I paused, felt my heart start beating faster in protest but continued anyway.

“In the morning, if you still want to, I’ll take you to the airport and buy you a plane ticket to wherever you want to go.  You don’t ever have to see me again, but I can’t let you wander around this area of town at night.  You wouldn’t last an hour.”

Her eyes locked with mine again.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” she finally said.

I nodded, and she dropped her head and shook it slowly as she turned around and walked back toward the bed.  She turned abruptly and yelled at me.

"I don't know what's going on here, but you're scaring me!"

Stepping forward and reaching out with my hand, I cupped the side of her face and moved in to kiss her. She wasn't going to have any of that, though, and turned her head away as I leaned in.  I pulled back and ran my tongue across my lips.

"I'm not trying to scare you."

“Well, you are!”

My stomach tightened up on itself.  I couldn’t figure out any way to resolve this with her and didn’t have the slightest idea what to do or say.  My normal reaction to anyone else would have been to sit down, shut up, and I would do what I needed to do.  With her, everything was ridiculously complex.  None of my usual responses worked.

“You need to stop with all the cryptic shit,” she informed me.  Her hands moved up to pull out the scrunchie holding up her ponytail.  I tried not to get too distracted by the way her hair fell around her shoulders, but all I could think of was running my fingers through it.

“I told you; I’ve never done the boyfriend thing before.  I have no idea what to do here.”

“Start by telling me what the hell is going on,” Lia said.

I sighed and rubbed my fingers into my eyes.

“I don’t know if that’s really the best way.”

“It’s a start.”

It was more likely to be an end, which was what had me on edge.  The thing was, I was afraid she was going to walk out.  I even recognized it as fear though I might not have admitted it to anyone else.  If she left and I never saw her again, I wasn’t so sure I’d survive.  I had to do something to keep her with me a little longer.

“Tell me about you,” I said.  It was my last ditch effort to try to delay what was coming.  “I hardly know anything about you, either.  You tell me about you, and then in the morning, I’ll tell you about me.”

It gave me one last night with her and one last morning of waking up with her.

Lia looked skeptical, but I also saw a hint of resignation in her eyes, which allowed me to breathe without my lungs feeling like they were being compressed.

“I don’t think what I have to say is all that interesting,” Lia sighed as she sat down on the edge of the bed again.

I sat down next to her and reached for her hand.

“I still want to know,” I told her.  “I’ll get something for us to eat, and then you can tell me, okay?”

Lia took a long breath and nodded her acquiescence.

Auburn Gresham wasn’t an area I’d spent much time exploring in the past, but when gang activity in the area began to push up into Rinaldo’s heroin trade, I’d been part of a group that came down and let them know exactly who was in control in the city.  The message had been clear—go ahead and do what you want in the south, but don’t fuck with businesses in the north.  We even picked a line—the 47th Parallel.  It didn’t quite match Korea, but it still served as an easy reminder.  It was based on 47th street, not any line of latitude, but it served its purpose.

During my tenure in the area, I’d found the best pizza place and made friends with the owners.

“Is that who I think it is?”

Jack Anderson leaned over the cash register and stuck out his hand, which I shook.  He was a dark-skinned man in his mid-fifties with white hair and stubble around his chin.  He’d been running the pizza place since his father passed away in the seventies.

“It’s been a while,” I said with a smile.

“You want the usual?” Jack asked.

“I haven’t been here in nearly a year,” I laughed.  I couldn’t believe after all this time the dude still remembered what I wanted on my pizza.  He didn’t do the traditional Chicago style, but the guy made the best thin crust and sauce around.  “Can it still be referred to as a ‘usual’?”

“Well, I don’t know anyone else who ever orders it,” Jack said.  “Face it, Evan, no one else thinks pineapple and mushroom go together.”

We laughed as he put in my order, caught up on some neighborhood shit, and then said our goodbyes as he handed me my pizza in a cardboard box with a stack of napkins on top.  I hoofed it back to the motel and Lia.  She gave me a strange look when I told her what was on the pizza but seemed to like it once she tried it.

“So, where were you born?” I asked.

“Dallas,” she said.  “My father worked for AT&T when I was young.  When my parents divorced, he and my mom split custody while I was growing up.  When mom got an offer for a new job in Phoenix, Dad didn’t want to be that far from me, so he quit his job and moved to Arizona as well.  He started working with the Navajo Nation to set up their computer networks.”

“What does your mom do?” I asked.

“She’s in the financial business.”  Lia took another bite of pizza, chewed for a bit, and then put the slice back in the box.  “I know she works in information security, but I honestly don’t quite understand it all.  She keeps hackers out of their systems, basically.”

I snorted.

“Is that funny?”

I shook my head.

“I just don’t think it’s very successful,” I said.  “There are a lot of people out there who are very good at getting past the security folks.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but she tries.  It’s pretty good money, at least, so she could afford to set aside money to send me to school.  I still haven’t managed to get a degree anywhere, of course, because that was about the time Dad died.”

“How did he die?”

“Cancer,” she said with a shrug.  “It fucking sucked.”

