by Loki Renard
We’re working against time. She’s shivering at the moment, but I’m worried that any second she’ll stop and just succumb to hypothermia. Pulling sopping wet clothing off her naked body, she’s exposed to God and everyone, but there’s no time for modesty. She’s just giggling away, laughing and telling me that I’m tickling her as she flails around naked. I can just barely get her into a couple of blankets and get dry socks and gloves on her extremities.
Remington is working on getting a fire going. It’s a risk, but it’s now one we absolutely have to take. In a couple of minutes, we have the first fire we’ve had in more than a week. The bitter cold feels as though it is finally retreating, but it is too late. Jazz is definitely delirious. She keeps alternately giggling and going quiet and I feel as though she’s seeing things that aren’t there.
“We can’t keep pushing her like this,” I say, holding her in front of me on my lap, cradling her close as the fire licks at the sticks and moss we managed to find that was somewhat dry. “It’s going to kill her.”
“Then you need to get back down into civilization,” Remington says. “We’re not too far from Canada now.”
“I don’t think we have time to get to Canada. I think she needs medical attention now.”
“We can’t take her to a hospital. She’ll be arrested immediately. And so will we.”
I snug her tighter to my chest. I didn’t think about this when we ran back up here. Being outside good society means being outside things like medical care.
“What if we forget about Canada? What if we head for Mexico?”
“What if we head for the fucking moon,” Remington curses.
I fall silent, thinking.
“There’s only one way out of this,” I conclude. “There’s only one way that Jazz gets to go back to her normal life.”
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” Remington growls. “You ruined your life once because you have to be a hero. Don’t ruin what’s left of it.”
“I’d do anything for her.”
“Why?” He grunts the question. “Haven’t you done enough? Way I understand it, none of this was your fault from the beginning. Why are you so fucking keen to sacrifice yourself for some girl?”
“Because she needs me,” I tell him. “Because she deserves a hero.”
“Oh, I get it. Hammer and his fucking god complex. You’re an idiot.”
I’m used to Remington’s rudeness, but right now, with the love of my life writhing in my arms and talking about funny people looking at us because of some new delusion, I don’t want to hear it. I will do anything to keep Jazz safe. Anything. Even if it means giving up everything.
Chapter Thirteen
Jazz
I wake up in a white room. In a white bed. Wearing a white gown. My memories of the past however many days are a daze of hot springs that are actually freezing lies, being carried very fast downhill, a long, lingering kiss that make me tear up even though I didn’t fully understand what was happening. And now this is even more confusing. Why am I here? How did this happen? I shouldn’t be in a hospital. Maybe a jail cell?
“You’re awake!” A nurse smiles at me and says the obvious.
“Am I dead?” I feel dead. I feel like the part of me that’s alive is missing and all that is left is the meat.
“No,” she says. “Not at all. Not even a little bit.”
“How did I get here?”
“That is something the police want to talk to you about.”
I look down at my ankles and wrists. I don’t seem to be shackled to the bed. That’s really promising.
“You’re so strong,” the nurse says, squeezing my arm and giving me a look filled with way more empathy than I deserve.
“I am?”
“To survive everything you’ve been through?” She shakes her head. “You’re an inspiration.”
Last I checked I was an unemployed bartender who banged her dishonorably discharged Marine boyfriend while his friends went out and killed cops, but I guess that might be inspirational to some people. I don’t say that to her though. Something is going on. Something weird.
I’m starting to get the idea that I’m not in trouble. Maybe they think I’m the victim? Maybe Jake did something to goose that idea along. But where is he? He can’t just have left me here, could he?
* * *
The answers come later that day, when I’m declared stable enough for an officer to come in and talk to me.
“We know you’ve been through a harrowing ordeal,” he says. “We know you were abducted, possibly violated. We know that you were made to strip for money, and when your ex-boyfriend tried to rescue you from that strip club, he was brutally murdered.”
“How do you know all this?”
“We’ve pieced it together over the course of our investigation. Plus there was a confession placed with you when you were dropped at this hospital, half-dead from hypothermia.”
A confession? Jake must have written it. Made himself the bad guy. This cop has the story completely backwards. In his version, I’m a helpless girl. Rodney was a hero police officer who died trying to rescue his girlfriend. Jake and the others? They’re the bad guys in this story. Though I bet Jake didn’t implicate any of them. I bet he took all the blame on himself. Stupid asshole.
“That’s not what happened...”
I’m about to defend Jake, when I realize that’s not what he’d want me to do. If he brought me here, it wasn’t so I could implicate myself.
Through the officer’s questions, I piece together the events of the past days. I was dropped off at this hospital by two masked men. No prizes for guessing who they were. These people didn’t know who I was, but a passing officer worked it out from a wanted poster. Those are still around, apparently.
“Am I in trouble?”
“For being kidnapped? No, sweetheart. You’re not in trouble. We’re going to get the son of a bitch who did this to you. Justice is going to be done.”
