Brittany
Time in Hell doesn’t move straight. It stretches, loops, and doubles back on itself like it’s trying to trip you.
Months pass. Long enough for the bruised feeling in my chest to dull but not disappear. Long enough for Oaks to become a shadow I can’t quite shake, even when I tell myself I’m done looking.
He’s everywhere without ever being obvious about it.
At the diner, he takes the corner booth near the window three mornings in a row, black coffee, no sugar, not even pretending to read the menu.
He tips heavy and doesn’t flirt and doesn’t look at me more than necessary.
The first time, I tell myself it’s coincidence.
The second time, I spill cream on the counter because my hands won’t stay steady.
The third time, I decide he’s doing it on purpose.
At the pawn shop, he wanders in claiming he’s looking for a torque wrench, then leaves without buying anything.
He stands too close to the glass case, talking to Lottie about something mechanical while I’m right there, pretending I can’t hear the way his voice gets lower when he wants somebody else to listen.
At Hollar Dollar, he rams his cart into mine in the cereal aisle hard enough to jolt me forward.
“Damn,” he says lightly. “Reckon we oughta exchange insurance.”
I glare at him over the dented cart. “You stalking me now?”
His mouth tilts like he’s amused, but there’s something tight under it, something that don’t match the joke. “If I was stalking you, you wouldn’t see me.”
“That ain’t comforting.”
He leans one forearm against the cart handle and lowers his voice like we’re sharing gossip instead of warnings. “Sophie’s gone missing.”
The words drop heavy between us, heavier than cereal and coupons and fluorescent lights.
I blink. “That ain’t funny.”
“I ain’t joking.”
I cross my arms. “That got anything to do with you following me into the frozen foods aisle?”
“It’s got everything to do with why you shouldn’t be alone.”
I roll my eyes because that’s easier than admitting the back of my neck just prickled. “I’m not alone. I got friends. I got…”
“Elijah,” he finishes.
The way he says Elijah’s name makes my pulse jump, like he put a finger on something tender on purpose.
“Yes,” I say stubbornly. “Elijah.”
He studies me like he’s trying to measure something he can’t quite reach. “You trust him?”
I hesitate a fraction too long.
“That’s what I thought,” he mutters, like he didn’t want to be right.
“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t act like you get to decide who I trust.”
His gaze softens just a hair, and that almost makes me angrier because it looks too much like care and he ain’t allowed to give me that. “I don’t want you trusting anybody,” he says quiet. “I want you careful.”
I shove my cart around him. “You don’t get to want things from me.”
Behind me, I hear him sigh like he’s tired or mean. Probably both.
Elijah is the opposite of complicated.
He holds doors. He listens when I talk. He doesn’t touch me unless I reach first, and even then it’s careful, fingers brushing mine, hand at the small of my back like he’s asking permission without saying it out loud.
We’ve been seeing each other for months now and he still hasn’t done more than kiss me.
It’s sweet in theory, like a movie that thinks restraint is romance.
In practice, it makes me feel like I’m positioned at the brink of something that never quite tips over.
The first time I lean in, thinking maybe he just needs encouragement, he presses his forehead to mine and smiles instead.
“I’m trying to do this right,” he says.
“Right how?” I ask, because my patience ain’t a holy virtue.
“Slow. Respectful.”
It should feel sweet. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it feels like he’s holding me at arm’s length and calling it kindness.
He keeps asking me to come to Pearly Gates.
“You’d like it,” he says. “It ain’t what people think.”
That ain’t exactly true. Pearly Gates has a reputation in this town like mold in a trailer, stubborn and hard to scrub out.
Doomsday prep sermons. End-times charts.
Videos that circulate every few years like urban legends.
Folks stockpiling canned goods and quoting Revelation like it’s a weather report.
“I don’t mind church,” I tell him. “Just not that one.”
He frowns gentle, like he’s disappointed but trying not to show it. “You shouldn’t judge it without seeing it.”
“I’m not judging,” I say careful. “I just want something quieter.”
There’s another church on Main, a small brick building with a white steeple that needs repainting.
The kind of place that sings off-key and passes casseroles around after service.
Nobody’s rich there. Nobody’s polished. Everybody knows everybody’s business, but they at least pretend to have manners about it.
“Come with me there Sunday,” I suggest. “Just once.”
He hesitates.
That’s new.
But he nods. “Alright.”
Sunday morning smells like perfume and potluck, cheap coffee and hand lotion and old hymnals.
I wear a simple blue dress, nothing flashy, nothing that could be mistaken for attention seeking in a town that calls a woman a whore for dancing with a biker.
Elijah looks handsome in pressed slacks and a white shirt, Bible tucked under his arm like always, smile calm like he expects to be welcomed anywhere he goes.
When we step inside the sanctuary, heads turn.
Hell never stops watching.
I feel it before I see her.
Bethany sits two pews ahead, spine straight, hair immaculate, wearing a pale yellow dress that screams money and control. She turns her head slow when she senses us behind her, and when her eyes land on me, her lips curve into something sharp.
“Elijah,” she says sweet as a church mint and twice as fake. “Didn’t know you were still slumming it.”
My stomach drops so hard it feels like falling.
Elijah stiffens. “Ma’am?”
Bethany’s gaze slides over me, taking inventory like I’m pawn stock. “She’s been busy lately,” she says, voice pitched just loud enough. “Haven’t you heard?”
