Tied

“I think I should go inside.” I unzip his jacket and slowly pull it off. “Thank you for the ride.”

“Tomorrow. Noon.” His eyes lower, his chest rising and falling as he shoves his arms into the leather jacket and lifts his hair out from beneath the collar.

“Okay.” I wonder what happened to my taxi girl and why she left me. Surely she must have had a good reason. I’ll call her in the morning and give her a chance to explain before I find a new driver, which is something I’d rather not have to do.

“Thanks for the good weirdness, Holly.” Straightening, he gives me a smile, which has a glint of wickedness in its curve, and gets back on his bike.

He said my name. And he smiled. At me. I feel the way those girls look, on the TV shows I spent so much time watching, when the guy they like finally pays attention to them. I feel giddy and nauseous, scared and happy and glowy. For the first time ever, I feel like a real girl. Nothing has ever felt better.

15

Holly

The anticipation of seeing him again today, as friends, kept me awake for most of the night. I kept peeking out my window after he dropped me off, wondering if he was still out there. I wouldn’t mind if he was, to be honest. I liked his attention, fleeting as it may be.

Earlier, while I waited for Feather to get out of the shower, I called Maria, the taxi driver. She apologized frantically, telling me she had gotten a call on her cell that her two-year-old son was sick and she’d had to leave quickly. She had no way of calling me, so she had no choice except to just leave. She told me she had worried about me all night, wondering how I would get home. I could actually hear the relief in her voice when I told her I was fine and would like another ride today.

“I’m going shopping, want to come?” Feather asks, coming into our small kitchen, where I’m drinking a cup of tea and eating a blueberry muffin.

“I can’t… I’m going to see Poppy today. The driver will be here in about an hour.”

“You mean you’re going to see Tyler,” she comments with a grin, grabbing her car keys off the heart-shaped key rack on the wall. The hook next to hers is empty, mocking me and my carless life.

I shift uncomfortably at the small wooden table. “Of course he’ll be there too.”

“I saw him drop you off last night. I can’t believe you got on that bike with him.” She leans against the doorframe, her long hair flowing down her shoulder and over her chest.

“You were watching me?”

“You can hear his motorcycle a mile away, Holly. I heard it in the lot and looked out the window, and there you were, all googly-eyed, staring up at him while he played with your hair. He’s actually pretty hot from a distance. The arms on him…damn, girl.” She pops the gum in her mouth and flashes a teasing smile at me. “I can see the appeal.”

“Feather…” I shake my head at her and tuck my hair behind my ear. “He wasn’t playing with my hair. There was a leaf stuck in it. I was embarrassed having foliage on my head, I wasn’t googly-eyed.”

Or was I? I certainly felt all googly and woogly.

“It’s okay to like him. You don’t have to get all embarrassed and nervous. I’m just not sure he’s the best guy for you to be crushing on, but he’ll do as a stepping stone.”

“Stepping stone?” I repeat.”What’s that?”

She lifts her hand to inspect one of her chipped nails. “Someone you see while you’re waiting for the next one to come along. Like training wheels for dating.”

My mouth falls open. What a horrible way to treat someone. “He is not a stepping stone.” Rising, I grab my dishes and bring them over to the sink to wash later. “Is that what Steve is for you?”

She actually stares off, contemplating her answer. I’ll be disappointed in her if she says yes, and I’ll feel sorry for Steve, who seems to really care about her.

“No,” she finally replies. “I really like Steve. I always have. We have a history, and we started as friends. I suppose, in a way, I wanted him to be a stepping stone, but he turned out to be a lot more.”

“I have a history with Tyler,” I say with slight defensiveness. I get to have a past with people, too, even if it’s not quite perfect and only started a year ago. It’s still my history.

“Pulling you out of a hole isn’t quite the kind of history that’s going to lead to everlasting love, Holly.” She turns before I have a chance to reply. “I’ll see you tonight. Have fun but be careful,” she calls out just before she closes the front door behind her.

