by Alice Ward
With a jerk, she backed out of the spot, then threw the car into first gear and gunned it toward the hill.
Huh. I thought sex relaxed people. It relaxed me, anyway. I felt like I could take a nap. Apparently, it had the opposite effect on Atlee. She was wound tighter than ever now.
Or maybe she was having regrets. I didn’t like to think that she was.
Careful to say nothing or even move too quickly, I grabbed my shirt from the back seat and slipped it on as she bumped fearlessly over the rutted road. Then it hit me…
Shit.
We were heading up a hill. The hill. The one with the barren landscape on the other side. Trees razed. Smoke and dust rising into the hot air. The section of land that looked dead, like a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Because of me. Because of my company.
“Wait,” I said, putting a hand on the steering wheel. “I don’t think we should go this way.”
She smacked my hand away. Hard. “Well, I do.”
I moved my hand to her knee. “Listen. You should—”
She shoved it away. Harder.
“What’s the big deal, you sexist ape? Just because we had sex one time doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do. I make my own decisions.”
Ah, that was it.
She didn’t want to cede control.
Especially to a scumbag corporate type.
That she clearly regretted having had sex with.
Even though she’d clearly enjoyed it.
She pressed harder on the accelerator as we reached the bottom of the hill, throwing it into gear to climb it. I held my hands out in surrender. “Atlee, I’m serious. This is the wrong way. We need to turn around. Please.”
She snarled in my direction and pressed the gas harder.
“Atlee…”
It was too late. We crested the top and the barren landscape spread out in front of us. It was like looking at another planet. A cold, dead piece of earth that was unfit for any living thing. The truck traversed the apex of the hill and started to sail down the decline, but she jammed on the brakes, sending us lurching forward.
Her hands gripped the steering wheel as her eyes darted back and forth over the stripped land. “Oh.”
Atlee cut the engine, her fingers shaking all the while. For a full minute, she peered out the dirt-crusted window in horror, as if she’d just mowed down something precious. Then she threw open the door and grabbed her phone. She went to the front of the truck and covered the lower half of her face with her hands as she looked over the vast nothingness. Her whole body was trembling, her graceful bare shoulders slumped.
Damn me to hell.
I climbed out and stood next to her, not knowing what to say. By that time, she was already filming, narrating as she swept the camera across a panorama. “This, my friends, is what non-sustainable palm oil harvesting is doing to our rain forests,” she said, her voice small and fragile, cracking, breaking my heart. “We’ve just driven up here and come across this place. It’s been totally razed, decimated, to make more space for the palm oil plantations. It extends as far as the eye can see, and…”
As she continued to speak, it felt like there should’ve been something I could do about it. Like I, as the CEO of one of the most powerful corporations on Earth, should’ve been able to stop this. To stop her from feeling like this. This felt like all me.
“I’m sorry, Atlee,” I said.
But either she didn’t hear, or she didn’t care. She handed me the camera. “Can you film me?”
I took the camera and focused in, centering her in the screen. “Go ahead.”
She gnawed on her lip. “Friends. I didn’t expect to… god. This is probably the most awful day of my life,” she murmured, choking up, lifting her glasses, wiping the tears from her eyes. “It’s one thing to talk about it, but to actually see it? It really brings it into perspective how devastating it is.”
A tear trickled down her face as she gazed into the distance. She clutched at her chest and stared at the camera for a full ten seconds, not saying a word. Then she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry if I’m not coherent. This is terrible. Really. I don’t… we’ve got to put an end to this, people. Please.”
She drew her hand across her neck, telling me to cut the filming, and roamed down the incline, her lower lip quivering. She looked up at the giant bulldozer, with a front tire that was taller than she was. She kicked it.
“Fuck this,” she muttered, voice cracking, tears glistening in her eyes. “Fuck all of this.”
Hell. If she shed even one more tear, I’d have the place shut down in a second. Somehow. I didn’t know how. But I would. I wanted to hold her to me, to stroke her hair and tell her it would be all right. I climbed down over the dried mud, rutted with the tire tracks of the bulldozers, and said, “This is partly my fault.”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “It’s all your fault.”
Wait. I wouldn’t go that far. “What? I didn’t know this was—”
She jabbed me on my left pec with her finger. “But you should have. This didn’t just happen yesterday, and you’ve already told me you worked for your daddy since you were a boy! It’s been happening for a long time, and it’s companies like Watts that have been burying their heads in the sand, that have led us to this!” she shouted, shoving my chest. She couldn’t move me, but she packed some serious will into her movements.
“Hey.” I tried to remind myself that she was distraught, so she was putting the blame where it wasn’t due. “Come on. Let’s go back. You can stay at my place tonight, and—”
“What?” She looked at me through tears like I was speaking another language. “Look. We fucked. Once. Because I was horny. Because of the heat. We both got off, and that’s all. I still hate you.”
Somehow, I always felt like I was defending myself to this woman. Of course, she was a lawyer. “Understood. I just thought you’d be more comfortable in—”
“With you?” She scoffed and turned back to the vast wasteland in front of us. “Please. People like you disgust me.”
