by Lynn Red
“Fair enough,” the lion said, backing away slightly. “It’s been twenty years, but just seeing you made me realize I’d done the right thing by coming back, by taking this risk. I was asking myself the whole way back to the Creek if I was going crazy. Turns out, I don’t care if I am. I’m in love with you, and I never stopped. But I’ll tell you this,” he backed away more, still not taking his eyes off Morales. “I’m not waiting another twenty years. I’ll be seeing you.”
Eve touched her chest lightly. “Okay,” she finally said. “I guess it is time to finally,” she trailed off, and stood up to draw nearer Morales. “I don’t know what it is,” she finished, “but right now I could really use a beer or four, and more air hockey.”
“You’ll never change,” Rake said with a laugh, as he backed through the door frame, which was of course, missing its door. “And that’s why I never stopped loving you. I’ll be around.”
Eve, Morales, Blake and Lexie, all four watched Rake return to his bike, kick it to life and speed off to God knows where. As soon as he was gone, the four of them walked together in the parking lot just out front of Ralph’s ex-door.
“You all right?” Blake asked in general.
Eve nodded, Morales clapped his friend on the arm. “I had a feeling you were watching,” Morales said. “You know, that feeling you get.”
“I know it,” Blake said. “I didn’t want to step in and turn that into something it wasn’t.”
“Thanks,” Eve said, still staring off into the darkness after Rake, who had kicked up quite a cloud behind him. “And I’m sorry, for all that.”
Morales shook his head. “You didn’t do anything,” he said. “And we can’t help who we love. That’s something I figured out a long damn time ago.”
When he said that, Lexie and Blake exchanged a quick glance, which wasn’t lost on Eve, who smiled briefly. “True,” Blake said. “If you’re in danger,” he was speaking to Eve, but she interrupted.
“I’m not,” she said. “He never hurt me, but it always seemed like he’d hurt other people if they happened to be close to me. I think he finally met his match with this one. I always thought Rake was kind of a psycho with the diving into fights, but I realize now he probably just always knew he’d win them.”
Morales snorted a laugh. “Well, I guess that’s an honor,” he said. “I’ve seen the look he had on his face before a few times. He was saying he didn’t have anything to lose, but I think that was a lie.” He turned to Eve. “That guy is more in love with you than I’ve seen in any of the three Sandra Bullock movies I’ve watched. But then again, I think you know that.”
“Twenty years,” Blake said with a hollow voice. “I’ve always wondered what that’s like. But now I think I know.”
Not paying attention to what he’d just said, Eve cleared her throat and started talking again. “Well, look,” she said. “I know that was pretty intense for everyone involved. But like I was telling Moe here,” she tapped Morales with a gentle head butt to the arm, “I really need a beer and I really need some karaoke.”
“I thought you said air hockey,” Morales asked, a smile twisting his lips. “Or are you just trying to trick me into going back to Tenner’s and stumbling through Paradise City again?”
“Everyone thinks they know the words to that song,” Eve said, smiling again, “but no one does. Not even Axl, I don’t think. Anyway, you two are welcome to join us. Assuming I’m not going alone, I mean?”
“I don’t care who you’re in love with,” Morales said to Eve, putting an arm around her shoulder. “I’m having the time of my life. I’ll take you up on that beer, that karaoke, and whatever else you want to do. I’m almost relieved,” he said.
“About?” Eve asked.
“Well, now I can just cut loose. I can just be me, you know? I don’t have to try and impress you anymore.”
“You were trying to impress me?” Eve asked with a curl to her lip. “If you were, I think you’d be better at air hockey.”
The four of them laughed for a moment, and then Eve grabbed Morales by the arm. “Come on, you big muscle head. I don’t know what the hell’s going on in my heart, but right now I’m just glad to have a friend.”
“Works for me,” the big bear replied. “See you at home? Maybe?”
Blake laughed, and nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe. We’ll see how following this map goes.”
