Loaded: A Bad Boy Romance (16 page)

H
e takes
a second before he answers me, just staring me down, towering over me, and holy
fuck
am I turned on.

I hate it. I hate that arguing with Alex makes me ten times hornier than actual foreplay with anyone else I’ve ever met. I hate that when I get mad at him I want to sit on his face, or that when he infuriates me I just want him to push me against the wall and
fuck me until I scream.

“No,” he says at last. “I didn’t lie about that part, and yet here you are.”

“I’m here because I didn’t have a choice,” I say. “Are you forgetting that you kidnapped me?
You. Kidnapped. Me.
”

He laughs suddenly, the low, raspy voice echoing through the dark cabin.

“You’re here because you
like
this,” he says. “Because you’ve been wet for me from the second we met. I don’t fuck girls who don’t want me, tiger. And you
want
me.”

I slap him.

I’ve never slapped anyone before. I have no idea what possesses me to do it.

Alex grabs my wrist before it falls back to my side and shoves it behind me, pressing our bodies together. It doesn’t hurt, but it could if he wanted it to, and I know it.

I’ve watched him kill two people. I watched him break someone’s jaw.

And yet, I
cannot
keep my fucking mouth shut.

“I’m not the one who’s been walking around with a permanent boner,” I say, as his erection presses against my belly.

“I like women,” he says. “What can I say? You’re not bad for a white girl.”

“Is
not bad
why you’re on the run from your own cartel?” I ask.

His erection throbs against me. I think I’m soaking my tiny denim shorts through already, and I’m fighting the urge to just wrap my legs around him right now.

Alex doesn’t answer, but he lets my wrist go and kisses me hard, his tongue in my mouth and I kiss him back, the pit of hunger yawning wide inside me, even though it’s been hours since the last time we did this.

He picks me up and just
throws
me on the bed, where I bounce hard and then he’s on top of me, yanking my knees up around my torso, biting my neck and then my shoulder as I gasp. It’s probably hard enough to leave marks. He’s not being gentle.

I don’t
want
him to be gentle.

Alex pushes his hand under the hem of my tiny shorts and slides two fingers inside me with no preamble, instantly hitting that sweet spot that makes me gasp.

“That’s what I thought,” he growls. “That made you wet as
fuck
, tiger, and I just gave it to you earlier today.”

He moves his fingers and I moan through clenched teeth.

“You were ready to bend me over the counter a couple of minutes ago,” I manage to say. “You’re one to talk.”

“Say you want my cock,” he says. He grabs my hand and puts it on his erection, then moves his hips against my hand, even as his fingers are inside me. “Tell me you want me inside you, that you want me to fuck you so bad you’ll let me do it bare.”

I don’t say anything. It’s true, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.

He leans down, his face practically on mine.

“Tell me you haven’t been able to think about anything for days, that when you close your eyes you think about my tongue in your pussy. Tell me if I’d fucked you on that counter you would have
liked
it.”

I keep my mouth shut. His fingers move, not gently, and I arch my back, gritting my teeth so I don’t make a noise even though I think he might make me come this way.

“Say it, tiger,” he growls. “Say you want me to fuck you hard
right now
. We can do missionary with the lights out. We can turn the lights on and find a mirror and you can see how fucking
hot
you are when you come with me deep inside you. You can be on top and ride my cock until you come two or three times. I don’t care how you want to fuck, tiger, just say the word, because I want to hear something filthy come out of your mouth.”

Another finger slides inside me and my toes curl and then his thumb’s on my clit and it sends me over the edge
instantly
, my nails digging into his shoulders even through his shirt, an animal
grunt
coming from somewhere deep in my chest.

His fingers stay in me, and it still feels good.

“Say it, tiger,” he whispers and
fuck
I want him, I want him to grab my hair and not be gentle and I want to still find bruises from when we fucked when this is all over.

I don’t say that.

“What if I don’t?” I ask. “You gonna break my jaw?”

