by Rebel Farris
I inhaled, not knowing what to say. What was there to say? All we could ever be was a snapshot. A moment frozen in time. Something that would live imprinted on our memories but couldn’t exist in reality. It was too fleeting for that. He was meant for bigger things, and I was meant to live out my days in my small, meaningless corner of existence.
Unbidden tears welled in my eyes, and I breathed deep to banish them. I pressed my lips to his again to hide the emotion bubbling up. When I pulled back, I searched for something to say to distract from the moment.
“You never told me how you knew… what to do… all the work you did on this truck.” I struggled to put my thoughts into words.
He huffed an amused breath from his nose before speaking. “When I joined the military as a young boy, I was a mechanic. It wasn’t until my commanding officer noticed that I had a gift for languages that I was moved to Intelligence.”
I tipped my head back, staring at the ceiling of the truck cabin. “How does a mechanic become a spy?”
He made a quiet, low hum, like he was searching his memory for the answer. “I never really gave it a thought. It was a series of events in my life that built off of the next. But now… I think it was no less than fate. It brought me here—to you.”
I smiled, but I couldn’t look at him. “I should get going.” I choked out through the ball of emotions lodged in my throat.
He sighed before he pulled me toward him for one last kiss—to my lips, my forehead—and then he was gone. The door to the truck shut, and I put it in gear. I tried to fight the urge to look, but it was too much. I watched him grow smaller in the rearview mirror until the driveway turned and he disappeared from view.
The quiet hum of the truck’s engine and the clank of rocks kicking up from the tires felt heavy, oppressive. Solid reminders that I was once again alone. I reached over and flicked the radio on. It was on a local country music station, playing Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson’s story about Pancho and Lefty.
Letting it play, I listened to that song, and the next and the next. Almost as if I got to keep a piece of him through his horrible taste in music.
Sleep had eluded me since the brief nap in the alcove. The heat and the soothing voices started getting to me. I rolled down the window a smidge, letting the cold whip through the top of my hair, and pulled my sunglasses over my eyes.
I didn’t know it was possible, but the farther I drove down the desolate country road, the more jaded and hardened I felt. It leached into my bones, a sort of numbing apathy. My time with him had forever marked me, though not in the way he’d meant it.
Reaching in my purse, I felt the cool metal of the gun he let me keep. I was definitely not the same girl who’d tripped over that body in the woods. I was something more. But if that more was something good, only time would tell.
Home
When I pulled into the driveway in front of my trailer, Joanne and Billy were out on their front porch, screaming and yelling as usual. But at the sound of my truck tires crunching the gravel driveway, they both stopped, staring as I got out.
I ducked my head to hide from their watchful eyes as I darted to my door. Pulling the spare key out from its hiding spot, taped to the bottom of the deck boards on my front porch, I took a moment to peek over at them. Their eyes strayed back and forth from the truck to me. When my hands found the key, I nearly cried in relief.
I’ll have to find a new place to hide a spare key.
When I closed the door behind me, I could hear their murmurs. They weren’t low-volume people, so I knew the chatter was about me. But I guess after being gone for more than a month and showing up in a new vehicle, I was something of interest in their small, monotonous world. It would pass.
I rubbed my hands up and down my goose bump-prickled arms. When I’d last been here it wasn’t cold outside, so the AC was still on. Not that it was actually running at that moment with near-freezing temps outside. It really did make it feel like I’d been gone longer. We’d officially moved from fall, which felt more like summer in Texas, to winter. Not that winter was dramatic or long-lived. But it was a shock to the system when you were used to the year-round heat.
I sighed into the quiet stillness, watching dust motes glitter in the early-afternoon light. Home. It was exactly the way I’d left it, but it didn’t feel quite the same. It felt off. I just couldn’t put my finger on what that was.
