Alive

by Victoria Johns

  My place had been trashed. It looked like a hurricane had blown through. How they’d caused this much damage with so little noise was definitely a skill I shouldn’t have been admiring. “Fuck! Look at my stuff.”

  “Get what you need. We have to move,” he urged.

  Everything I’d worked so hard to create. My first perfect home that wasn’t tainted by either of my parents, and everything that was all me, was upside down and had been tarnished by the dicks who had done this. “Move it,” he insisted again, only this time I could feel the anger in his tone.

  Jake followed me, tiptoeing around broken stuff to my bedroom. He aleady had his cell phone out, and he was snapping pictures of the damage in the place. “Just in case,” he said, when he saw the look of confusion on my face.

  My bedroom had taken the brunt of it. They’d upturned all my furniture, slashed my mattress open and my fucking clothes and underwear were strewn all over the place. “Help me shift this,” I asked him, and once we’d removed the bed frame from the spot where it had been dumped, I set about finding my secret stash.

  I pulled back the rug to see that the first of my hidey-hole floor planks had been discovered. “Shit,” he said from behind me. “Did they clean you out?”

  “Only what I wanted them to find,” I told him, breathing a sigh of relief. One thing I’d understood quickly living with two addicts was that nothing was ever safe around an incessant gambler and a drug user. I pulled the rug back a lot further to reveal my true safe place. “I learned a long time ago that if they think they’ve found your stash, they stop looking for the real treasure.” Popping the plank at one end revealed a deeper recess where my savings account documents were, and a whole host of cash I’d been putting aside since I’d started work.

  “Clever girl. Now can we move?”

  I grabbed a backpack and started throwing everything into it.

  Taking one last look around my house before we left it, I knew in my heart I wouldn’t be coming back. It felt dirty, like my private space had been invaded beyond repair. I was so close to finishing my college course, too, but right now survival had to be my only focus. Jake sensed my suffering and put his arm around me. He was big enough to be able to rest his head on top of mine. “It’ll all work out. I’ll make sure of it,” he promised, and feeling safer than I had in a long time, I returned his affection. It had been so long since I’d been embraced and it made me emotional.

  We chanced leaving by the front door, walking quickly along the sidewalk, both of us watching for any sign of danger. When we heard a car, he’d grab my hand and pull me up the nearest pathway to hide. Once the car had gone, we continued our way back to the alley where he’d parked. After the first traffic scare, he never let go of my hand. I should have been focusing on my surroundings and getting to safety, but all I could concentrate on and think about was how amazing my hand felt shrouded in his.

  Reaching his car was like a mini victory and we both breathed a little easier. As soon as he got the engine going, I warmed my hands on the heater and noticed he was dialing a number on a cell phone.

  “What?” the answering voice grunted.

  “Things got heavy. I had to intervene,” he began.

  “I told you to keep your fucking dick in your pants!” the guy shouted back, exasperated.

  Jake slammed the steering wheel with his hand, making me jump, and wasted no time shouting back. “I fucking did. She was getting unwanted attention from Mansion, like, ‘I’m going to drag you into this car now’ type of unwanted. They’ve trashed her place, so I got her out of there.”

  The guy on the line went quiet for a moment, “Why do I get the feeling she’s with you now?”

  “Hi, is that Ross?” I asked nervously.

  “No, sweetheart, a friend he called for help. Are you okay?” he said more softly.

  “I am now, thanks to Jake.”

  The voice chose not to acknowledge my praise for his colleague but carried on regardless. “Rebecca, have you ever seen Mr. Mansion before?”

  “No. Not until I started dancing at the club.”

  “You sure?” he asked again.

  “Positive. Why?”

  “Because a Mr. Benton Mansion, with that same social security number, died over ten years ago.”

  “What?” Jake shouted before I could get there.

  “Settle down, Jake,” the voice returned in warning. “I hadn’t had chance to contact you yet. The data only came in late last night and without a photo of the guy himself, I’m working blind. Essentially, he isn’t who he says he is.”

