Page 103 of Touchdown, Tennessee

But I had been anticipating a move like that. I reacted fast, knowing that it was safe for me to dart to the right and follow him off the highway.

“Christ,” Andrew said, reaching for the little handle above the window on his side and gripping my thigh with the other. He was braced, and clearly terrified.

“Been a long time since I’ve tailed someone in a car, but we’re going to be okay, Andrew. You have my word.”

“What the fuck do you mean it’s been a long time? You’re telling me you’ve tailed people in car chases before?”

I tracked the white pickup as it turned after the highway exit, and I followed after it.

“The times I’ve done it have all been illegal. This time it isn’t.”

“For fuck’s sake, Gray.”

“It’s not what you think. I started driving at age thirteen, way before I had a real license to drive. Sometimes I’d secretly get in my mom’s old shitty beat-up car and follow after her when she got into men’s vehicles. I never trusted them.”

“You’d drive around as a thirteen-year-old?”

“I did a lot of things I shouldn’t have done when I was a teenager, Andrew. Fuck, he’s heading onto a dirt road.”

I watched as the truck veered off, turning left down a dirt road with no lights on it.

“That isn’t a dirt road,” Andrew told me. “It’s a dirt lot that leads to a field. He’s fucking driving us into afield.”

I sat up a little straighter, putting my foot on the gas pedal. “Then we follow.”

The car bumped beneath us as I turned. It was rough terrain, shaking the whole car.

“You can’t take this car offroad,” Andrew said.

“I can take this anywhere.”

The truck came to a fast stop before I could process what happened.

I heard the crunch of metal before I saw the result of it. I jammed my foot on the brakes, turning my car to the side.

It drifted to one side, narrowly coming to a stop in the field before I hit the edge of the truck.

“He hit something,” I said.

“Holy fuck. They installed concrete pillars at the edge of this lot.”

The front of the white truck was completely crumpled. The moment I realized that Colby wasn’t going to be able to drive off again I bolted out, gunning it for the front of the truck.

He was already trying to run off.

But he wasn’t going to make it.

At the edge of the dirt lot there was a small row of trees. I made my way around one as Colby ran straight through, and I met him on the other side, tackling him to the ground.

I pinned him.

It had been a long time since I’d been in any sort of fight, either, but the instinct would never leave me.

“Delete the fucking video or I break your phone,” I roared at him.

He struggled but I kept him pinned to the ground.

“I don’t know who the fuck you are, butfuckyou,” he said. “I’m not deleting shit.”