by Fiona Keane
It all flooded back to me—the moment I first saw her, when I went to her house to kidnap her, talking on the beach, our first kiss, always running after her…killing Simon with her. Shit. That snapped me out of it. My fingers painfully combed through my hair, stopping at my eyes to violently rub my hormones back to a level zero. Opening my eyes to the blurry view, I noticed Soph hadn’t moved. She was still staring up at the moldy ceiling while her clothed body weighed with the cold water.
“Soph.” I reached out to her without reply. “Soph?”
Her arms were freezing. The water wasn’t as cold as I had thought, considering her arms were icicles. Her eyes wandered down from the ceiling in response to my touch. I watched her expression, waiting for anything.
“Sophia?”
Her lips twitched in response, barely able to smile, but telling me she was in there. Somewhere. She was so lost and, again, I had dropped weight on her, demanding that she marry me. I watched her swallow, the length of her throat shivering as she inhaled.
“Jameson.”
“Yes.” My eyes lit up, pulling my body into the shower with her, inching close to dangerously deviant within her presence under the water. Soph’s hands climbed to my chest, holding my filthy skin beneath her wrinkled palms.
“I don’t want to wait,” she whispered against my chest, the cascading water muffling her voice as it poured around us.
“Soph,” I groaned, killing myself to keep sane.
All I wanted was Sophia. All I needed was Sophia. Yet, seeing the lost girl, the lonely vacancy behind her eyes warned me. It screamed at me to protect her, to not consume her, but to savor her. Slowly.
“No.” I shook my head, kneeling against the slimy floor of the shower, grabbing her hands tightly in my own. “You haven’t answered me. I can’t even think of anything else until you answer me.”
“You never asked me a question, Jameson.”
True. I didn’t. But here I am, on my knees, holding her hands while our bodies dripped of brown and red.
“Will you marry me, Sophia? Because until you do, I cannot…I will not…shit. Soph, I won’t ruin you.”
“Ruin me?”
My head shook, sadly thinking of what expectations I had already damaged for her. I had taken her friends, her family, graduation, college, everything. Whatever came next, whatever Soph expected for us, needed to be undeniably amazing. It had to be as exquisite as my heart knew Sophia could be. Just one taste…no. I squeezed her hands even tighter, pulling myself back to reality while my knees ached.
“I love you,” I told her, my eyes narrowing with solemnity. “I will always love you. I will love you until I die.”
“You almost did die, Jameson! You almost died!”
“But Sophia…” I rose, pulling her against me. “I didn’t. I’m here. I am right here with you. This is me.” I held her hands to my chest, hoping she could absorb the violent beat of my heart beneath my skin.
“Feel this,” I pressed. “This is me. This is us. We’re together.”
Her head shook. “I don’t want to miss out on our life together, Jameson. I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to live with regret. I need you so much.”
Dammit, Sophia, you have no idea.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sophia
My skin felt dry beneath the cold water that fell upon my face. It was a peculiar sensation, having stood for so long beneath its penetrating spray that my skin no longer felt it. The only feeling I recognized was Jameson.
“Stay with me,” his voice mumbled against my neck. “Soph.”
Had I left? My eyes wandered down, following the movement of his head as my neck had bent backward. I left. Standing here, in his arms, beneath the shower, I disappeared.
“Jameson.”
His face lifted from the sensitized skin beneath my ear, warm pools of hazel cautiously eyeing me. “You’re back.”
“I’m so sorry.” My cheeks reddened, possessed with embarrassment. “I don’t even…I’m so…”
Jameson’s lips again silenced me, buffering any continued thought while he allowed my brain to slow. My hands were clinging to his chest, clean of the damage from Oregon. I pressed my forehead into the hollow of his collarbone, almost collapsing against him with a heavy sigh. I was still in my jeans. We were clothed, but for his missing shirt, standing in the glacial shower of a truck stop just an hour outside of the future.
“Soph,” he whispered, his right arm leaving me to turn off the water. “You just froze. You stopped talking to me and…froze.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I mumbled, my body stiffening with the chill taking over the family restroom.
