Unfiltered & Unsaved

by Payge Galvin

  That made her laugh a little. “I’m a math geek,” she admitted. “I love calculus.”

  “Huh, I guess somebody must, but I always thought they were aliens in disguise. Yours is perfect, by the way. So, how is the weather on your planet back home?”

  “Cooler,” she said. “One thing I’ll never get used to here is the summers. It’s like living in a toaster oven.”

  She was, she realized, actually chatting, as if she knew Elijah. As if they were friends. He had an easy, calm, gentle way about him—charming without being overbearing. He seemed to like to talk to her … not like most of Brittany’s boy-toys who couldn’t care less what a woman had to say, especially if it wasn’t oh yes faster or ride me like a rented pony.

  She hadn’t been intending to think of him like that, but the train of thought led to a split-second speculation about what his chest looked like under that neatly buttoned, pressed shirt. Well built, she thought. Solid. Strong. His skin looked velvet-soft over the muscles, and his hands were beautiful. A few scars on them, as if he’d worked in carpentry or some mechanical field, but the shape of them reminded her of pianos and paintings. They looked like expert hands that would be gentle and precise in their touch, just exactly where they needed to be. She could almost feel them on her, and the brief, intense fantasy left her a little flushed and short of breath.

  “What other schools are you considering?” she asked him, when the silence stretched a little too long. He was shuffling through the papers he’d brought out, and now he looked up with an apologetic grin.

  “Sorry, got distracted. I guess I’m drifting, more or less. Making my way across the country and stopping in at a bunch of campuses. Started out in Florida, heading for California. Then I’ll make my choice, I suppose. But right now, ASU Rio Verde’s looking pretty good.” He managed to make that sound flirtatious but not obvious, somehow. Maybe it was the very subtle lift of his eyebrow, the shape of his lips (they were, she had to admit, really nice lips). “Although of course there’s the money issue. Got to figure out how I’m paying for all of it.”

  “I hear that. I had to work a lot of part time jobs to save up, and ASU-RV isn’t exactly pricey.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed and looked at the paperwork in front of him again. “I’m working a part time job right now. That’s part of why I’m moving around so much. You know?”

  “Really? What are you doing?”

  “Selling.” He pushed the papers across to her, and she automatically reached out to take them. He laughed in a ruefully charming way. “Magazines. I know, I know, who reads print magazines anymore? But the truth is, we get bonuses for signing up three people a day, and I’ve already got two for today. You could really help me out if you just take one. Plus, you get entered into a drawing.”

  “For money?” She probably sounded disappointed, because she was. So he hadn’t talked to her because he was nice … only because he wanted to sell her something. Besides, she didn’t want money. She wanted something else. Peace of mind, which probably wasn’t included in the raffle.

  “Sorry, no, not cash. A paid vacation to Hawaii. Two weeks including airfare, hotel, meals, everything. They even throw in your own private driver.”

  She stared hard enough to make her eyes burn. “Seriously?”

  “Well, there’s a take-it-in-cash option if you win, but honestly, I don’t recommend it, they’ll short you. The vacation’s really nice—luxury resort and everything.” He reached into his backpack and dug out something else—a brochure. “Here. Take a look.” It was nice. A Hilton, right on the beach. The suite looked bigger than the house Hope had grown up in. “So what do you think? Save my life? We’ve got some inspirational magazines in there too if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  She nodded, not really listening, because a picture of a blond woman about her age captivated her. The woman relaxed on the beach in a bikini, looking happy and at peace. She could imagine herself there, imagine the warm press of the sand beneath her, the tropical sun, the cool ocean spray.

  It looked like … escape. And she so desperately wanted to escape from the wasteland, into the light.

  Elijah had stopped talking, and was looking at her as if he’d asked her a question. She raised her eyebrows. “Um … sorry?”

  “I was just wondering if you had plans later,” he said. “Maybe for dinner.”

