Loaded: A Bad Boy Romance (15 page)

T
he SUV thumps
off the highway and starts down the gravel road. We’re going faster than I’d like but it’s better than getting caught and raped by a biker gang.

Alex’s knuckles are cut and bruised and bloody, and I’m sure the blood isn’t all Alex's. I hear the
crack
it made again and just the memory of the sound sends a shudder down my spine.

He was already on the floor
, I think again.

Alex flexes his hands again, looking at the damage.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he finally says, his voice low and quiet.

“I’m not,” I say, not looking at him. “But I probably should be.”

I almost wish I
were
.

If I were afraid of Alex, I probably wouldn’t want to fuck him so bad. I probably wouldn’t have made a spectacle of myself this morning, pouring water all over myself like a woman in a Letter to Penthouse or something.

It worked, though.

Before I can get further on
that
train of thought, I look at the atlas again and pretend that I’m finding a route.

“I’m glad you’re not,” he finally says. “Most people are.”

“Is that because you live a hyperviolent lifestyle and earned yourself that reputation?” I ask, nastily.

“I do what I fucking
have
to,” he says. “I didn’t want to pull a bullet out of a guy when I was eleven. I didn’t want to watch my brother die when I was thirteen, but I wanted to be dead even less, so I fucking
learned
.”

His brother died?

He’s staring straight ahead when I glance over at him, rigid in his seat.

He didn’t mean to tell me that
, I realize.

My eyes drop to the tattoo on his forearm: 5/2/84 - 4/13/2004. His brother was only a couple weeks shy of twenty.

“You make your own decisions now,” I say softly.

I think of the
crack
again and swallow hard.

The guy was already down.

“And I decided to handle that guy,” he says.

I lean my head against the window and look at the desert. It’s early afternoon, and a low rise is coming up on us, separating this dirt road from the highway. If we’re not careful, we could get lost out here.

There’s nothing else I can say to Alex, no way I can make him understand the unease I’m starting to feel around him now. This suspicion that he’s in this life because he
likes
it, because the violence and the power and having two guns in the glove box make him feel good, macho, whatever.

Self-defense — or defending a helpless woman wearing nothing but a bed sheet — is one thing, but violence for the sake of violence?

Breaking a man’s jaw?

Crack
. I shiver again, then look over at Alex. He’s still looking straight ahead, glancing in the rear view mirror every thirty seconds or so.

“Are your hands okay?” I ask.

He flexes them off the wheel and looks at his knuckles like he hadn’t considered it before. They’re bruised and covered in dry blood.

“The fight got a little dirty,” he admits.

For once, I keep my mouth shut. The rise is between our dirt road and the highway at last, so we can’t see it.

“If you stop, I can get the first aid kit out of the back,” I say.

“I’ll be fine,” he says.

I nod at the road ahead.

“So when we get wherever it is we’re going, you’re just going to show up blood-stained with bloody knuckles?”

He takes his foot off the gas and the car slows quickly as he glances over at me, then smiles just a little and sighs.

“I hate it when you’re right, tiger,” he says.

My heart skips a beat, but I ignore it and open my door. We meet at the lift gate and I pull the big red duffel bag toward me, hunting through it for water and hydrogen peroxide to clean him off as he sits on the gate and looks at the road behind us.

“I broke his jaw because he called you a cunt,” he says.

I don’t look Alex in the face, I just take one hand and drizzle water over it. It’s gotta hurt, but he doesn’t even react.

“I thought he called you a wetback,” I say.

I take his other hand and pour water over it, the fat drops landing on the dirt.

He just shrugs.

“I’ve been called worse,” he says.

“So have I,” I say. “Pretty sure you called me a
fucking
cunt this morning.”

“You still mad about that, tiger?”

I’m not. I hadn’t even remembered that it happened until right now, to be honest.

Instead of answering I take his hand again and pour hydrogen peroxide over his knuckles. It fizzes, and I
know
it stings, but he doesn’t react at all.

He catches my look and half-smiles.

“It tickles,” he says. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Seems like it’s not your twentieth rodeo,” I say. I pour a little more on and let it bubble, then gently pat his knuckles dry.

He laughs.

“It’s not that either,” he says. “At least I didn’t break any fingers this time.”

“You usually break a finger?”

“Not anymore,” he says. “I learned.”

He tilts his head and looks up at me, and I finally look him in the face. He’s got a bruise purpling on one cheekbone.

“I could teach you to throw a pretty good punch,” he says.

“What makes you think I don’t?” I ask.

“Make a fist,” he says.

“I’m busy bandaging your sorry ass up,” I say.

“Ten seconds,” he says. “Come on. You gotta know this stuff now that your lifestyle is so dangerous.”

“Whose fault is
that
?” I ask. “I should be eating lunch at my desk right now.”

“Isn’t this more exciting?” he asks.

