1. Melissa #2
Gravel, then asphalt. A two-lane highway that cut through the hills with no markings, no streetlights, no indication of which direction led to anything. I picked right because it was slightly downhill and downhill meant a valley and valleys usually meant towns.
I walked. Limping now, my right foot bleeding into the gravel, the bag over my shoulder with its water bottle and granola bar and whatever else was in it that I hadn't looked at because looking would have taken time and time was the one thing I didn’t have on my side right now.
The road was empty. No headlights in either direction.
I walked for what felt like hours, but in reality might have only been twenty minutes.
Time seemed to stop functioning normally when you're barefoot and bleeding on a highway in the dark.
Every sound could be a truck coming up behind you with men who would take me back to that ranch.
Then I heard a sound. An engine, but wrong for a truck. Higher, sharper. A single headlight appearing around a bend ahead of me, growing brighter against the asphalt.
A motorcycle.
Every instinct I had left split down the middle.
Half of me wanted to dive into the scrub grass at the shoulder and lie flat until it passed, because a man on a motorcycle on this road at this hour could be anyone, could be connected to the ranch, could be the kind of man who finds a bleeding woman on a highway and sees an opportunity.
The other half of me understood that I was barefoot and bleeding and eight miles from nowhere in the dark, and the temperature was dropping.
If the ranch had already noticed I was gone then men in trucks were driving these roads right now looking for me, and standing here alone was a death sentence of its own.
I stood in the road. I put my hands up. I decided to make myself visible because the alternative was the dark and the dark was where the ranch lived and I was done with the dark.
The bike slowed. The headlight washed over me, and for three seconds I was pinned in it, a woman standing on the side of the road with blood on her feet and a canvas duffel bag hanging from one shoulder. I didn’t even want to think about what I looked like right now.
The engine dropped to idle. The rider put a boot down.
Big. Tattooed. Arms like construction equipment, hands wrapped around the handlebars with knuckles that looked like they'd been broken more than once.
He wore a leather vest over a dark shirt, and even in the headlight's glare I could read the patches on it.
A motorcycle club, The Forsaken Angels. Was this the kind of man every self-defense instructor warned me about?
He looked at me and I looked at him.
And I almost ran. My legs knew it before my brain did, because the last man who'd seemed safe had driven me to a ranch in the hills and locked me in a room and everything I knew about reading people had been wrong. My judgment was the weapon he’d used against me.
I'd chosen Tyler and Tyler had destroyed my life, and the idea of choosing again, of trusting again, of putting myself in the hands of a stranger who looked like violence given a body and a motorcycle, made my stomach turn so hard I nearly doubled over.
But the road behind me led to the ranch. And the road ahead of me led to nothing I could reach on bleeding feet before sunrise. And this man was here, right now, engine idling, looking at me with an expression I couldn't read in the dark.
"Please." My voice came out wrecked. Shaking, cracked, the voice of a woman who'd been holding everything together by her fingernails and had just run out of surface to grip. "Please, I need help. They're going to come looking for me. I can't go back. Please."
He didn't answer right away. His eyes moved over me, .
He was taking inventory. My feet first, bare and bloody on the asphalt.
Then my arms, where the bruises Tyler had left were visible below the sleeves of my t-shirt.
My face, whatever he could see of it in the spill of the headlight.
The bag on my shoulder. The way I was shaking, full-body tremors that I couldn't control and had stopped trying to.
I watched his hands tighten on the handlebars. His jaw shifted, something moving behind his teeth, and even from six feet away something shifted. Whatever he’d been when he pulled up, he was something else now.
He didn't ask who they were. He didn't ask where I'd come from. He didn't ask why I was barefoot and crying on a highway this late at night.
He swung his leg over the seat and stood up. He was taller than I'd expected, broader, a man who took up space just by existing. He shrugged off his jacket from underneath his cut and held it out to me.
"Put this on."
I took it. My hands were shaking too hard to find the sleeves, and he waited while I struggled with them, keeping three feet of space between us because he seemed to understand that not giving me space right now would be the wrong move.
I got my arms through eventually, the jacket heavy and warm, and it hung past my thighs and the sleeves covered my hands and for a second I just stood there inside it, breathing,
He got back on the bike. Looked over his shoulder.
"Get on."
I stared at the back of his vest. The patches, the club name, the insignia I didn't recognize.
I thought about Tyler, who'd had kind eyes and a warm laugh and had delivered me to a room with a boarded window and a mattress on the floor.
I thought about how wrong I'd been about a man who'd looked safe.
This man didn't look safe. Nothing about him looked safe at all. He looked like the thing you’d cross the road to avoid.
And he was sitting on a motorcycle in the middle of nowhere, offering me a ride to a place I'd never been, and every rational part of my brain was screaming that this was how I got into trouble in the first place.
But Tyler had looked safe. Tyler had looked like everything a woman was supposed to want. And Tyler had been the most dangerous man I'd ever met.
Maybe the math worked differently than I'd been taught. Maybe the danger you could see was less dangerous than the danger you couldn't.
I got on. I put my hands on his sides because I didn’t know where else to put them. My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt. Under my palms, the heat of him, solid muscle and bone. The bike started moving and the road behind me began to shrink.
I didn't know his name. I didn't know where he was taking me. I didn't know if the calculation I'd just made was the best decision of my life or the absolute worst.
But what I did know was that the wind was on my face and the ranch was getting further away with every second, and that was enough. For right now, sitting on the back of a stranger's motorcycle with blood drying on my feet and someone else's jacket over my shoulders, that was enough.