Thursday, June 5 | 8:00 p.m.
“That’s the last of it,” Jude said as he tossed our matching military-style backpacks into the bed of the truck, then poked his head into the cabin and gave it one more look.
I fingered the ends of my newly brown hair as I waited by the bumper. It felt bittersweet to leave the cabin. A little terrifying. The cabin was safe, but Jude had become my safe place too.
We had to put an end to this. We were alive, but we weren’t living. It seemed utterly ridiculous to worry if I would ever see him again once the smoke cleared. So much could happen between now and then. Still, the question had eaten me alive for the last three days.
Every night since I had first made the request, Jude slept in bed with me. And every night since, he hadn’t woken up to make his rounds.
He slept.
That was probably a good thing, considering we had a twelve-hour drive ahead of us. I could snooze away in the passenger’s seat, but he needed to be awake for the trip. I would have offered to drive, but I knew there was no way in hell he’d let me touch the steering wheel.
Jude pulled the front door shut and locked it, then turned his back on the cabin like it was just another building.
My gut sank as I gave in to the onslaught of memories one last time. The only thing that made me turn away and climb into the truck was the guilt that roiled in my stomach every time I thought about how much I shouldn’t want to stay. Save for the supplies stored in the cellar, we had erased every piece of evidence that we were ever there.
Was that what it was going to be like after Vegas? Life went on? I went back to teaching? Jude went back to . . . Well, I didn’t know what he would go back to. He certainly couldn’t go back to the Four Horsemen.
Would we just part ways as unlikely friends? Would this ordeal become my “fun fact” whenever I had to suffer through professional development icebreakers?
So this one time, I was kidnapped and hidden away in West Virginia. But it’s cool. We had sex, played cards, and fell in love. Then he took me to Las Vegas and I won a metric fuck ton of money to buy our collective freedom from the mob.
My entire body went numb as tears grew in the corners of my eyes.
We fell in love.
I was supposed to stay away from him.
We fell in love.
I was never supposed to return to the Four Horsemen.
We fell in love.
I was supposed to run from him.
I wasn’t supposed to trust him.
We fell in love.
We fell in love.
We fell in love.
I wasn’t supposed to love him.
But I did.
I wasn’t supposed to live.
But we fell in love.
The truck growled to life as Jude pulled away from the cabin to head down the mountain. I wiped the tears away as we left it all behind.
Safety. Comfort.Home.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. I was supposed to be relieved. I was supposed to want my life to go back to the way it was.