“You can answer me.” His body lowered, his face looking for my buried expression.
Jameson’s warmth disappeared as he stepped from the shower, dripping with water. His skin was clean of the blood, but I knew his mind wasn’t. While I watched him sort through his school bag for my clothes and pull mounds of paper towels from the dispenser, my body began to shiver. I noticed the horror inflicted upon him.
“Jamie…” My voice shook. “Your body…”
He stopped reaching for paper towels and looked at me impassively, as though I had lost my mind.
“All wounds heal, Soph,” he muttered before returning to the paper towels. He began sifting through the stack of them, using wads to dry his hair and bare chest.
Jameson’s neck was dark, violet, and crimson from Simon’s choking hold. I hadn’t spotted it before; I had been driven by my need for him, too focused on him to notice.
He laughed, his back toward me while he pulled on a black t-shirt. “Stop staring.”
I turned around, climbing from the shower with my back toward Jameson as he reached for the waistband of his saturated pants.
“D-D-Do you have…pants?” God, Sophia. He laughed, a warm chuckle in the background of the disturbingly awkward symphony.
“Yes, Soph. I have pants.”
I nodded to myself, growing more frigid as each moment passed while I stood in the center of the restroom, dripping onto the floor. The only noise aside from my chattering teeth was the sound of Jameson shuffling through our things and changing behind me.
The paper towels sounded rough as he collected more from the dispenser. My eyes sauntered down, glaring helplessly at the pulsating bruises forming along my wrists. Someone is going to ask questions. My right fingers tickled against the darkest mark along my left wrist, pausing when Jameson’s hands wrapped around both of my wrists, paper towels squished between our skin. It was a rough barrier that I wanted eliminated. I wanted to feel the warmth of his forearm and hands against my trembling arms.
Once he began to peel the soaking shirt from my arms, feeling the patient, unwavering love behind his actions, all I could do was close my eyes and wait. His chest left my back, leaving an emptiness in his wake as he approached my front while holding the cuffs of my shirt. He was pulling my sleeves toward him, letting my arms slip through the holes and drop at my sides.
“Just stay still,” he whispered, dangerously close to my ear.
I complied, my body paralyzed with an indescribable emotion, something my mind refused to fathom. After all of it, after everything, my heart belonged to Jameson. I trusted him. The hands lifting my shirt from my body, pulling off the wet jeans adhered to my legs, those were the gentle, delicate hands of the man I loved. Who also just killed someone. Those hands took a life, but also consumed mine.
Jameson was behind me, beneath me. I could feel his hands on my calves, lifting the opposite leg to slip my foot through the hole of my pants. He patted my legs with his piles of paper towels, lifting away the memory of Oregon now contained in droplets of water. He grumbled a little, wincing as he stood from kneeling below me, and I heard him toss out the paper towels. Opening my eyes, I saw his hand extended toward me, carrying my dry clothes.
“Get dressed.” Jameson stared at me, his hair pressed over his forehead in a damp
mess and his eyes glowing with exhaustion.
His stare never left mine, never glancing over my figure to acknowledge the fact I was standing in my underwear, which was still wet. I couldn’t take my eyes from him. I gazed with my mouth gaping open, speechless, while his hands combed through his wet hair once I had taken my clothes from his grasp. I hurried to get changed, goosebumps taking over my complexion the longer I stood staring at him. He was going through his school bag when I had finished flipping the hem of my shirt over my waistband.
“You look beautiful.” He turned toward me, pulling the strap of his school bag over his chest.
“So do you.” I looked up at him. “Thank you…for helping me get dry…” It was amazingly intimate. The restraint he held upon himself, the gentle way he cared for me while he held my soul together.
“Don’t mention it.” His lips quickly met my forehead before he took my wrists in his hands and let his lips linger along the darkening reminder of how close we came to losing each other. “I love you.”
