Page 8 of This Might Hurt

JUDE

There are many things I didn’t think through about this situation.

One is the possibility that he’ll go tearing down the interstate again at a hundred miles an hour for god knows how long.

Luckily for me, he weaves from one smaller road to the next like he’s driving through town and out the other side.

Every turn mashes my face or my ass into the tightest corners of the trunk, my backpack digging into my stomach, but at least it’s slow.

After maybe half an hour—I keep trying to count and getting distracted—the car starts bouncing over dirt.

Gravel pings off the undercarriage right next to my ear, and I can taste the grit of dust in my mouth.

I have to work one arm out from underneath my body and pinch my nose to keep from sneezing as the car creaks to a stop.

I lift my head and try to listen, blinking back the sweat that’s dripping into my eyes. A door opens and the car shifts under me, followed by ten or so meandering steps. I wait for something else to happen, but the silence just stretches out endlessly.

Kicking the emergency latch, I gulp in a desperate, thankful breath of fresh air as the trunk pops open. Dark purple clouds have turned the air dim, and the uneasy wind smells sharp. The rain in town hasn’t reached us yet, but it will any minute.

I stick one wobbly leg out of the trunk like a baby animal learning to walk and roll over the edge into a crouch with my shoulder against the warm back bumper.

Shaggy summer grass tickles my calves as I study the cottonwoods towering around us.

When I hold my breath, I can hear the murmur of running water, which explains how all this green shit popped up in the middle of nowhere.

Whatever he’s doing, he found one of the only nice places around to do it in.

Grasshoppers skitter out from under my feet as I drag myself upright.

My thighs hurt more than that one nightmare week when I tried to get into squatting free weights.

The man I’m looking for is standing with his back to me about fifteen feet away, staring at what must be the river.

He looks so standoffish from behind—something about the unnatural straightness of his spine, like he’s never allowed to slouch.

I want to touch the perfect, unblemished skin where the backs of his arms emerge from his t-shirt sleeves, to see if it’s cold or warm.

He stands there without moving for so long that I pinch myself to make sure the world didn’t get stuck on pause.

I can’t decide if it’s weirder to go up behind him and get his attention or wait like a creep, but he makes my decision for me by turning around.

My throat closes up when I see him. He looks sweaty and shaky, like he might pass out, but most of all he’s just…

gone. His soft eyes are like a black hole that could eat everything and still be empty.

I didn’t expect him to be happy to see me, but the wretched panic that flashes across his face hurts. “No,” he croaks, backing away until I’m afraid he’s going to fall into the river. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I should have thought of a decent answer to this on the way here.

“Um—” White light cracks the air for a split second, followed by a long roll of thunder from one end of the sky to the other.

A drop of water flicks my neck, then my hair.

The bad feeling keeps getting worse and worse until I can’t breathe.

I only know that he shouldn’t be here. “Could we find somewhere inside to talk?” I swat at a wet spot on my cheek.

The corners of his mouth tighten. “Why won’t you leave me alone? What’s wrong with you?”

I blink at the coldness in his voice, rocking back on my heels.

If anything, he’s not saying it hard enough.

Everything’s fucking wrong with me. I’m a parasite that devoured myself, the version of me that had a family and a brain that didn’t betray me every day.

But I wasn’t expecting the words from someone who doesn’t even know what I did wrong yet.

“What’s going on with you?” I murmur. “You’re all fucked up.” I can see the river behind him as I move closer, brown and sluggish between rocky banks.

“Go. Away,” he growls, shrinking back like an animal.

“What do I have to do to get rid of you? Do you want more money?” He fumbles in his pocket for a slim leather wallet and throws it at me hard.

“Take all my credit cards. I won’t report them stolen; you can get millions off of them. What else do you want?”

“Okay, calm the fuck down.” I bend over and scoop up the wallet where it bounced off my shoulder into the dirt.

“This isn’t what I want.” Because I don’t think he’ll believe me, I wind up and pitch the wallet past him into the river, where it disappears with a plop.

Maybe now he’ll start a fight and I’ll be able to dig in and find the part of him that’s hurting so bad.

