48. Tank
Tank
The edge of campus is busy enough that no one looks too closely at the giant sitting on a motorcycle across from the humanities building.
They still look, obviously. People always look at me.
The mask Ellie’s been trying unsuccessfully to convince me to go without, at least around the house, hides the worst of what happened to my face. But a giant man dressed in black with most of his scarred face covered tends to attract its own kind of attention.
Not disgust or horror, maybe, but add the motorcycle and the dark tattoos of dog skulls and feathers interrupted by an endless sea of even more fucking scars, and most people decide I’m either waiting to kill someone or pick up their daughter. Neither is good.
Today, it’s the second one.
Sort of.
I check the time again even though I already know Ellie’s class ended four minutes ago. She won’t be alone. Jinx started attending with her after the new semester began, having somehow bullied his way through late admissions with a high school transcript Cyrus definitely did not doctor.
I’m happy for him. He’s always wanted to go.
I knew that even before he learned to laugh when people called him Trailer Taylor and pretend like none of it cut.
He used to keep college pamphlets under his mattress and the cushions in the RV like they were dirty magazines.
Whenever we found them, he’d claim he collected them for the graphic design.
None of us believed him, because Jinx doesn’t design shit.
Now he’s taking communications classes, which feels like cheating given he could charm state secrets out of a brick wall.
It’s also our compromise with Ellie. She gets to finish her degree, and one of us is always nearby without her having a very obvious criminal hovering outside the bathroom or following her between lectures.
Most of the time.
I’m only here today because I missed her.
Besides, the media circus has mostly died down, so we don’t have to keep such a low profile anymore. There are still stories when someone has a slow news day, but Cyrus fed the press a version satisfying enough that they stopped digging for better answers.
Disgraced senator Todd Waterson discovers his wife’s old letters to the father of her child. In a jealous rage, he checks her out of rehab, drives her to an isolated field, and kills them both in a vehicle rigged with explosives.
And it’s close enough to the truth to hold up under scrutiny.
People wouldn’t understand the whole story anyway. They’d pick Marney apart for leaving rehab with him, and some would blame her for staying to begin with. They’d drag Ellie back through the ugliness of it all and turn her into either a helpless victim or a spoiled senator’s daughter.
Cyrus made sure neither of those things happened. We all protect her in the ways we’re good at, and controlling the narrative is his.
Todd was an evil man.
Marney, for all her flaws, was his victim.
And Ellie is a survivor.
That’s all the world deserves to know about it.
It’s been months since the funeral, and sometimes the grief still hits Ellie without warning. I’ll find her sitting on the kitchen counter at four in the morning with one of Marney’s scarves wrapped around her hands, or she’ll go silent when a certain song comes on in the grocery store.
Once, I found her crying because she reached for her phone to send her mom a picture of a dress she saw on an ad.
But she laughs more than she cries now.
She sleeps through most nights. She eats. Things are settling into a new normal, slowly but surely. It’s a better normal, in most regards, because she’s in our house and in our lives. And she’s there because she wants to be, not because of Kade’s contract.
Though she and Kade are apparently renegotiating the contract at her request.
Last I heard, she sent back another round of revisions with so many comments that Kade threatened to charge her billable hours.
He has no idea what he’s gotten himself into.
I don’t care about any of it. Contract or no contract. Collar or bare throat. I’ll sign whatever she wants if it makes her happy, and burn it the second it doesn’t.
I just want her.
And for the first time, I let myself fully believe she wants me too.
The doors open again, and I know her before I see the pink in her hair.
She comes through, laughing with Jinx, her head tipped back and one hand hooked around his arm. He’s wearing an expensive yellow coat and his long matching blond hair is tied back, and there’s glitter near his temple.
He spots me first.
His smile turns knowing.
“Speak of your stalker.”
I grunt in half-hearted betrayal.
Ellie’s head snaps around.
The second she sees me, she runs.
I barely get the kickstand down before she hits me, throwing both arms around my neck and her legs around my waist like she expects me to catch her.
I do.
And I always will.
She kisses me through the mask, her warm lips pressing against the leather covering my ruined mouth.
I can’t completely feel it, but my body knows what she’s doing anyway.
My arms lock around her, one beneath her thighs and the other across her back, holding her so close her laughter vibrates through both of us.
She doesn’t even seem to care that her friends are watching, shocked that I’m the one she’s hanging off of right now and not the blond pretty boy they were gaping at a minute ago.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, pulling back enough to look into my eyes. “Jinx is with me. You don’t have to watch me too.”
I lift one hand from her back.
Missed you.
Her expression changes immediately.
All the teasing melts away, and her green eyes go soft.
“Oh,” she whispers. “Well. That’s disgustingly sweet.”