Nodding my agreement, again unable to speak at the risk of opening my mouth and throwing up or convulsing against the floor in a fit of tears, I wrapped my arms around Jameson’s waist. He was warm, dry, protective. With our belongings in tow, and me beneath his right arm, we left the restroom and returned to the car. I had forgotten about the disaster I left on the floor of the passenger seat.
“I got it.” He smiled, watching my eyes as the door opened.
He knelt down, pulling our wet clothes from the strap of his bag, and mopped up my vomit. I clung to the door while he jogged to the trash near a payphone, returning to me just as swiftly. It was so quick. He washed us, cleaned us, dried us, and just threw out the last tangible reminder of that day. Our soiled clothes were gone. Now we only had our wounds, internal and external, all of which, with Jameson, I knew would heal.
“Soph?” His voice rang with urgency as his fingers trailed along my forearm.
“Sorry.” I snapped from my daze. “Ready to go?”
“Anywhere.” He kissed my forehead before helping me climb down into the car.
Anywhere. He spoke of such promise and, observing the determination in his warm eyes as he waited for me to buckle in, I knew he meant it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jameson
Soph passing out the minute I merged back onto I-5 was a blessing and a curse. I wanted her to sleep. Lord knows she needed that, and so much more, but my mind was spinning with worry about why she wouldn’t answer me. The silence consumed me, waiting for her to wake and tell me she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me. I already knew that, of course, we were hopelessly intertwined, but my heart was twisting nervously, almost painfully, with the fear of rejection. I was perpetually guilty of going one step too far when she was already barely treading water in my arms.
Her hands were bound within her lap, the inside of her wrists hidden against her legs while we sped closer to the Canadian border. Lifting my hand from the gearshift, I reached for her left hand. It was limp. Warm, but limp, flopping sadly within my hold.
She didn’t move, her breathing didn’t even falter. She was out. I hoped, as if I had a say, that she wasn’t locked within a nightmare, caged within the terrorizing confines of her memory.
Intertwining our fingers, my heart softening by the gravity of her touch, I raised her wrist toward my lips. Her bruises were warmer than elsewhere on her skin. I kissed them, gently adding to the burn in hopes of extinguishing the pain.
“Hmm,” she mumbled in her sleep, her wrist turning in my hand.
I glanced at Soph, worried I had woken a sleeping angel, relieved that she had simply turned her sleeping face toward me. It killed me just how beautiful she was. Soph had been wounded, her soul and heart shattered with the scrapes and bruises of her world, but that trauma, her resilience, only magnified her beauty.
Soph’s beauty was like a ripple in the water, never ending and consuming all who were witness to the tsunami that was the glorious blue of her eyes, the soft lips that tickled into a smile when she was comfortable enough to smile around you, or the way her hair glowed in the sun.
The landscape was beginning to change, the Cascades forming their peaks above the horizon and widening paths of pine trees. We were driving almost alongside a massive train carrying carefree tourists across the border.
What the hell just happened? Were we going to talk about it? How do I talk about it with Soph? Dammit. Everything that happened and I had to bombard her. Again.
I willed Soph to wake up, desperate to stop my mind from overanalyzing every mistake I had made, every piece of the horrific puzzle we experienced over the last day alone. Instead, I kept driving, focusing on the merging traffic that slowed from multiple directions as we approached the border crossing.
With Soph still asleep, I slowly released her arm back into her lap and reached with my right hand into the bag at her feet, struggling to steer and collect the new passports I had protected since Memphis. As I entered a lane, sandwiched between semi-trucks, stuck between the past and future with no possibility of escaping our current path, I was now praying for Soph to stay asleep.
I didn’t want her to worry about her bruises, the money, our identities, or anything while we slipped through the border to begin anew. I didn’t want Sophia Reid to wake up in Canada. I wanted Ophelia Black to wake up in Canada. Technically, Sophia Reid did die. However, in her mind, I know she wouldn’t accept that until the border had long since become a memory to us. The blinding red flash of the semi-truck’s brakes switching on before it pulled through inspection yanked me back and my heart began pounding.