“Sure, it’s more
exciting
,” I say. “I don’t think it’s
better
.”

He laughs.

“Tiger, I think you were born to be on the run,” he says. “If I didn’t have you here guiding me I’d have driven straight into a trap by now, I’m sure of it.”

“Someone’s gotta be the brains of the operation.”

“That make me the brawn?” he asks.

I look at his knuckles again.

“Was it ever up for debate?” I ask.

He holds up one hand and makes a fist in front of his face.

“Come on,” he says.

I sigh, then clench my right hand into a fist, and he nods, then stands.

“That’s good,” he says, and reaches out for it. “Tuck your thumb behind your knuckles so it doesn’t stick out. Whatever you do, don’t put your thumb
inside
your fingers. It’ll break for sure.”

He gently presses the first knuckle of my thumb until it’s below the knuckles of my fingers.

“There you go,” he says. “Now, when you throw a punch, you want to hit here,” he says, running his big fingers over my third knuckles, where my fingers meet my hand. “Hit with your fingers and you’ll break them. Keep your wrist straight. Punch from the core, that’s where you get power from.”

He’s made a fist himself, and he’s demonstrating in slow motion: wrist straight, knuckles first. He stops short of my shoulder.

“Now you,” he says.

“You want me to just punch?”

He thumps himself on the arm and half-turns toward me.

“Right there,” he says.

“What if I hurt you?”

Alex just laughs.

“I’m not worried,” he says.

I punch him before he finishes that sentence, grimacing as I drive my fist into his arm as hard as I can, thumb tucked and wrist straight.

“Not bad,” he says. “Put your back into it and watch that wrist.”

I punch him again. It’s like hitting a bag of sand. There’s no
way
I’m doing any damage.

“Better,” he says.

I sock him in the arm a few more times. It’s like an oven out here, and after five or six I’m sweating already, droplets pouring down the back of my neck.

“Okay,” Alex says. “If you’re really gonna punch someone, go for the nose. It might not stop them, but it hurts like a motherfucker, and they’ll take a long enough pause for you to run.”

“Should I practice that?” I ask, raising both my fists in front of my face, and he laughs again.

“I don’t fight women,” he says.

“You just kidnap them?” I ask.

It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it.

“I do my job,” he says.

My fists are still in front of my face, and for a split second, I think about punching him in the nose, grabbing the keys, and driving off. I don’t do it.

I drop my fists and hold out a hand again. He puts his in it, and I pull him the two steps back to the giant SUV, put gauze over his knuckles, and wrap a bandage around his hand a few times.

I do the same to the other hand, and he holds both hands up, examining my work.

“It’ll do,” he says, and I roll my eyes. I put the supplies back into the duffel bag and shove it into the car.

“We done?” I ask.

“I didn’t want to kidnap you,” he says. He looks me dead in the eye, and I almost feel like I’m being pierced through.

“But you did,” I say.

“I took orders,” he says. “Even though I didn’t want to. They’d have gotten you some way, tiger. You’re lucky you got me.”

Before I can answer, there’s a roar in the far distance, the
unmistakable
sound of motorcycle engines. Lots of motorcycle engines. My stomach plummets, and Alex stands, closing the lift gate.

“I gotta stop letting you talk me into taking breaks,” he says.

We get in again and take off, the dirt road rattling us around as Alex takes it at sixty miles an hour. I sit in the passenger seat and make both my hands into fists, making sure I tuck my thumbs and keep my wrists straight. After a while I can’t hear the motorcycles anymore.

T
he strange thing
about being on the run is that after a while it gets dull. All I’m doing is driving, eyes ahead, hands on the wheel, ignoring the firecracker in the passenger seat.

That’s almost the hardest part. She’s
right
there and I can’t touch her, not if I want to keep this thing on the road and not flip us into a ditch.

We listen to a hip hop CD that was in the CD player, then an old Blink-182 album that Tessa finds in the glove compartment. After a long time, we come to a stop sign and a paved road. She points left, and I drive into the mountains.

Gradually, I’m coming up with a plan. Tessa’s not going to like it, but that’s just too bad. She doesn’t need to
like
it.

She doesn’t even need to
know
about it. She’s got her feet on the dashboard, watching the scenery go by, like any girl on a road trip.

For a moment I wonder what it would be like if we
were
on a road trip together. That’s one of those things I’ve never done, unless driving a truck with a couple kilos of black tar strapped under the back seat and praying I didn’t get caught was a road trip.

That could be good, though. Just the two of us, driving around the country, stopping to see the World’s Largest Ball of Twine or the Two-Headed Pig and taking pictures of ourselves.

“Do we have a plan?” she asks, bringing me back to reality.

I clear my throat.

“Sacramento,” I lie. “All these small towns are too risky. Cops get bought, a phone call gets made, we’re fucked, but Sacramento’s big enough that won’t happen.”

