Page 18 of Love at First Sighting

Carter

“Is this you?”

El’s voice is so close it sends a shiver down my spine as her breath hits my neck.

I know stealth hour is not the time for lust, but I allow myself half a second to think about how close her face must be to mine.

How if she wanted to get closer and press against me for tactical purposes, I would not be mad at all.

Her fingers graze mine as we crouch to the ground.

“Leonard, can you get us out of here?” I ask.

“Shit,” he mutters. “The signal’s going in and out, and it looks like I’ve got a thirty-second delay on the cameras now. My directions could be way off base.”

El lets out a sudden gasp beside me, and she gropes up my arm to find my shoulders.

She slips a finger underneath my suspender and holds on tight.

While I’m sure she’s clinging to me for some kind of safety, it doesn’t feel like the responsibility falls solely on my shoulders.

It feels like a plan to take care of each other.

“Copy that,” I say. “Catch you on the other side.”

I turn off the earpiece. I don’t want any distractions and I want to be as attentive as possible. I need to get myself and El out of here. I dragged her into this, and even though she pushed because she wanted to be here, I can’t risk anything happening to her.

And I won’t have answers about the family I lost.

I might also be in prison, so that’s no good, either.

“Don’t move,” I whisper.

Another door opens behind us and I hear the too-familiar click of PIS dress shoes on cold floors.

It was the sound of Marcus coming home from work every night—usually late, after I’d already made myself a cobbled-together dinner.

Irritated grunts as he sifted through the mail for the day and tossed his keys on the counter.

“Dang flabbit,” the guard mutters. Who in their right mind uses the phrase dang flabbit anymore? But if anyone’s going to, my first guess would be a PIS agent. Shit.

If it is, I hope to god it’s not someone I know.

A stream of light bleeds into the room. I clutch El’s arm and guide her across the floor, leading her out of his line of sight. We sneak into another aisle.

“Why are the damn lights off?” he says.

By the time the lights come back on, we’re out of his view. Now we can at least see, but he can also see us.

I draw a finger to my lips and step away from El.

We quickly move to the next aisle and inch toward to the door.

I keep one eye on the door, the other on El.

While I’m sure I look like a deer in headlights, El is every bit the agent I’d want to be.

Her face is determined as she evaluates each corner for opportunity and risk.

We’re nearly at the door, having successfully navigated several of the aisles, when someone shouts.

“Hey!”

I push El around the corner, but I don’t pull myself back fast enough.

“Oh shit,” El mutters. I don’t look back at her and instead take a big, dumb risk and step into the aisle.

If El’s smart, she’s going to run for the door and use the distraction I’ve offered her.

If one of us has a chance to get out, they tell everyone else the truth.

Not to mention, I’m pretty confident she’d be willing to bail me out of jail.

“Hands where I can see them!” the guard yells. “What are you doing here?”

Committing treason, sir.

The guard approaches me. I don’t see any identifying PIS sigils or badges, so he may be just a security guard, which is excellent news. I hope a security guard isn’t privy to what they’re even protecting here. God knows, PIS has no idea what they’re protecting half the time.

Nevertheless, I put my hands where he can see them, because this guard doesn’t hesitate to draw his gun on me.

Jesus Christmas, I really don’t want to get shot.

PIS field agents have to go through weapons training and are typically armed in case of emergency or dangerous close encounters.

I failed my weapons assessments despite studying for days and feeling confident, so I am severely and literally outgunned here.

“I’m not here to cause any trouble,” I say, but my voice shakes.

“Don’t move!”

So, I don’t.

I’m hoping if he’s a government employee, he’s paid as badly as I am. I imagine someone would be less inclined to kill if the pay isn’t that great.

I hope El has taken this chance to get the hell out of here.

“You supposed to be in here, man?” The guard says, pacing closer to me. I’m duly aware of the barrel of his gun aimed right at the center of my chest. It’s making it really hard to think smart.

I have the right to remain silent, so I gladly take it.

Which results in the guard shoving my face into the shelves.

I get a mouthful of cardboard and a single handcuff around one wrist. It happens so fast I can’t act or protect myself.

My cheek hits one of the shelf bars and I can already feel the shiner I’m going to have.

He pats me down, roughly groping at my pockets and waist, feeling for a weapon. I left my badge and wallet in the car, so there’s no way to identify me, thankfully.

“Whoa,” I say, “usually people take me out to dinner first.”

“You think you’re funny, huh?”

“Sometimes.”

Through the narrow spaces between file boxes, I catch El’s eye. She’s directly on the other side of the shelf. I hope I can tell her enough with a look that she needs to go .

She moves out of view, but the guard catches her movement and lets out a curious grunt.

No, no, no. We can’t have this. I push back against the guard, throwing off his balance.

His chest is firm and it takes all my strength to even move him.

It takes about 3 percent of his strength to shove me back into the shelf. This time, he makes sure it hurts more.

The guard pulls my bad arm back, twisting it at an angle that makes me bite my lip hard enough to taste blood. I don’t let him get my other hand in cuffs, hoping I’m making a big enough issue to let El run and get out of here. Then she speaks.

