I wish…

Swear to God, those were the most dangerous words I knew. It wasn’t important what words came after.

I wish I had a cheeseburger. I wish I had a million dollars. I wish I had a dog that didn’t look like a rabid squirrel.

Those weren’t the words that mattered, that wrapped around my legs, dragging me to the ground.

It was the “I wish” part that got me.

Admitting to the world—to myself—that I wanted something was a dangerous act. Because the minute I wanted something, it had value, and it could be taken away.

It would be taken away. That’s how my universe worked.

That was the first lesson I really learned, and the only one that totally stuck.

It’s not that I didn’t know how to wish. I had been a kid once. Kids wish.

And truthfully, even though it hurt, I lived wishes. I ate them and kicked them around my empty apartment like crushed beer cans. I had to bite my tongue to keep them from sighing out of my mouth when I wasn’t paying close enough attention.

I turned my face away from them, and shut down my brain and heart to them. I got so good at pretending I didn’t wish, that I started to believe it.

Not actually wishing took constant vigilance.

Not that I was content—fuck no. Far from it.

But I was accepting. I was…resigned.

Well, that was before.

Before last night. After touching Beth, the way I’d dreamed for seven long years, everything was different. Today, in the bright shimmery sunlight of my last day with Beth, I was so fucking far from resigned. I felt like I was being torn apart.

I’d been okay with our decision: one night together and then we each go back to our lives. But now, in the misty sunlight, I wasn’t okay.

Now I was swarmed with wishes.

They buzzed around my head and hung around my body an inch thick, so many I could barely see. I could barely move.

Wishing had paralyzed me.

I wish…

I watched Beth jump across the puddles scattered around the cracked and uneven asphalt between the gas bays and the family restaurant. She jumped over a little one, skirted a bigger one. The wind pulled at the tight bun she’d put at the top of her head, teasing out a few strands that flew out around her like flags.

I wish I could have her.

She used to do that as a kid, walking across the parking lot of the high school we shared for three months: she jumped over puddles and cracks like it was hopscotch. Smiling at me over her shoulder like she was having fun, like it was all a game and she wanted me to play with her.

I wish she was mine to keep.

And then—like now—I wanted to grab her and shake her and tell her everything was dangerous. We had to be careful. Our happiness would only be rewarded with trouble. Wishing only brought grief.

I wish I was hers to have. An hour, a week, three years. Forever. I don’t give a fuck. I’d be happy for anything. A second more of her skin against mine. Her smile burning its way into my brain.

It was ridiculous, I know. Our happiness would be rewarded with nothing because our time was over. But still…the urge was there. To wrap her up and put her in my pocket and keep her safe.

But safe, for me, meant doing nothing. It meant standing very still and letting life pass me right on by. It meant no pain, sure.

But it also meant no joy.

And Beth deserved joy. Beth was joy. She was music and art and laughter and orange Skittles. She was sex. Healthy, happy, nothing-held-back, nothing-is-dirty-or-secret-or-wrong, orgasmic, touch-me-all-over sex.

And I was the opposite of all that.

I had a shit apartment in the worst neighborhood in San Francisco. My only friend was out of the country more than he was in it. I had a dog for company and a backbreaking job that was ruining my body.

And I was a virgin. That’s how terrified I was of wishing. Of wanting.

Well, former virgin.

What part of me could she possibly want? What part of me was worth giving her?

I’d held myself so still waiting to pay my debt to Bates, the man that got me and my friends out of jail that night seven years ago, when we killed our foster father after he attacked Beth.

It still wasn’t paid. I was supposed to pick Beth up and drop her off at a rehab facility, but her mother had been there and Beth had begged me to keep driving.

And I never could say no to Beth.

So now I had to go to Bates and explain the situation to him. Hope that he would understand. Which was ridiculous. Bates was a killer, a drug lord, an ice-cold criminal, and I had no idea what was going to happen tomorrow.

The threat held over our heads if we didn’t pay back this debt was that we would go to jail for another crime he’d pin on us. Something heinous.

Or he could put a bullet in my head.

See, I had no fucking business wishing for anything. But I couldn’t fucking stop; they were pouring out of me like I was made of holes.

I wish I could touch her again.

I wish we were back in that cabin.

I wish we could stay there forever.

But one way or another, debts had to be paid.

Beth had to move on, too. Her career was hanging by a thread; there was a European tour she needed to salvage. No one said having all your dreams come true was easy, and she was the proof of that. She was a pop star now, having barely survived a seven-month trajectory into the stratosphere that left her reeling.

She’d stumbled, thanks in part to that shitty doctor and a bunch of people who didn’t actually care about her, while pretending that they did. She’d been taking some heavy-duty drugs for a few weeks, but they were out of her system and she had a long road ahead of her. But she would be okay.