He turns away, peering out across the water as rain starts to drench the back of his t-shirt. “I wish I’d never fucking set eyes on you. Get away from me.”

Never show your face here again. You already took everything from us; don’t hurt us more. We can’t bear it. I study my hands, flexing my fingers as I turn them one way and the other. He’s just talking. He doesn’t know what I’ve done; he can’t mean it like that.

The rain keeps getting heavier, darkening the ground and soaking into my t-shirt.

In a couple of minutes, it will be a downpour.

I don’t have a jacket, so I’ll be huddled on the edge of the highway later with my thumb out like a pathetic little drowning rat.

Rain is getting into his car through the open doors, so I decide to shut them while I think about what to do.

I never get confused like this, but he’s pulling at all the starved parts of me that need to love and take care of someone.

And as evidenced by the gun in the gas station, my love and care are not always good, healthy things.

I almost trip on a navy blue leather bag sitting on the ground by the driver’s side door, with its shoulder strap trailing in the dirt.

It must have been tucked behind his seat, because I don’t recognize it.

I glance at Andrew’s rigid back, then poke the half-open top with my toe.

There’s a hint of something pale caught in the zipper.

It doesn’t look like anything special, but every instinct in my body turns toward it.

I bend over and hook my finger through the weird, rubbery-feeling loop.

“Wait, stop.” I didn’t know he was watching me until the words crack apart between us, tasting like fury and shame. Wet grass crunches, like he took a step toward me. “Please.”

I pull. The thing in my hand sways gently, uncoiling like entrails getting dragged out of a dead body until it becomes a long silicone hose the same length as the car in front of me, from exhaust pipe to front windows.

Underneath it in the bag I can see a roll of silver tape. I was right. He was escaping.

When I look over my shoulder, Andrew is standing perfectly still, his palms pressed to his forehead and his frantic eyes fixed on mine.

I wanted him to open for me, I wanted to see inside him, but now he’s flayed out against his will and it feels like a nightmare.

Every movement and breath and shadow in his eyes all day, it was all fear, all for this. “What the fuck?” I whisper.

His tall body curls into a crouch, his face buried in his arms. Even from this far away I can see him shivering.

I drop the hose. It slaps into the dirt like some kind of snake, flopping around before settling into stillness.

For a second, I have to press the back of my hand against my mouth to keep from dry heaving.

I realize that all afternoon I’ve been watching two halves of him struggle—the one that was dragging him to this place, and the one that was fighting desperately for any reason to keep going.

My hands are itching to grab his face, to reach down into his mouth with my dirty fingers and pull everything up and out where I can examine it and understand.

I kick the hose so it slithers away into the grass and we can’t see it anymore, then look down at his wet hair and the t-shirt plastered to his back with the rain. “Please go,” he whimpers into his arm, hunching his shoulders tighter. “I need—I can’t take it anymore.”

Trying to swipe rain out of my eyes with my drenched sleeve, I sit down cross-legged in the dirt in front of him. “I’m here,” I tell him. I rest one hand palm-up on the clumpy, wet earth between us and wait. “You didn’t want to leave me behind, remember? I don’t want to leave you behind, either.”

“You don’t understand,” he chokes out, so quiet I can barely understand. “I don’t want to die, but I can’t fight them anymore. It hurts too much.” I can see water dripping off his chin, between his knees, into a little puddle on the ground.

I watch his shoulders rise and fall, to reassure myself I got here in time. “I know,” I murmur a few inches from his hair. “I’m sorry, I know it’s bad. Do you want to hold my hand?”

Every muscle in his body sags, but he doesn’t uncurl.

After a silence that goes on for minutes, he frees one hand from the death grip around his head.

The tip of one shaky finger brushes the center of my palm, feather-light, and for a second I’m afraid the electricity that rushes up my arm is enough to kill me.

But my pulse keeps thumping steadily as I watch him trace the diagonal line that my palm-reading aunt told me meant I was going to get my heart broken someday.

“That’s good,” I breathe. “I’ve got you. It’s over now.”