My sandal steps onto the pavement.
Which I’m surprised to realize isn’t pavement at all. It roughened into dirt road, the sides delineated only by earth—no curb. The past summer had been particularly hot, and the overhead sun must have scorched the grass, leaving only crinkled chuff.
As the sheriff lowered the flashlight to the ground, I finally get a good look at him.
Wind-blown hair and slightly quirked lips. A broad chest and long legs. He looks like he could go to battle at four in the morning. Those brown eyes hold a thousand secrets.
Secrets like the tattoo on my finger and the pain it can bring.
Awareness hits me like a ton of childish bricks. My puffy eyes and runny nose would be very clear in the headlights from his patrol car. I had taken off my hoodie once we left the city limits, leaving only my thin tank top. Hours of driving without stop made me unsteady.
It looks bad, listing to the side like this. I can see how he might doubt my sobriety, but I’ll prove him wrong. I’ve been stone cold sober since I turned fifteen, since I was born. Since Daddy gave me away like a gift, completing the promise made when I was born.
A modern-day curse.
CHAPTER FOUR
Then the spiteful old fairy’s turn came. “When the princess turns of age, she shall prick her finger with a spindle, and she shall die!”
Jessica
The sheriff bends down and drags a stick through the dirt.
I feel my eyes widen. “You can’t be serious. Where’s the breathalyzer? I want to do that one. Don’t worry about violating my right to privacy or anything.”
His lips tilted, amused. “I appreciate the offer, but I wasn’t trying to protect your privacy. We don’t have one of those. This isn’t Tanglewood, Ms. Beck.”
My gaze slides to the lettering on the side of the cop car. Sheriff is written in large block letters. Hmm. Provence Police Department, the logo proclaimed. Definitely not in Tanglewood city limits, where the cops had way more than breathalyzers in every car. They had actual machine guns and tanks, ostensibly to handle riots even if everyone knew they’re army surplus. Deals made in backrooms at the expense of the taxpayer—and the unsuspecting citizen the military gear would inevitably be used on. A war against its own people. That’s all I knew about cops. The enemy. Not this man, leaning a hip against my rusty car, raising an eyebrow as he waited for me to walk the line he’d drawn by hand.
No, this definitely isn’t Tanglewood.
“If you’ll start from one end and walk to the other,” he prompted.
I move to the end of the line. “Do I need to touch my nose?”
“Only if you want to,” he drawled.
If it’s optional I’m definitely not doing it. I’m pretty sure I look silly enough as it is, standing on the side of a back country road, afraid for my life but strangely exhilarated. As if I’ve been operating in the shadows for so many years. And in this moment, with night a heavy veil around us, I’ve woken up.
I hold my hands out in the air on either side. It just seems like the thing to do. I’m a tight-rope walker in one, two, three steps. When I leave the line behind, I turn my palms up and offer him a dry, “Tada.”
I didn’t mean it as an invitation, but it feels that way.
His gaze moves down my body, taking its sweet time and turning an inspection into a statement of interest. Heat flares in his eyes. I’m sure it’s there, but the next second it’s gone, replaced by that impersonal cop stare.
For the briefest moment, he definitely checked me out.
Did he like what he saw? A shiver ran down my body. I shouldn’t care about that. It’s just that it had been so long since I felt that kind of interest. Never, really.
The kind where she had a choice.
“You got a jacket in the car?” he asks.
The night breeze runs over my skin, making goosebumps. Not because it’s cold. Because it’s a tactile awareness of his gaze. I can’t ever admit that to him. To anyone. Hell, I shouldn’t even admit it to myself. And I’ll let him bundle me in a down feather jacket if I don’t have to explain the real source of her chills. Sexual awareness. A foreign feeling but undeniable.
Well, good thing I’m leaving here. And I’ll be far, far away.
Never to return. I’ll never have to see the sheriff again, and why does that suddenly seem worse than everything that came before? Like the worst tragedy in a sad story?
“Okay, I believe you,” he says. “You’re not drunk.”
“Thank you.”
“But you are unfit to drive. I can’t ignore how you were driving earlier. More importantly, I can tell you’re exhausted just from looking at you. It’s a danger to the people around here. And it’s a danger to you.”
Blood rushes to my face, because what does he know about the danger to me? What does he know about fists and locks and being given as a gift before I could walk?
I wish I could be angry at him, but he’s right.
It’s something else that makes my cheeks hot. Shame.
Ky deserves better than this, even if I don’t know how to give it to him. Exhausted. That’s what the sheriff called me. Not only from driving for hours, from running tonight. I’m bone-deep tired. Soul-deep tired.
“I understand.” I swallow hard, more deflated by this one moment than I was for years of pain and powerlessness. This moment seems to cut deeper than all of them, standing in front of this man who is so far above me. “I’ll sleep it off in my car until daylight, and then we’ll go.”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that either.” The drawl shrank under the serious, almost regretful tone.
That old anxiety resurfaces—mistrust of anyone with a badge, of anyone with a dick. “Why not? I wouldn’t be endangering anyone that way.”
“Well, there’s no way I could trust you to stay put unless I also stayed out here all night, which I’d rather not do. Then there’s the fact that leaving you out here and defenseless wouldn’t be safe for you.”
“Do you have any ideas, then? Because I’m fresh out.”
“Is there someone who can come pick you two up?”
CHAPTER FIVE
At this all the guests trembled, and many of them began to weep. The king and queen wept loudest of all. For a curse like this could not be broken.
Jessica
My sleep-starved mind turns the question over like it’s completely new. Like I’ve never before wondered if anyone could help me. First my mother had failed me. Then my father. God, every person who looked the other way on the sidewalk when a teenage girl cowered beside a man old enough to be her father had failed me.
That was the way the old Jessica saw the world.
Then the little window on the pregnancy test showed positive, and everything changed. This was my fresh start. Ky had a real chance at life. And I learned to look on the bright side.
Like the fact that I can take care of myself and him. Usually.
Loneliness rises like acid. “No.”
Crickets serenade us in the pause that followed. The sheriff doesn’t look like he’s coming up with an idea. He looks like he’s trying to talk himself out of one.