She was strong. Stronger than me, for sure. She wished and then she went after those wishes and made them real. She had a life, a passion.

She’d moved on from the nightmare. The office and the Pastor were in her rearview mirror, and they were not slowing her down.

It was beautiful to see. Like…the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

I didn’t just hope Beth was going to be okay. I knew she would be. It was a truth that settled around me like a blanket on a cold night. If nothing else, Beth was going to be okay. It had been the only thing that mattered then, and it was the only thing that mattered now.

So, I was going to drive her back to Los Angeles and say good-bye.

And then I was driving back to San Francisco to pay my debts.

I wish…

The meter clicked to a stop, and I put the nozzle back, the smell of gasoline and a recent rain in the cool air. Beth was no longer jumping puddles. She’d gone inside to get us some coffee and whatever food was easy to eat on the road.

She was pissed, I was pretty sure. Pissed that I wouldn’t answer her questions about why I’d still been a virgin. Mostly I was embarrassed to talk about it. Who confessed those kinds of things? And I was a little bit scared to talk about it, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but this feeling sat in the back of my brain, warning me not to get into this with her.

Not to get deeper into her.

I was scared that talking about it would make it real, make what we’d done some kind of tangible tie between us—and it was, of course it was, but I needed it to stay indescribable.

Beth wanted to talk and frame out the parameters of everything. She wanted every thought and feeling to be turned into something concrete. I needed to feel like it had all been a really great dream.

Because it was going to be hard enough to walk away from her.

And there were plenty of things she wasn’t telling me, the situation with her mother being first and foremost. I had a lot of questions about Beth and her mother, but she wasn’t answering them.

She talked a good game about telling each other everything, clearing the ghosts from our past, but she was as guilty of secrets as I was.

I kicked open the door to the men’s room that was on the outside of the gas station and had to breathe through my mouth.

I hoped the women’s room was better, for Beth’s sake.

Jada, I reminded myself, and then realized it didn’t matter. It was over.

We didn’t belong together. We didn’t seven years ago. And we didn’t now.

And it didn’t hurt. Not in the sharp way I’d grown used to. But it ached. Like the scars across my back had. And it would ache, I guessed, for the rest of my life.

However long that was.

The wall of urinals was on the far side of the bathroom and there were two stalls on the side near the door. The door closed behind me, and the bathroom became a dark cave. I picked the far urinal and unzipped.

The door opened behind me, letting in a bright slice of light, and I finished peeing, zipped back up and turned, only to find two men standing in front of the door, their arms crossed over their chests.

The door closed behind them, making the room dark, and one of them reached over and flipped on the light, a bare bulb that flickered from the middle of the ceiling, the light fixture long ago busted and gone.

The men were still looking at me. One wore a suit, black tie, crisp white shirt. The other man wore a leather jacket that didn’t make a lot of sense, weather-wise.

My skin tightened over my body. I walked to the sink, watching the men in the mirror as I turned on the faucet to wash my hands.

The guys weren’t here to use the bathroom. They were here for me.

“You Tommy MacNeill?” one of the guys asked. I cranked off the water and turned to face them, wiping my dripping hands on my jeans.

“Who wants to know?”

“Bates,” the guy in the leather jacket said. “Bates wants to know.”

* * *

I wanted to weep. But I didn’t. Because I had a job to do and that was to get some coffees to go, maybe a breakfast sandwich or three, and then I had to get the hell out of Tommy’s life.

This was good-bye. After everything that had happened between us—seven years ago and in the last three days—we were going to have an awkward, silent drive to Los Angeles, where he was going to drop me off and never look back.

And I knew it was for the best, like I completely got that I’d hurt Tommy enough, but it still stung, deep in my body where the pain lingered and reverberated and made me catch my breath and wish for different things.

A bell rang out as I stepped into the family restaurant. The smell of bacon and coffee and fried potatoes was thick and rich in the air, and as I walked through the crowded restaurant, I was again grateful that all my success had been in disguise, so I had the pleasure of a truck-stop breakfast without someone taking out their cell phone to get a picture.

But even as I walked over to the cash station to ask about to-go orders, I could feel people looking at me.

It’s the hair, I told myself. I had mermaid hair. And mermaid hair got looks.

But when I passed a man in a trucker cap who quickly tapped the shoulder of the woman next to him and tried—with zero skill—to not point at me while totally pointing at me, I started to wonder if it wasn’t just the hair.

TVs lined the dining room, and I passed one with the sound turned up. The picture changed, and I stopped in my tracks.

It was my mother on the screen. In a red suit, her blond hair pulled back in her classic chignon.