I file our conversation into the messy backroom of my mind, with the other things I don’t want to think about, and take a quick shower with what’s left of our hot water. I should know better than to let Feather shower first if I don’t want to end up with lukewarm water. As I’m toweling off, I slowly inch the towel away and reveal my reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door as the fog slowly dissipates.

I’m not used to looking at my body. I had one tiny, compact mirror while being held by the bad man, so I was only able to see two circular inches of my body at a time. He only gave it to me so I could put the awful red lipstick on, but sometimes I stared into it when I was alone and watched my lips talk to myself. Other times, I could angle it just the right way to see the cigarette burns he’d branded into my skin and the thin red slash marks the knife had made when he threatened me.

Once I used it to look at the letters carved across my stomach, even though the reflection made the word backward. That was the first and last time I used the compact to look at the ugly letters on me.

Feather has told me numerous times how pretty I am, how she wishes she had a body like mine. Rockin’ curves were the words she used. At the time I laughed nervously and told her to shut up, not believing her, or even caring. I didn’t need or want to be pretty.

But lately, I’ve been wondering if I really am pretty. More specifically, I wonder if Tyler thinks I’m pretty. As the fog fades from the mirror, I wrap the white towel around my body to cover it all up. Even if he does think I’m pretty, he would change his mind damn fast if he ever saw what I looked like under my clothes. The pretty girls on TV don’t have scars and words carved into them.

This time, when I get out of the taxi, he’s sitting on the ground waiting for me, his back leaning against a tree, staring up at the sky with a small twig in his mouth. Poppy and the fox are sitting with him, and it’s obvious they’re very attached to him in the way they stick by his side. I think that’s a good sign because animals don’t like bad people. His subtle acts of chivalry might seem small, but to me they are huge. It’s a hint that he cares, maybe even likes me.

Or is it a sense of responsibility? I wonder what it feels like knowing you saved someone’s life. Do you feel forever responsible for them? Like feeding a stray cat that keeps coming back and you’re not sure what to do with? So you just keep feeding it out of a sense of pity and obligation?

God, don’t let me be a stray cat.

He stands as I approach and brushes debris off the back of his jeans. “They wait for you?” he asks, nodding toward the taxi.

“Yeah.”

“Tell her to go.”

“But how will I—”

He interrupts me. “I’ll get you home.”

I hesitate, leaning down to pet Poppy, not sure if I should trust Tyler so completely yet. Last night was nice, but not enough to gauge who he really is. If I tell the driver to leave, I’ll be stuck here—on the edge of town, on a back road near the woods—with a man I barely even know.

Alone.

Trapped.

“You can trust me,” he says. “I’m a good weird.”

Smiling at our inside joke, I walk back to the car to tell the driver she doesn’t have to wait for me today. She eyes Tyler suspiciously, doing nothing to hide her obvious distrust of leaving me here with him. It was clear from our conversation on the phone this morning that she feels some sort of concern for me, but she finally relents after I insist that I’ll be fine. Apprehension simmers through me as I watch her drive away. This is another big step for me, letting part of my safety net go voluntarily.

Without a word, he turns and heads down the dirt road, and I walk briskly to catch up to him, as do Poppy and the fox. “How did you come to have a fox for a pet?” I ask. “Are they common as pets?”

“No, they don’t make good pets at all. They’re destructive and hyper and hard to train.” He coughs. “I found him as a kit, stuck in a trap. He had a broken leg.”

“Oh…that’s so sad.”

“Yeah. I tried to release him back into the woods after it healed, but he kept showing up at my door, scratching and crying. He didn’t want to go. So I let him stay.”

Oh, God. He does have stray cat obligation tendencies.

“He’s in one of the Christmas tree pictures I bought at the boutique. I look at his adorable little face every morning, he almost looks like he’s grinning. What’s his name?”

“Boomer. Well, Boomerang. Since he kept coming back.”

Yikes. Just like me.