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Silence.
I whirled on him, only to find myself staring at his phone light.
“When you sneak up on a girl in a dark alley, her thoughts are, in a split second, ‘will I be raped?’ or ‘is he going to kill me?’” I continued. “Your first thoughts are of going home. We are not the same.”
He walked around me to the bike and got on.
I realized that I would have to ride on it with him.
Goddammit.
I glanced at the vehicle in the dark—fucking time change—and grimaced.
“Let’s go,” he urged.
I waited for him to get settled, then reluctantly got on behind him.
I wasn’t scared of riding with him, per se, but I definitely wasn’t excited to do it, either.
My dad had died when I was a teen from a motorcycle accident. He’d been riding when he’d lost control of the bike on a curve, and he’d been unable to keep the bike standing up.
My mom and I had been driving home behind him because we’d all met for dinner and had driven home afterward. I’d begged and begged my dad to let me ride with him, but my mom had wanted to go over my chemistry homework with me, so I’d been forced to ride with her.
The headlights had illuminated the entire accident in front of us.
One second he’d been upright. And the next, he’d been on the ground, sliding toward the guardrail on his back. His legs had been split, one up high and one down low, to help control the slide.
So when he’d hit the guardrail, the metal had split him like a zipper from groin to shoulder.
When we’d gotten to him, he’d been in two pieces. His left leg and most of his torso on the left, and everything else on the right. His entrails had been wrapped around the guardrail as if he’d spun around it multiple times on the way past.
And my mom had run over to him and held his hand after calling 911.
I, on the other hand, had come to a stop just a few feet away from the other half of his body and hadn’t been able to move past it.
My father was a giant of a man. Six foot six and over two hundred and fifty pounds. He’d been massive. But that day, he’d looked so small, so freakin’ broken.
I swallowed hard when my butt met the back of the bike.
Like my dad, Davis was a really big man. So big, in fact, that he felt like a brick house in front of me.
“Need to scoot forward,” he said in a clipped tone.
I did, scooting so far forward that I was close, but not quite touching him.
He sighed, reached back, and yanked me into him so hard that I slammed into his back.
“Oooof,” I said as I hit him hard. “That’s really unnecessary.”
“Whatever,” he growled.
Why did he sound so angry all of a sudden?
He started his bike and backed out of the alley, his headlight highlighting the dark recesses of the alley.
I frowned when I thought I saw something move, but before I could say anything about it or study it even more, we were moving fast down the length of the back driveway toward the road that would lead us out of the business park.
We got to Twelfth Street, and then we were flying, as if Davis was urgently heading toward his home to get me off the back of his bike. Which, probably, more than likely, was the truth.
I had no other choice but to hold on to him, and that only caused him to drive faster. Which fucked me up even more, because the faster we drove, the more I thought about how my father had died in that accident, and how I seriously did not want to wind up split in two on the side of the road, dying only to be taken to the hospital and live for another twelve hours while thousands of medical personnel stopped by to see my “medical miracle” father barely surviving without his liver, intestines, and kidney.
By the time we got to his house, I was having a full-blown panic attack without Davis’s knowledge.
Lucky for me, he got out and headed inside without looking back at my hyperventilating self.
He left the door open, though, allowing me to follow him once I’d gotten myself semi under control.
When I finally got inside, it was to see a warm and welcoming house.
I’d been to Davis’s house all of three times in my life. All three of those times were with Sara, who’d dropped off dinner for Davis. I’d gone to the bathroom and gone right back outside so they could do their weird “best friend” thing.
When I’d first met Sara our senior year of high school when we’d moved to that small town of Mooresville, Alabama, I’d instantly latched on to Sara. She was a kind, caring, and compassionate woman.