They all laughed again before Eve and Morales made their exit. Right before they zoomed off, Eve called out. “You follow that map, and you won’t see him at home for at least a couple of days!”
“I’m counting on it,” Blake said, pulling Lexie closer.
For a moment, she just stood there, with her head on his arm, enjoying the warmth of his embrace. “What what is like?” she asked a few seconds later.
“Huh?” Blake asked. “What?”
“That’s what I asked,” Lexie said with a smirk. “Anyway, you said a few minutes ago that you’d wondered what something was like, but you didn’t finish. About Rake waiting twenty years—impressive, if a little stalker-ish, by the way—for Eve?”
“Oh, right,” he said. “What it’s like to—actually never mind,” he said. “I think I know what it’s like to not give a shit about anything in the world except the person you’re with.”
That brought more happy tears rolling down Lexie’s cheek, but she didn’t bother wiping them away, instead just leaned into Blake as she kept fiddling with the tape on the box. “Yeah,” she said. “I think I just figured that out too. Say, you got a knife?”
He laughed out loud. “That’s a little abrupt of a change in subject. You gonna skin me and wear me for a coat?”
“It wouldn’t fit.”
“Good point,” he said with another chuckle. “Yeah, there’s a bunch of them in the toolbox, why?”
“Because this thing is bound up tighter than a dog who ate a box of crayons. Going back to the whole dog ass joke that started this adventure. And if it’s for us, I mean, what the hell?”
The two of them turned back to the truck, but Blake spared one last second toward Eve and Morales. They were still clothed, but that didn’t seem to be getting in the way of anything. “Come on,” he said. “I think she made up our minds for us, huh babe?”
Without a word, Lexie yanked Blake’s arm, tugging him back toward the truck.
It took fairly significant effort to cut through the four layers of packing tape, and one layer of old fashioned silver duct tape that Eve had, for some reason, bound the package with. Whatever was in there, she really didn’t want anyone opening it until the time was right. Apparently, the time was right.
“Oh wow, talk about Rambo,” Lexie said. She had pulled a huge blanket, just about the size of a California king out of the box. From it, a massive combat knife tumbled, clanking on the pitted asphalt of the Fun Pit. “What the hell is this thing?”
Blake plucked it from the ground. “About four hundred bucks, for one thing.” He admired the sheathe before pulling it from the canvas holster where it lived and turning the blade in the moonlight. “Someone who really knew what they were doing made this thing. Look how the blade’s honed at the tip and then just kind of flat toward the hilt. You use this part,” he rubbed a fingertip crossways over the sharp bit, “for cutting. You know, ropes, clothes, whatever. And the flat part’s for prying.”
“Could you use it to open oysters?” Lexie asked. Blake was still staring, completely entranced, at the fine piece of craftsmanship in his hand.
“Er, well yeah I guess. It’d screw up the blade though.” It took him a second to realize exactly how out-of-left-field her question had been. “I almost hate to ask—why oysters?”
“Well,” Lexie held up a mesh sack full of clattering shellfish. “We seem to have a lot of them. Also we have a lot of dry ice, and a blanket the size of, well, you I guess.”
“It gets curioser and curioser,” Blake said. “Wait, what’s that?”
He bent down
and unfolded part of the blanket that was lopped over. “Some kind of letter?”
“Use the knife to open it,” Lexie said. “Something about a big soldier man carving into a helpless letter with a giant knife really gets me going.”
“You’re not kidding are you?” he asked with a laugh. From Lexie’s expectant, sidelong glance, he knew that no, she was not kidding. “All right, let’s see here.”
The knife’s tip slid effortlessly through the parchment envelope, leaving a slit in the paper that would make a surgeon proud. He held the envelope open, but Lexie took the note. “Hum,” she grunted, squinting at it in the darkness. “I can’t quite make out what it says.”
“Well it is dark out,” he said.
“Oh right. Truck?”
“Already open.” He opened the door for her.