A yawn cracked my jaw as I crossed the room to the short hall where the thermostat was. Once the heat kicked on, and that odd smell of burning dust filled the room, followed by warm air rising from the vents in the floor, I walked into my bedroom and pulled up the comforter that rested at the foot of the bed until it covered the whole bed, then stripped out of all my clothes and dove in. My mind had shut down the second I entered my house. Now, I was coasting on autopilot.
I shivered under the covers, rubbing my feet together to stifle the chill. As heat filled the room and my body warmed the space under the blankets, I drifted into a dreamless, restless sleep.
When I gave up and let my eyes stay open, the sun was setting. I lay in bed watching the shadows grow longer across the ceiling. My mind was drifting—a thoughtless, listless pool of nothing. The heater cut off, and the silence thrummed in my ears, growing louder with each passing second. It was the kind of loud that only exists in silence, screaming at me.
Something was off. Nothing felt right. I was happy to be home, sleeping in my own bed, surrounded by my meager belongings, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was that was bothering me. My thoughts felt disjointed, disconnected.
I knew what I needed to do, as much as I dreaded the thought. I needed to go to the diner. I needed to see if my job was salvageable.
Oscar, the owner, was a grumpy, irritable sort on a good day. I doubt he’d be pleasant about my disappearance. Which also brought me to the thought that I needed a good story. I couldn’t tell the truth. No one would believe it. It would likely just cause more anger at my thoughtless vanishing act.
I could always say my car broke down and caught fire in the middle of the countryside, and it took well over a month to hike back. No. I would’ve starved to death.
What the fuck was even a believable excuse for disappearing for more than a month and then expecting to resume life as it was before, like nothing even happened?
Bending the truth was always an option. I went hiking, my car was stolen, and a nice man let me stay with him until he fixed his truck and gave it to me.
And why did he do that? I hadn’t questioned it because I really didn’t know how I was going to get by without a vehicle. Everything was too spread out not to have a car. Though I supposed if I tried, I could walk to work, and it would only take a few hours. But he was now stuck out there, with no option to leave. Maybe he could call the people on that phone for a ride. Or maybe he was expecting them. Would he be in danger?
Ugh. Why am I even thinking about that? Xander is not my… I didn’t even know what. But I knew I needed to forget everything about that place, for my own safety.
He was just a nice man, with a few broken-down cars, who’d fixed one for me, but it had taken a month. He didn’t have a phone, so I couldn’t call.
Ugggh. I pulled at my hair.
Nothing about what happened was even remotely believable as a good excuse. Trying to save my job was most likely an exercise in futility. Oscar would probably laugh at me as he booted my ass out the door. There just weren’t a lot of options, other than to try and explain and beg for forgiveness.
With that as decided as it would ever be, I crawled out from the bed and darted into the bathroom. Turning on the shower, I hopped back and forth between each foot, rubbing my hands on my arms to fight off the cold. The second steam started curling into the air, I jumped into the shower, nearly slipping, to get into the hot stream of water.
Steam curled into the air as I leaned back into the water, letting the soothing heat penetrate my skin and relax my muscles. I was slightly sore from
climbing down a cliff and sleeping on a rock less than twenty-four hours ago. Without looking, I reached down to the corner of the tub, picking up the bottle of shampoo. I flipped open the cap to squirt some into my hand but drew up short when the smell invaded my senses.
Peaches.
Holding the bottle out at arm’s length, I glared at it. The scent was so strong. How had I forgotten that I owned peach-scented shampoo and conditioner? But it wasn’t exactly peach. It was a fruity essence, but the peaches were overwhelming the whole scent. I looked around, which was silly because I already knew that I didn’t have an alternative set of shampoo and conditioner. Just the one. I was going to have to suck it up and spend what was left of the day smelling like the one thing that would be a constant reminder of him.
I hurried through the rest of my shower and stepped out with one foot, grabbing the towel off the hook. When I moved back into the shower to avoid dripping water everywhere, I slipped, lost my balance, and crashed to the tub floor. One foot still hung over the tub’s edge, and I found myself staring up at the ceiling with an ache in the back of my head.
