Ihear his motorcycle after eleven painful minutes. Not cop sirens, just the loud purr of a motorcycle. I keep my back pressed against the wall of the alleyway. My cheeks are tear-stained and I don’t know what to do with the gun lying at my feet. My fingerprints are all over that gun and…I killed someone.I see Zebulon’s shadowy silhouette dismounting his motorcycle.
He’s technically a bad guy, but right now he’s the person saving my life. An immense sense of relief unlocks the tension in my neck and shoulders I didn’t realize that I was holding. Zeb reaches into his pocket for something and doesn’t bother trying to hide that it’s a gun.
“Janelle?” he calls in a low whisper. I peel myself away from the wall slowly, whimpering as I expose my hiding spot to Zebulon. His face transforms entirely when he sees me. I’ve never had anyone look at me like that before. Zebulon holds his arms out wide and I don’t even care that he’s holding a gun that would otherwise scare me.
I run for him and wrap my arms around him, pressing my face into a chest that feels unusually safe and comfortable. Zeb hugs me back. The bergamot and sandalwood scent of his deodorant draws me in. The spiciness mixes with his masculinescent and blissful waves of pleasure restore a temporary sense of calm.
Whenever I stop moving, or actually think, all I can think about is the fact that I’m going to go to prison where I’ll die with a cockroach burrowing its way into my brain through my ear while I sleep. With a dead body lying in the alley next to me, it’s easy to let my mind wander to the most horrifying places.
“Fuck, baby. You’re scared,” Zeb murmurs, cradling my head close to his chest. “I can feel you shaking.”
I didn’t realize that I’d been trembling as my body desperately struggled to process powerful surges of adrenaline. Zeb’s arms wrap around me and even if I shouldn’t let this stranger hold me in such an intimate way, I feel desperate to cling to something real, human and living while I can.
“I’m going to die in prison,” I choke out and then the sobs break through. Zeb holds me tighter against his chest. I cry out a few more times and then it hits me that I’ve never been held like this before. There’s never been a time in my life, not in any relationship, where a man has held me against his chest like I’m downright precious.
“No, you won’t,” Zeb says in that soothing, deep voice of his. His hand strokes the back of my head. “You won’t die in prison, Angel. I swear it.”
My sobbing continues a few moments longer and then Zebulon silences me by doing something else that I don’t expect. He plants a gentle kiss on the top of my forehead, reminding me of the kiss we exchanged in the bathroom that must have been almost a month ago. I realize that it’s not just him kissing me. I’m clutching him back, almost as hard as he’s holding onto me.
“Cry it all out,” he says. “Once you’re done, I’m going to put you on that bike, take you to a safe place and get this cleaned up.”
“I’m going to die in prison.”
My lips feel numb and I’m saying the mantra so I can get used to my fate before it happens. I killed a man with his own gun and I’ve never had so much as a parking ticket before. I’m not built for jail. I couldn’t even make it past the part ofOrange Is The New Blackwith the tampon.
Zeb’s sharp tone snaps me back. “You will not. I will take care of this and make it disappear, Janelle. Look at me.”
His voice is forceful and I’m too weak to disobey his commands regardless. I look up at Zebulon’s icy eyes and find surprising warmth on his face that I never saw before. He’s serious and there’s an expression on his face that makes me really believe he saw war up close. It’s a strange look that I’ve never seen on anyone else like this. Whatever he saw must have been bad enough to change him – and I’ve seen things too in my line of work as an LPN.
But not like this. Zeb’s eyes keep me hooked onto his every word even if logic tells me to break away from his overly intense gaze.
“I will make this go away,” he says. “I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe. No matter what happens.”
His voice is so steady that the sound roots me in place. I want to argue against this rooted man standing up for me because it doesn’t feel like something that actually happens in real life. I want to test this reality, almost to prove that it couldn’t be real. Six-foot-five inch muscular soldiers like Zeb don’t notice women like me and they definitely don’t stand up for us…
“You don’t even know me.”
There’s a flicker of interest on Zeb’s face, like he finds what I’m saying fascinating. His glass eye is a pretty shade of blue that matches the working eye perfectly, but it still remains fixed on me with uncomfortable focus.
“I don’t have to know you,” he says, sending a run of pleasure straight between my thighs, an involuntary response I’m havingto his voice that I wish I could ignore. I never knew what it was like to be hypnotized until I heard that voice.
He bends down and kisses me – this time on the lips. I pull away quickly and glance over guiltily at the dead body on the street. Zeb seems embarrassed, but he doesn’t balk or flinch at the presence of a corpse.
“One phone call,” Zeb says. “Then I’ll take you out of here.”
I heard every word of Zeb’s phone call, but so much of their discussion seemed to be in some type of code with names that I’d never heard before and slang that I didn’t recognize. I understood that Trigger and Zebulon were the same person because he explained that part during a gas station rest stop moment, but aside from that, everything else just sounded like gibberish. Zeb had to fight me onto the back of his bike.
Leaving the corpse behind felt…weird.
“Within three minutes of our departure, we will have a man there to handle it,” Zeb assured me, and with that plus a lot of physical coaxing, he got me on the back of his motorcycle. I’ve never been on the back of a bike before and it didn’t make me feel better that Zeb let me wear his helmet. He didn’t have time to pick up an extra one, but the thought of his unprotected skull getting crushed to pieces right in front of me scared me more than the thought of my own death.
Zeb emptied the ammunition from the gun in front of me and slipped the unused bullets into his jeans before storing the handgun in the pocket of his cut. Then we drove…
Zeb has to peel me off of him when we get to the Super 8 Motel off Route 495, closer to Lawrence than Boston. I’ve never had a reason to go out this way, but I’ve seen this Super 8 from the highway before on road trips to New Hampshire.
He checks us in, pays in cash and uses a fake name – Gideon Blackwood. Pretty good for coming up with a fake name and having no preparation for it. The man behind the counter clearly doesn’t care about my identity, so I guess it’s a good thing I’m not being sold.
We get up to the motel room on the second floor and it looks like it hasn’t been updated since the nineties. The bed squeaks when Zeb sits and puts his head in his hands. I feel guilty and consider running for the door and telling him that I can make my way in this world on my own. Zeb looks up at me as if he can read my mind.
