“No. What are yo—” I cut off her protests with another kiss.
“I don’t have time to argue with you, Sweet Bee. Do what I say, it’ll be fine.” I see the moment she steels her spine and nods once like it’s taking every ounce of her bravery to go through with my plan. Even though she has no idea what that plan is.
Just as I let her go and sit in the passenger seat, she calls out, “Tanner?”
“Yeah?”
There’s a second hesitation and I can see a million questions running through her watery blue eyes. “Be careful.”
I nod, giving her my confidence that it’ll all be just fine, and she accepts it.
As she runs back toward the woods, I take the wheel from the passenger side and put the car in drive. I’m pressing down on Sully’s knee to get the car to a reasonable speed and hoping to get to the small clearing in the trees on the other side of the roadwhere tourists usually stop for pictures of the canyon below. This is all a gamble considering the short distance and the speed I need for the stunt to work.
The speed isn’t ideal as we come up on the exact spot I want the car to drive through, so I mentally prepare for my exit. Next to me, Sully is coming to again and I don’t have the luxury of fucking this up again. Too much is on the line, and by too much, I mean Berkleigh. If shit goes wrong and he doesn’t die tonight, she’ll be implicated right alongside me and I can’t have that happening.
Our only saving grace would be a loss of memory, but that shit’s for fiction, not reality.
He either dies right now or I’ll have to dive right into plan B, and for once in my life, I don’t have one.
Well, that’s a lie. I don’t have a specific one for this exact situation but I do have a general contingency plan in case shit goes wrong. Problem is, it’s for one person, not two.
“What the—” Sully doesn’t have the time to realize what’s happening before I open the passenger door and throw myself out just as the front wheels hit thin air and the car flies over the edge into the ravine.
The momentum of the car throws me farther than I anticipated. No matter how hard I try to roll toward the right side of the road to avoid following Sully, fate has decided tonight’s the night she grows a sense of humor.
At the exact moment that I hear the crash of the patrol car, my body hits a tree trunk, slowing me down but not stopping me completely. To say it hurts like a motherfucker would be a lie because my brain is too busy scrambling for ways to save my life before limb.
In moments like this, it’s all instinct. There’s no rationalizing any-fucking-thing, it’s pure will to survive and a hint of luck.
Somehow, I latch onto a branch sticking out from the side of the ravine. Instead of freefalling to my death, I’m now hanging freely into the void and hoping that root isn’t going to snap. Again, I know my hand is going to be fucked up, even with the gloves on, but this isn’t the time to wallow in the pain that will be later.
I take the time to breathe a sigh of relief that I’m not dead…yet. Hanging from this branch on the side of a mountain isn’t looking good though, either. As I look down and around, searching in the dark for a way to haul myself up, an orange light below gets my attention. I’d expected the crunching of metal and glass, or even some smoke and steam, but luck is on my side. My best guess is that leaking fluid and a small spark had an intimate moment and in about two minutes that flame is going to reach the tank.
Contrary to popular belief and Hollywood movies, cars don’t spontaneously blow up when they crash. Not anymore, at least. New technology has seen to it, which is great on any normal day, but in situations like these, it’s a shame.
“Tanner! Take my hand.”
You have got to be fucking kidding me!
Chapter Eighteen
Berkleigh
With a snarl that would scare away the most dangerous predator, Tanner reaches up and grips my forearm. His other hand is still clutching onto the branch that saved his life, and as I try to heave him upward, I realize that this probably wasn’t one of my best ideas.
“Wait!” I have nothing to leverage against, nothing holding me in this spot, and if he keeps pulling then I’m going down with him. “Give me a second.” What for, I have no clue. I was living my best badass life and this seemed like the right thing to do.
“Yeah, no problem. I’ll just hang around here until you’re ready.” His tone doesn’t match his words and he continues before I can get a word out. “Plant your feet and fall back. Put all your body weight into it right the fuck now or the car that is currently on fire is going to blow us both up.” Digging his own feet into the rock wall as I obey his instruction, he uses the leverage to pull himself up with the help of me and the branch. He gets far enough to claw at the earth as I scramble backward, almost horizontal at this point, but I refuse to let go.
I may not have thought this through, but it was impossible to do otherwise. The crash, the sound of metal crunching, I had to come back. A new, much darker part of me feels like it would have been Karma playing her hand if Tanner died. I killed one bully…why not be responsible for the death of another? But that same dark part of me would have been devastated, broken, and I would have sought revenge on every cop I ever saw again.
I don’t want Tanner to die. Idowant some answers, an explanation maybe, or even a simple conversation about why he became an asshole, and I’ll only be able to get that if he’s still alive.
That’s absolutely the singular reason I want him around…
Who am I kidding? I’ve fallen harder than that car went into the ravine and I’m just as fucked.
“Why the fuck did you come back?” Tanner finally gets himself to safety and I fall on my ass as he lets my arm go.