We’re not going to Sacramento. It’s too far, and even if Sacramento might be okay, there’s hundreds of miles of small towns between here and there.

After running into the Diablos like that, I’m not risking it again. Tessa needs to be safe by
tonight
, because every hour she’s with me, it gets riskier for her.

She opens the atlas and glances it over, crossing her ankles on the dashboard.

“We could make that by tonight,” she said. “We’d get in late, but we could do it.”

I take a deep breath.

“I had a better idea for tonight,” I say.

She looks at me skeptically.

“Is it ‘get murdered’?” she asks. “That seems like the other option.”

“You still want to go to Yosemite?” I ask.

She just
looks
at me.

“Are you insane?” she finally asks.

“Only a little,” I say.

“
No,
” she says. “We’re not on vacation.”

“The cartel won’t be there,” I say. “Yosemite’s full of families and boy scouts. It’s not even on La Carretera’s radar.”

She’s still looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.

“The area outside of Sacramento’s dangerous,” I say. “Someone catches up to us on the road, in the dark, they could run us off the side of a mountain and no one would ever even
know
. Besides, I don’t want to get into Sacramento at three a.m. The only police working then is the skeleton crew. Better to get in tomorrow morning.”

Tessa still looks suspicious, but I can tell she believes me. She probably shouldn’t, but it’s not like she knows anything about escaping from cartels.

“Okay,” she says at last. “It sounds dumb, but I guess you know what you’re doing.”

Yeah. I do.

W
e pull in at dusk
, and when I stop at the entrance kiosk it wakes Tessa up.

“Are we there?” she mumbles. I have another flash of taking a normal vacation: her asleep while I drive, me waking her up when we’re home.

It’s not going to fucking happen
, I remind myself as we drive through the valley.

“I’ve never been here before,” she says.

“Me either,” I say. “It’s nice.”

It’s also federally owned, meaning the police force isn’t county police.

I park in front of the cabin rental office and get out, and so does Tessa. Even though she’s wearing a black tank top now, it’s still tight and she’s not wearing a bra underneath, not to mention those tiny shorts.

“Stay in the car,” I say. I’ve got the sunglasses on, plus a baseball hat I found in the back of the SUV, but I’m afraid she’ll attract every man in a one-mile radius dressed like this.

“I’ve been sitting for hours,” she says.

“You can’t just go in there like
that
,” I say.

She levels a glare at me, then walks ahead and up to the swinging glass door.

“Whose fault is that?” she asks, and goes inside.

Fuck
.

I catch the door before it closes and follow her in, and hell, even
I'm
staring at her ass, and I've been looking at it all day. The clean-cut, twenty-something young man behind the counter doesn’t stand a chance.

“Hi,” she says to him, and leans her elbows on the counter, hunching forward just a little. “Any chance you’ve got a cabin tonight? We’re on a last-minute vacation.”

The guy swallows, and I stand a couple of feet behind Tessa, my hands in my pockets, and just watch his face.

“You’re in luck,” he says. “Someone just canceled not five minutes ago for one of the rustic cabins in Big Trees. Otherwise, we tend to book up months in advance.”

“That’s
perfect
,” Tessa says, as she plays with a strand of her hair. “Thank you
so
much.”

I narrow my eyes. She doesn’t play with her hair. She’s not the
play with my hair
kind of girl.

“Glad I could help,” the guy says, clicking away at a computer. He’s making the world’s most valiant effort to only look at her face, but I’d bet money he’s got a half-chub behind that counter.

“That’s gonna be two-sixty-one-thirty-eight, and I’ll need an ID,” the guy says.

Tessa turns and looks at me over her shoulder and I step forward, pulling my wallet out. I toss two-eighty on the counter.

“ID, babe,” she says.

Babe?

“You didn’t leave it at the bar, did you?” she asks.

I make a show of looking through my wallet and coming up with nothing.

“Shit,
babe
,” I say. “I guess I did.”

“Babe, you
know
mine expired and I haven’t gotten my new one yet,” she says, sounding exasperated. “Why’d you leave it there?”

“You’re the one who thought we should do kamikaze shots to celebrate being on vacation,” I say, starting to get into our fake argument. “The hell did you think was going to happen?”

She rolls her eyes dramatically. Even if the argument is fake, her irritation is real, and it’s starting to make her nipples poke through her tank top again.

I give them a good, long look. If she can call me
babe
, I can stare.

“This is what’s wrong with you,” she says, jabbing one finger at my chest. “You think you can just do whatever you want, and you never think about other people.”

There’s a mixture of anger and lust burning a hole through my chest, and it is fucking
potent
. She doesn’t know a thing about me. She has no
idea
whether I think about other people. Hell, she doesn’t even fucking know what I’m about to do to make sure her pretty little ass is safe.