  “That’s fast.” She tried to pass it off with a laugh. “From ow, my hand’s burning to dinner in under five minutes.” It was, she had to admit, a vast improvement over the come-ons Brittany’s hookups used on her, but she struggled with the concept. It wasn’t him, it was the idea that she still had some kind of real life, some kind of actual schedule into which he would fit. Dinner. She didn’t remember what a dinner looked like, especially one spent with a boy. No, a man. Young, but clearly every bit his own person. “So, you’re saying I’m saving your life if I order a magazine? Really?”

  For a split second, she could have sworn that there was something dark that flashed through his eyes … something that seemed completely wrong for his calm, easy exterior. But then he shook his head and smiled again. “I just mean you’ll save me from having to get written up for not making quota. What are they going to do, shoot me?”

  And just like that, she flashed back to …

  The taste of the coffee with too much cream heavy in her mouth, and the shouts, and the crushing panic when she’d realized that it was happening, really happening, and the look on the other faces in the room at the moment the gunshot exploded … and the blood …

  Hope jerked as if she’d saved herself from falling off a steep drop, and gasped for breath. She felt cold, suddenly. Her hands were shaking and her skin looked pale, and when she tried to pick up her water bottle she almost turned it over instead.

  Elijah was looking concerned. “Hope? Are you okay?”

  No. No she was not okay, but she couldn’t explain that, couldn’t explain anything even to herself and certainly not to him. She found herself reaching down and putting a hand on her heavy, stuffed backpack, just to remind herself it was still there.

  “I’m fine,” she lied, and picked up his magazine form. She scanned the images blindly, and picked one at random. “I’ll take that one.”

  His eyebrows rose. “You want … Fit Pregnancy?”

  “No!” She almost knocked over her drink again trying to look more closely at the choices. “I mean … I mean Scientific American. You can stop laughing now.”

  “I’m not,” he said, deadpan, but spoiled it by the crinkles around his eyes as he tried to suppress the smile. Then he burst out with a half-smothered guffaw. She laughed, too, not even meaning to, and felt tears stinging her eyes at the same time. She felt hot and cold and embarrassed and foolish and scared and lost and alone, and she wanted … wanted …

  “I’m sorry,” Elijah said, and got his laughter choked down to a few aftershock chuckles. “But it was too perfect. Sorry, Hope. I’ll put you down for SA. It’s forty dollars a year, is that okay?”

  “Sure,” she said. She took some deep breaths, until she was sure all of her emotions were bottled back up again (though she could feel the pressure pushing at those corks, all the time) before she unzipped the front of her backpack and took out her wallet.

  Crap. Somehow she’d failed to put anything in it. “Um … do you take credit cards?”

  “Nope, I’m sorry,” he said, and he seemed genuinely sorry about it. “Cash. I keep telling them we need those card reader things for our phones, but …”

  “Oh.” Just tell him no. Tell him to go away. Better yet, walk away yourself. The sensible side of her was preaching, but she felt so cold and so alone, and the sensible Hope, the one with the road map and the certainty that everything in life was good and clean—that Hope wasn’t any kind of company on this darker path. She couldn’t face sending Elijah away. Not quite yet. Wasn’t it worth a small risk, to make someone else happy, even if just for a moment? You’re not thinking
of him, Sensible Hope warned her. You’re thinking of yourself. Of how you want him to stay. How you want to go out to dinner with him and forget what happened and be normal again.

  Sensible Hope made her mad. “Hang on,” she told E.J. She hesitated a long moment, then ducked down and slowly, carefully unzipped the middle part of her bag. It was in the shadow of the table, tucked tightly against her leg, but she still cast a glance around to be sure nobody was watching. Paranoia tightened its grip on the back of her neck.

  She eased the zipper open just enough to see the money.

  The sight of the tight-fitting stacks of bills made her feel sick and lightheaded, and she stuck her hand into the opening and blindly tugged two bills free. She slid them across the table to Elijah, then quickly zipped the bag shut again.

  Tried, anyway. The teeth stuck, and as she tried to pull harder with panic bubbling in her blood, the metal zipper tag broke loose and fell to the floor.

