks up the moon like it feeds her and I have no idea what we’re doing next. I didn’t plan for what would come next. But if there’s anything I know how to do, I know how to survive.
Rose doesn’t look worried at all. And her confidence in me gives me a jolt of reassurance.
We slow to a walk as we near the empty road and I’m looking around, trying to come up with a plan.
I have no fucking clue.
I honestly wasn’t sure I’d even be able to get us this far.
It was entirely too easy.
I look back, expecting to see a sign that someone is following us.
No lights bouncing around, the way men running with flashlights would look, no sounds of footsteps or yelling.
Only dark, silent trees look back at me. Do they even know we’ve escaped?
“Why are you frowning?”
Her face is free of concern, not an ounce of fear on her.
She’s fucking beautiful.
“Trying to figure out what to do next, espinita ,” I respond, attempting to keep uncertainty out of my tone.
We’re still making our way through the clearing, toward the berm, when I hear an engine rumbling up ahead. It’s been so long since I heard the sound of a car and this one sounds like it’s another mile away from falling to shit. Loud, coughing, and angry, I hope the car able to take us as far away from here as possible.
I run a little faster and step out onto the road, just as a pick-up truck revs past, so close, the ends of my hair dance dangerously. “Holy fuck,” I say, just as I’m jerked back by the collar of my shirt.
The truck halts to a stop a few yards away, its brake lights casting a red glow on the asphalt.
Rose lets go of my shirt and up ahead, the truck driver’s door squeaks open. I can’t see the person until they’re almost halfway past their truck, heading our way.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” a voice almost as hard on my ears as the engine rings out. The man walking toward us is all gut, his long hair tied back, and what appears to be brown eyes full of anger. “What kinda psychos are you, coming outta the goddamn woods like that? I coulda killed you or gone off the goddamn road!”
Rose moves to step forward, but I hold my arm out, keeping her in place.
I don’t need to look at her to know she’s ready for whatever bullshit comes our way. I can feel how tense she is; her presence alone feels like a fucking threat. Cálmate, espinita.
Suerte, suerte, suerte.
“We need help,” I tell the man, holding my free hand out toward him. He’s closer and I can see the silver strands highlighting his dark hair and the crow’s feet at the ends of his eyes that would be showing, if he were smiling. But we aren’t that lucky.
He’s a mean-looking son of a bitch.
Mami would complain. She’d say, “he’s being a cabrón” as she takes a swig of wine and spits a little at his worn boot-clad feet.
But she’s not here. I have to remind myself, even if I can sense her like a shadow nearby.
“That’s obvious. The pair of ya standing out here, no shoes on, looking crazy as all hell.” His voice sounds more like a growl than anything.
I drop my arm, hoping maybe if he doesn’t see either of us as a threat, he’ll get us far away from Silverwing.
He pauses for a moment and I have no idea what to make of this fucked up situation. We are standing here looking crazy as hell in dirty, sopping socks. But the only thing in my mind, ringing louder and louder, is that we need to get the fuck out of here. “We need a way out of here.”
The man twists his lips as he stares at Rose, ignoring me.
I wonder what he sees when he looks at her.
I know I look like an asshole, my features appearing near threatening when I’m not actively smiling. But Rose, she looks like she was made by the sun. All light and intensity.
He doesn’t know she could burn just as fucking hot.
I look at her, from her expressionless face, to her fists at her sides, down her legs.
Blood.
On her pants, and on her socks.
Fuuuuckkkkk.
“You’d best get going. After I call the cops, there won’t be much time for you to get very far.” He turns to hobble back to his truck.
He’s almost to the cab door when Rose shoots past me, like a golden bullet.
She’s slamming the door on his body for the second time before I get my head out of my ass and run to her. His body slumps and he slides out a little, his head in the door jam. I’m wrestling her away but she shoves at me and kicks the door so it bounces off his skull.
“Rose!” I’ve all but mimicked the goddamn wrestlers on TV with the ways I’m attempting to restrain her, scared as shit that she’ll turn on me. “What the fuck?” I grunt when I get an elbow to my stomach and double over. My arms band around my center in a shitty attempt to ease the pain.
