The Great Escape

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  So what? It had been almost four months since she and Ted had made love, and she was only human. Since she had no intention of giving in to her wayward thoughts, what was the harm? Still, she wanted to punish him for making her mind wander where it shouldn’t. “It’s strange that you don’t have any tattoos.” She dog-paddled next to the stern. “No naked women dancing on your biceps, no obscenities etched on your knuckles. Not even a tasteful iron cross. Aren’t you worried you’ll get kicked out of the biker club?”

  The flickering light coming off the water softened the hard edges of his cheekbones. “I hate needles.”

  “You don’t swim. You hate needles. You’re afraid to show your legs. You really are sort of a mess, aren’t you?”

  “You’re not exactly the person to call anybody else a mess.”

  “True. Deepest apologies.” She managed something almost approaching one of his sneers.

  “When are you going to call your folks?” he said out of nowhere.

  She went under and didn’t come up until she had to. “Meg lets them know I’m safe,” she said, even though she knew that wasn’t the same as talking to them herself.

  She missed Charlotte and Holly’s spats, Tracy’s dramas, Andre’s rambling accounts of the latest fantasy novel he’d read. She missed Nealy and Mat, but the idea of picking up the phone and calling them paralyzed her. What could she possibly say?

  Panda gave her a none-too-gentle assist back into the boat. Her cheap one-piece black swimsuit rode up, but he didn’t seem to notice. He fired up the outboard, and they chugged back to the dock. As he killed the engine, she gathered up her flip-flops, but before she could climb out of the boat, he said, “I have to get back to work. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  She’d known this limbo couldn’t last forever, but she still hadn’t made plans to move ahead. Couldn’t make them. She was paralyzed, caught between the focused, organized person she’d been and the aimless, confused woman she’d become. The panic that was never far away kicked up inside her. “I’m not ready.”

  “That’s your problem.” He tethered the boat. “I’m dropping you off at the Shreveport airport on my way.”

  She swallowed. “No need. I’m staying here.”

  “What are you going to do for money?”

  She should have solved that problem by now, but she hadn’t. Although she wouldn’t admit it, she didn’t like the idea of staying at the house without him. For a brooding and increasingly mysterious stranger, he was surprisingly relaxing to be around. So much more relaxing than being with Ted. With Panda, she didn’t have to pretend to be a better person than she was.

  He stepped out of the boat. “Tell you what. If you call your family tonight, you can ride with me for a while longer.”

  She scrambled onto the dock. “For how long?”

  “Until you piss me off,” he said as he tied up the boat.

  “That might not get me to the next town.”

  “My best offer. Work with it.”

  She was almost glad he was forcing her to do what she should have done from the beginning, and she nodded.

  That night she did her best to put off the phone call with various unnecessary chores until he lost patience. “Call them.”

  “Later,” she said. “I have to pack first.”

  He sneered. “Chickenshit.”

  “What do you care? This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Sure it does. Your mother was the president. It’s my patriotic duty.”

  She snatched the phone. As she punched in the number, she wished she’d been able to get her hands on his phone just once when he wasn’t watching. Even as she retreated to the deck, he could see her through the window.

  Her heart hammered when she heard Mat’s familiar gruff voice. She fought back tears. “Dad …”

  “Lucy! Are you all right?”

  “Kind of.” Her voice broke. “I’m sorry. You know I wouldn’t hurt you and Mom for anything.”

  “We know that. Lucy, we love you. Nothing could change that.”

  His words twisted the knife of guilt even deeper. They’d given her everything without expecting anything back, and this was how she repaid them. She struggled against tears. “I love you, too.”

  “We need to sit down together and discuss what happened. Figure out why you didn’t feel like you could talk to us about it. I want you to come home.”

  “I know. How—how are the kids?”

  “Holly’s having a sleepover, and Charlotte’s learning to play the guitar. Andre has a girlfriend, and Tracy’s really pissed with you. As for your grandfather … You can imagine how he’s taken this. I suggest a stiff drink before you call him. But first you have to talk to your mother. You might be thirty-one, but you’re still part of this family.”

  He couldn’t have said anything that made her feel worse about herself.

  “Lucy?” It was Nealy. He’d passed over the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Really.”

  “Never mind about that,” her mother said briskly. “I don’t care if you’re a grown woman. We want you home.”

  “I—I can’t.” She bit her lip. “I’m not done running away yet.”

  Nealy, of all people, couldn’t argue with that, and she didn’t try. “When do you think you’ll be done?”

  “I’m … not sure.”

  “Let me talk to her!” Tracy shrieked in the background.

  Nealy said, “We had no idea you were so unhappy.”

  “I wasn’t. You can’t think that. It’s just—I can’t explain.”

  “I wish you’d try.”

  “Let me have the phone!” Tracy cried.

  “Promise you’ll stay in touch,” her mother said. “And promise you’ll call your grandfather.”

  Before Lucy could promise anything, Tracy grabbed the phone. “Why haven’t you called me? This is all Meg’s fault. I hate her. You should never have listened to what she said. She’s jealous because you were getting married and she wasn’t.”