I stare into her eyes, long and hard. The guy behind the counter is watching us and trying to act like he’s not watching us.

“Babe, I’m sorry,” I finally say, and put a hand on her ass.

I don’t mean it, and she can tell.

“I didn’t mean to leave it there. We can get it on the way back to Fresno,” I tell her, trying to sound like a boyfriend who wants to end a fight.

She sighs dramatically, then turns back to the guy. I give her ass a squeeze. I don’t know if the guy can see it behind the counter, but he can tell where my arm’s heading.

I swear I see a faint flush creep up Tessa’s neck, and her nipples are out and hard now, like twin pebbles beneath her shirt.

“Is there
any
way we could get it for just tonight without an ID?” she asks, and then bites her lip.

The guy frowns, then looks at a door behind him. It probably goes to an office.

“Well—” he says, hesitantly.

He makes another valiant effort not to look at Tessa’s tits, but now she’s leaning over the counter. I want to punch him for looking, but instead, I slide a finger under the hem of her shorts.

“We’d be happy to give you a security deposit,” she says. “It’s just, we’re
really
stuck and I didn’t even think that this might happen.”

She shoots me another glare, so I slide another finger under there.

He looks at the door again, then straightens up, like he’s suddenly decided he’s the one in charge in this rental office.

“You know what? It’s fine,” he says, and smiles at Tessa. “No security deposit, it’s just one night.”

“Oh, my god,” Tessa says, putting on hand on her chest. “Thank you
so
much. You’re a
life
saver.”

“No problem,” he says, and gives us a polite nod. He makes change and hands it back, along with a paper pouch with two keys in it.

“Number two-eighty-one,” he says. “Pinecone court.”

Tessa puts one hand on his arm as he’s handing over the keys. Something dark inside me feels like it might explode, and for a moment, I think about just socking this guy right in the face.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Brian,” he says. He glances at me,
clearly
nervous as well as excited.

“Brian, thank you so much,” she says, and takes the keys. “You saved the day.”

He smiles, a nervous, polite smile, and puts his hands on the counter awkwardly.

“Have a nice stay!” he says, and we walk back out, my hand still on her ass.

W
e don’t say
another word until we find the cabin.

“Here we are,” I say, banging the door open.

Tessa walks inside first and stops, looking around.

“It’s cute,” she says.

“It doesn’t even have running water,” I say.

“This was
your
idea,” she says. “You’re the one who thought going to Yosemite was better than turning ourselves in.”

“I’m trying to keep us
alive
until we can turn ourselves in,” I say, fumbling at the walls for a light switch.

She snorts, standing in the middle of the room, looking around in the dark.

“Can you turn the lights on?” she asks, sounding annoyed.

“I’m fucking
trying
,” I say, still searching the walls for a light switch. “I don’t think this fucking cabin has electricity.”

“Again,
your
idea,” she says.

“I get it,” I say. I give up on the light switch and just shut the door, then walk into the dark cabin. “You don’t think we should be doing this, so you flirt with the cabin rental guy and pick a fight with me.”

“Flirting with the cabin rental guy got us this cabin,” she says. “I don’t know what
your
plan was.”

“Oh my god, Brian, you’re a
life
saver,” I say, mocking her. “You saved the day.”

I can barely see her in the dark, but for a moment she stares at me, then laughs.

“You’re
jealous
,” she says.

I snort.

“You’re un-fucking-believable,” she says, getting closer to me, her voice low and furious. “First you kidnap me, then you dress me like Redneck Slut Barbie, and
then
you get mad when I have the
nerve
to wear it while I talk to someone else.”

“I’m not jealous,” I say, thinking furiously of her hand on his arm. “But you should have let me handle it.”

“Handle what? Brian?”

“Is that the cabin rental guy?” I ask. I remember his name, but acting like I don’t makes me feel better.

“Don’t act like you forgot already,” she says. “You were practically fingering me while I was talking to him.”

“Just trying to keep up appearances,” I say. “You know, act like a couple. PDA and shit. Whatever it is couples do.”

I’m angry and hard, all at once, and it makes me want to grab her and push her up against the wall. Get a little rough. Make her rake her nails down my back.

“
That’s
not it,” she says. “Men in couples don’t practically whip out their dicks for a measuring contest every time their girlfriend talks to someone.”

“Do women in couples flirt with other men to get cabins a lot?” I ask, sarcastically.

“I guess you don’t know, being mister fuck-and-run,” she said.

Now
I
laugh, savagely. I take a step forward in the dark and tower over her. She doesn’t back down.

It’s Tessa. She’ll never fucking back down.

“
Who’s
jealous?” I ask. “Sounds like you’re the one who’s upset that I’m not your boyfriend.”

“I’m not an idiot,” she hisses. “I took you at your word when we met. You lied about shit, but you didn’t lie about
that
part.”