Page 89 of Come Back to Me

Then, I scurry to his truck, hop, skip, and high-jump into the cab because it’s so fucking tall, and somehow, I manage to take off before he can get out of the lake.

A wild, wicked laugh soars from me as I put the pedal to the metal and hightail it out of there on terrain that shouldn’t be tackled at one hundred and forty clicks per hour, but there’s no one around and we’re in the middle of nowhere and?—

Five minutes in, the guilt hits.

The radio egged me on with Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers,” my unexpected anthem, as I fled the scene. But one too manytumbleweeds pass me by as the song fades onto another one on the radio—Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.” I immediately silence the tune. Those lyrics won’t amp up my mad, only reduce it.

But the damage is done.

“It’s really isolated out here.”

Impossibly, the farther out I drive, the more isolated it seems.

In the dark, it looks like a ghost town. In the light, you can’t help but notice how we’re out in the middle of nowhere.

“What if those bikers come back?” I tug on my bottom lip. “We didn’t hear them make their return journey to the city yet.”

Eventually, I have to brake and idle as I war with myself.

He hurt me.

He lied.

He betrayed me.

He dumped me.

He Dear Johned me!

He said he knew Butch and confirmed he was an asshole.

He got me off.

He made me feel a pleasure like I’ve never experienced before.

He made me smile.

He made me feel good about myself.

He fed me.

He...

I release an annoyed growl because, clearly, I wasn’t made to be Thelma or Louise.

Only, as I turn around, that straight line I figured I was traveling in... not so straight.

“You listened to Miley Cyrus, then you had your first guilt trip. Then you hummed for—” I blink. “Two minutes? Youreached the kettledrum trill on the first movement. That’s, what? Five minutes?”

With a rough estimation that I drove like a madwoman for ten minutes at least, I pull into a sharp curve and hurtle back to the lake.

Except, it isn’t there.

THE LAKE ISN’T THERE.

“How did it move?” I wail, hearing the internal glockenspiel and the tambourines clattering with the impending disaster.

I stop the truck and perch on the footboard so that I can overlook the terrain.

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