He doesn’t say anything, just presses down on the accelerator.
“Turn the car around! I want to go home!”
He puts his hand on my hand. I don’t want it there. He says, “I’m sorry. Let’s go make up somewhere, okay? This is stupid. If I floor it, we’ll be there for sunrise.”
“Don’t floor it! Are you insane? And where will we be, exactly?”
“I planned this. This will be special.”
“Not that special! The first time we do it—if we ever do it—it won’t be make-up sex. Don’t even bother.”
“We have to talk. Not about that.”
“Talk to me now.”
“Wait until we get there.”
“Don’t order me around!”
“Don’t start!”
It’s like this all the way up into the mountains until we’re at the ridge of wherever we are—just us and the coyotes and whatever else they have around here that bites.
56
Jack
After three hours of acting like an asshole because, apparently, it’s my nature, I’m driving along with no idea of where I should take her. I had it planned out. I knew the terrain. Now all I know is I can’t go back there because I already led the lowlifes who followed me west from Yucca Valley Correctional to what was supposed to be the crime scene.
Where we go now is anyone’s guess, or, if I’m lucky, nobody’s guess.
Normally, I’m good under pressure. But this is life-and-death and, right now, I wish I had a sliver of my father’s lethal grace.
I pull off onto a gravel fire trail until the car is out of sight of the main road.
She looks so upset, I start to stroke her hair, but she pulls away. She says, “You’ve been yelling at me all the way here. You have to say sorry like you mean it before you start making out with me.”
“I was patting your head!”
“I’m not your cocker spaniel!”
“Do you have a compulsion to turn things to crap?”
“No wonder your ex is your ex!”
She storms out of the car and runs into the unfamiliar woods, kicking the door shut behind her. It’s first light, and she’s running toward the rising sun. I squint, but I can barely see her.
I’m so pissed at her. I shout, “Wait up!”
She shouts back at me, “How could I be with such a jerk?”
I go running after her. This isn’t the way this was supposed to go down. I reach out—I’m about to grab her arm—but I wasn’t supposed to be overpowering her. There wasn’t supposed to be physical force and certainly not me yanking her arm out of its socket.
I take her hand instead, my fingers clamped like the jaws of a wrench.
“Don’t make me chase you down! Crap, Nicolette, I get that you—”
Nicolette?
What have I done?
Her hand twists out of my hand. I go for her wrist as she breaks away from me. A sharp kick to my ankle, and she catapults off me. There’s a yell like the cry before you break a board in half in karate, that kiai, and she’s gone. She’s racing deeper into the woods, and I’m running after her.
Every time my ankle comes down anything but straight on, where the terrain is uneven—every stride—I get a thrusting blade of pain. I want to kick her back. Then I have this feeling-like-shit moment because what kind of person wants to kick a girl who’s a foot shorter than he is?
And then the deeper thrust of realization: what I was supposed to be doing to her went far beyond kicking her. And the fact that I’m chasing her through this desiccated landscape with a gun in my hand doesn’t look good for me. But it doesn’t seem as if she’s going to stop long enough for me to tell her that the gun was in case the guys who decked me followed us. She’s not going to slow down long enough for me to say it’s in my hand because I can’t even walk fast with it stuck in the back of my jeans, and I couldn’t exactly drop in on her wearing a holster for her to discover while making out.
The girl can run. It’s the damned Cotter’s Mill Unified High School track team. Who knew she could sprint like this? When I catch sight of her, she’s bouncing off things like she grew up getting chased through the wilderness. She makes it over rocks and outcroppings of thistly bushes like Bambi—not Bambi in the headlights but surefooted Bambi.
She’s running toward the precipice, toward the cliffside of the narrow stretch of woods between the road and oblivion. When she realizes, she dodges back into the woods.
I’m waving this gun in front of me like a fool, like I was planning to shoot someone with it. This is something I’m not going to do.