“?” Her voice sounds low, uncertain as she comes down from her violence.
And I hold one of my hands out to keep her from touching me. “I’m fine,” I tell her, my voice a little raspier than usual.
Shit. This is already starting off badly.
“We have to go,” I grunt out, remembering that we’re on the fucking run. I stand straight and attempt to shake off the now dull ache.
Rose stares at me, disheveled and perfect. “Did I hurt you?” she whispers. Her eyes are wide, her hands are clutched in front of her.
If it were anyone else, any other fucking person, I’d give them my anger, my sarcasm. I wouldn’t spare even an ounce.
But with Rose, I only assure her that I’m fine again before I check the man’s pulse. It’s faint, but it’s there.
I’d prefer if we didn’t start our new lives with murder.
I reach into his pockets and draw out his wallet.
But I’ll start with theft.
Rose and I drag his body off the road, toward the woods, hidden amongst the trees.
This life I am choosing with Rose will not be without cost and I need to get used to that notion.
There will be casualties.
People will get hurt if they get in our way.
People will probably even die.
And they’ll definitely suffer , I think to myself as we get in the truck. Rose barely has her seatbelt on before I’m damn near pressing the gas through the floor.
The trees are flying past, the truck shaking, the engine so loud we won’t be able to talk unless we yell over it.
We’re fucking reeling.
We’re fucking free.
When I steal a glance, she’s got her head slightly sticking out of the window, the wind tearing through her hair and a grin nearly splitting her face.
Even covered in blood, she looks like a damn dream.
After a half hour of speeding through backroads, I pull into a closed gas station and take stock.
The stolen wallet holds eighty-four dollars and a picture of a smiling little girl he’ll likely never see again.
It does something inside me, twisting my heart a little.
He’ll probably die on the side of the road, and that little girl will have a hole in her world.
That hole will be our fault.
“What does suerte mean?” Rose whispers the question, breaking me out of my downward spiral as I stare at the picture.
And I blink because what the fuck? I remember thinking it but I don’t remember uttering the word. “It’s Spanish. I relate it to luck or destiny.”
Rose kinda squints and I shrug.
“You don’t believe in fate or soulmates?” I ask, tucking the picture of the little girl back into the wallet and shoving those feelings down deep where I can’t let it slow us down.
“The idea of having a soulmate is ridiculous.” She peers over at me as she leans back into the passenger seat. “But I suppose if I had a soulmate, it’d be you, .”
Just like that, my heart untwists itself.
I’m not entirely sure what’s next, but it’d be a hell of a lot worse without her.
And I’m reminded why we’re even here to begin with.
My hands reach for her before my brain registers what I’m doing. I don’t care that she’s covered in blood from more than one person now, I don’t care that we’re both tired and have no fucking clue what comes next. I don’t care.
Not as I press my lips to hers. The first is a soft question as my hands slide over her jaw to anchor her to me.
The next is a certain answer.
She sighs into my mouth and digs her nails into my skin.
“We did it,” I say between kisses.
She nods once, a little one that doesn’t force us apart.
When I sit back, I glance around, trying to figure out which way we should go. We’ve been sitting here long enough.
I push the key back into the ignition.
Before I turn it, I glance over at her.
Her eyes are on the full moon outside, her body now leaning toward the windshield. “We’re free,” she whispers as she looks up at the sky.
“Yeah. And we have to keep moving if we want to stay that way,” I remind her.
“We need to find my mother,” she says, her eyes still on the moon in wonder. “Head toward Utica.”
My lips press together, to keep the words I want to say from forcing their way out.
You don’t need to do this shit, Rose. You have me.
But it’s better not to fight so early on. It’s better to find a way to reason with her on the way there.
When I turn the truck on and pull off, I take a right out of the gas station parking lot.
Not two miles down the road, a sign tells us that Utica is thirty-five miles from here.
Rose grabs my hand and squeezes.
I’m a fucking idiot for feeling jealous, for wishing she was this excited about us , but I squeeze her hand back as we rumble down the road toward Rose’s revenge.
