Page 29 of Gabe

Picking it up, I shoved the phone against my ear. “Gabe? You there?”

At first, I was met with only static and silence. Then, very faintly, I heard a single word spoken in Gabe’s familiar voice.

“Frankie.”

CHAPTER 11

Frankie

Even when I pushed the accelerator all the way to the floor, the RV barely went above sixty. It took me several hours to drive out to the area Gabe had indicated, and I was a wreck the entire time. My hands felt numb on the steering wheel, and it took all my concentration to keep breathing evenly.

The sun had already been down for hours when I crossed over the border of a little one-stoplight town a hundred miles away from our safe house. Gabe’s voice had sounded strange on the phone, slurred and difficult to understand. It had taken a lot of back and forth to come up with a basic idea of his location. Neither the RV nor the secure cellphone had GPS, so I’d had to figure it out using a paper map I’d found and Gabe’s vague description.

In the end, all that effort turned out to be pointless. Gabe said he was at a bus stop, and the tiny town only had one.

A streetlight flickered with an uneven tattoo of sparking electrics, and barely illuminated the bus stop. The ramshackle structure looked like it was ready to fall down at any moment and was only identifiable as a bus stop by the small sign hanging from a single crooked nail.

I barely remembered to put the RV in park before I flew out of the door.

“Gabe.”

A lone figure sat on the bus stop bench, slouching against the awning’s support pillar like he was asleep.

Please, let him just be asleep.

The person had a coat draped over them like a blanket, so I couldn’t immediately see their face, but they stirred at the sound of my voice.

I collapsed to my knees in front of the bench, crying with relief when the coat fell away to reveal familiar gray eyes.

“Oh my God, Gabe. You’re alive.” My hands fisted in his shirt and I started shaking him. “Don’t scare me like that again. I thought that... I thought you were... Oh, you fucking ridiculous man.”

I don’t know what possessed me in that moment, but before I realized what I was doing, I pulled Gabe closer and kissed him. Pressure had been building in my chest like a bubble for days as I worried over him. Once I knew he was alive, the bubble popped, and all that tension had to go somewhere.

It was a particularly graceless kiss. Just a smashing of lips together with no art or skill involved at all. I tasted blood from where I’d cut my lip on my own teeth, but I didn’t care. Nothing mattered in that moment except the feeling of Gabe’s heart still beating under my hand.

As quickly as the moment of madness overcame me it left, and I realized what I was doing. I pulled back and stuttered out an apology.

“Oh, fuck, I’m sorry. What am I doing? That’s not... I shouldn’t... Sorry.”

I expected outrage, or even confusion, but Gabe didn’t say a word. Squinting to get a better look at him in the flickering light, I found gray eyes staring at me with an unfocused glassy appearance, like he wasn’t really seeing me.

Then, right as I watched, Gabe’s eyes slipped shut and he slumped forward so his head landed on my shoulder.

“Gabe? What?” I grabbed the man to steady him, and that was when I felt it. Gabe was burning up. Fever scorched his skin from the inside. It was a wonder I hadn’t noticed it during the kiss, but I’d been too caught up in my own relief.

I shook the man, trying to wake him up. He mumbled something, but his head lolled on his shoulders like a broken puppet.

“Ah, shit. Let’s... um, let’s get you inside the RV. Come on, Gabe. Help me out. You’re too heavy for me to carry that far.

Whatever infliction Gabe suffered, he remained just conscious enough to support some of his weight as I dragged him over to the RV parked beside the bus stop. Once inside, with the door locked, I laid Gabe on the bed at the back of the vehicle and started inspecting him.

His clothes were much more ragged than when he left two days ago, torn in many places and covered with splotches of mud.

Because of that, I didn’t immediately notice the blood staining his shirt around his right shoulder, which had dried to a similar brown color.

There was no way for me to remove the shirt from Gabe, so I just tore the fabric away. It was already so damaged, the fabric easily gave way under my hand, leaving Gabe naked from the waist up.

I had my answer.

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