I just stared at her. People like me? Right, the scumbags.
My hands curled into fists at my sides. What the hell was I doing, giving into my base desires by being with this woman? She’d chewed me up, spit me out on YouTube, and yet I kept coming back for more punishment. A porcupine would’ve been more pleasant.
And I had my company to think about. My employees. My legacy.
I didn’t need to waste my time with this. No matter how good she tasted.
“No, you listen. I’m working on it. You saw evidence of that. I can’t change the past, and I can’t change this moment, but I’m working on a different future. It will take time.”
She brushed a hand under her nose. “Time. All the animals who lived here didn’t have time. Nobody cared about them.” She turned to me. “How much time do you think?”
I looked into her reddened face. I couldn’t lie. “I don’t know.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. “So, in the meantime, while you’re ‘I don’t knowing,’ children are being abused and animals are being killed because you have to make sure your company… your investors… your bank account doesn’t lose a dollar?”
I blew out a breath. “It’s not that simple.”
She shook her head and backed away. “Sure it is. You’re the boss. You say ‘stop’ and this all stops. Don’t you think that things would change pretty damned quickly if you had the balls to do something that brave?”
Balls? Brave?
She was hitting below the belt. “And what happens to those families my disgusting money employees, Atlee? Those human beings who have to pay their mortgage? Human beings who have to eat? Buy medicine? What about them? I just shut everything down… then what?”
She stared at me. It was clear that she didn’t have an answer either.
“That’s what I thought.” I took a step toward her, fury burning in my gut. “You sit on your high and mighty holier than th
ou throne, spouting out your ideas and expectations to the world. You get people riled up and picketing and liking your posts… but you don’t know the first thing about what it takes to run a company.”
Her face paled. “I—”
“You nothing, Atlee.” I was in her face now, just sick of it. Sick of her. Of everything. “It might be okay to live off emotion for you, but other people need food in their bellies, a roof over their head. Do you seriously care less for those families than you do a monkey?”
Slap.
My cheek was burning before I even realized she’d lifted her hand.
Fine. I probably deserved it.
Atlee backed up, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror at what she had done.
“Atlee… look…”
But before I could finish, she whirled and ran back to the truck. Seconds later, the door slammed shut and the engine was starting.
I needed a minute to calm down before I got into an enclosed space with the tornado. Turning my back on her, I stared out at what she cared so much about.
Tires crunched over the road, and I turned, thinking for a moment that the crazy woman might possibly be intent on running over me. Instead, she was backing up, leaving me choking in the dust.
She was fucking leaving. Without me.
I flipped her off. No way was I going to chase after her like a pathetic fool.
Several hundred yards away, she did a three-point turn, then stabbed the gas, the engine roaring as she sped away.
I watched her go. The sun was starting to sink in the sky. She’d be back. She didn’t know the way out of this jungle, and I was the one with the sense of direction.
The familiar stress that always crowded in on me at Watts Enterprises started to invade. For the past couple of days, I’d had a breather from it, but now, it hit me full force. I felt a vein pulsing on the side of my forehead as I walked slowly down the path she’d gone, expecting to see her, idling, around the next bend.
But she wasn’t.
I did the same with the next bend. And the next, always expecting to see her waiting for me. By the third curve in the road, my expectations had pretty much dissolved.
She wouldn’t attempt to go all the way back to Shah Alam without me… would she?
But this was Atlee, who was quickly proving to be the most infuriatingly strong-willed woman I knew. Atlee, who refused to back down on anything. Atlee, who’d taken a day-long plane ride by herself, just so she could hand me my balls on a silver platter. Make that a sustainable bamboo platter.
Yeah, she most definitely would.
A quarter hour later, I decided I was, most definitely, SOL. My best shot of ever getting back to civilization again was by finding the plantation house and hoping I could hitch a ride to the nearest town with one of the workers.
If I could get there by nightfall.
I had a flashlight. I had water. I had food. A cell phone. This may have been an impulse trip, but I’d still planned as much as I could, and I’d come very well-prepared.
But all of those things were in my fucking truck.
On my person? I had a whole hell of a lot of nothing.
I refused to think about that. It wasn’t like this was the middle of uncharted jungle. The plantation headquarters couldn’t be that far away, and at least I had the rutted roads to follow.
Everything would be fine.
I looked up at the sky, trying to gauge with my excellent sense of direction which way to go. Not easy when the jungle looked the same in every direction, and the thick foliage was pretty much blocking out all the sun.
I finished buttoning up my shirt and shook my head, laughing bitterly at how fucked I was. Forty-five minutes ago, I had her naked, under me, and I felt like I could take on the world.
Now, the world definitely had the upper hand.
I picked up the pace, and a song came to mind. “Nothin’ But the Taillights” by Clint Black.
As I began to hum the damn song, I decided Clint was right. She wouldn’t be laughing when she handed me back my keys.