I watched her closely, noticing her fingers twitch and her eyes blink rapidly a few times to hold back the moisture forming in them.

“You were with him,” I said.

“I had just finished high school when he was diagnosed.  They said he had maybe a year, but he didn’t make it past eight months even with all the chemo and shit.  I took care of him because there really wasn’t anyone else, and William did all the business stuff while he was sick so we could afford medical bills.”

“So your fiancé worked for your dad?”

“Yes, for about six years.”

“While you were in high school.”

“We started dating when I was fifteen.”

“How old was he?”

She blushed a little, and my suspicions about him being quite a bit older were confirmed before she answered.

“He was twenty four at the time.”

“Around here, we would’ve called you jail bait,” I said.

“Only if the parents pressed charges,” she said, and I knew she was right.  If the parents were okay with it, well, at least one parent, then the law would turn a blind eye.

“What did your mom think?”

“She didn’t like it,” Lia said.  “She didn’t like Will, anyway, and definitely didn’t like me being with him.”

“Just because of the age thing or something else?”

“I think just age initially, but I also think she realized, long before I did, that he wasn’t quite what he pretended to be.”

“You mean before he threw you out of a moving car and left you for dead?”

Lia glanced at me with dark eyes and then looked down at her hands.

“Something like that.”

“Have you seen him since then?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

She looked back up at and me and bit her lip for a moment.

“He was there at my mom’s house.”

“After I dropped you at the bus station?”

Lia nodded.

“What happened?”

“The usual,” she responded.  She seemed to want to leave it at that, but I wouldn’t let her.  Eventually she told me the rest.  “He was drunk; Mom was yelling, and I was stuck between them.  The major difference was that I had decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore.”

“Do what?”

“Put up with him and his crap!” she growled.  “He could have really hurt me when he pushed me out of that car, and then he just left me there!  I wasn’t going to listen to him go on about how he came right back and was so sorry and spent hours looking for me—it was bullshit, and I wasn’t going to listen to it!”

She took a deep breath before she went on.

“I told him I’d found someone else.”  Lia glanced at me, seeming embarrassed for a moment.  “I know we didn’t really…well, it’s not like we committed to each other or anything, but for the first time since high school, I realized there were other options out there besides Will and how he treated me.”

She looked up at me, and her eyes began to sparkle with tears.

“It’s all right,” I soothed.  “Go on.”

“He didn’t like that answer,” she said with a shrug.  “He started yelling, and Mom told him he needed to just leave.  She came up near us, and he pushed her away.  Then he grabbed my arm and squeezed really hard–”

Lia’s breath caught in her throat, and the tears that had been building up since I stopped her at the door finally cascaded down her cheeks.  Dealing with crying chicks was definitely not something within my repertoire, so I went with the only thing I could think of—I grabbed the box of tissues from the bathroom and handed them to her.

Lia wiped her eyes and gripped her fingers around the crumpled tissue as she composed herself.

“I had bruises there for over a week afterwards.  Mom started yelling—said she was going to call the police—and that made him let go.  I told him we were through and that I never wanted to see him again.”

“What did he do?”

“He laughed.  He said I was his, and nothing was going to change that.”

A tickle in the back of my head—one that was rarely wrong—told me that I was going to kill that motherfucker someday.

“He still wasn’t leaving, so Mom ran inside the house and came back out with the phone in her hand.  When he realized that she really was calling the cops, he got in the car and left.  That was the last I saw him.”

I tried to clear my head enough to listen to the rest of the story, but it wasn’t easy.  I didn’t know what the asshole looked like, but I had enough of a vision in my head that I could see myself with the business end of my Beretta in his face.  At some point, I was going to have to find a picture of the guy and make all that come true.

Lia continued.

“Mom immediately started quizzing me about the ‘new guy’ and if that meant I really was done with William for good.”

I sat still, wondering just what she might have told her mother about me, not that Lia knew much at that time—even less than she did now—but it still left me feeling a little uneasy.  I wondered if any other girl had ever described me to her mother.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“Not much.”  Lia shrugged one shoulder.  “I mean, I didn’t know much, did I?  I said you were retired from the military, and we had just met by accident.  Once she found out what the ‘accident’ was, it kind of distracted her from the original conversation.  We never really talked about you again until I was leaving.”

Her eyes found mine.

“She told me to be careful,” Lia said.  “She told me that I didn’t really know much about you and that you might not even be who I think you are.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her I would be careful and not to worry.  I didn’t know much about you, but I was sure you weren’t like William.  We both considered that a step up, so that was it.”

Lia stared down at her hands as tears started spilling off her eyelashes again.

“And then…and then…” Lia sniffed and wiped at her nose with the tissue again.  “Then I found that cabin and your note, and I just…I didn’t know what to do or what to think.”

Without knowing what else I could do, I reached out and took her hand again.  Lia’s fingers gripped mine, and she leaned against my shoulder.  With one arm around her, I pulled her against my chest and rubbed up and down the top part of her arm while she cried.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered against her hair when she stopped sobbing.  “I didn’t want to leave like that.  I didn’t have a choice.”

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Back here,” I said.  “My boss told me I had to come back.”