“Can you disable the cameras?…I can work with thirty seconds.”

She must be talking to Leonard. She must have a plan.

She must not be fleeing like I want her to.

Something moves on the other side of the shelf.

There’s a faint wiggle and creak of the steel shelves and then a drag of paper.

I glance up in time to see the box of files directly above me being pushed over the edge of the shelf.

When the box drops, it mostly hits the guard.

He lets out a baffled “HUH?” before he’s clocked in the face by a box of HR violations and lets me go.

I scramble out of the way, toward the end of the aisle, to find El.

The guard climbs back to his feet and actually growls at me.

As he gears up to throw himself at me again, another box flies off the shelf and hits him in the face like a game of Whac-A-Mole.

Damn, this girl has good aim.

El finds me first. Her nails dig into my jacket as she pulls me toward the exit. I nudge her up the stairs, and she trips on one of them, but I catch her by the waist and get her back to her feet.

The guard is bumbling and yelling for backup. Shit. Shit. Shit.

“Go. Move faster,” I plead. El reaches the top of the stairs and breaks into a full sprint for the steel door we entered through. Then I remember we’ve got another obstacle to cross. The drone.

El whips the door open and pulls me outside, slamming it behind us. I look to the sky and hold a hand across her.

“Wait.”

We listen, scanning the soundscape for any sign of the drones or cameras.

All is silent, so we proceed. El and I keep low to the ground and navigate through the brush until something whirs behind us and I pull El to the ground with me.

We scuttle behind a large rock and I place my hat on her head, tilting it down to shield her face from any cameras.

El tucks herself into my jacket, holding on to one suspender. I can feel her heart racing as hard as mine is, but we both find some comfort as I tuck an arm around her back and hold her closer.

The whirring skirts around us and I slowly pull away. “We’re clear.”

She nods. “Let’s get out of here.”

We rush the final stretch down to her car and hop in. She turns it on and the self-help podcast we were listening to on our way here blasts through the speakers as she peels away from the side of the road and drives.

“If you can’t see the future you want, then how can anyone else?” the podcast says.

All I can see is El being hauled away in handcuffs. El in trouble. Someone laying a hand on her. There’s this overwhelming feeling that I need to protect her.

I glance across the front seat at her, flipping off another driver as he cuts her off and weaving between cars as we make our way out of the canyon.

I don’t even have time to be nervous about her driving.

El can handle herself. She took care of both of us just fine back there, but the prospect of something happening to her doesn’t sound an oh-that-sucks alarm in my head.

It makes me feel enraged and terrified at the same time. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.

I try so hard not to care. Fair-weather friends, girls for a night or two. The fewer people I care about, the less it hurts when they realize they can’t love me back and leave. But here I am.

“You okay?” El asks.

My throat knots. “No.”

El chews on my word before pulling over.

We’re far enough away, so lost in a sea of LA traffic that whoever was after us isn’t bound to find us now.

We’re on a dusty road off the Pacific Coast Highway and El hops out of the car.

At first, I don’t know what she’s doing, but then my door swings open and she directs me to turn.

She kneels in front of me on the ground, finding the space between my legs.

She reaches over me, pressing herself against my thighs as she pops open the glove compartment. I’m too hypnotized watching the commanding and confident look on her face to notice what she’s grabbing…until a glaring white light ignites in front of me.

“Calm down. It’s a ring light. Let me see the damage.”

With her free hand, El brushes her thumb along the bruising on my cheek. There’s no cut, but the skin is raw and stings. As she finds a particularly tender point, I wince.

“Is it an end to my Abercrombie modeling days?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like your crowd in the first place. You’ve got too much of an edge to you.” She smirks and runs her finger around the scarring near my eye, so delicate it makes all the pain in my body go away. “You’ve got bad-boy scars and a pretty-boy face.”

Why does that feel so good to hear?

“And,” she adds, “I think you’ll be okay. It’ll look like you got into a bar fight for a few days, tough guy.”

El smiles and drags her eyes down my body until she reaches my hands. Her fingers weave with mine, and then she jolts.

“Oh damn.”

“What?”

She doesn’t explain, just reaches into her purse on the floor.

Finally, she whips out a single bobby pin and bends it.

El picks up my hand. I’m still in one handcuff.

She furiously digs the end of the pin into the lock and wiggles it around, sticking her tongue out of the side of her mouth in deep concentration.

“You know how to pick locks?”

“Handcuffs, at least,” she says. “I had a boyfriend who roped me into a BDSM class once, so…I guess I know handcuffs.”

I want to fucking die. That is the absolute last thing I want to hear when El is kneeling between my legs, picking a goddamn lock, and telling me nice things.

Now all I want is to know what she looks like when I strip her down, plant myself between her legs, taste every inch of her, and leave her with only one name on her lips.

The handcuff pops open and I shake it off my wrist. El spins the cuffs around her finger with a dignified laugh, tossing them back into the car. Then she rests her hands on my thighs. Oh no. She slips an extra bobby pin into my pants pocket.

“There. For the next time you get stuck in handcuffs.”