by Skye Warren
The waitress returned with our food, setting it down in front of a silent Hunter and myself.
She kept her gaze trained on the table. “Can I get you anything else?”
He reached into his back pocket and she flinched. But he only pulled out a handful of bills.
“This should cover it,” he said. “Keep the change. And don’t come back to the table.”
She snatched the money and scurried back to the kitchen.
Hunter stood without touching his food. He seemed agitated after his confession, far more affected than he wanted to appear.
“We won’t be stopping again until morning, so eat up. Come straight outside when you’re done.” He sent me a dark look. “Don’t make any trouble, sunshine.”
I watched him leave the diner, his confession still roiled through my body. Sometimes it was better not to know. Did he also feel sick to his stomach? Is that why he left without eating? I didn’t know. I shouldn’t care about him anyway.
I looked down at my food as the grease cooled, leaving an unappetizing sheen. He probably wouldn’t know if I didn’t eat it, but I considered it anyway, just to be obedient and to stave off the hunger for the rest of the night. But why was I thinking like this?
He’d left me—unattended.
Sure, I could see his silhouette through the musty curtains right out front. He was blocking the exit, but not the only one. There must be another one out back that the employees used. Here was my chance to get away.
Maybe I could fool myself into going along with him. Consent and cooperate and let myself be used just so I didn’t have to be a victim. But that was all veneer, like the slick coating of grease that formed on my steak and eggs. It changed how it looked, not what it was.
A convicted rapist. I had no choice but to run.
I stood quickly, heading toward the back where the waitress had been. The raucous conversation grew abruptly quiet. I could feel the men’s gazes on me, but I resolutely kept my eyes averted, mimicking the waitress. She’d seemed to inherently understand the dangers of Hunter and the other men. Maybe that had been my problem from the first. I’d seen Hunter leaning against the cab of his truck. I should have run in the other direction but I hadn’t…and somehow that had led me here.
Like stepping through a white trash looking glass, I had ended up in a different truck stop. I’d become a different girl. One who knew how to suck a cock, for one thing. One who knew what the sunset looked like from the tallest hill as far as the eye could see. One with enough courage to run when the opportunity presented itself.
In the back, the girl was washing dishes in a large steel basin.
Her eyes flashed with fear when she saw me. “You can’t come back here.”
“Please. Help me. I need help.”
“Not me.” She shook her head as if I were threatening her. “I can’t help you.”
“Just call the police. Let me call them.”
A large, heavy-set man came out of the back, his yellow-stained wife-beater pulling up short of covering the dark, bulbous skin of his belly.
“What’s going on in here?”
The girl shook her head, tears glistening in her eyes.
“Please, that man out there, he kidnapped me. You have to call the police.”
His eyes seemed too large for his head, not out of surprise, just naturally that way. I could see the whites even as he frowned. “I don’t have to do anything.”
I drew in a shaky breath. “He’s…he’s going to hurt me if you don’t help.”
A flash of sympathy lit his bloodshot eyes. Then it was gone.
“If I were to go calling the cops on my customers, I would be out of business in a week. Or wind up dead on my office floor.”
Desperation streaked through me. I ran away from his cold, pitying stare and pushed through the back door. There was nothing but empty fields to my right. On the other side, a short row of trucks. I needed to make a decision. Hunter was still out front. His truck was out there too. Soon he’d come looking for me. I had to make a decision.
Since the fields were wide open, he’d see me in a minute. He’d catch me and what? Punish me? I didn’t know, but there was no turning back now. I almost wished I hadn’t run now that I saw how pathetic my options were, but it was too late for regrets.
A click from the door behind me warned me that it was going to open. I didn’t know who it was, but I ran toward the row of trucks. Footsteps pounded behind me, barely audible above the rasping of my own breath. I reached the first truck and darted behind it, but I was slower than I’d hoped, weakened by days of inactivity and sparse diet. A fist tangled in my hair. I felt myself yanked back against a tall, unyielding body.
Chapter Eight
An estimated 5,000 bodies have been found at the foot of the falls since 1850.
“Lookie what I found,” the man holding me said.
Not Hunter. Suddenly my fear was a hundred times worse. I hadn’t known I trusted Hunter but faced with another trucker, I knew I did. Whether it was a sickness or some sort of Stockholm Syndrome, I believed that Hunter wouldn’t truly harm me, but this man?
No.
I fought in a wild clash of soft punches and hopelessness. I heard laughing and a curse when I caught something soft beneath my fingernail. Thick fingers grabbed my arms, wrenching them above my head as I was twisted to the ground.
“Let me go.” It felt like a whisper, low and grating the walls of my throat, but through the melee, they heard me.
“Now why would I do that when the fun’s only started?”
“He’ll make you pay¸” I said, and knew then that it was true.
The men just laughed.
One of them knelt between my thighs, unbuckling his belt. I closed my eyes against the sight of his thin, glistening erection. Rough hands yanked at my hem, pulling it up. The air felt cool against my heated skin before they grabbed my nipples and twisted.