  My hands began to shake even though I was holding them up in front of the heater, which was blasting out warm air. Jake noticed and took hold of them, clasping them between his and giving me a look of complete reassurance. “Ditch the rental and get another. Ditch your phones, including the SIM cards. Buy a prepay and text me the number. Don’t fly home and keep Rebecca with you. You’re road tripping. Make sure you change cars often and stay in low key places.”

  “We’re coming home?”

  “Until I can figure out what’s going on and check in with Ross, yeah.”

  “Roger that,” Jake replied.

  “Take care of her,” I heard the voice respond. “And you be careful,” he added. There was something different in the voice this time. It was caring and it was genuine.

  “Will do.”

  “Get to it then.” The abrupt manner had returned and then he hung up.

  Putting the car into gear, Jake pulled away and was quiet for a long time. The silence wasn’t comfortable like our pancake silence from a couple of nights ago. It was awkward.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally said, feeling ashamed and guilty.

  “Don’t be. None of this is your fault. Well… maybe some of it.” Jake smiled.

  He shocked me with his answer. “How so?”

  “Those fucking dance moves. That ass in red PVC pants, pumping along to Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat it’—any man with half a brain and a functioning dick would be pushed into criminal activities to keep you and see that every day.”

  “You saw that?” I asked, embarrassed. I was sure he could see the blush in my cheeks even in the dark of night.

  “Oh yeah.” He grinned. “You can move, Rebecca.” I groaned and covered my face with my hands and he burst out into huge bellowing laughter. “You do all that shit in a cage, for a crowd, and one little compliment makes you go all shy? That’s cute.”

  I found myself chuckling along with him.

  That was something amazing in itself. My life had just burst open wide, yet this handsome stranger had managed to make me laugh as we began a road trip to God knew where. Not even hearing that my boss wasn’t who he claimed could dampen the hope I was feeling that maybe I’d be okay. With no idea of what the future held, I sat back in the seat and remembered I’d been in worse situations before and back then I’d been alone.

  But I wasn’t alone now.

  Now, I was with Jake.

  Jake

  I knew Jonas would be pissed that I’d gone rogue, but I made a spur of the moment decision and stuck with it. His manner on the phone pissed me off. I did what I thought was right. I could only imagine his reaction if I’d called and told him she’d been taken. He’d probably have hunted me down and hurt me.

  Never the less, he was the expert at all this shit. It was his territory. And though it pained me to do it, I shut my phone down for the last time and left the SIM card, watching it float in a cup of coffee before flushing the fucking lot down the toilet. Try tracking that one, Mansion!

  The slight frisson of panic I had before I went through with it, though, was odd. This was my life; all my contacts and my electronic little black book were being flushed down the sewers. I didn’t know how this would affect my life, but I sensed I was going to go home a different person. I’d seen what was possible in life if you did something you were passionate about. Rebecca had briefly shown me and Jonas was currently showing m
e that. Everything inside me was telling me this was big and I shouldn’t ignore it. It wasn’t just the adrenaline of being in a risky situation. It was being able to help someone who really needed it and being able to stand tall when things got tough. That was what mattered in life. Not random fucks and pretty women who I saw as conquests on some mental checklist.

  I’d only been this responsible for someone once before in my life, with Lacey, when she’d miscarried and needed some head space before her world exploded. I stood up then, without hesitation. I went to bat for my best friend and upset a lot of people. Knowing I’d done that for her, like now when I was working to keep Rebecca safe, was important. To date, they were both the most important things I’d done with my life.

  The rental instruction was carried out. The car was swapped for the first available one I could find. We did a flyby of my motel and I grabbed what I could lay my hands on immediately. I figured the minimum requirements had to be my bill fold and ID. As long as we had Rebecca’s cash, we’d survive.

  The long road ahead and the monotony of the drive had already given me some thinking time. The biggest sledgehammer was when I understood that I was being forced to be independent and responsible. Doing simple things like buying a road map and planning a journey without my brothers’ or parents’ input became something I was desperate to excel at. I had to make decisions without anyone’s influence. I thought about including Rebecca in them, but she had enough on her plate and trusted me like I was the expert. Letting her know differently would cause her to panic.

