Reckless

“Yeah?” she said, her voice quivering nervously.

I opened my mouth to finish things off while glancing at Samantha’s innocent, tear-stained face.

“Tell me, agapi mou,” she said softly.

I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t break her heart any further than I already had. I couldn’t tell her that what Jake had planned for Madison on Valentine’s Day would be a million times more awesome than sitting in court behind me, watching the burners heat up under my ass. Shit, Jake could buy Madison one of those boxes of candy hearts with the messages printed on them and mail it to her a week late, and that would still be way better than Samantha sitting in the back of the court room with me on February 14th.

Man, I was a fucking prick.

Sharp as a tack, Samantha said, “What about Valentine’s Day?”

I couldn’t tell her.

“Is…is your trial on Valentine’s Day?”

After an interminable guilty silence, I nodded.

“Oh, Christos,” she said. Her eyes were tearing up again. She held one hand to her mouth, as if to cover her shame. There was this sad tone to her voice that made me want to chuck biscuits all over her carpet.

That was when my final surprise came.

Clarity.

I finally saw it in the form of one of those forty-foot earthquake waves that washes inland for miles and destroys everything in its path. That wave was Samantha’s parents.

If they found out I was in jail, it would confirm everything her mom had said on the phone about me. It would be hard, ugly proof. Then they would go to war for their daughter.

The thing Samantha didn’t realize was her parents cared about her. A lot. Sure, they were thick-skulled about it, thinking a stable 9-to-5 was the path to satisfaction.

They may’ve been misguided, but they cared. That’s why they weren’t going to tolerate their daughter dating a two-bit tough in lock-up.

No fucking way.

Earlier, on the phone, Samantha’s mom had been a momma bear backed into a corner. She wasn’t giving up her daughter to me.

I wouldn’t put it past her to hop on a plane to San Diego to stage an intervention on Samantha’s behalf. Round her daughter up and take her back home to D.C., just to get her away from me for good.

Shit, if some guy like me was dating my daughter, I’d probably do the same thing.

There was only one way to fix this.

I stalked over to the door and yanked it open. “I have to go.”

“No, Christos, wait!” She grabbed after me, but I slipped free. “Don’t leave! I need you!”

I couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes. My heart was already broken into too many pieces.

I was out the door and hopping on my bike seconds later.

CHRISTOS

The lane lines on the freeway machine-gunned at me like tracer bullets.

My Ducati screamed between my legs. I was tucked beneath the fairing as wind pounded the front of the bike.

It was three in the morning and I was doing 175mph on the Five.

The pain inside me was so big, nobody could save me from it. My only option was to speed away from everything, go so fast, nothing could catch me.

Somewhere far behind me were my problems.

Samantha’s broken heart. There was no way I could fix that, not unless I could magically rewrite history and erase my past.

Her parents. Something in my gut told me they were coming for her. They weren’t gonna let this two-bit fuck-up take their daughter away. No way.

My pending trial, two days away. The possibility of jail time, maybe even prison time.

In all three cases, I had no control over the outcome. Everything was up to the people around me. It was driving me nuts. But there was one thing I could control.

I could control my fate.

The only thing stopping me from high-speed death on this freeway was me.

This I could control.

My bike. The pavement. I was in my element.

I ignored the demons behind me as I concentrated on the road ahead. The surface was damp but not wet. It had drizzled just before sundown, hours ago. Traffic had dried twin wheel-tracks into each lane. The tracks were about two feet wide. As long as I kept my bike inside the track, I was on dry road.

If I hit the wet strips on either side at 175? I didn’t fucking care.

All I could think about was keeping my bike in the dry track. There was no time to think about anything else.

At this speed, the lazy curves of the freeway became dangerously sharp. If I kept my eyes trained in the distance, I could time things tightly enough.

If you went the speed limit, the ride from Samantha’s apartment to Pacific Beach took about twenty minutes. I’d made it in seven. I got off the freeway at Garnet to turn around. The cops always got heavier near downtown.

A minute later, I was back on the freeway heading north, and winding through the gears past one- forty.

I eased up carefully on the throttle as I hit the curve around Mount Soledad. As soon as the road straightened at La Jolla Village, I opened the throttle back up and blasted past SDU. When I shot beneath the overpass at La Jolla Village Drive, there was a brief concussion as the cement roadway overhead smacked the roar of my Ducati’s engine back at me.

This section of straightaway was about three miles long. I cleared it in just over a minute. I had hoped to catch air over the top of the grade at Genesee, but the pitch was too shallow, even at 175.

I relaxed the throttle again as I neared the merge with the 805. I scrubbed off some speed and toed the shifter while blowing past two cars heading into the turn. I think I was still holding one-thirty as I rounded the curve.

The bike leaned as I hit the apex of the turn and feathered the gas. As I started coming out of it, I brought the bike up to standing while winding out the throttle.

The engine screamed as I worked my way back up the gears and arrowed across four lanes, cutting a razor line between an eighteen wheeler and an SUV.

I rocketed northward with the hounds of hell nipping at my heels.

They couldn’t catch me.

SAMANTHA

I dreamt of a fallen angel.

I woke up in the middle of the night, gasping for air.

Alone.

“Christos?” I asked the emptiness that enveloped me.

My darkened apartment was empty. I shook off my nightmare and reached for my phone, sensing deep in my heart that something was wrong with Christos. I dialed his number for the fiftieth time that night. It rang four times, then went to voicemail.

For the fiftieth time.

I had tried following him when he’d left my apartment earlier, but there was no way I was going to catch his Ducati with my VW.

After driving all over my neighborhood for thirty minutes, feeling lost only blocks away from my own apartment, I’d given up and gone home.

I had then texted and called Christos repeatedly, but he’d never answered. Eventually, I’d given up trying, exhausted from the worry.