We’d driven another hour when I take an exit into a small town that I don’t catch the name of. The sun is due to come up soon and even in the dark it looks like one of those stupid ass Norman Rockwell paintings like mami used to have on a plate before I told her it was a Christmas painting.
She threw it out the window, her drunk ass never having realized it for herself. Christmas wasn’t celebrated in our home, even if it was Jesus’ birthday. No holidays, no moments of joy. Only violence and repentance when she sobered up, only to repeat the vicious cycle.
I see a small shopping center on the right and pull inside the parking lot, hoping one of the stores is open.
When I look over at Rose, after parking the truck, I realize she’s asleep. Good. The last thing I need is her coming inside with me, blood on her pants and now her shirt.
A big ass sigh escapes my lips and I scrub my hands over my face. Mierda. Facial hair has never really been an issue for me, it usually grows only enough to look like I’d been dabbling in someone’s pubes. But in my time at Silverwing, my face decided to grow more hair. Enough to make a short beard that feels foreign and itchy. I feel it now as I try to gain a sense of I didn’t just fuck my whole life up.
She’s still sleeping when I hop out of the truck, preparing myself for the odd stares I may get.
My clothes feel gross, sticking to me and doing not a fucking thing to keep the cold breeze from slapping the shit out of me. I hadn’t noticed the cold before.
Adrenaline, idiota .
We have to figure our shit out quickly. It’s too cold to be wandering around without warmer clothes or some sort of shelter.
I have the cash tucked into my waistband and as I enter the store I wonder if I’ll bother spending it or just exercise my five-finger discount.
It’s even fucking colder in here than it is outside. I shiver, ignoring the way my now dingy socks feel, damp and loose.
Mami would pop me upside the head for walking around looking like this.
That blonde devil has you walking around, dressed como un perderdor ; like some kind of homeless loser.
“I was homeless, Mami ,” I mutter under my breath, trying to hide the fact that she’d becoming less of a fantasma and more of a reality as I maneuver through the store with her breathing down my neck.
The woman standing at the register shoots me a strange look and it feels like déjà vu. The way people looked at me at the crazy house before I even got to Silverwing, when they had to decide if I was going to off myself or not.
And then they sent me to rot at Silverwing, all because they wanted me to remember how I got on that balcony.
But I don’t fess up to shit I didn’t do. And that bit of my life is time I can’t account for, even now. It’s scary, if I think about it too much.
The woman is still watching as I take a deep breath and walk toward the minuscule clothing section.
I’ve had to be a decent thief in order to survive. But the woman at the register finds her way toward me, just as I realize I have no fucking clue what size Rose wears. Not in clothes, not in panties, not in shoes.
So I grab whatever the fuck I can for us, enough so that we aren’t riding around looking like two psychotic escapees—which is exactly what the fuck I feel like as this woman damn near breathes down my neck—and I head to the register.
It takes most of our money, but nothing beats the feeling of peeling off these dirty ass socks on my way out and tossing them on the ground just as I slide my feet into knock-off Crocs.
I hear the woman yell after me to pick them up but she can kiss my fucking ass for all the dirty looks she gave me while she rang me up. I know I’m tattooed and a pretty big guy. But it’s the person I’m with that she should be more afraid of.
When I look up at the truck, I see Rose standing just in front of it. Thankfully she hadn’t moseyed on inside or I’d likely be cleaning more blood off her.
“Get in the truck, Rose,” I tell her, my patience running thin on low sleep and stress over what the fuck would happen next.
“I thought you left me,” she says, her voice quiet. But it doesn’t crack, doesn’t waver. She is confidently vulnerable and it’s the strangest fucking thing.
I sigh as I head to her side of the truck, taking her hand in my free one. I toss the bag on the hood and pull her close, pushing her messy hair from her face as I look into her sleepy baby blue eyes. “Now why would I do that, espinita ?”
Her pretty pink lips poke out just a little, and I’m fucking weak for her. I couldn’t leave her. Not now, not even if she tried to push me out the goddamn door.
“We have to go,” I whisper before pressing a kiss to her lips and then another. “You need to not look as fucking insane as you do right now.”
We get in the truck and I pull off, just in time for the woman inside to step out, a phone pressed to her ear.