  At the first little town we came across, I got a new prepay, texting the number to Jonas, Jack and Lacey. It was like dumping an unnecessary load of baggage and starting again by taking the opportunity to rewrite the script. Fortunately, my parents weren’t big on technology and telling them I had a new cell number out of the blue would mean lots of questions I wasn’t ready to answer yet.

  Jonas texted back immediately with:-

  Lacey replied with:-

  Jack, as expected, didn’t reply at all, which was disappointing as that was the reply I most wanted.

  When we’d been on the road for hours, I was beginning to feel exhaustion poke at my senses and best my concentration levels. The last few days of irregular surveillance hours and little sleep were catching up with me. It was when Rebecca sensed it and offered to drive that I knew we needed to stop and get some rest. I couldn’t protect her in an instant if I was half asleep.

  I swung our rental into the parking lot of a decent looking motel and told her to lock the doors and wait for me in the car. Ten minutes later, I’d checked us into the only room they had left. “I’ll take the floor,” I decided as soon as the only bed in the room came into view.

  “Uh… okay, if you’re sure.”

  “We could head out for food but I’m beat and I think we should lay low, rest up and then get moving. Until Jonas nails down Mansion’s ID, I think distance is the best plan we can have.”

  “Sure. I’ll let you have first shower.”

  The old Jake would have been a brazen motherfucker and just stripped off before strutting for the shower, but that didn’t feel right with Rebecca. Our whole relationship was built on something entirely different. She fucking trusted me. Treating her like she was just another fuck in an extensive line of them was just disrespectful, not to mention the complications it would cause.

  And Jonas would have murdered me with his bare hands.

  No. Getting Jake’s snake out and swinging it round with wild abandon was not the smart move here.

  I showered in record time, wondering what would greet me when I saw her again. I was expecting her to have a girlie crying fit at some point. Her life had just been turned upside down and I needed to be there to help her come to terms with it. My first mistake, though, was that I didn’t take any clean underwear into the bathroom with me and the towel wasn’t big enough to completely cover all of me. I felt a tiny bit nervous, which was just ridiculous, and after kicking myself to just get on with it, I opened the door. Rebecca had stripped the bed to give me a pillow and a blanket and my makeshift cot was lying neatly on the floor beside hers.

  “Thanks,” I told her.

  Rebecca stayed in the shower for nearly twenty minutes and appeared with her hair wrapped in a towel while another one covered her body. I’d spent most of that time wondering whether she was going to come out naked, but the bra straps told me that she’d saved us that discomfort. I still had to look away, though. I was like a teenage virgin, all flustered and embarrassed. That girl had fine fucking legs. Her dancing kept her athletic and even though she wasn’t my usual type, I’d have still been drawn to them on a nightclub dance floor somewhere if I’d spotted them under a short dress.

  “There’s a pizza place across the way. I called earlier and they’re going to deliver,” she told me.

  “Good thinking,” I mumbled, still feeling absurdly nervous. Still in her towels, she wandered by the T.V. set and switched it on. Just that bit of extra noise seemed to calm the atmosphere down. We both needed a distraction and I was still waiting for her to have that ‘life gone to shit’ moment.

  The pizza arrived and the smell of it made my stomach rumble with hunger. Rebecca had her own and she’d ordered me for one, too. I’d never seen a girl eat with such a big appetite and it was refreshing. We all but inhaled them. God, we were hungry.

  The more I saw of this life, which was still only a brief glimpse, the more my respect piled up for my big brother. Helping people he didn’t know, shitty sleeping patterns in dangerous situations, sporadic food intake mixed in with a lot of drama and being away from your family—yeah, he was fast becoming my fucking hero. “I’m whacked and we should get an early start.”

  “I could sleep.” She yawned and I hopped up off the floor and plunged us into darkness. I lay there for a few minutes until I heard her whisper, “My life just went down the toilet.”

  Here it was. I knew it was in there somewhere.