He stops moving, and in that instant, I can see something shift. He goes from the sexy, irresistible man who was just telling me filthy things to business Alex, the guy who’s got a mission.

He pulls his fingers out and stands. I’m still lying on the bed, half undone.

“No,” he says, wiping his fingers on the bedspread. “I’m not gonna break your fucking jaw.”

He turns and opens the door and I sit up.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“Stay there,” he orders.

I stand, because I have no fucking intention of staying here, but he gives me a look of pure fury that stops me.

“Just do what I say
for fucking once
,” he says. “I shot two people for you. Would you just do what I say
one fucking time
?”

I sit back down on the bed. He slams the door behind himself, and I sit in the dark, wishing I hadn’t opened my fucking mouth.

T
he whole cabin
shakes when I shut the door, and I storm down the steps and stalk down the road.

Break her jaw. Am I going to fucking
break her jaw
.

I killed two of my
own
guys for her, beat up a guy for calling her a cunt, and can’t
think
about anything but the next time I can taste her, and she sees a violent thug.

She wants to fuck the violent thug, but still. That’s all I’m ever gonna be in her eyes, and no amount of fucking in Yosemite will change that.

We’re different. We belong to different worlds. In hers, you talk your problems out.

In mine, you break jaws.

I grab some stuff from the SUV — a gun, more cash. There’s a hotel next door to the cabins and I walk to the parking lot, moving through the shadows. I pick out the most middling cars — Fords, Chevys, Toyotas — and try their door handles until I find a ten-year-old Nissan that’s unlocked.

I could hotwire it with my hands tied behind my back, so in five minutes I’m pulling out of the parking lot for the camp store. I park far away, walk in, and grab a Sacramento Bee from the stand just inside the doors, flipping through it furiously until I find what I want, a couple pages in.

I drop the paper and head back outside, where there’s an actual pay phone.

“I’ve got information on Tessa Fulbright,” I say. “The missing person.”

“Okay,” says the woman on the other end. “Just me just connect—”

“No,” I say. “She’s in Yosemite National Park. Big Tree cabins, number two-eighty-one, Pinecone Court. Say it back to me.”

She says it back nervously.

“Who is—” she gets out, but I hang up the phone.

It’s done. It’s over. Tessa’s going to be safe, and I’ve got things I have to do.

I hotwire the Nissan again and drive it west out of the park, staring into the dark and forcing myself not to think as I head through the mountains.

“
F
uck you
,” I mutter after he slams the door. I’m just talking to myself, in the dark, but I feel a little better.

I find the lights — it’s a pull chain in the middle of the room — and wash my face in the sink. There’s water after all. A long time passes, and I start wondering where the hell Alex went.

Did he get caught?
I wonder.
Maybe someone recognized him, wherever he went.

I pace around the cabin.

Finally there’s a loud, authoritative knock on the door, and I jump. It’s not Alex. He doesn’t knock like that, he just pushes doors open.

I glance at the cabin’s windows, heart beating wildly, wondering if I should run.

What if this is the cartel? What if Alex was very,
very
wrong about whether they’d be in a National Park?

They knock again, pounding so hard that it shakes the walls of the cabin.

“Yosemite Police!” a man shouts. “We’re coming in.”

The knob turns and the door opens, revealing two men and a woman wearing tan uniforms, an official-looking car behind them.

“You’re Tessa Fulbright?” the man in front asks, stepping inside.

He keeps one hand near his gun and his back against the wall as he looks around the tiny space, but there’s nowhere a person could hide in here.

Where’s Alex?
I want to ask.
What happened? Where’d he go?

Is he okay?

“Yes,” I say.

“Are you alone in here?”

“Yes,” I say.

The other two officers step into the cabin, and suddenly it’s crowded in here.

“Are you hurt?” he asks.

I just shake my head. The woman officer looks at my bandaged feet in slip-on shoes and frowns.

“Can you walk?” she asks, her voice gentle and soothing.

