Page 98 of Vicious

I loop the shirt onto my belt in a makeshift belt bag. “No more options, May. Come on.” I wade into the river, extending my hand to her.

The water is cool, but in comparison to the summer heat, it’s almost a boon.

May bites her bottom lip, but she realizes as well as I do that there’s no time for hesitation. She takes my hand, following me into the river. Her eyes are wide with fear and pain, but she lets me pull her along until the water is too deep for us to stand up in.

“Boss! They’re in the river!” Brad yells back to Jake.

“What?” Jake stops on a small hill overlooking the river, and he lets out a loud sound. “Fuck! Go after them!”

It’s hard to hear them after that, though, because the river is so loud around us.

May is making panicked little noises, her breathing coming too fast. She’s starting to go under. “Chase. Chase, I can’t?—”

I hook an arm around her and bring her back up. “Remember what I taught you. We’re going to swim diagonally. Not against the current, but with it.”

It takes a lot more effort to swim in the river than in the pool, but the advantage here is that we’re moving even without our input. The current takes us away from Jake and Brad, and their shouting grows distant.

“It really hurts, Chase,” she tells me over the rush of the water, her voice wobbly but not nearly as desperate as I might’ve thought. “I’m not… not sure I can get all the way across.” She doesn’t give up, though, which is one of the things I love most about her. She just keeps trying, even when the odds are stacked against her.

“You can,” I tell her, for all that I’m fatigued myself.

I see her grimace, but she nods slightly without arguing with me.

We get closer to shore, little by little. She breathes like I taught her and does her best to be more than a dead weight in the water.

By the time we reach the other side, both of us bruised from rocks and debris, the sun is beginning to set. I drag us out of the water, and we collapse onto the sandy riverbed.

“Fuck,” I say.

I twine my hand with May’s. She squeezes mine briefly, but she doesn’t move beyond that. “Fuck,” she agrees, letting out a soft wheeze of a half-laugh, half-sob.

We lie there for a moment, trying to catch our breath, then I tell her, “We need to move.”

“You think they were able to follow us through that?” she asks, lifting her head slightly. She looks even worse than she did, shivering and exhausted.

“Not really,” I say. “But I think we need to find a way to dry off.” I sit up with a long groan and extend my hand to her once more. She looks at it and, after a long beat, takes it.

I help her up, and we end up staring at each other.

“We’ll get you to safety,” I promise her.

“I’m sorry I left,” May says, her eyes glimmering with tears. “I just?—”

I put a finger over her lips. “I found you again, Ah-May. You’re mine. You know that, right? I’m not going to ever let you go.”

To my shock, she kisses my finger.

I watch in awe. Then I pull my finger away and lean down to kiss her, pouring all of my desperation into that kiss.

She kisses back—with no real skill, but that’s all right. It’s just something else I have to teach her, something she seems willing to learn now.

It only took a near-death experience.

When she pulls away, May rests her head against my shoulder. “It hurts,” she admits. “I think it’s just bleeding a lot, though. I don’t think she managed to cut that deep before Baba…” She trails off, burying her face against my wet chest.

“I’m sorry,” I say with more earnestness than I expect. “I didn’t expect Simon to… well, in the end, he was a lot braver than I thought.”

“In the end,” she repeats, choking back a sob. “He can’t be dead. There’s so much we didn’t get to say. I was so fucking mad at him.”

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