Something slick poked around my thighs, sliding through the folds of my sex. He was trying to find his way inside. It felt like being violated with a fish. I was going to vomit, and the way they were holding me down, I would probably choke on it.
An unholy sound rent the air, sending chills along my exposed skin. It sounded like death. Was it me? But no, I was still on the ground. It was the man between my legs who had moved. Pain shot through my limbs as I curled in on myself, rolling to my side though one person still held my arm.
There was a shout, and the hand holding down my right arm was lifted. I flailed, hitting and scratching, though it didn’t move them. Dimly, I registered the sounds of flesh on flesh—not mine though.
The sound of flesh hitting flesh was punctuated by grunts. My vision cleared. Hunter was poised over one of the guys at his feet, raining down blows onto a man. As I watched in horror, the man twitched and then laid still, his face already too bloody to be recognizable.
Hunter looked like some kind of avenging angel, but an angel would never pull a knife from his shoe with a glint in his eye. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what happened next. I heard it instead, just the whisper of sound as sharp metal sliced through the air, its abrupt quieting as it met some solid object, and the thud of a body as it was dropped.
The final man was pulled off me, practically lifted into the air above me before being thrown a few feet in a spray of gravel. The man fought back, but he was no match for Hunter, who pummeled him until his head fell with a thud.
I sat there, open-mouthed with shock, my body still lewdly exposed. Hunter came to stand over me, breathing hard, his face a grotesque mask of violence. His hands were covered in blood and bruises. Not an angel—a demon, and somehow sweeter that a beast so savage had saved me.
“I told you not to start trouble,” he ground out, his broad chest heaving.
Tears slid down his throat. Would he hurt me now? If he hit me like he’d just beaten them, I’d die. In fact, I thought for a minute that they were dead, but low groans in the air proved other
wise.
He pulled me up, keeping my dress raised and running his hands along my body. “Are you hurt?”
It hurt everywhere, but I was too numb to feel it—a strange and contradictory feeling.
I shuddered beneath his hands.
He released me. “Get back to the truck. I need to clean up here.”
Clean up? What did that mean? I ran around the diner. His truck gleamed in the sunlight, blinding me. If I got in the back of that truck, would he touch me again? Did I want him to?
Yes, something inside me whispered. Wash them away, make me clean.
Instead I ran toward the road. I couldn’t see any other buildings nearby, but the hill crested just up ahead, blocking my sight to anything beyond. I was running on fumes after the interrupted meal and my fight with the men.
I glanced back. The truck sat exactly where I’d left. He must still have been cleaning up, whatever that meant. My muscles felt nebulous and insubstantial, but somehow they managed to drag me up the road.
At the top of the hill, the scene spread out before me with depressing majesty, a blank canvas of farmland and sky—not a building in sight. My feet slowed to a trod but didn’t stop altogether. There was nowhere to run to.
Gravel crunched beneath my feet. Then louder as the truck rolled up beside me. A hiss as the brakes halted its motion, then the door opened.
“Get in the truck.”
I glanced up at him. He didn’t sound mad, even though I’d clearly disobeyed. He even looked handsome if intimidating up high in the cab, those intense eyes. Maybe the creepiest part was how unaffected he seemed after beating up grown men, almost killing them.
Maybe he had killed them. Maybe that was what cleaning up meant.
I kept walking. With a shudder, the truck rolled forward to catch up with me.
“Get in the fucking truck, Evie.”
I stood still, thinking. It felt important, that moment. Even though I didn’t have a choice, there was a pull toward him or away. At some point those men should have walked away from me—from him. But they didn’t and they’d lost. Was that me? Fighting a fight I couldn’t win, only to get bloodied from my efforts?
Though if I imagined myself the loser, the one wielding the punches was just life, just fear. If I looked at it from just the right angle, it seemed like Hunter could be my defense. He’d certainly figured out how to combat the inevitable.
Swallowing hard, I walked to the back, waiting for him to open the heavy back door. I just knew he’d put me back there as punishment, and I wanted it. I wanted to crawl onto the thin mattress and sob.
Instead he opened the passenger side door to the cab and gestured me inside.
With my arms wrapped tightly around my middle, I walked to the front. Climbing inside exposed all sorts of new hurts in places that had been too blank with shock. I shivered in the seat, feeling cold and dirty and alone. Worst of all and completely irrational, the hurt of betrayal panged in my gut. As if he should have protected me from them. From myself.
He got in the driver’s side and started the truck without looking at me. We’d gone fifteen minutes before the tears began falling in earnest. Another five before broken cries tore from my chest, unstoppable. I hated him for not putting me in the back, where he wouldn’t bear witness to my pain.
He pulled over and shut off the engine, magnifying the gasping sobs I couldn’t hold in.
“Are you hurt?” he asked hoarsely. “Do you need to go to a hospital?”
“As if you would take me,” I spat.
“Do you need a doctor?”
A doctor? Sure, I needed a psychiatrist. I’d probably need daily sessions for the next ten years just to make sense of everything that had happened to me with Hunter, then another ten years for everything that had happened before.
I shook my head tightly. A hospital wouldn’t help anything. I didn’t even care about getting away anymore. It was all a big joke, freedom. Trapped at home or trapped out in the world. Would it help to get strapped to a hospital bed? Not at all.