  No. No, no, no … She stared at it in frozen horror, lips parted and throat locked on a scream that she managed to throttle, somehow. Close it! Just get it shut! But she couldn’t. The zipper was slowly, inexorably widening under the pressure from the contents. She sucked in a fast breath and remembered that there was a paper clip fastening together the papers that Elijah had handed her. She grabbed for it, and threaded it through the zipper’s tag hole with fingers that were surprisingly steady. One try. Then she pulled, and everything fastened up tight, all her sins and traumas hidden away behind a thick, durable, waterproof layer of canvas.

  “Everything okay?”

  She looked up. Elijah was standing now, leaning on the table with both hands as he tried to see what she was doing. Had he seen? Oh God, she couldn’t tell.

  Hope forced a smile onto her cold, numbed lips. “Fine,” she said. “Sorry. Zipper broke on my backpack. I guess I need a new bag. Hope you don’t mind that I stole your paper clip.”

  He shrugged, reached for the cash, and then did a double take. “Um … I don’t have change,” he said. “And that’s way too much unless you’re signing up for a lifetime subscription.”

  She realized, too late, that the bills she’d pulled hadn’t been twenties. They’d been old, worn, well-faded hundreds. “Oh,” she said numbly. She didn’t want to open the backpack again. It was like Pandora’s Box, and all the awful things in it could spill out. “Just … keep it. Call it a tip.”

  Elijah gave her a long look, but then he pulled the paperwork back, hesitated over the two hundred, and then slid one of the bills back to her. “Thanks for that, Hope. You’re really way too nice, and I can’t keep that. I will keep the change, if you insist—that means a lot to me. And I’ll be happy to sign you up for the magazine,” he said. “But you’ll have to give me your mailing address and phone number, okay? Promise to keep it in strict confidence.” He said it with another of those curious expressions … almost flirtatious, not enough to be creepy, mixed with a little self-aware irony. In other circumstances, she’d have found it charming. Cute, even.

  She grabbed her water, cracked the seal and drank it down; it was just something to do while her mind and body calmed themselves a little. Then she recited her dorm address and her cell number, but her brain was off somewhere else, not even really listening. She could have been giving him her bra size for all she knew, because it was starting to hit her, really hit her, that she was carrying around enough money in her pack to make people willing to kill her for it.

  Especially strangers. And you just gave him your address. It hit her with an icy shock that she’d just made a tremendous, stupid mistake. What if he’d seen what was in her bag? What if he’d known all along, and targeted her because he just wanted to find out where she lived? For God’s sake, Hope!

  She stood up suddenly, hoisting the heavy bag. “I—I have to go,” she blurted out. “I have classes. I’m sorry.”

  Elijah looked at her with such surprise she felt a twinge of guilt, and then his face smoothed into a bland mask. “Sure,” he said. “I understand.” The smile he gave her this time didn’t seem nearly as real as the others. Or maybe she’d never understood that the others had been false all along. He’d made her feel comfortable, safe, but she didn’t know him. Couldn’t know him.

  Couldn’t trust him. Couldn’t trust anyone.

  She bolted.

  Lack of sleep and too much stress made her clumsy, and she almost tripped on the steps heading up to the exit. She looked back once she’d made it to the top, but Elijah Crane was still sitting just where she’d left him, calmly gathering his papers and putting them away, and then sipping his hot tea.

  He wasn’t even looking toward her. And she thought he looked a little sad, but that might have just been her imagination.

  She let herself feel a little safer, just a little, although now it felt as if a spotlight was shining directly on her, and every stray glance from strangers meant they knew something, or at least suspected something. She heard a siren out on the street, beyond the ASU Rio Verde campus, and her heart hammered into high gear, sending painful prickles of adrenaline up and down her arms. She froze in the shadow of a building and listened as the sound dopplered higher, then lower and slower as it passed.

  Not for her, then.

  Yet.

  She walked quickly back to her dorm. The lobby held the usual mix of students making out and students studying, nodding along to their headphones; she hurried past all of them, ducked into the elevator, and headed up to her floor.

  It was quiet. Blessedly quiet. All the doors were shut, and as she walked toward hers, she heard nothing … no moaning, no bed squeaking, no sign of Brittany’s presence at all.