I was usually more confident, capable—but the moment the border agent’s eyes caught mine, every miniscule detail of the events at Soph’s house played through my mind, horrific scene by horrific scene. Her wrists, tied to the stove. Soph falling, breaking away from me. The skillet. Losing my air. Soph saving me. Simon’s face breaking beneath my hold. Running. Killing. Living.
“…Sir?” Damn. How long have I been sitting here with him staring at me like a nut?
“Sorry.” I cleared my throat, rolling down my window further. “Here you go.”
My heart was pounding so hard, it could have echoed throughout the BMW’s surround sound. With my eyes fixed on the agent, I watched Soph in my periphery. She hadn’t moved. Please don’t move your arms, Soph.
“You’re coming from the US, huh?”
“Yes.”
“What part?” What did Toby and Matilda write on our paperwork? Shit. Shit. Think.
“Mr. Black?” He glanced beneath his visor, looking into the car at Soph while my mind went haywire.
“Sorry.” I laughed uncomfortably, placing my fingers against my head. “I’ve had a migraine today. Just hoping to get the wife through so she can see Vancouver when she wakes up.”
“That’s still a bit away from here,” he said calmly, eyeing Soph. “Is your wife well?”
“Yes.”
“And her passport is in…ah, yes…congratulations on your marriage. Honeymoon?”
“Yes.” Breathe. Swallow. Think of the future. Think of Sophia. Just get her across. Pull this off, Jameson.
“What are your plans in Vancouver, Mr. Black?”
His brown eyes were fixed on mine, impassive and expectant. I couldn’t tell him the truth. Why is this so difficult right now? Because Soph is passed out, if her wrists move an inch this guy will think I’m a criminal who is kidnapping her. Damn. I am. It’s hard because we just killed someone. We have new identities. Pull it together. Do this for her. Do this for the both of you.
“Visiting the university.” My throat cleared, struggling to maintain composure. “She wants to look at it for graduate school. I’m just coming along for the ride.”
“I see.” His eyes drifted from our paperwork back into the car at Sophia and I. “Would you mind pulling forward to that yellow line up there?”
“Up there?” I pointed toward the
direction in which he referred, my stomach dropping against the floor. No.
“Yes.” Holding our paperwork, the agent stepped from his booth and crossed traffic, motioning for me to pull through and park against the yellow line sprayed on the pavement. At least we’re now in Canada. Breathe. Sophia, stay asleep.
I navigated through the merging traffic, my lungs emerging on the other side of the border with a heavy weight inside of them. I parked along the yellow line, as directed, and found my right hand clutching the gearshift, practically piercing the leather and metal within my grasp. Soph’s hands twitched in her lap, drawing my attention to her. No. No. Stay asleep.
The agent was talking with two other men dressed in similar uniforms, all of whom handled our paperwork. The tallest of the three collected the pile of our passports, the fake marriage certificate, and identification forms before placing it all beneath his left arm and, with his head hanging, slowly made his way toward our car.
“Yes,” Soph mumbled in her sleep. “Of course…of course I will…”
My eyes snapped toward her, panic filling my hyperventilating chest. She couldn’t wake up. Yes? No. The agent’s steps were steadfast, determined, a stride that exuded confidence as he reached my door and motioned for me to step out from the car.
The sun hit my face, a cooler and less invasive feeling than in Florida. It tickled my skin rather than burning against me. The fictional line that divided the United States and Canada was powerful—even the air felt different there. We’re in Canada. We made it.
“Sir,” the new agent addressed me, my attention lifting from the sun to him. “Is…is your wife okay?”
“Of course.” My mouth spread into a smile, the most debilitating charming expression I could muster. “You’re married?”
I glanced at the silver band around his ring finger, which elicited a simple positive response.
“You know how it is as a newlywed.” I laughed, crossing my arms, continuing my pathetic attempts to charm this stranger who now held our lives in his hands—literally. “It was a long night. Couldn’t…well…it was a long night.”