  “Trace, I know I disappointed you, but this isn’t Meg’s fault.”

  Her baby sister Button had turned into a volcano of eighteen-year-old outrage. “How can you love somebody one minute and then not love them the next?”

  “It wasn’t exactly like that.”

  “You’re being selfish. And stupid.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt you.” Before she lost her courage, she needed to get the rest of this over with. “Put the others on, will you?”

  In the next ten minutes, she learned that Andre still talked on the phone to Ted, that Holly was auditioning for a part in a play, and that Charlotte had mastered “Drunken Sailor” on the guitar. Each conversation was more painful than the last. Only after she’d hung up did it register that all three of them had posed the question her parents had never raised.

  “Lucy, where are you?”

  Panda came up behind her on the deck and took the phone before she could check his call log. Was he in touch with the tabloids or not? He disappeared back inside, and when she finally went in herself, he was watching a baseball game. “I need to make another call,” she said.

  He studied her. “Phone’s been acting up lately. Give me the number and I’ll put it in for you.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “It’s temperamental.”

  She had to stop playing games. “I want to see your phone.”

  “I know.”

  “If you don’t have anything to hide, you’ll let me look at it.”

  “Who says I don’t have anything to hide?”

  He was enjoying himself, and she didn’t like it. “You know everything about me, but I don’t know any more about you than I did eleven days ago. I don’t even know your real name.”

  “Simpson. Bart.”

  “Afraid I’ll see the National Enquirer on your speed dial?”

  “You won’t.”

  “One of the other tabloids, then? Or did you contact the
legitimate press?”

  “Do you really think somebody like me is going to cozy up to the press?”

  “Maybe. I’m a lucrative meal ticket.”

  He shrugged, extended his leg, and pulled his phone from his pocket. “Knock yourself out.”

  The fact that he was giving up the phone told her she wouldn’t discover any secrets, and she was right. The only call on his log was the one she’d just made. She flipped the phone back to him.

  As she walked away, his voice drifted toward her, quiet and a little gruff. “I see you as a lot of things, but a meal ticket isn’t one of them.”

  She didn’t know what he meant by that, so she pretended not to hear.

  PANDA ABANDONED THE BASEBALL GAME he hadn’t been watching and moved back out to the deck. It was time to have a serious talk with himself. As if he hadn’t been doing that for almost two weeks.

  Be the best at what you’re good at. That had always been his motto. Be the best at what you’re good at and stay away from what you’re not. At the top of that list? Emotional crap.

  But being closed up with her like this would drive any man nuts. Those shorts and T-shirts made her look like a damned fifteen-year-old, which should have turned his stomach but didn’t because she wasn’t fifteen.

  He was trapped with his arousal, his resentment, his fear. He gazed out into the night, trying not to give into them. Failing.

  LUCY STUDIED THE CURLING WALLPAPER in her bedroom. They were leaving here tomorrow morning, and Panda was as much a mystery to her as he’d been when she’d climbed on his bike. She didn’t even know his real name. Most important, she didn’t know whether or not he was selling her out.

  She’d eaten barely any dinner, and she went into the kitchen to fix herself a bowl of cereal. Through the window, she saw Panda on the deck, where he was staring at the lake again. She wondered what he was thinking about.

  She sprinkled some Special K in a bowl and carried it into the living room. The American President was playing silently on the television. As she started to sit, she spotted what appeared to be a business card wedged at the back of the seat cushion. She slid it out.

  CHARITY ISLAND FERRY

  RESIDENT PASS

  # 3583

  Your Pure Michigan Adventure Begins Here

  Had this fallen out of Panda’s wallet or had a previous tenant lost it? Only one way to find out. She returned the card to the seat cushion, leaving it just as she’d found it.

  The next morning it was gone.

  Chapter Five

  LUCY FINALLY KNEW SOMETHING ABOUT Panda that he didn’t want her to know. That should have made her feel better, but she didn’t want to leave Caddo Lake, and her mood was dismal as they rode away. She persuaded him to stop in Texarkana where, fake pregnancy in place, she pointedly purchased a prepaid phone of her own. She told him to put it on her expense account.

  Right after they crossed into Arkansas, they had to pull beneath an underpass to wait out a rain shower. She asked him where they were going, not expecting him to answer. But he did, at least partially. “We should be close to Memphis by nightfall.”

  His bike had Texas license plates, he vacationed on the Louisiana border, they were headed for Tennessee, and he had a resident ferry pass to an island somewhere in Michigan. Were these the practices of an itinerate construction worker or simply the lifestyle of a wanderer? She wished she could be as mysterious, but it was hard to have secrets when your life had been laid out for public examination while you were still a teenager.

  Their nighttime lodging was a backwater Arkansas motel near the Tennessee border. She took in the room’s painted cinder-block walls and ugly puce bedspreads. “I’m sure there’s a Hyatt someplace nearby.”

  He dropped his pack on the bed closest to the door. “I like it. It has character.”

  “Characters. We’ll be lucky if those drug dealers lurking outside don’t break in and murder us in our sleep.”