I look down. I’d almost forgotten about my feet.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Can you come with us?” the first guy asks.

His voice is gentler with every question, and suddenly I remember: I’m not a fugitive.

Alex
was the fugitive.

I’m a kidnapping victim.

“It’s over,” the woman says.

She puts a hand on my bare shoulder.

“You’re safe now,” she says, her face soft and worried.

I have the sensation that something is crashing down around me, that the insanity of the last two days has come to a screeching halt and now it’s
finished
, for good.

I burst into tears.

I’m not sure I
want
it to be over or that I
want
to be safe, but I don’t want the alternative,
either
. I’m confused and hungry and tired and just fucking
exhausted
, and something happened between me and my kidnapper that I already know I can never tell anyone about. I can’t even explain it to myself.

“Thank you,” I say, between sobs. The woman squeezes my shoulder.

As I follow them out, I can hear one of the officers speaking quietly into a walkie-talkie:
she’s here, she’s alive, she’s fine.

He sounds a little surprised.

T
he next twenty
-four hours are a blur. They give me a jacket and a blanket, and within the hour, the FBI shows up by helicopter. Alex is long gone, and all I know is how he slammed the door behind him.

I don’t tell them that we were going to go to Sacramento, even though that obviously wasn’t true. They question me for hours, gently, like they think I’m breakable.

I don’t lie, but I don’t tell them everything. They already know who Alex is, so I name him. I tell them about the wedding but leave out the part where he fingered me outside. I tell them about the kidnapping and the safehouse, about trying to escape through the desert by foot, about two other guys coming to kill me.

I don’t tell them that I fell asleep on Alex while we watched movies, or that he made me spaghetti. I tell them he killed the other guys but not about the night before, or that he found me in the shower afterwards and held me.

Basically, I leave out the sex parts. They seem to buy it.

I talk to my dad on the phone. He’s nearly crying with relief, but I can’t stand to say more than “I’m fine,” to him before I hang up.

This is his fault, after all.

They fly me back to Los Angeles and have me checked out by a doctor. She’s warm and gentle, with shoulder-length gray hair and warm brown eyes.

When she removes the bandages on my feet, she seems surprised.

“You walked barefoot through the desert?” she asks.

“I tried,” I say.

“There’s no sign of infection,” she says. “You’re lucky. Whoever dressed these wounds did a good job.”

My eyes fill with tears. The tears make me furious, so I rub them away before she can see.

Besides my feet, I’ve got a couple bruises and I’m slightly dehydrated, but I’m fine.

Before she lets me leave, she has me come into her office, fully dressed in jeans and a shirt that don’t quite fit, but they’re better than what I was wearing when they found me.

“First, I want you to know that I’m bound by doctor-patient confidentiality,” she says. “Even under oath, I can’t discuss what you’ve told me in confidence.”

I nod. My stomach twists.

“One of the things I did was run a rape kit,” she says.

My eyes go wide, and I shake my head.

“He didn’t rape me,” I say.

“I didn’t find any evidence of that,” she says, gently. “But I did want to ask whether you’d like the morning after pill. It’s effective for up to seventy-two hours after unprotected intercourse.”

She looks at me. I look at her.

She
knows
.

With everything else, I completely forgot that I could get pregnant. When there was a cartel after me, that part didn’t seem so important, but now?

I swallow.

“Yes, please,” I say.

She nods and slides a small cardboard Plan B box to me across her desk.

M
en in suits
put my dad and me in a hotel in Los Angeles. I don’t know if they’re FBI, CIA, DEA, ATF, or whatever combination of letters deals with cartel kidnappings, and I don’t really care.

My dad seems so pathetic that it’s hard to stay mad at him, though I manage it for a little while. He tells me that he thought he was just making some extra money, and it turned into much, much more than he thought it would, that he’d never have done it if he knew what would happen, all that.

I believe him, but it doesn’t make it better.