But it won’t be. It can’t be. Not now. Things are too broken and messed up and maybe I was too weak, in the end. I couldn’t keep up with them. I couldn’t make it to Canada. I broke down and they had to ditch me here, in a hospital. I feel like I’ve been ejected from the only place I ever really belonged.
Just thinking those thoughts makes me break down in tears. They think I’m innocent. I’m not facing any charges. I’m free. But Jake is more wanted than ever, and I might literally never see him again. Ever.
* * *
Six months later...
After my release from the hospital and a flurry of media inquiries that I refuse to respond to, I try to get on with my life. It’s hard. It’s brutally, mercilessly hard. At first, I expected Jake to show up almost every day. Then weeks passed and I didn’t hear from him and I started to think that maybe he wasn’t coming back for me. That broke my heart, but I understood. I’m trouble. Being with me is a life sentence for him. We’re both safer apart.
That doesn’t stop it hurting though. I’m fucking aching inside every minute of every day. The news cycle has moved on and there are no more articles or pictures of Jake appearing on the television and in newspapers. I try to live my life. I don’t want to. I just don’t see what choice I have. He’s gone. I hope wherever he is, he is free. I like to think about him up in the mountains with Remington and the boys, hunting deer and telling stories around the fire at night. I hope he’s happy.
I keep my head down and I work. I want to earn enough money to go and look for him, but it’s not easy on minimum wage, so I’m completely reliant on the generosity of tippers. He’s out there somewhere, and maybe I can find him. That’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night, anyway. Truth is, I know there are tens of thousands of places he could be, and there’s no way I can search all of them. But fuck it. I’m going to try.
This isn’t over, I tell myself.
It turns out, I’m right. But not in the way I think.
At work one day, the world shatters all
We have the television on sports. Customers like it, even when they bitch about it, and though I’m not a sports fan, the background noise is comforting. Usually.
“Breaking news!” the television declares in a deep baritone. “Wanted murderer Jake Lister has been killed in an altercation with law enforcement, bringing the several month long saga to a bloody end.”
The tumbler falls from my hand, shatters on the corner of the counter, coating me in shards of ice and glass. I don’t care. I feel like something big and deep and hollow just opened up inside me, a void I’m never going to fill.
He’s dead.
Dead.
The word doesn’t make sense. Nothing does anymore. I thought I had moved on, but now I know I hadn’t at all. I was waiting for him. Believing in him. I thought he’d come back for me. I knew he would. But he can’t come back from the grave. That’s one border even Jake can’t cross.
“Are you okay, Jazz?” My co-worker sees the mess and the glass and reaches for me. I shy away from her. I don’t want anyone to touch me ever again. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to feel touch again.
“I... have to go home.”
* * *
That’s the last time I go to that job. The next few weeks pass in a blur. I can barely get out of bed. He’s dead. After all this, he’s gone. I can’t believe it, but I have to. I look up articles connected to his death, and discover that he was caught in a shootout. He fought to the fucking end for me, and in the end, I can’t get the idea out of my head that he died alone, in the dirt.
It’s enough to make me want to abandon life too, but I don’t dare. Not after everything he sacrificed for me. I owe him one thing: to live. Even if it fucking hurts. Even if every breath I take feels like knives going into the softest parts of me.
Each day, I expect the memories to fade. I expect ‘real life’ to come flooding in, but it doesn’t. I serve a steady stream of customers, some of whom flirt with me. I ignore them. They’re not Jake. Nobody is Jake, and I’m not going to take some second class version of him. Sometimes I see a guy who could almost be him—a tall, broad, blond man—from behind. My heart lifts just for a second and I hope that it is him, but then they turn around and my spirits crash again, because nobody is him. Nobody is as heroic, as strong, as kind, or as gentle as Jake. Nobody can live up to my memories of him, the passion that turned me inside out, the dominance that wasn’t some alpha poseur, but the real kind of dominance that you get with a man who is fully competent in all things, and who values innocence.
He didn’t even know me when he decided to throw caution to the wind and save me. But he did save me, even if, in the end, he maybe couldn’t save himself.
They call him a murderer. A criminal. A disgrace. But he is a hero. And that is a secret I have to keep, because telling it means undoing everything he sacrificed himself for. It’s not fair, the way some men are remembered as heroes when they were as fucked up as it gets, while other men die with their names shamed and spat on, never getting any of the recognition they deserve. The world is bullshit, and I am done with it.
Chapter Fourteen
One year later...
“You want ice in that?”
“Straight on the rocks,” my customer repeats slowly, as if I’m the dumbass, and not him. This is the fifth or sixth bar I’ve worked in over the last few months. I’m having trouble adjusting, so my cut price counselor says. She also says I should try yoga, because yoga helps you heal from losing the love of your life, apparently.
“You can have it straight, in a glass by itself, or on the rocks, on ice,” I explain with more patience than I actually have. This is my life now, one big long set of fake smiles and under-pours. I’m getting my own back on life, stiffing it one small shot at a time.
