I have to get out of here.
Five steps down the road, I kick off my shoes. My feet kiss the stones and dirt and I find my stride. The same stride that earned me varsity on Torreon High School’s track team. The same stride that led to me running on Stanford’s team.
I soar down that road.
Ten meters. Twenty. Thirty.
Escape is a possibility that becomes more real with every step; my heart soars with hopeful elation.
Maybe I can make it.
Then I scream.
A rock bites into my foot, cuts through skin and into the flesh of my heel and buries itself deep. Pain blasts through my skull and rips its way out of my mouth in a sudden, violet eruption of agony.
I stumble, fall, hit the ground.
His heavy footfalls draw closer.
Gritting my teeth and groaning through the pain, I stand back up and limp forward. It’s useless, I know, but my body is flooded with adrenaline and fear enough to have me on the verge of throwing up. I have to do something.
Ten more steps. That’s all I get.
Then his hands touch my shoulders, lock down with a ferocious strength that draws a yelp of surprise, and he hauls me to a stop so suddenly I nearly catch whiplash.
“Let me go,” I scream, red-hued anger settling over my eyes and blinding me to everything but my abject failure.
I may scream it more than once. In his face. With every bit of frustration and fear that is surging through my gut. Frustration at my situation, at losing my admittedly shitty job, at being upset at losing my shitty job, at this painful moment — bleeding from a foot wound outside some gun-wielding maniac’s old high school drinking cabin — being the agonizing and ignominious nadir of the last too-many months of failure.
I had so much promise. And now I’m nothing. Just a loser with a bloody foot who is stuck in a cabin with some guy who thinks it’s a good idea to call himself ‘Blaze’.
When my screams die, Declan — no, Blaze — lets out a sigh and his grip on me changes. It loosens. And his face changes. The anger softens into something almost approaching understanding.
“I’m not going to let you go, Tiffany. I can’t do that,” he says. His voice burns low with compassion. “I wish we weren’t here, but we are. And that’s not going to change. Now, your foot, are you OK?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. I am so not OK on so many levels; this goes deeper than the stone in my heel.
“Let me help you.”
He doesn’t wait for me to say ‘yes’, he lifts me up and tosses me over his shoulder and carries me back to the cabin, stopping only once to kneel over and pick up my discarded heels from the side of the road.
I stay on his back as we reach the cabin, as he knocks over a little statue of a turtle and opens a hatch on its belly to reveal a hide-a-key. It’s not objectionable. He smells nice — a woodsy, smokey scent that’s not out of place with the surrounding forest. His back is firm, muscular, just like the rest of him, and his butt is nice — I’ve got a magnificent view of it, slung across his shoulders and with my face resting against his low back just a foot from his backside.
If only he hadn’t literally kidnapped me as part of his escape plan from an abortive bank robbery. And gotten me fired. And had such a terrible credit history. And put a gun in my face. Even a great butt doesn’t excuse all those massive red flags.
Declan — Blaze — puts the key in the lock, turns it, and, with an audible and deep-throated grunt, muscles open the front door.
The inside of the cabin assaults my nostrils with its mustiness. It smells like a tomb and feels about as lively as one, too. A shroud of dust covers everything, and the furniture looks like the relics of a long-dead era; furniture that, in color and form, would be more at-home in the 1960s; pictures of people I don’t know — most of whom are probably dead by now — hang on the walls. And there’s a dead rat sitting right in the middle of the combination living room-kitchen-dining room; an open-plan prison, just for me.
“Gross,” I say, on seeing the dead rat.
Declan nudges it out of the way with his shoe, sending it flip-flopping into the corner where it lands in a puff of dust. As light as a feather, he sets me down on the mildewy couch and, with a gentle touch that belies his raw strength, he takes hold of my injured foot by the ankle and props it up on the coffee table.
“Stay here for a second, Tiffany. I’ve got a first aid kit, I’ll be right back.”
He’s gone for a second and then back with a tin box with a big red ‘X’ on it. Out come bandages, antibiotic cream, and a pair of tweezers.
A moment passes where he holds my foot — gentle, careful — and frowns down at the rock protruding from my heel.
Then he’s up again, fetching a tea kettle, which he quickly fills with water from the tap and then sets on the gas stove, which he lights.
“Are we having tea, now?” I say.
He shakes his head. “No, but I need to boil this water to disinfect it before I use it to clean your wound.”
It’s not long before the kettle is boiling and Declan is kneeling in front of me, kettle on the floor and tweezers in his hand.
“I’m not going to lie to you, this will hurt. Hopefully, you won’t need stitches, but we’ll