Mostly, I watch TV in my hotel room. The lobby always has at least two armed men in it, and every half hour, they patrol the hallway. They go to my apartment and get stuff for me, so after a couple days, the Burbank Marriott is almost home sweet home.

My boss emails that she heard about me on the news, and I can take as much time as I need. I ask if I can work remotely, starting tomorrow, because I need something to
do
and she says yes.

So I work twelve-hour days, alone in a hotel room. The guys in suits give evasive answers whenever I ask what’s going on, when I can go home, but from the urgent way they talk to each other I can tell something
big
is going down.

I read the paper that slides under my door every day, and it’s two weeks until I

finally find what I’ve been dreading.

That’s it.

That’s all Alex’s death warrants: a paragraph in the local section of the Los Angeles Times.

I read it about fifty times, until I feel nauseous. I wonder what he did when he left Yosemite. Why he left without me, what his
plan was. It obviously didn’t work.

I feel empty, hollow, like the inside of my skin has been scraped out, and I
hate
myself for feeling this way. He kidnapped me. He murdered two people without blinking, beat up another guy.

The very definition of
bad
.

So why am I remembering the way his eyes glinted when he called me
tiger
? Why do I keep thinking about him bandaging my feet after I walked through the desert?

Why do I keep making a fist, tucking my thumb behind my knuckles so I don’t break it when I throw a punch, and then crying harder?

I
stop paying
attention to the news, other than to read that dental records confirmed it was Alex’s body they found. After a few weeks I’m told I can go home.

There’s news footage of a dozen Mexican guys being handcuffed and walked to police cars outside some club. One is a short, stout guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt, plaid shorts, and socks with sandals. Apparently he’s in charge of the whole operation.

I go back to work and try to have a normal life, but the trial starts for the guys who got arrested.

I don’t testify. The only guys I can testify about are dead. I talk endlessly to the prosecutors as they try to glean scraps of information from me, but I hardly know anything. Alex didn’t tell me much, and I think it was by design. If I knew something, I was dangerous to the cartel, and they might want me dead.

The gossip news gets a whiff of
something
, though. Even though I’ve kept my mouth shut they look at the pieces, note that Alex killed his own men and took me on the run, and suddenly we’re Bonnie and Clyde.

I get really good at saying
no comment
when cameras get shoved in my face while people ask whether Villalobos and I had a relationship.

We might have. I don’t fucking know anymore. I just know that one of the last things I said to him was
are you gonna break my jaw
, he left, and now he’s dead.

The trial finally ends after a year. Everyone is found guilty. The leader will be in jail for the rest of his life, and the news shouts that La Carretera has been shattered, disbanded.

I quit my job and move to Portland, Oregon, where I don’t know a single person.

I
t takes a long time
, but I start feeling like I have my life back. I get another job as a junior architect at a firm that designs eco-friendly schools. I join an adult kickball league, and after games we drink beers together. I think some of them might actually be my friends.

I go to a lot of therapy, and while I don’t tell my therapist the whole truth, I think she guesses. We talk a lot about grief, a lot about trauma, and the phrase
Stockholm Syndrome
comes up more than once.

She doesn’t think I had it.

I go on coffee dates with men who wear knit hats and have tattoos of deer, men with names like Mark and Harrison and Patrick. They’re nice, decent young men who would probably make good boyfriend material.

They don’t do a
thing
for me. I turn down second dates.

Six months go by as I float through life, every day getting a little brighter, a little more in-focus.

A
nd then
, I see Alex.

I’m walking home from work and he’s sitting in a car at the end of a block, and even though he’s far away and I know better, the very deepest part of me is
certain
it’s him.

I walk toward the car, but then it starts, makes a U-turn, and drives away.

I’m left standing there in the northwest drizzle.

It wasn’t him
, I tell myself.
Don’t be stupid.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

Alex is dead
, I think.
What you’re experiencing is a normal part of trauma and grief and adjusting to new things and whatever the fuck else is going on with you right now
.

I look at the road where the car disappeared for another moment.

Then I walk home.