If this shit wasn’t totally my luck, I didn’t know what was.
Alex stopped suddenly.
Perching my chin on his shoulder, I saw him peek at me out of the corner of his eye for a moment before we suddenly started walking again. “There’s a car coming,” he warned.
Not two minutes later, an engine grumbled from the direction we’d just come, and he moved off to the side where the gravel was lighter.
Just as it was right behind us, someone yelled, “Get a car, assholes!”
The driver had rolled the passenger window down, and I got a real clear view of a middle finger being shot at us from a lifted, older-model pickup with a small, blue flag mounted to the rear window. With another bark of the muffler, the truck picked up even more speed as it shot down the road, leaving us in a big cloud of dust that had me closing my eyes and holding my breath.
I hadn’t even realized that Alex had stopped walking, but the second the dust settled, he started moving again.
I glared at the taillights way up ahead. “Is it hard not to destroy people like that?”
He sounded dead serious as he replied, “It makes me feel better to know I can.”
“Did you see the Trinity flag?”
Alexander huffed.
Fucking hypocrites.
I hoped he got a flat tire.
We made it down the road; then his body tensed beneath mine. “Someone is up ahead.”
I tensed, squeezing his throat with my forearm before I realized I was choking him and loosened my hold. “Someone bad?” I whispered like they could hear me.
His gaze was focused straight ahead. “No, a couple in their driveway,” he explained quietly. “Don’t say anything.”
I pressed my lips together and clung to him, knowing what came out of our mouths wasn’t going to be the problem. He was still barefoot and covered in three different shades of Earth. I was in sleep pants and a flannel, with a dirty backpack perched on my shoulders that was filled with my damp clothes and a slightly expired can of beans I’d ended up taking from the last house.
We were a fucking mess.
I hugged him a little tighter.
“What are you shivering for? It’s not that cold,” he grumbled.
Now he wanted to get chatty again? I glared at him out of the corner of my eye. “Says the guy who doesn’t feel cold and is wearing a sweater.”
“I can take it off if you want. It hasn’t been washed in weeks.”
I eyed the side of his deceiving, perfect face, wondering again if it was the food alone that had revived his grouchy ass. “Do you just like to argue for the sake of arguing, or did I do something to you in another lifetime that I don’t remember?”
I wasn’t much better than him in the first place, I knew it. Hadn’t I been giving it back to him just as much as he’d been dishing it? Hadn’t it made me secretly smile too?
A purple eye peered at me a moment before we made it to a deep driveway with a huge, downed tree across it. Beside it was a woman who had to be in her seventies or eighties, along with a man around the same age, holding a chain. A chain that was connected to an all-terrain vehicle parked beside it.
“Don’t say anything,” he repeated under his breath.
I watched the man move around the side of the trunk, like he was trying to find something. Where to hook it to? “We’re supposed to ignore them?” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“What if they try to talk to us first?”
“I don’t care. Ignore them.”
