Swallowing down my childish desire to be loud just to counteract his quiet, I bite my tongue and wait for him to offer more of an explanation than just yes. But he doesn’t. Instead, he lets the silence stretch, making me more and more uneasy with every second that passes.
“Why do you follow me on social media?” I finally ask when I can’t stand staying quiet a moment longer.
“Because you returned to Rapid City to collect your belongings and didn’t come home.”
I wait again, but that’s it. I didn’t come back to Rockhead Point, so he learned everything he could about me without me even being there. Is that weird? It feels weird, but then not at the same time.
I don’t know anything about him apart from the fact that he’s sexy in a scarily cold kind of way. But even in his anonymity, he still doesn’t strike me as an active social media user. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he has his own thirst trap YouTube channel where he dresses in fatigues, then the lights go out and he reappears doused in red light, shirtless, his fabulous abs glistening in the shadow.
My eyes drop to his lap, and an inappropriate whimper falls from my lips as I imagine how hard and delicious his anatomy a little lower than his abs might be.
“Little Doll,” he says…chidingly? Amused? It’s hard to decipher what he’s thinking and feeling because his face is expressionless.
His lack of emotion is disconcerting because, despite dressing in black, liberally using black eyeliner, and embracing a goth aesthetic, I’ve never hidden from my emotions or pretended to be apathetic. I know sometimes goths are portrayed as perpetually miserable, but that’s not me. Emotions are a spectrum that my parents taught me to explore and to embrace. I laugh, I cry, and I feel everything, both good and bad.
So when Knight listed my parents’ deaths like they were mere bullet points in my life, I felt a fresh surge of the constant and familiar longing for them. Even though I lost my dad ten years ago and my mom six years ago, their loss still feels almost as raw and omnipresent as it did the day they slipped from my life. Honestly, I don’t think the pain of losing them will ever go away, and I kind of hope it doesn’t. I don’t want to forget them or how they helped me become who I am.
But who am I?
I used to know. I used to be so sure, so confident in myself and my beliefs. But Abel has made me question everything I thought I knew about myself. He did it last year and then again since I stupidly allowed him back into my life, and now I feel adrift in my own skin.
A part of me wants to blame Abel for how I feel, but I let him chip away at the things that make me, me. I let him erode me until I don’t recognize myself, until I lost myself to him.
Every time I’ve looked at myself in the last two weeks, I haven’t looked or felt like me. I feel outside of myself, disconnected from who I thought I was, and I have no idea how to piece myself back together, or what I’ll look like once my puzzle is complete again.
“I’ll help,” Knight says, dragging me once again from my self-recriminations and answering a question neither of us has asked.
But I don’t argue or tell him I don’t want or need his help. Instead, I nod because, even though it makes no sense, hishelpthis morning has made me feel more connected to who I thought I was than I have in weeks. Hishelpis confusing and intense, but because of it, I already feel stronger. So I nod in agreement, because even though he’s a stranger, I have a feeling that if anyone can fix me, it’s him.
I’m not sure what drives me to do it, but relinquishing my death grip on the seat beneath me, I reach over and take his hand. Bracing for rejection, I tense, but instead of pulling away, he curls his fingers around mine and holds me tightly.
I wouldn’t call myself a chatterbox, but my distaste for silence does lead to me talking rather than sitting quietly. But oddly, when Knight doesn’t say anything, I don’t either, and it’s not uncomfortable. Instead, the total lack of sound and the weight of his fingers curled around mine is comforting.
After a while, the silence becomes peaceful. When we start to descend, and Knight speaks into the radio, his voice shocks me, and I flinch, trying to drag my hand free of his. When a staticky voice bursts from the speakers, the sound shatters the bubble of calm and makes the intimacy of holding his hand feel wrong.
Instead of releasing me, Knight’s grip tightens, and he places our joined hands onto his thigh, spreading my palm over his leg and holding it in place. He doesn’t turn and look at me, but his body language exudes enough dominance that it fills the cockpit, and I’m not sure I could move my hand away if I tried.
My stomach dips as the airplane continues to slowly descend toward the ground, and even after Knight lifts his hand from on top of mine, I find myself gripping his thigh for comfort as I close my eyes and fight the urge to assume the brace position.
I don’t open them again until I feel the wheels hit the tarmac and Knight’s warm hand covers mine again. We taxi along the runway for a few minutes before he steers the plane toward a huge domed hangar, slowing to a stop once we’re parked inside. Flipping a handful of switches on the panel, the engines go quiet while he writes something down on a sheet of paper inside a binder he pulls out from a pocket at the side of his seat.
I don’t ask what he’s writing, and he doesn’t offer an explanation. Instead, once he’s finished, he closes the binder, lifts my hand from his thigh, and curls his palm around mine before entwining our fingers together.
Standing from his seat, he tugs me up, places the binder on his now-empty chair, and leads me out of the cockpit and into the main body of the plane. Impressively, he doesn’t let go of my hand as he unlocks and opens the exit door and pushes the stairs out, before leading me carefully down them and onto the ground.
Letting go of my hand after a tight squeeze, he climbs into the plane again and reemerges, carrying my suitcase. The moment he’s beside me, he takes my hand again, towing my case with the other as he leads us into a small office. The man seated behind the desk eyes me curiously, but before he can speak, Knight hands him the keys to the plane, tells him the flight log is in the cockpit, then tugs me away.
“Who does the plane belong to?” I ask quietly as he leads me out of the hangar and toward a parking lot.
“It’s mine.”
“Holy shit,” I mouth silently. I have no idea how much a plane like that would cost, but it must be a lot, and really, who owns their own plane? Who is this man?
Without speaking, Knight walks us over to where a massive black SUV is parked in the corner of the lot. No, it’s not just anSUV. It looks like a freaking tank—huge, and completely black, with fully blacked-out windows.
“This is your car?” I squeak.
“Yes,” he states bluntly as he opens the passenger door. Using our entwined hands, he pulls me toward him, then lifts me off my feet and places me onto the seat.