“My daughter,” she was saying in that voice… that fucking voice that meant people would be doing what she wanted because she expected it, “is in danger. From herself and from the man that kidnapped her from the drug rehab facility where she was to undergo rehabilitation for opiates and get psychiatric counseling.”

I opened my mouth to breathe but couldn’t pull in any air. There was no air. Not anywhere in the world. My mom had it all, and that look on her face told me if I wanted to breathe again, I was going to have to go to her and ask for it.

And then it wasn’t my mother on the screen with her perfect suit and her do-as-I-say voice. It was a picture of me taken when I was out at McDonald’s just the other day. Like… yesterday. I knew because I was wearing the howling wolf shirt. The same fucking shirt I was wearing right now. I gasped, walking backward.

And then it was a picture of Tommy with a pair of emoticon socks in his hand.

Bile rose up in my throat. My mother was having me followed. My mother…

Trying really hard not to make a scene, I walked back to the front door. The same cheerful bell rang out as I left, but it sounded false. Chilling even.

Like the go bell at a dog race and I was the rabbit they wanted to tear apart.

Tommy, I thought, we need to get out of here. Now.

But at the gas bays, Tommy wasn’t standing by the truck.

Tommy wasn’t anywhere.

* * *

I scanned the bathroom for some kind of weapon. There was a mop bucket in the corner, with the mop in it. The paper towel dispenser looked like it would come off the wall without any effort. I edged sideways, closer to the mop. I’d break the handle over my leg, and I’d be able to do some damage.

The other man, a thin Filipino guy, took out some black gloves and started putting them on. He smiled like he was really looking forward to trying to beat the shit out of me.

“My name’s Sammy,” he said. “And I’m here to tell you Mr. Bates doesn’t like it when people don’t repay their debts.”

“You can tell Bates things weren’t what they seemed.”

Sammy glanced at Leather Jacket Guy, and they both laughed. In that moment I sprang for the mop, had it in my hands and broken over my knee before they’d stopped laughing at their own joke.

I went after the guy in the leather coat first, because I didn’t know what he had under all that leather. As he lunged for me, I brought one part of the wooden handle down over his arm. I wasn’t the best fighter, but I was strong as fuck and something snapped in the guy’s arm with a nauseating crunch.

He howled and I smashed him across the face with the other stick. He fell sideways, hitting his head against the sink before falling to the ground in a heap.

With that guy out of the picture, I turned on Sammy, but he was already there. Two lightning-fast punches across my face, knocking me back and back again. I tripped over the mop bucket and almost fell on my ass, but I wouldn’t survive if I gave him that kind of advantage.

Trying to get out of Sammy’s range, I shuffled sideways, but the guy was fast and he landed a punch to my ribs that knocked the breath out of me before I brought a piece of the mop handle down across his back.

He grunted but didn’t let up. The skin over my eye split, and my ears were ringing.

“We’re gonna leave you in this bathroom, asshole,” Sammy said. “And we’re gonna do what you couldn’t. Deliver that girl where Bates wants her to be.”

“You’re not getting close to her.”

“You won’t be able to stop us.” He kicked at my leg. I wasn’t suspecting it and went down hard on my knee. He brought both fists up over his head and smashed them down on the top of my back, and I fell forward, braced on my hands. One of the mop-stick weapons rolled out of my grip.

Fuck.

It was the goddamn office all over again.

“Say good night, asshole,” Sammy muttered, and I could feel him above me, winding up with his weight and strength.

I brought the stick up right between his legs as hard as I could. Sammy sucked in all the air in the room, a high whistle between his lips. He fell against the filthy wall, and I got to my feet. He was white and not breathing, his eyes rolling back in his head.

Just to make sure we’d get a head start, I hit him in the back of the leg with the stick, sending him hard to his knees, where he rolled to his side, cupping his extremely damaged junk. Future generations of Sammy were in doubt as of this moment.

I dropped the stick and limped out of there as fast as I could with my effed-up knee and the blood running down my face.

To my surprise, Beth was running across the parking lot toward me, her face white as a sheet. She got one look at my face and sprinted to my side.

“Tommy—” She gasped, her hands reaching for my face. I grabbed her elbow and spun her around so we were both walking/running to the car. “What happened?”

“I’ll explain in the car. We’ve got some trouble.”

“Let me drive,” she said, and I gave her the keys.

We were in the truck and peeling out of the gas station within seconds.

“Anyone following us?” she asked.

“Those guys who jumped me in the bathroom, they’re not moving for a while.”

“Other people in the restaurant though. They might follow us.”

“Why?” I asked, turning sideways to look out the back window, grunting with the pain as my ribs protested the twisting.

“My mom.”