“Son of a bitch.” I hauled myself up out of the tub and finished drying off. “It’s not like I’m clumsy.”
I meant it. I’d never done that before. And then it hit me that I was talking to myself. I shook my head at myself and was suddenly dizzy. I braced my hand on the wall and closed my eyes. My stomach roiled, and a pressure built just under my throat.
I turned back into the bathroom and collapsed to my knees in front of the toilet. Fumbling to open the lid, I heaved several times before it finally bubbled up. Yellow bile. Nothing else. I dry heaved for several seconds more before my stomach settled. I rubbed the tender spot at the back of my head.
Shit. I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought. I glared at the offending bathtub. Going to a hospital was out of the question; I’d no insurance and no money. How had I made it through a really dangerous situation unscathed, only to injure myself taking a damn shower? I probably just needed to eat something. The last thing I ate was that egg while sitting in the alcove. It had been well over twelve hours.
I was sure that any food in the house had spoiled. I pulled myself up from the floor. Just another reason to go to the diner. I needed to eat… and hopefully, save my job.
Battleship
I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot at half past five. It was too early for the dinner rush, too late for lunch patrons. Out of habit, I drove around to park in the back, turned off the engine, and listened to the steady tick tick of the cooling metal as I breathed deep, trying to steel myself.
I wasn’t a liar. I didn’t like being put into the position to have to do it. But I wasn’t stupid enough to not see the necessity of it in this case. Even then it didn’t sit well. My stomach was twisted into knots. Though, that could’ve been a side effect from the bump on my head.
Threading my fingertips into my hair, I felt the lump. I took a breath. I could smell him everywhere. That combination of cedar, engine grease, and male, haunting me. And even if my rational brain knew it was the truck his scent clung to, I could still close my eyes and see that strong jaw laced with evening stubble. His denim-blue eyes, watching me…
Suck it up. Let’s get this show on the road.
The door creaked as I swung it open. Walking around to the front of the strip center, I stopped in front of the frame shop. There was a different Ansel Adams print hanging in the window display. It didn’t bring me the same joy as it used to. It was still a pretty landscape from a distant yet beautiful place, the dark, almost black sky framing the cliff face filled with so many shades of detailed lines. The man made black-and-white photos look like they contained more colors than the rainbow.
But the darkness in his photos is what drew me to photography in the first place. The stormy skies and monotones made me feel less alone. The solitude of the viewer looking at a photo of simple untouched nature—it felt comfortable, like he understood me. Even his predominantly white works held a moodiness that most people wouldn’t understand. They’d see the snow and not the shadows.
I’d spent countless hours at the library looking up his work after the first print appeared in the frame shop’s window. It was that ability to convey emotion, to say more than words with just nature and a spectrum of grays—from black to white—that’s what I’d wanted to do.
As impressive as it still was, and even though I’d been eying this one since the girls had bought me Vernal Fall, I couldn’t see myself wanting it anymore. I really didn’t know why. It wasn’t any less impressive. The darkness and emotions were still there. The black-and-white photo of the giant cliff made me think of my own encounters with a much smaller cliff that wasn’t quite so anonymous, and then my mind drifted back to him.
Wendy, the frame shop’s owner, looked up from behind the counter when she spotted me and waved with a warm smile. I tried to smile back, but my mind was off in a dark place and the effort fell flat.
My tennis shoes scuffed the pavement as I turned quickly on my heel and hurried away, trying to ignore the way her face fell at the look on mine. Maybe I shouldn’t have done this today. I should’ve waited a day or two. Got my bearings back before attempting to greet people and be social.
Just to the left of the diner’s entrance hung a “Help Wanted” sign. I sucked in a breath and tried to suppress the hope that Oscar would let me have my job back. My head was filled with visions of him laughing in my face, even if I’d never actually seen the man laugh in all the years I’d known him. It just felt like something someone would do to a girl who disappeared for a month and attempted to get her job back with a shoddy excuse.
