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He walks in silence. Each heavy tread of his boots jerks my body, but I don’t ask to be put down. I’m not strong enough. The full horror of what nearly happened hits me in a shudder. Tears slide from my eyes, but the desert wind blasts them away. By the time we can no longer see the cars, my skin feels flayed alive by it.
The pain is good, cleansing. I want the desert to slough away my skin until there’s no part of me left that Alec LeMarque has touched.
Noah’s strong arms feel so good around me.
I hate him for rescuing me.
I hate myself.
I lose myself in the delirium of my humiliation. I don’t know how long we walk, but Noah’s breath comes out in shaking rasps. His steps become slow, shaky. His skin is slick with sweat by the time we reach civilization – and calling it civilization is a stretch. We arrive at a gas station on a crossroads, a few miles off the highway I can just make out winding through the desert beyond. Noah leaves me in a lawn chair and points at a payphone. “I’ll be over there. I need to make a call.”
I don’t move or reply. I can’t.
My fingers search for the locket around my neck, and when they find it still there, I slip it under the fabric of my top so Noah can’t see it.
I stare out across the desert, at the scrabbly bushes and gnarled Joshua trees and Jurassic rock formations jutting from the earth like dinosaur teeth. I think about what happened, what could have happened. I close my eyes and see my blood-splattered reflection, feel a gnawing pain in my heart that will never heal.
Something plops down on the table in front of me. I cry out, tripping over myself as I struggle away.
“Didn’t mean to startle you.” Noah slides into the chair opposite me and holds out an object. A plastic spoon.
I peer through a curtain of blonde hair matted with dust and dirt and blood at the object on the table. It’s a chocolate cake, five miles high – layers and layers of cake and cream and frosting and a mountain of fresh, glistening cherries on top. It looks like the kind of cake you’d see at a high-end wedding, not at a gas station in the middle of the fucking desert.
It’s so fucking random and crazy that I burst out laughing.
Noah digs his own spoon into an equally ridiculously slice of key lime pie. “There’s an entire cabinet of epic cakes inside. I remember you used to like cherry-flavored stuff.”
“I did?” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“Sure.” Noah gives me an odd look, those coal eyes studying me intently. “At school, whenever they had cherry pie for dessert you shoved everyone out of the way in the cafeteria line so you could get there first. You used to take three slices even though we were only allowed one. The rest of the class was too afraid of you to rat you out.”
“I bet you did, though.” I carve off the tip of the cake. It’s so tall I can’t get the entire thing on the fork.
“Nope. I was afraid of you, too.”
Hmmm. I watch Noah as he carves off the tip of his pie and slides it between his lips. He no longer is the arrogant, aristocratic king. The desert has stripped him of his crown – his wavy hair rumpled and plastered to his scalp with sweat, his skin dry and patched with grazes, his eyes red and bloodshot. And yet, to me, he’s never appeared more noble.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” I blurt out.
Noah turns away, hiding his face. “Eat your ridiculous cake.”
“Answer me, Marlowe.”
He sighs. “I’m not being nice. No matter how much I fucking hate you, I’m not going to rape you in the middle of the desert. What Alec tried to do was sick. End of.”
I’m dying to ask him about the party the other night where his hard cock ground into my hip. But I can’t deal with thinking about cock right now, so instead I carve off another corner of the cake with my fork and shove it into my mouth.
“Okay, this is amazing. You have to try it.” I wave my spoon at him.
“I have my own.”
“Not for long.” I reach across and swipe a decent chunk off the side of his pie.
“What are you doing?”
“Enjoying the spoils of war.” I grin as I shove the pie into my mouth. Something about the sugar and about being here with Noah and the relief at not being a corpse roasting under the desert sun turns me giddy.
Noah watches me out of the corner of his eye, and I notice that the fire on the edge of his coal-black irises has dimmed. The hatred that usually burns for me alone is now the warmth that dragged me from the desert. He swipes his cake away from me. “Are you high?”
