Reckless (54 page)

I clutched my fists in front of me, squeezing the air in frustration. “You’re missing the point, Samantha. The thing is, I was watching the guy in my rearview for three miles. He was lagging farther and farther behind after every turn. He started trying to make up lost ground by coming into the corners too hot. All I would’ve had to do was slow my bike down, let him catch up, keep a pace he could safely manage. If I’d done that, we would’ve been toasting beers at the end of the day. But I didn’t. I had an ego about the whole thing. I wasn’t gonna let some hothead beat my shit, no fucking way.”

Holding fingers against her lips, Samantha searched my eyes. “When did this happen?”

I could see her wheels turning. She was desperately trying to make sense of this. But there was no sense to be made.
 

I indulged her. “Three years ago,” I sighed.

She took a step toward me, resting one hand on my arm. “Oh, Christos. You were nineteen. You were just a kid.
I’m
nineteen. I still do stupid things all the time. If that guy hadn’t followed you that day, the next time, he would’ve followed someone
else
he shouldn’t have been following. It wasn’t your fault.”

“But that’s not what happened,” I argued, shaking my splayed hands in front of me. “He died when he was following
me
,” I sneered, dropping my arms to my side in defeat, “because
I
got too competitive. Not some other rider. I wasn’t thinking to myself, ‘Oh, this young fellow is terribly outclassed. The responsible thing for me to do as a grown-up is take the poor boy aside and set him straight before he injures himself. Teach him to mind his own limits, and follow the rules of the road responsibly.’ Nope. I was just thinking that his sorry ass wasn’t going to catch me. Now he’s dead.”

Samantha chewed on her bottom lip and frowned. She was silent.
 

Because there wasn’t a good argument in this case, was there? That’s why they called it
reckless
driving and
criminal
negligence.

I rubbed my hand across my face and tipped my head back in frustration.

“And that’s just the tip of my iceberg,” I sighed. “I’ve been in so many punch-ups, I’ve lost count. I’ve hurt a lot of people, put them in hospitals countless times. Broken bones, knocked out teeth, all because deep down,” I was seething now, “I’m a fucking
hot
-head who didn’t know how to control my shit for
years
before I met you.”

A pained, disgusted grimace stretched across Samantha’s face. Her arms dangled uselessly at her sides.
 

I’m sure any desire she’d had left to hug me or tell me everything was going to be all right evaporated when the truth came out. I couldn’t blame her. I was disgusted with myself too. Because I knew that beneath my shiny, chromed-up good looks, I was a monster.

She took a hesitant step back, toward the coffee table. If she was backing away from me, I couldn’t blame her. When you smelled trouble, that’s what a smart person did.

“But you never started any of those fights, right?” Samantha asked seriously.

I had another can of disappointment for her. I pulled it out of my back pocket and popped the top.
 

I huffed out a laugh, “Yeah.”

She was frowning and chewing her lip again. “What do you mean, yeah?” she asked.

“I mean, I’ve started tons of fights. Shit, even the ones I didn’t? I could’ve walked away. But I decided to stay and fight. I wasn’t going to let anybody out-man my shit.”

“Christos, that isn’t like you,” she frowned sternly.
 

Sadly, she was in total denial. Because I knew the truth. I could be a fucking prick when I was trying to deal with the rage that had boiled in my veins for a decade…since my mom…

Mom…

Samantha shook her head definitively. “That’s not the man I know,” she said passionately, “the man I fell in love with.”
 

And there went my silver lining, my hope that this would all work out. Because she hadn’t fallen in love with the real me. She’d fallen in love with the thin veneer I’d pasted over my brutish past in the last two years. She didn’t want to know about my shit. Fuck,
I
didn’t want to know about my past, but I was fucking stuck with it. I chuckled to myself. What difference did it make if I got locked up after my upcoming trial? I would forever be chained down by my history.

I sneered at her. “That’s because I’m really not the man you think you know. I’m a fuck-up, Samantha.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s not?”