To tell the truth, I really didn’t know what to expect as I opened the glass door, greeted by the tinkle of the doorbells and the familiar smell of greasy foods.
“Holy shit.” Tia gasped, her jaw dropping as her emerald eyes pinned me in place by the door. “I quit,” she hollered over her shoulder. “You hear that, Oscar?” She tugged hastily at her apron.
Oscar looked up from the papers spread before him in a booth, and when his gaze landed on me, his eyebrows rose a fraction.
“You are not quitting on me. What’s going on?” Rachel said, as she walked out of the hallway leading to the kitchen access and halted in her tracks.
Her jaw went slack as she paused for a moment that felt like hours before she mumbled, “You’re alive?” At the sound of her own voice, she unfroze and shoved past Tia, nearly knocking her friend over as Tia grappled to remove her apron. “You’re alive!”
All five feet two inches of the way-too-perky blonde crashed into me. My breath rushed out involuntarily as she squeezed with a strength that belied her petite frame. She let go and leaned back, clasping my cheeks in her hands, her hazel eyes glassy with unshed tears as she searched over my face and my body. Then she tugged me back into a hug, burying her face in my neck.
“Where the fuck have you been? You had me worried sick.” Her voice was muffled by my hair, and it made me huff a laugh. She drew back, glaring. “I’m not kidding. I went to the sheriff. Course they couldn’t do nothin’ about it, useless bastards.”
A throat cleared next to us. “Don’t I deserve a hug too? I mean, I’m the one who’s been working in this hellhole since you left. Antonio told me last night that I smelled like a mannaggia hamburger. That is so gross. Your job should never overpower your Chanel.” Tia’s gorgeous face wrinkled into a frown, marring her smooth olive-toned skin.
Rachel and I held an arm out and she wrapped her arms around both of us. We stood there like that for a few moments—a few too long moments, and it began to feel awkward. I didn’t know what to do with it. Stay and continue a hug that had passed its prime, or break away and risk offending one or both of them?
Tia pulled back first and wiped at her eyes, turning away to stare out the window. “I’m glad you’re all right. We both worried about you.”
I tilted my head and watched her. She was
n’t being dramatic. Neither was Rachel. They both seemed genuine. It almost felt like a punch to the gut—the realization that they’d cared if I disappeared. I’d felt like we’d drifted so far apart since they both married and had kids. They had families, and all I had was them. I was the loner and always felt like the fifth wheel, on the outside. Like they tolerated me, but I wasn’t important. A feeling that could only be described as guilty relief coursed through me. Guilt because I had discounted their feelings so much, but relief that my life wasn’t as dismal as I thought.
I didn’t realize I was crying until Rachel leaned forward and wiped the tears off my face. Taking my hand, she led me toward a booth. It was the one right next to Oscar’s usual spot, though he had gone back to whatever he was working on, paying no attention to us.
There were no customers in the place, aside from Ethel and June, two older ladies that came in with various games and drank hot tea, while chatting and playing. This time, it looked to be Battleship. But with the teapot between them and a container of tea bags, they wouldn’t need anything anytime soon.
Why am I even thinking about that? I didn’t work here anymore. I didn’t need to worry about when the customers would need something and if I’d enough time to sit before I was needed again.
“Sit.” Rachel shoved me toward the seat and slid in across from me. Tia pushed her in farther as she sat next to Rachel. “Tell us where you’ve been. What happened? You’re obviously upset, but you seem healthy enough, other than the fact that you look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
I bit my lip, frowning. I didn’t know where to start. “I… I went hiking. On my day off. I bought a camera and drove out to the country to take some pictures.”
Rachel nodded. “Little John told us that you bought the camera. He was convinced that you ran off to Hollywood to become a photographer.” She shook her head. “I tried telling him that you go to Hollywood to become an actress; photographers don’t need to go anywhere.”