Heat rushes up my neck. “Stop.”
"Oh, honey," she goes on, kicking back like she’s queen of the church. “You really think my husband would keep going around her if she wasn’t already fucking him?”
Gasps ripple, the kind of soft little sounds people make when they’re starving for a mess and pretending they ain’t. Somebody sucks in a breath like it’s scandal and salvation at the same time.
Elijah turns to me so fast it’s almost violent. “What is she talking about?”
“I’m not,” I start, panic crawling up my spine. “I haven’t…”
“Y’all been seen all over,” Bethany cuts in smooth. “At the gym. At the store. At the diner. Funny how that works.”
“Elijah,” I say, desperate now, hating myself for needing him to believe me. “You know me.”
His jaw tightens. “Have you been seeing him?”
“No.”
“That ain’t what people are saying. ”
“I don’t care what people are saying,” I hiss, because I’m about to lose my shit in a church like the Lord ain’t got enough problems. “I care what’s true.”
Bethany smiles like she’s enjoying a private joke, eyes bright with it. Elijah steps back from me, just a little, but enough. It’s the tiniest distance in the world and it still feels like the floor dropped out.
“You told me you wanted something different,” he says quiet.
“I do.”
“Then why does his name keep following you?”
Because he won’t stop showing up. Because he thinks he’s protecting me. Because Hell won’t let me breathe without attaching me to somebody and calling it my fault.
“I didn’t ask for it,” I whisper.
The pastor starts the sermon and nobody’s listening to him, not really. Folks keep their eyes forward like they’re holy, but their attention stays right here, wrapped around my throat.
Elijah doesn’t sit next to me for the rest of the service.
By the time we walk out into the parking lot, the air feels thick with humiliation and judgment and the kind of heat that makes you want to peel your own skin off just to get away from it.
“I need to know,” Elijah says, voice tight. “Are you still involved with him?”
“I was never involved,” I snap. “He’s married.”
“That ain’t never stopped men before.”
The words sting because they’re true about the world even if they ain’t true about me.
“I’ve barely kissed you,” I say suddenly, the frustration spilling out like I can’t hold it anymore. “We been seeing each other for months and you ain’t even done more than kiss me. You think I’m sneaking around with a biker?”
His face flushes. “That ain’t fair.”
“What ain’t fair is being judged for something I didn’t do.”
He looks torn. Hurt. Suspicious. Like he wants to be the kind of man who believes a woman and he’s fighting the part of him that’s been trained not to.
“I just want you safe,” he says.
“I’m tired of men saying that like it gives ’em permission to control me.”
We part stiff, like we’re strangers instead of whatever we were trying to be.
I don’t go home.
Because there ain’t one.
I finally told Lottie. Then I packed my clothes into plastic bins and moved into her finished basement like it was temporary, like I’m waiting on something better, like I ain’t terrified of getting too used to somebody else’s kindness.
After church, I drive straight there.
My eyes burn, but I refuse to cry again.
I push open the basement door without knocking and stop cold.
Oaks is on the couch.
Boots off. Elbows on his knees. Looking’ like a man who ain’t slept in a week and don’t care if it shows. For a split second neither of us speaks, and the air feels too tight to breathe.
“What are you doing here?” I demand.
He glances up slow. “Same as you, apparently.”
Lottie appears at the top of the stairs, Mason on her hip, her expression already tired like she’s been holding the whole town together with duct tape.
“Bethany threw him out,” she says blunt. “And the clubhouse ain’t an option right now.”
“Why?” I ask, my voice coming out thinner than I want.
Lottie’s eyes flick to Oaks and back to me. “They got a prisoner,” she says.
My blood goes cold. “Who?”
“Becki,” she says quieter. “From Pearly Gates.”
The room tilts, just for a second. From Pearly Gates, my ass. Our Becki.
“What did she do?” I ask.
Lottie says, “You don’t want to know.”
I think of the number she scrawled on a receipt for me. “Yes, I do.”
“She picked the wrong side in a war,” Oaks answers like that explains everything. “We found Sophie, and Becki’s been behind it all along.”
“Bullshit,” I say, not knowing where it comes from. A feeling more than anything. “She only does what she has to.”
Oaks stands slow, every inch of him controlled, like he knows what it looks like for him to move too fast around me.
“Before you start,” he says, voice rough, “it ain’t what you think.”
“I’m not thinking anything,” I snap, because my nerves are raw and my life is falling apart and he is the last complication I can afford. “I’m too busy being homeless.”
The word hangs there.
His eyes sharpen. “Homeless?” he repeats, like he didn’t hear me right. “Is that why you’re staying here? I thought maybe there had been another threat.”
I fold my arms tight. “My dad sold the house.”
Something shifts in his expression. Not pity. Not sympathy either. Something heavier.
Silence stretches.
This basement suddenly feels too small, too close, too temporary, and the worst part is the only place I got left is the same place he does.
Lottie clears her throat upstairs. “Y’all can either fight it out or fuck it out,” she calls down, like she’s announcing last call. “But I got a toddler. I ain’t got time to watch.”
Oaks looks at me.
I look at him.
Time in Hell doesn’t move straight. It loops.
And somehow, even when I try to walk away, I end up right back in the same room with the same biker.
Only now there’s nowhere left to run.