Lexie was so absorbed with the scripting on the letter that she only caught Blake attempting a Sonny Crocket-esque slide over the hood of the car. Just as it seemed he’d make it, his jeans pocket caught on the lip between the hood and frame. He went down without a sound, sprung right back up and dusted his palms and the ass of his jeans before hopping in the driver’s seat.
She read for a moment, and then without looking up from the letter, cracked a smile.
“Shut up,” he grumbled.
“I didn’t say anything. Not a thing. Just sitting here reading this letter. Not saying anything at all.”
Blake grumbled something inaudibly.
“I’m not saying anything. Not a single thing. Nothing at all about your cool Sonny Crocket moves, nope, not saying anything.”
He feigned irritation for about three more seconds before he cracked up. “I have no idea why I tried that just then. I think I’ve always wanted to do it, and somehow, having you here has done all sorts of things to my courage to fuck up and not worry about looking like an idiot.”
Lexie cocked her head, then looked up. “You know? That might just be the sweetest thing I’ve heard in a long, long time. Only you could turn falling over your own ass into something that made my heart sing.”
He turned the car on, and then grabbed Lexie’s hand again as soon as the ignition turned over. “It’s weird,” he said. “When I’m not holding your hand, I want to be.”
To that, she just smiled. “You want to read, or should I?”
“Go ahead,” he said. “I have terrible night vision anyway. I mean, I’m not going to have a wreck, but I’m also not reading any literature in the dark.”
“Well, you might not want to be doing anything when I read this, because it’s kind of amazing.”
“Eve always manages, doesn’t she?”
“So it would seem. What’s it say?”
“Not a whole lot,” Lexie said. “But what’s there is pretty heart wrenching.”
Blake took a deep breath. “Good heart wrenching or bad?”
Lexie shrugged and just started reading. “Sometimes, plans seem to come together out of nowhere. Other times, they seem like an uphill battle you’re never going to win, so you dig in your heels and fight until the last breath. That’s pretty dramatic, but there it is. I’m not paid to be reasonable.”
They both laughed as Lexie read the last line. She continued. “But usually the battles are worth it, the wars hurt and they leave us battered, bruised and scarred. It’s what comes next that matters most, though. I’ve had your file for about a year, Lexie,” Lexie read, and smiled as she pointed to herself, “but when Blake’s friend forced him to come in and talk to me, I realized why I’d never matched you with anyone. I never found the right person. Well, as I was talking to the enormous bear who is no doubt sitting right beside you, I saw you in him. I saw your passion, your fierceness for life.
That’s about the time Lexie began to tear up—for real this time, no little drops on her cheeks—and Blake squeezed her hand harder. She kept on. “Most of my matches work, yeah, but not like this. Not this perfectly and this obviously. You’ve both scraped out hard lives and made the best of them, and now you can share a life that won’t be easy, but will certainly be easier for having each other.”
“She is psychic,” Blake said with a note of disbelief in his increasingly husky voice. “How’d she know all that? Just from talking to me for five minutes and reading your application a year ago?”
Lexie just shrugged. Blake had been right, she realized just then. Thinking sometimes just gets in the way of the good stuff. She wiped away a tear, and read some more. “I figured the double date thing wouldn’t work out for a variety of reasons, most of which come down to me finally getting over my fear of love, and a whole ton of other things. That’s why it was a double, after all, because I was scared. But now I know there’s no reason to be, and there’s no reason to hold on to old pains and old wounds, no matter how deep they were.”
“Psychic or not, she’s goddamn right about that,” Blake said. “Some things just never seem to go away until you let them, you know?”
Lexie nodded. She looked over at her bear, and wiped a tear that had come down his cheek away. For a moment, she just watched his face, stared into his eyes. He was so raw, so vulnerable with her, that she could hardly believe he wasn’t like this with everyone else. She knew better though; she was just the same. When it came to this unlikely bear, she laid her heart open from the beginning, and she never did that, so she understood.
“Anyway, I’m getting all emotional and philosophical. Point is, you two are perfect together, and there’s something folded up in this letter that Blake will understand. I can’t wait to see the two of you together. Maybe sometime soon you two, Moe and I can go actually have a double, after we’ve all closed up our wounds?”