  “Maybe,” I told her gently.

  “No, it really fucking is. I can’t go back there. I won’t be able to finish college. If dancing made this happen again then my life is really over.”

  “You can finish college anywhere and you’ll dance again when the time is right,” I said, trying to offer some practical and comforting words.

  I knew she needed to argue about this with someone and I was pleased her anger was finally surfacing. “You don’t get it!” she spat. “I won’t be able to dance forever. This is my time. I’ll be too fucking old.”

  “I don’t know the ins and outs of dancing, but I know when a pretty girl moves her body in sync with music, she can be twenty or fifty and still catch your eye. It shows her spirit, a hint of her character and inner beauty. If dancing is in your heart, you’ll do it again.”

  Rebecca stayed quiet for what felt like ages and I couldn’t tell whether she was thinking over my words or genuinely pissed at me. I wasn’t here to play mind games, which was a first for me where a woman was concerned, and I was just too fucking tired.

  A few hours later, Rebecca woke me up. “Jake, come on. Get in here.”

  “Uh…” I grumbled and then I felt how cold sleeping on a draughty floor in your underwear really was.

  “You’re exhausted, and I can literally hear your teeth chattering. I feel guilty that you’re cold. Bring your bedding and come up here.”

  “Bad idea.” I turned her down flat.

  “No, a bad idea is you getting sick because you caught a chill. Don’t argue with me.”

  I hated that I knew I was going to give in. Now I was awake I could feel how fucking cold I really was. Grabbing the blanket and pillow, I moved to the bed and climbed in. “Oh fuck, that’s warm,” I cried, realizing what I’d been missing out on.

  “Shit! You’re freezing. Turn over. Let me get you warm,” Rebecca urged, and I stilled at her suggestion. “Don’t be a baby. We’re adults and this is s
imple survival. Think of it as a medical emergency.”

  I turned away from her in the small bed. It was one of those cheap hotel beds that claims to be a double, but you get one normal sized human in it and the only other person capable of sleeping next to you is a dwarf.

  I felt my nerves tingle again. I’d had more bouts of fucking nervousness since we’d entered this room than I had for as long as I could remember. After a couple of scary seconds, I felt her turn and shuffle up behind me. Her hands tentatively touched the small of my back and glided round my middle until both her hand and body were flush up against me. Rebecca’s body was cooking hot and I felt her hand start to drag lower. Feeling alarmed at where she might end up, I grabbed at it and pulled it higher so it rested on my upper abdomen. I didn’t need the touch of her hand any lower. My body was reacting on instinct and my shaft was as hard as a rock. Being a well-endowed guy already meant that the top of my cock was hovering around my belly button, dangerously close to escaping the waistband of my boxers, just where her hand had been.

  I settled into the comfort she was offering, feeling her knees folding and spooning the backs of mine, and her cheek gently resting against my back.

  Motherfucking hell, she fit me perfectly.

  Yawning and breathing in again was an epic mistake. I could smell her clean, just showered scent. It was such a normal smell, just the free hotel soap, and yet more intoxicating than anything else I’d ever smelt on a woman before. No perfume compared, and this natural scent was bringing my senses to their knees.

  Before I could stop myself, I groaned involuntarily and felt her stiffen behind me. “Sorry, this shitty bed is heaven compared to the floor. I’m getting warmer. Thanks for letting me share it.”

  “It’s the least I could do. Good night.”

  “Night.”

  I woke the next morning to an unfamiliar sound and my brain scrabbling around trying to figure out what it was, but before I could investigate, I needed to come up with a way to extract myself from the confines of the bed and Rebecca’s body. During the night, we’d both switched positions and I was now wrapped around her body, with an arm wedged underneath her and a thigh shoved between her legs. In my subconscious state, I’d let my hand wander and get comfy around one of her breasts, and now I could feel the delicate lace beneath my fingertips. Once again, I was swamped by her scent as my nose was firmly embedded in her thick, luscious hair, and I was breathing it in like it was a form of oxygen my body needed in order to thrive.