Jinx reaches us at a much more dignified pace, shifting his bag higher onto his shoulder. “I’ll let you take her home, big guy. I have a study group.”
Ellie reluctantly unwraps herself from me. Her shoes touch the pavement for all of two seconds before Jinx catches her around the waist and kisses her.
Not a quick goodbye, either.
He bends her halfway backward, one hand in her hair while she clings to his coat. A pair of women passing behind them whisper to each other. One looks from Jinx to Ellie and then to me, eyes widening as she puts together whatever version of the equation her imagination offers.
Ellie surfaces with pink cheeks.
“Jinx,” she whispers.
“What?” He looks innocent. He’s never looked innocent a day in his life. “Everyone knowing you’re fucking multiple men is by far the least scandalous thing that’s been in the tabloids lately.”
“Jinx!”
“Well, it’s true.”
He laughs, kisses the tip of her nose, and backs toward the building where her friends have gone from shocked to completely fucking jealous. Confused, but jealous all the same.
If only they knew she has all four of us. Almost wish I were a fly on the wall for that conversation, when she has it.
“Don’t keep her out too late!” he calls to us.
Ellie flips him off.
I reach into the side case and pull out the helmet.
She goes still.
Because it’s pink. Not pale pink or rose gold or any of the colors salespeople use when they want to charge extra. It’s bright, unapologetically Ellie pink, with a dark visor and reinforced shell.
“You got me my own helmet?”
I sign, Safer than wearing mine. It’s too big for you.
Her fingers slide across the glossy surface. “Tank…”
I shrug, suddenly uncomfortable with the amount of emotion in her voice. It’s a helmet. I measured her head while she was asleep, researched impact tests, ordered three models, and returned two after I decided the padding wasn’t good enough.
No big deal.
She hugs it to her chest. “I love it.”
I take it from her and fit it carefully over her head, checking the strap twice. Then a third time, because apparently some of Ellie’s habits are contagious.
Her arms circle my waist once we’re on the road.
She holds on tight as the campus disappears behind us. I could take the direct route home, but I don’t, and she doesn’t ask why. We ride beyond the busy streets and the tall buildings until the road narrows, winding through trees just beginning to turn green again.
She taps my shoulder near the reservoir overlook.
I pull onto the old service road and stop in the place we used to come as kids, when all we had were stolen drinks, five bicycles, and the certainty that the world ended at the edge of Willow Creek.
Ellie climbs off and removes her helmet. The wind has tangled her blonde-and-pink hair, and she leaves it that way.
“We should stop here,” she says.
I gesture around us. We have.
“You know what I mean.”
I don’t, but that glint in her eyes warns me I’m about to find out.
Before I can get off the bike, she steps between my knees. Then she braces her hands on my shoulders and climbs onto the seat in front of me, facing backward, her thighs settling on either side of mine.
I catch her hips on instinct.
She smiles.
“I’ve always wanted to do this.”
Do what?
She takes my hand before I lower it and guides it beneath her shirt, pressing my palm against the warmth of her waist.
My pulse kicks hard.
Then her fingers find the straps of my mask.
I go still.
She pauses immediately. “Okay?”
I search her eyes.
There’s no fear in them. No pity. Nothing but Ellie.
I nod, sighing.
She removes the mask with the same care she used the first time, setting it inside her new helmet.
The open air touches my ruined face.
So do her fingers.
She traces the scar cutting through my eyebrow and my torn eyelids, her other cupping the worse side of my jaw, thumb brushing along my scarred gumline, then leans in and kisses me in the awkward way that belongs only to us.
There’s no hesitation anymore. She knows how to work around everything I’m missing, how to make the kiss feel whole.
Her mouth moves against mine, and the rest of the world falls away, leaving only her warmth and the weight of her in my lap.
She wants me.
The thought still feels too large to hold.
We shed jackets and caution in uneven stages, laughing when the handlebars get in the way and when the bike shifts beneath us.
I keep one boot planted firmly on the ground and both hands on her, because even now, even with her breath coming fast against my neck and her fingers tangled in my hair, some part of me is built to catch her.
What happens between us belongs to the trees and the water and the low creak of the bike beneath our bodies. It belongs to her quiet gasp against my shoulder and the way she presses closer, trusting me with every vulnerable inch of herself.
And after, she stays wrapped around me, cheek resting against what’s left of mine while the sun sinks lower over the reservoir.
“I love you,” she murmurs.
Before, I would have looked for the lie. I would have tried to understand how someone like her could look at someone like me and find anything worth loving.
I still don’t understand. Maybe I never will.
But she loves me.
And I accept she does.
When you’re handed a miracle, you don’t ask questions.