I’m not sure what I’m expecting pulling up outside 3480 Valencia Road, but it’s not the sight that greets me.
I brake outside the small home that clearly needs better care (the grass is uncut and dying and the paint’s peeling), and notice the girl perched on the front steps. She staggers to her feet, mascara streaked down her face and her complexion sicklier than usual.
She shuffles across the pavement clutching her tiny purse and phone in one hand and her pair of heels in the other.
It’s as she gets closer that I notice all the other unsettling details about her appearance.
The dress ripped at the hem. The medley of purple and blue coloring along her throat and the other bruise on her knee. Her puffy, bloodshot eyes and the way she struggles to even open the door, like she’s still not all the way sober.
My stomach pits, those protective instincts magnifying by a thousand. I’m half a second away from jumping out of the truck and running around to the other side to help her in when she finally manages to crawl into the seat.
Her purse and heels slip from her fingers and tumble to the floor of the cab. She plops down into the seat and fumbles with the seatbelt for so long I reach over and grab her hand to stop her. A simple touch, yet one that jolts us both at once from the skin-on-skin contact.
She goes still, her misty dark eyes flicking over to mine. Even more up close, I can see all the other telltale signs she’s in distress. Tears she’s holding in. The subtle quiver of her bottom lip. Makeup that long ago faded. Some of it smeared, like her mascara.
Immediately I have an urge to wrap her up in a warm blanket and shield her from the rest of the world. I want to makeanything and everything that’s gone wrong better somehow. Not that I know her well, but it’s an instant and intrinsic urge that comes on so strong, I can feel it pulsing through me.
Whatever the fuck happened to this girl last night, I need to know about it. I need to make it right.
It’s easy to act out of impulse. Go shooting off at the hip. Let baser emotions and compulsions drive me. But I force myself to keep calm—for her benefit too—and start off where it makes sense.
“Are you sure you’re alright, Solana?” I ask. “Are you hurt anywhere?”
She can’t seem to look me in the eye. Her eyelashes flutter as she blinks then drops her gaze to some indiscriminate point in between us, like the gears. Slowly she shakes her head and then mumbles, “I didn’t mean to spend the night.”
“Spend the night with who? Whose house is that?”
“My friends’.”
I study the way her behavior shifts and the cues she gives. I’m twice her age, a father of two, and the president of a biker gang—I’m pretty damn good at picking up on tells. She starts picking at the torn fabric of her dress, brows knitting like she’s thinking up her story.
“Friends,” I repeat. “What kind of friends?”
She shakes her head and mutters names like, “Shay, Yvette, and… and some others…”
Some others, alright.
Something tells me those some others are of the opposite sex.
“How’d your dress rip, Solana?” I ask.
“I… I fell. I was drunk, okay? I know I shouldn’t have been drinking, but I had a few and got clumsy and fell in my heels.”
“And that’s where the bruises are from?”
She quickly nods.
She’s lying. Either she doesn’t want to tell me the truth, or she doesn’t even know the truth herself.
My money’s on the latter.
The girl’s still tipsy. I can tell in how uncoordinated she is, see it in her watery, unfocused eyes, and even faintly smell it on her breath.
But she’s not going to tell me much more than she already has. Not right now, parked out in front of the house she just escaped.
“Do you want me to take you home?” I ask.
Again she nods, this time slower.
