Page 3 of Touch of Innocence
TWO
The sound had been buzzing around in his engine since he’d crossed the border into Texas from Oklahoma, but Gunner had ignored it. He’d rolled through Dallas because he couldn’t afford to stop. There wasn’t time for that. He had to get to Austin, and he could worry about his bike then.
He knew better, of course. He might pretend that the little sound would go away, and it was even possible that it would, but as the miles rolled smoothly away under his worn wheels, the sound didn’t even out. If anything, it got louder, and Gunner knew that he’d made a mistake.
But what could he do? He was in a hurry, and he had no money to speak of. Enough to keep his bike gassed up, and some small amount of food in his stomach, but that was about it, and even that was running low. Austin. He repeated the name of the city over and over again in his head as the wind whipped past his helmet. Austin, Austin, Austin. Where he would be safe, and where he had a job waiting for him.
Not that it was the most glamorous job, just working in some dive bar, but he would be lucky even to get that, and he knew it. Not too many people wanted someone like him working for them.
If he could get there, it would be fine. He held that mantra loud and clear in his head, focusing on it above all else. Bugs flew past his face, and some of them actually splatted right against the visor of his helmet, but he kept on rolling because Austin was the answer to all of his problems.
It was clear to him that he wasn’t going to make it to Austin, though. It became a game, almost, passing through the towns and deciding to push on just once more, to the next one. One after the other, they fell behind him, and he recklessly let it happen.
The noise worsened with every mile that he passed, but Gunner set his jaw and never faltered. Not until the bike actually started to shake, and the noise became a cacophony, roaring like an injured beast at him and threatening to shake right apart if he wasn’t careful.
He was so close. He would guess that he was an hour, give or take a bit, outside of Austin, but that wasn’t going to do him a bit of good if his bike fell to pieces right on the blistering hot summer-heated asphalt.
Still, he wasn’t sure what choice he had, until the sign came up, informing him in cheerful, reflective green metal that there was a town up ahead. Serenada. Well, he’d never heard of it, but his bike gave a shudder and a belch, and he had to face facts.
He would be lucky to make the last few miles into town. Making it to Austin was nothing but a pipe dream. How infuriating, to make it almost all of the way and then to have to stop a little more than a stone’s throw away from his goal.
Story of his life, really. Glumly, he let the bike roll on into town, his eyes peeled for a mechanic. He just really, really hoped that a town this small would even have one. Or he’d have to try to get someone to let him borrow their phone, call a tow truck to get him to the nearest city with a mechanic. His own phone was dead, and it had been for days. He didn’t have money for hotels, or even motels, not anymore.
He didn’t have money for a tow truck, either. Or to pay for the repairs which his bike was inevitably going to need. He hadn’t had the time, or the tools, to poke around much, but whatever was wrong with it, he wasn’t sure he could fix it. Not without parts and tools.
His eyes stung, and he gritted his teeth so hard that he could almost swear that he heard them crack, even over the rumble and growl of his poor wounded bike. She deserved better than this, being ridden right into the ground. He’d just have to find a way to make it work.
First things first. His heart leaped when he saw the sign up ahead, announcing itself in plain, dusty letters asMike’s Autobody.He’d made it. He might have to throw himself on someone’s mercy, but he had made it, and it was with relief that he let his bike limp on into the parking lot.
It was a small place, and it looked a little run down to him, but it also looked like heaven. A safe refuge, at least for now, though he cautioned himself against feeling too safe.
Hadn’t he learned that there was really no place to feel truly safe, not in the whole world? Hadn’t he searched and searched for freedom, and never found it? The fear was always there, and so was his past, and he couldn’t outrun it.
He’d certainly tried hard enough.
* * *
Inside, the little shop was air-conditioned, but that couldn’t make up for the blistering heat outside. Texas in the summer, even the early summer, was not a fun place for a boy from the Northern states to be. Gunner knew that he had to look like a complete and total disaster, face sticky with sweat and the dust which had caked there, but he wasn’t there to win any fashion shows.
A beautiful man, maybe ten years or so older than Gunner’s twenty-four years, nodded at Gunner as he walked past him, an arm slung around a young woman just short of her teenage years. Gunner nodded back, watching him go. He wasn’t usually into guys with kids, but that one was something else. The man had a ring on his finger, though. Obviously taken. Oh well.
Inside the building, along with the fresh, cool air which dried some of the sweat on his face, there were two men, one of them older and stained with grease, the other the cleanest man that Gunner had ever seen. There was also a mess, like a cyclone had hit the place, concentrated entirely on this small waiting room.
What exactly had he walked into?
“Can I help you?” the older man said, and Gunner took a deep breath. There wasn’t a lot that he hated more in the world than having to ask for help, but over the last couple of years, he’d had to do it pretty much every time he ran out of money, which was to say, quite a lot.
About half of the time, he got told to beat it. But he never would have made it as far as he had if not for the other half of the people, the ones who helped him even when they had no reason to do so. People were generally good, in his experience. Or far more often than he would have thought, anyway.
What would this guy be? One of the ones who would do his best to get in Gunner’s way? Looking into his eyes, Gunner knew it was too hard to tell. There seemed to be something wrong, a sort of tension hanging in the air, but Gunner really had no choice but to try.
“My bike is crapping out,” Gunner admitted. “I think it might be the connecting rod.” He’d had time to think about it, and it seemed to be the most likely cause.
“Yeah?” The guy narrowed his eyes at him, and Gunner glanced over at the other man in the room. The one who really didn’t seem to belong there, as neat and tidy as he was. He had his nose buried in a book and seemed completely uninterested in anything that was going on.
Too bad. The man was cute, with high, sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin, and shaggy golden brown hair falling into his face. Gunner might have been interested if he hadn’t been so sweaty and exhausted and worried. Even as he thought that, though, his eyes were pulled back toward him, not that it mattered, because the pretty man was far too wrapped up in his book even to notice.
“Yeah. It’s kind of a knocking noise deep in the engine,” Gunner explained. “But I don’t have the tools to deal with it.” To say the very least. With the current state of his finances, he wouldn’t be able to deal with a flat tire, even.