  Hope sucked in a deep breath and put the key in the lock … the wrong one, of course; she had three that looked alike and she never could pick the right one under stress. Once again, she reminded herself to mark it with nail polish or something, but she knew she’d forget as soon as she made it into the room. Especially today, when she could hardly pull herself together at all. Her hands shook, and she bit her lip on a sudden, unexpected sob.

  Come on, Hope. Hold it together. You can cry once you’re inside. Provided Brittany wasn’t there, of course; she couldn’t cry in front of her roommate. That would mean exposing herself to far too much ridicule, and she couldn’t shrug it off right now the way she’d been able to before. Hope felt like a balloon full of misery in a world full of sharp edges. It would only take a tiny cut for all that black despair to just come pouring out. Again. Elijah had seen it in her, bubbling under the surface. She had to learn to hide it better.

  The lip-biting thing wasn’t working. Her hands continued to shake, and she took in a deep, exasperated breath to try to steady herself.

  The door to the stairs behind her opened with a slow wheeze, and she cast a glance over her shoulder as she tried the next key.

  Somehow, she’d known it would be Elijah. That was both creepy and comforting in equal measure.

  As soon as he saw her, the young man stopped and held up both hands in an I surrender gesture. “I know, I know, it looks bad,” he said. “I’m sorry, honest. I’m not stalking you. Look, I can’t take all this cash. The magazine’s actually just twenty, but I told you forty because—yeah, because I’m a scumbag sometimes, and I’m trying to save some money to get the hell out of this gig. I was going to slip the rest under your door. That’s the truth, I swear to God. I didn’t even know you were here. You said you were going to class.”

  He looked so worried that she might scream that she lost any desire to, and instead felt a surge of guilt. She had lied to him, after all. And without much of a qualm, either, because all she’d thought about was getting out of there, both for safety and to cry in peace.

  The urge to cry seemed to have receded , thankfully, but her paranoia was once again trying to surge. She took a deep breath. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” she said. “You were being perfectly nice and I flaked out. I … haven’t been sleeping really well. I think I
’m not myself.”

  “I understand that,” he said. “Lack of sleep, I mean. Seems like I never really get enough.” He laughed a little, but it didn’t sound amused. He did seem tired, she realized. There were subtle signs of it, shadows around his eyes that she recognized in herself. “Can I give this back …?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out folded bills, which he offered.

  “Keep it,” she said. “It’s okay. Honest. I’d rather you have it.”

  His arm sagged down a little, but he didn’t put the cash away. “Are you sure? I don’t want to rip you off if you need it.”

  She knew how she looked. She always tried to dress neatly, and today she was wearing a khaki skirt that ended at her knees and a plain white button-down, but the skirt was old and well-washed, and her walking shoes were scuffed and clearly in need of replacement. The shirt’s cuffs were fraying. She looked like what she had been a couple of days ago: a poor, struggling college student working hard to pay for her education.

  She also looked like she’d slept in these clothes, and in fact, she had. More than once.

  A (probably) sketchy guy selling magazines was feeling sorry for her and trying to give her money. What would be next? The homeless offering to spot her a meal?

  Hope couldn’t help it: she laughed. It started out as a burst of uncontrolled, wild amusement—bitter and black, but still there—and then she couldn’t stop, even when she covered her mouth with one hand. She felt out of control and shaky, and even though she was standing on the solid floor of the dorm, she felt as if it was ice, cracking under her feet. Slick, treacherous ice and a bottomless drop into the cold, cold deep.

  She just … grayed out. She wasn’t aware of falling, but suddenly she came back to herself with her back against the door of her room, the keys swaying gently in the lock above her head, and Elijah was crouched in front of her.

  Oh. She was sitting down now. He looked worried, and his palm was so warm where it cupped her face. His lips were moving. She couldn’t really put together what he was saying, but it was nice to watch. He had full lips, and she wondered if he would taste of tea. That would be interesting. She wanted to reach out and touch those lips, see if they were as soft and smooth as they looked. She really liked his mouth.