The sobs threatened to tear me apart. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on this way. I wasn’t sure I’d ever stop. I wrapped my arms around my waist as if holding myself in.
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “I’m sorry I…I’m sorry I let them touch you. I should have been there. Should have known you’d try to run.”
A cry hitched in my throat. He’d caught onto the same perverse responsibility that I had, the implication that he should protect me even while we both knew he could hurt me.
Incredulity had a calming effect. “Don’t you see how messed up this is?”
No, I didn’t need to be afraid anymore. The worst had already happened—almost happened. And the truth had become clear when those men were on top of me.
I trusted him.
So I rephrased the question. “Don’t you see how fucked up this is? That you beat up those guys for…for…” Here my courage deserted me. “For what you did,” I finish lamely.
I saw the ripple in his throat as he swallowed. He looked less menacing in a side profile. Or maybe that was just the grief in his eyes. It didn’t look new. It looked ancient, as if it had always been there. In fact, I thought it had been, and I’d been too wrapped up in my own sadness to notice his.
“So what do you want?” he asked. “You want me to let you go?”
I said nothing.
He gestured angrily out my window. “So leave. Get the fuck out.”
Tears sprang in my eyes. Wasn’t this what I wanted? Okay, in my fantasies I was dropped off closer to civilization. But even barring that, I wasn’t sure I could get by without him. I hated the helplessness, but in this moment, with my flesh still warm from cruel hands, I hated even more the thought of wandering.
What was the point? Niagara Falls wasn’t a person. It was just another place to be alone.
He sighed. “Let me keep you a little bit longer. You can take some time to recover. Then we can talk about what to do next.”
“Are you giving me a choice to leave?”
He frowned. No, he wasn’t. “I’m just asking you not to fight me anymore. Don’t run from me. And in return I’ll show you new places. I’ll even let you sit up front.”
He said the last wryly, and I puffed a laugh.
“I guess I don’t have a choice.”
“You do. More than you realize. But I want to…I want to keep you a little longer. I’ll make it good for you. Okay?”
God, he was so messed up. This was his way of asking for a relationship.
And I was so messed up too.
“Okay.”
Chapter Nine
The Niagara River flows at approximately 35 miles per hour.
“Where are we going?” I asked, climbing down from the truck.
He grinned, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “Wait and see, sunshine.”
Hunter had pulled off a wide dirt road. Parking was always a challenge anyplace but a truck stop, so we stopped in some grass. It was surely illegal but no one seemed to be around. We were in the middle of nowhere, and the thought occurred to me that he could dump my body easily.
But I wasn’t afraid.
He was just too…cheerful, almost. Brimming with anticipation to show me something. Like a kid.
Silly thought.
We hiked along a trail and reached a tall metal marker: Enchanted Falls, 1 mile.
I froze, mouth open. “We’re going to see waterfalls?”
He suddenly seemed bashful. “Figured since we were passing through.”
Squealing, I threw my arms around his neck. He caught me with a small oomph of surprise but after a second, he pulled me to him in a bear hug. It had only been on impulse, but he embraced me as tightly as if he’d been waiting just for this, as if it meant something when it couldn’t.
I backed up, blushing. He cleared his throat and ducked his head, so that despite his foot and a half on me, I was looking at his profile from the top of his head. His
hair was curly, I realized in the yellow-bright sun. It was cut short, but light reflected blond strands pulled through the darker brown.
He seemed more human in the light—less sinister. I imagined him in some innocuous setting. We could have met on a trail like this, just two people enjoying the beautiful setting, the smell of pine and gentle sound of water in the distance.
“It’s not too far,” he said gruffly.
We continued along the path. It wasn’t too uneven which was a good thing, considering my shoes were basically ballet flats. I felt the shape of each pebble and twig beneath my feet almost as if I were barefoot, although less sharply. The path turned rockier as we approached, the sound rising to a roar in my ears before it even came into view.
Eager, I quickened my pace. The trail continued at its full width forward, but I heard the waterfall to my right. I began to round a small bend obscured by the trees when Hunter yanked me back.
“Careful,” he warned.
Curious, I cocked my head then turned back to the path. We crept forward together, and I understood his warning. The trail ended on a bluff overlooking the waterfall. We weren’t at the bottom of the waterfall but at the top.
My heart squeezed at the sight. Water streamed down in rushes too fast for the eye to process. Mist rose up like tendrils of steam, the wetness kissing my face as I stood there.
A tall wooden fence, rotting, was all that separated us from a downward hill that met up with the shore far below.
“Can we get to the bottom?”
“Eventually.”
He continued along the main path, and I followed him. We came out upon a wide river—the source of the falls, I realized. Though the water ran swiftly, it was clear and peaceful, nothing like the thunderous violence of the falls.
Looking at the lands untouched by man, I imagined a time when people might have traveled this river without a map. What a shock it must have been to anyone traveling this river without knowing about the falls up ahead.
To my surprise, Hunter took off his shoes and waded into the river.
He turned back, a grin on his face. “Come in.”