I was going to make damned sure about that.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Atlee
When my old boss, Roger Stapleton, said I was big on acting out of emotion, and not so good on thinking things out?
Well, this was a perfect example.
I drove into the brush, feeling hot, angry… ready to punch something. All I’d been thinking then was that I needed to get away. From him. From that horrible, raped landscape. So, I’d scrambled away from him, jumped in the truck, and lit off down the road.
Everything in my life felt wrong. He was a monster. He was responsible for this. And what had I gone and done? I’d fucked him.
Yeah. Great solution.
Not only fucked him but had a hell of a time doing so. Probably the best. No, definitely the best. Hands down. Sure, I’d had sex before, but compared to Wyatt, those three guys had been boys. Wyatt was all man, the way he’d touched me, commanded my body, made me come, again and again.
I didn’t want any man, especially him, having that control over me. Thinking he owned me, that he could use me as he pleased. I’d used him. I’d gotten off, the end, goodbye.
And it felt good to be careening away from him, leaving him as helpless as I felt.
For at least fifteen minutes, I raced along the dirt road, through the brush, laughing and thinking, Good. You’re getting what you deserve.
And then I started to realize that I was well and truly screwed.
I had no idea where to go once I hit the main road. Wyatt hadn’t used a map. He and his “excellent sense of direction” had just found the way there.
That was okay, I told myself. If I got lost, I could just flag down a passing local.
That was, if I ever saw a passing local. We hadn’t seen another human being on the entire last two-thirds of our trip up.
It’d be fine. I was still on plantation lands, not in some remote area that had never seen human life. No one could wind up wandering forever, could they? I had the truck. I had plenty of gas. I had our lunch. Some water. Bug spray.
I’d be all right.
I hoped.
Pressing on the accelerator, I looked up at the sky. The sun was still fairly high up there, but it was sinking lower, not as strong, so the jungle had begun to take on a darker, more sinister air. The shadows were growing longer.
That was okay. I’d be out and on the main road before it got too dark.
But Wyatt?
I willed myself not to think of him, but it didn’t help. It was shitty, leaving him there. Knowing what an arrogant bastard he was, though, he’d probably already found a means of getting back home and was in better shape than I was.
And it really would’ve been nice to have some company right now. Even if he was a murderer of the earth who had a way of rendering me completely powerless with one touch.
Even if part of me wanted to crawl into his arms and let him hold me. He didn’t do that stuff. He was the man, according to that article I’d read, who was rarely seen with the same woman twice. A player.
But I refused to think he’d played me. I’d gone in and gotten exactly what I wanted.
I reached down to upshift and saw his phone sitting in the cupholder. Which reminded me of my phone. I glanced into the back seat and spotted the old blue blanket where we’d done the deed.
A blanket. Arrogant bastard, he’d probably planned the whole thing. Taking me out to the middle of nowhere, stripping me, fucking me like an animal in the middle of the jungle while I moaned and swayed underneath him.
But I couldn’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. At the thought of it, my entire body ached again. For him. To feel him pumping in and out of me, his hands, slick with sweat, gripping my hips.
Clearly, my vagina wasn’t discriminating in the least.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
I gasped as I drove into a hurricane of insects the size of my fist. On the other side of the sw
arm, I grimaced at the sight of their broken carcasses on the already dirty as hell windshield. Gross.
“Sorry, bugs,” I murmured as I fiddled around, looking for the windshield wipers. “Guess I’m a murderer too.”
I found the right control, and the wipers swept across the windshield, just dragging more dirt into my sight. Perfect. I pawed around the console for a button with windshield fluid when suddenly, a dark figure streaked in front of the truck.
What the…?
Slamming on the brakes, I skidded downhill, the truck fishtailing sideways. I braced myself, begging for the large vehicle to stop. It didn’t. The damn thing seemed to pick up even more traction, heading off the side of the road and straight in a drainage ditch.
I screamed, wrenching on the wheel, but it was too late. I looked out the driver’s side window only to see the thick trunk of a palm tree rushing up to meet me.
No. No. No.
But yes. I crashed against it with a thud that wrenched my head up against the ceiling of the truck before throwing me back down on the seat cushion. Pain radiated in my head as the screaming metal of the truck grew suddenly quiet.
I sat there for a good minute afterward, shaking and seeing starbursts in my vision. I touched my forehead. It was sore, swollen, and… oh, great. A goose egg. That had to be attractive.
I peered in the rearview. Ugh. I looked like a deformed unicorn.
I craned my neck in the direction of the dark blur that’d crossed the road, hoping to see what that mysterious thing was. But it was gone.
Just an animal. Nothing more. This was the jungle, after all.
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. You love the outdoors, Atlee. Nature is your friend. That’s why you’ve been fighting so tirelessly to protect it.
I suddenly thought how ironic it would be if I died out here, surrounded by the very thing I’d been trying to save. It was poetic, in a Jack London short story kind of way.
No. I wouldn’t think of that. I didn’t have much experience in Malaysian jungles, sure, but I was fine. Perfectly fine.