I’m going through the motions, trying to live the life Jake wanted me to have. Whatever that means. I’m still low skilled and therefore poor. I’ve put on several pounds of misery weight, not that it matters. It’s not like I’m cruising for dudes, and the extra cup size seems to help with tips anyway.
“Just put it in a fucking glass, lady,” the sweaty wannabe biker curses at me.
I pour the liquor over ice, all the while debating throwing the bottle at his head instead. That’s something I’ve come away with since the whole ordeal. Violent tendencies. I have way more visions of kicking the shit out of people than I did before—not that I follow through on any of it.
“Now that’s no way to talk to someone serving you,” the man behind him drawls. I freeze. There’s no fucking way that voice exists on Earth anymore.
“Fuck off, buddy,” the weekend warrior swears again, a second before he is grabbed by the jacket and swung away from the bar, like he’s a naughty kid and the guy behind him is his daddy, correcting bad playground behavior.
I stare at the man who moved him.
I don’t know that face, but I sure as hell know those eyes, that voice, and that body.
I stare harder. Longer.
The man smiles at me, and I know the smile, though again, the face giving me the smile is wrong.
“Can I speak to you somewhere private, miss?”
I nod swiftly, not knowing what to make of this. Is this one of Jake’s brothers? Or maybe his father? I never found out exactly what was going on with his family, but one of them might have hunted me down, I guess. I feel sickness rising in me. I don’t want to explain to them that their son died saving a loser waitress.
“We can talk back in the storeroom,” I say, coming out from behind the counter and waving for him to follow me to the room where we keep kegs and boxes of chips and napkins and stuff.
He follows me there, and with every step, I feel his eyes boring into me, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Something weird is happening. Something isn’t right. But I’m not scared, I’m just... confused.
“So, uhm... What do you want?” The question falls out of my mouth bluntly.
The man looks at me with that familiar intensity and shakes his head. “It’s so damn good to see you, baby.”
I swallow, still not sure who or what I am looking at.
“You didn’t...” He draws in a breath. “You didn’t forget me, did you, Jazz?”
No fucking way. It’s not possible. It’s a matter of public record that it’s not possible.
“...Jake?” I whisper his name, almost too scared to say it.
“It’s me, baby,” he smiles.
“I thought you were dead. They said you were dead. Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t dead?” The questions tumble from me in a panicked torrent. I have extreme emotional whiplash right now. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t know what to do.
“They said you were dead too, once, remember?”
I stare at his face, following with another question even though he didn’t really answer any of the first ones. “What did you to do yourself? I thought I said no plastic surgery?”
“I did what I had to,” he says. He’s almost completely unrecognizable. I can’t believe it; the longer I look, the more I see how things have been changed. He’s had a nose job that has straightened it more than it was, his cheekbones are higher, his jaw more pronounced. His hair has been colored dark and speckled with gray. He looks older, and more mature, but some of that isn’t just in his appearance. It’s in his eyes.
* * *
Jake
I have been waiting for this moment for over a year. The most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever experienced was leaving Jazz at the hospital, but we had to do it. She was going to die of exhaustion if we didn’t. I was in a situation where I couldn’t look after her, and knowing that broke me for a time.
Before I left her, I wrote a full confession, pinned it to her clothing like a baby. She wasn’t in any condition to speak for herself. She was utterly delirious, and I was worried she might not make it, even with treatment. The note said that I had taken her, that I had forced her into every single bad action she had been in the presence of, that she was innocent. Because she was, and is.
The truth is, I used her. She wouldn’t understand it, but I did. I leaped at the chance to engage in a blood feud with those crooked cops, to kill them instead of even trying the sane route. I killed Rodney, not just because he had to die, but because I wanted to make the mess out of him that he wanted to make of her. Jazz will probably never know what happened in his last brutal moments. I might have evaded human law, but I know I will face my god when the time comes and answer those charges then.
In the weeks following, Remington and I split up for safety’s sake. Alone, all I could think of was how I had taken her and made her an accessory to something heinous. For a long time, I didn’t plan on coming back to her. I didn’t think I was worthy. I’m still not sure I am, but I thought, in the end, that maybe I could give her what she needed. I just had to give up everything. Including my face.
She’s looking at me with some measure of fear, and I wonder for a moment if she wants me anymore. Did she feel relief when she heard I was dead? Was there some kind of lightness amid the grief, thinking that the whole crazy situation was over?
I decided before I came that I wasn’t going to pressure her. If she tells me to go, I will go.
“I’m sorry, Jazz,” I say softly. “I’m sorry to come back this way. I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch some other way, and just sprang this on you, but I didn’t know if you were being watched. And there was no way to really explain, except to show you. I know a lot of time has passed. And I know nothing good happened when you were with me. I made a lot of things worse. But I promise, if you give me a chance...”
My words are cut off as she hurls herself at me with tears in her eyes and wraps herself around me like a koala.
* * *
Jazz
I realize he thinks I’m not pleased to see him. He couldn’t be more fucking wrong. To prove it, I rush into his arms, just fucking throw myself at him, holding him so tight I think I’m going to squeeze the life out of him.
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