“Mine closed the first time I saw you, Lexie,” Blake said.
“I forgot I had any,” she said, “and trust me, I’ve got plenty.”
The left side of Blake’s mouth curled in a smile. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a slip of paper which had fallen from the letter and onto Lexie’s lap. “Looks like coordinates.”
She shrugged, and handed the paper to Blake. “She said you’d know. Some kind of Army thing?”
“Oh my God,” he drew a whistling breath between his teeth. “I mean, yeah I guess. Army or Boy Scouts, either way. I haven’t done any real, hardcore, numbers on a sheet of paper orienteering since bootcamp.”
“Really? How do you guys get around?”
Blake tapped the screen of his phone, which was mounted on the dash by a plastic doohickey. “GPS,” he said with a grin. “Like any sane person. Anyway, is there a map in there? Can’t make much sense out of a bunch of coordinates without a map to go with them.”
“Can’t find one,” she said. “At least—wait, what’s that?” she pointed to a folded bunch of paper that had at some point been wedged underneath Blake’s windshield wiper. “That wasn’t there before, was it?”
“I hope it’s not a Chinese menu,” he grumbled. “Or some weird religious tract. Nothing against those folks, but damn do I hate it when those things smudge my glass.”
“If smudges on your windshield are the worst of your problems, life must be pretty all right,” Lexie said as she craned herself out of the car and plucked the paper from the wiper. “Here.”
Blake let out a loud ha! as he opened it. “Ask and ye shall receive, I guess. It’s a map, that much is sure. Of what, though, I’m not entirely—” he broke off with another laugh. “She does think of everything.”
“What is it?”
“It’s of here. I mean, not the Fun Pit, but the first coordinate is right here, exactly where we’re parked. This is some seriously spooky shit. I feel like I’m in the middle of a lost episode of, well, Lost.”
“If it starts here, then...?”
Blake got a look on his face that was part mischief, part excitement and all gorgeous. “Well then I guess we get out of this truck and see where we end up.”
Lexie pushed her door open with her foot, and gathered up the blanket from th
e floorboard. “Hey, one more thing,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Do the Crocket slide again. And this time I’m going to film it. I think this should be the first part of that damn DVD my agent wants. The beginning of a new life, a new adventure. And what better way to celebrate it than sliding over a truck hood?”
To her surprise, Blake just smiled back. “Somehow, I don’t even care if I bust my ass again. I’m just glad you want me along on your ride.”
“Get after it cowboy,” she goaded him. “Slide or fall, we’re in this together.”
It took him a minute to work up the courage to take another gander at the slide. The whole time he was backing up, getting in a football ready position, hoofing the ground like a bull ready to charge, Lexie was just watching him and thinking. You’re in it with me. I’m in it with you. I don’t care how many times I fall from here on out, I’ll always have you to catch me.
“Here I go,” Blake said, and then resumed pawing the ground.
As he started to run, Lexie realized that for the first time since she’d started her crazy life as an internet pseudo-celebrity, she wasn’t worried about ad revenue, blog visits, or book deals. She wasn’t thinking about any of that stuff; she was just watching this bear charge his own pickup truck.
It was like every weight she’d been carrying for years lifted off her shoulders all at once. If she could have somehow been in Blake’s head, she would have known that as his feet left the ground, he was thinking exactly the same thing.
He jumped.
She broke out into a smile that stretched her lips so far it hurt. She didn’t know what was going to happen next, and for maybe the first time in her life, she honestly didn’t care. It was the moment. It was the here and now.
His ass met the hood, and he slid, rivets in his jeans thumping across the lines.
Lexie gritted her teeth, bracing for him to hitch on the car again and end up in a heap.
If she could see into Blake’s head right then, she’d know that he knew he wasn’t gonna fall. Not this time, and not ever again. But he was also thinking that even if he did, she’d be there to pick him up.