  “Exactly why you can’t have your own room.”

  “Why I can’t have my own room is because you like being difficult.”

  “True.” He cocked his head and gave her his calculated biker’s sneer. “Plus, this way, I might see you naked.”

  “Good luck with that.” She grabbed the pajama shorts and T-shirt she’d bought when they were at Caddo and headed for the bathroom. Once she’d sealed herself in, she took a deep breath. She was flustered enough from spending the day plastered against his back with the vibrations from that big bike stirring her up. She didn’t need him baiting her.

  The flimsy shower stall was barely larger than a phone booth, and every time she moved, she banged her elbow into the plastic panels. She tried to imagine Panda attempting to wedge his body into such an uncomfortably small space.

  His naked body.

  She dropped her hands from the breasts she’d been soaping for too long. She was female. She couldn’t help the way Panda stirred her baser instincts. There was something primal about him. He was earthy and carnal, all brawn and muscle. Made for sex. It would be rough and raunchy, so different from sex with Ted, who’d been the gold standard of male erotic perfection—polished, inexhaustible, selfless.

  Only now could she begin to admit how taxing that selflessness had been. She’d wanted to give back as good as she got, but what she got was so perfectly executed that she had no idea how to return it in equal measure, and that kept it from being as good as it should have been. She’d worried that her moans were too loud, her movements too awkward, her caresses too tentative, too rough, not in the right place. What if she was taking too long or her breath was bad or her thighs were jiggling? What if she farted?

  All that stress.

  It would be so different with Panda, so easy. He’d only be out for himself. And who cared what she did or what he thought about it? She could respond or not respond, however she felt. She wouldn’t need to worry about how her words, her actions, her moans—or lack of them—affected him.

  The idea of simply taking what she wanted from a man who expected nothing except access to a female body tantalized her. All through high school and college, she’d fantasized about the wild men she sometimes encountered: the son of a wealthy socialite who’d supplemented his income dealing drugs, the college basketball player with the mile-wide grin who’d cheated on his exams, the guys with the cocky struts and cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths, the ones who drove too fast, drank too much, worked their bodies instead of their brains. And now Panda.

  How would he react if she walked out naked? She couldn’t imagine that he’d turn away.

  This trip was nearly over. She understood that, even if he hadn’t spelled out the exact timetable. Any day now, he’d be dumping her. Would she ever have a better chance for free, dirty, uncommitted sex? This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Was she going to let it pass her by?

  Two weeks ago, she was engaged to another man—a man she still loved in so many ways. Jumping into bed with Panda would be unforgivable.

  Still, the idea wasn’t altogether repellent.

  She felt an irrational urge to talk this over with Ted. He was always clearheaded, and she wasn’t clear about anything right now.

  Even as she dried off, she was still thinking about it. She knew what she wanted. Didn’t know what she wanted. Finally she decided on a coward’s compromise. She wrapped herself in the threadbare towel, opened the bathroom door, and said, “Don’t look.”

  He looked. Not even being subtle about it but studying her in a way that made her skin hot. Long seconds passed before he spoke. “Are you sure about this?” No games. Straight to the point. Pure Panda.

  “No.”

  “You must be fairly sure.”

  “I’m not.”

  He took more time thinking it over than she’d expected. Finally he rose from the bed and jerked his T-shirt over his head. “I need a shower. If you’re still wearing that towel when I come out, lose it.”

  She didn’t like this. N
ot the fact that he intended to shower—she knew exactly how grimy they were from their long bike ride—but she didn’t like having more time to think than she wanted. Was this the best way to move on from Ted or the worst?

  The bathroom door banged shut. He’d left his phone behind, proof that he’d wiped it out again. She made a call. “Meg …”

  “Luce? Honey, are you all right?”

  “I’m … fine.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Because …” Lucy paused. “Would I be … like … a total skank if I slept with another guy now? Like in about ten minutes?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Kind of. He’s no Ted Beaudine, but …”

  “Then you should definitely sleep with him.”

  “I want to, but …”

  “Be a skank, Luce. It’ll be good for you.”

  “I guess if I’d seriously wanted to be talked out of this, I’d have called somebody else.”

  “That tells you a lot, then.”

  “You’re right.” The water shut off in the bathroom. Panda had taken the fastest shower on record. “I have to go,” she said in a rush. “I’ll call when I can. Love you.” She hung up.

  The bathroom door opened. Now there were two of them wrapped in threadbare towels, Panda’s draped so low she could see the entire plane of his stomach … and the bulge beneath.

  He held his discarded clothes in one hand, his hair a long wet tangle, his lips thinned in something approaching a scowl. Water beaded on his chest and on his bare legs, which were—no surprise—free of any disfiguring scars. What was surprising, considering the lack of sunlight they received, was how tan they were. Even more surprising was how foul his mood seemed to be for a man about to get lucky.

  He cocked his head in the general direction of her towel.

  “I’m still thinking,” she said.

  “No, you’re not. You made up your mind.” He yanked his wallet from his jeans pocket, flipped it open, and pulled out a condom. “I only have one of these, so you’d better be good.”