“No,” she protested softly. “I
know
you.”

“No you don’t,” I laughed. “I’m not a Boy Scout, Samantha. I’m the bad guy.”

“But you never start fights!” she pleaded. “You’re always protecting me.”

I chuckled. “Maybe now. Two years ago? I was the asshole. I was the guy starting shit everywhere I went.”

“I can’t picture you doing that,” she whispered.

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t.” I was ready to jump out of my skin.
 

I wanted to ram my head into the wall. I should’ve told her sooner that I was a Class-A fuck-up and let the chips fall, instead of jumping into a relationship with her. Then she could’ve calmly decided to keep her distance. That would’ve been okay. I could still have mentored her. But I’d been too much of a coward to tell her. A fucking yellow-backed coward.

Samantha had needed a guide through her art career when I’d met her, not a fucked-up lover.
 

But I had been so head-over for her after only a few short weeks, I’d let my heart overrun my good sense. I’d let my greedy need take over. The next thing I knew, after spending a month or two with her, I loved her so much, the idea of scaring her off by telling her the truth about my past and my impending trial had freaked me to the point I just buried everything.

For the last five months, it had felt so good being the good guy she thought I was. Maybe I thought her love for me as the good guy would make my bad guy go away, like he had never existed.

How wrong I was.

Now I had the most amazing woman I’d ever met staring at me like I was the fucking monster I’d always been.

At least now she knew the truth.

I was Jekyll & Hyde.
 

Too bad Samantha had fallen in love with Jekyll, because I was Hyde to the core.

I couldn’t hide my Hyde anymore.

I took a deep breath and stared at her. May as well put the final nail in this shit and bury it. She didn’t need me bringing her down.

I said, “Remember when you were talking about Jake’s surprise Valentine’s Day plans for Madison?”

“Yeah?” she said, her voice quivering nervously.

I opened my mouth to finish things off while glancing at Samantha’s innocent, tear-stained face.

“Tell me,
agápi mou
,” she said softly.

I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t break her heart any further than I already had. I couldn’t tell her that what Jake had planned for Madison on Valentine’s Day would be a million times more awesome than sitting in court behind me, watching the burners heat up under my ass. Shit, Jake could buy Madison one of those boxes of candy hearts with the messages printed on them and mail it to her a week late, and that would still be way better than Samantha sitting in the back of the court room with me on February 14th.
 

Man, I was a fucking prick.

Sharp as a tack, Samantha said, “What about Valentine’s Day?”

I couldn’t tell her.

“Is…is your
trial
on Valentine’s Day?”

After an interminable guilty silence, I nodded.

“Oh, Christos,” she said. Her eyes were tearing up again. She held one hand to her mouth, as if to cover her shame. There was this sad tone to her voice that made me want to chuck biscuits all over her carpet.
 

That was when my final surprise came.

Clarity.

I finally saw it in the form of one of those forty-foot earthquake waves that washes inland for miles and destroys everything in its path. That wave was Samantha’s parents.

If they found out I was in jail, it would confirm
everything
her mom had said on the phone about me. It would be hard, ugly proof. Then they would go to war for their daughter.
 

The thing Samantha didn’t realize was her parents cared about her. A lot. Sure, they were thick-skulled about it, thinking a stable 9-to-5 was the path to satisfaction.

They may’ve been misguided, but they cared. That’s why they weren’t going to tolerate their daughter dating a two-bit tough in lock-up.

No fucking way.

Earlier, on the phone, Samantha’s mom had been a momma bear backed into a corner. She wasn’t giving up her daughter to me.

I wouldn’t put it past her to hop on a plane to San Diego to stage an intervention on Samantha’s behalf. Round her daughter up and take her back home to D.C., just to get her away from me for good.

Shit, if some guy like me was dating my daughter, I’d probably do the same thing.

There was only one way to fix this.

I stalked over to the door and yanked it open. “I have to go.”

“No, Christos, wait!” She grabbed after me, but I slipped free. “Don’t leave! I need you!”

I couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes. My heart was already broken into too many pieces.
 

I was out the door and hopping on my bike seconds later.

CHRISTOS

The lane lines on the freeway machine-gunned at me like tracer bullets.

My Ducati screamed between my legs. I was tucked beneath the fairing as wind pounded the front of the bike.

It was three in the morning and I was doing 175mph on the Five.

The pain inside me was so big, nobody could save me from it. My only option was to speed away from everything, go so fast, nothing could catch me.

Somewhere far behind me were my problems.
 

Samantha’s broken heart. There was no way I could fix that, not unless I could magically rewrite history and erase my past.

Her parents. Something in my gut told me they were coming for her. They weren’t gonna let this two-bit fuck-up take their daughter away. No way.

My pending trial, two days away. The possibility of jail time, maybe even prison time.
 

In all three cases, I had no control over the outcome. Everything was up to the people around me. It was driving me nuts. But there was one thing I
could
control.

I could control my fate.

The only thing stopping me from high-speed death on this freeway was
me
.

This I could control.

My bike. The pavement. I was in my element.

I ignored the demons behind me as I concentrated on the road ahead. The surface was damp but not wet. It had drizzled just before sundown, hours ago. Traffic had dried twin wheel-tracks into each lane. The tracks were about two feet wide. As long as I kept my bike inside the track, I was on dry road.

If I hit the wet strips on either side at 175? I didn’t fucking care.

All I could think about was keeping my bike in the dry track. There was no time to think about anything else.

At this speed, the lazy curves of the freeway became dangerously sharp. If I kept my eyes trained in the distance, I could time things tightly enough.

If you went the speed limit, the ride from Samantha’s apartment to Pacific Beach took about twenty minutes. I’d made it in seven. I got off the freeway at Garnet to turn around. The cops always got heavier near downtown.

A minute later, I was back on the freeway heading north, and winding through the gears past one-forty.

I eased up carefully on the throttle as I hit the curve around Mount Soledad. As soon as the road straightened at La Jolla Village, I opened the throttle back up and blasted past SDU. When I shot beneath the overpass at La Jolla Village Drive, there was a brief concussion as the cement roadway overhead smacked the roar of my Ducati’s engine back at me.
 

This section of straightaway was about three miles long. I cleared it in just over a minute. I had hoped to catch air over the top of the grade at Genesee, but the pitch was too shallow, even at 175.

I relaxed the throttle again as I neared the merge with the 805. I scrubbed off some speed and toed the shifter while blowing past two cars heading into the turn. I think I was still holding one-thirty as I rounded the curve.

The bike leaned as I hit the apex of the turn and feathered the gas. As I started coming out of it, I brought the bike up to standing while winding out the throttle.
 

The engine screamed as I worked my way back up the gears and arrowed across four lanes, cutting a razor line between an eighteen wheeler and an SUV.

I rocketed northward with the hounds of hell nipping at my heels.

They couldn’t catch me.

SAMANTHA

I dreamt of a fallen angel.

I woke up in the middle of the night, gasping for air.

Alone.

“Christos?” I asked the emptiness that enveloped me.

My darkened apartment was empty. I shook off my nightmare and reached for my phone, sensing deep in my heart that something was wrong with Christos. I dialed his number for the fiftieth time that night. It rang four times, then went to voicemail.

For the fiftieth time.

I had tried following him when he’d left my apartment earlier, but there was no way I was going to catch his Ducati with my VW.

After driving all over my neighborhood for thirty minutes, feeling lost only blocks away from my own apartment, I’d given up and gone home.
 

I had then texted and called Christos repeatedly, but he’d never answered. Eventually, I’d given up trying, exhausted from the worry.
 

After the draining conversation with my parents, the frightening conversation with Christos, and the panicked calls to his phone, I’d had zero energy left. I was so exhausted, I didn’t even consider ice cream before crawling into bed and sobbing myself to sleep.

Now that I was awake, the images from my nightmare still haunted me.