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The silence is deafening.
I’m handcuffed to a man who sleeps so soundly that I can’t tell if he’s even asleep. If he is, then he sleeps like the dead.
Scratch that. The dead don’t sleep anymore. Someone needs to create a new saying. I will be that someone. He sleeps like the…living? Well, that doesn’t work either. Screw it. Someone else can be that someone.
The fingers of my free hand tap on the ground at my side. The fabric of the sleeping bag I’m laying on makes such a faint noise when I tap that it almost sounds like thunder in the dead of the night. Even crickets have disappeared. There are crickets back at my colony. There are even some cats, which are nice, but I wish we had dogs. I’m sure they would make the best sidekicks right now, like in the movies. Although with my luck I’d get a dog who would pee himself and hide behind a tree instead of fight, but still, I would protect that pupper with all I had without hesitation. I hope there are still dogs left in this world.
I switch to tapping the side of my leg instead. It’s been hours since we all separated into tents for the night. I fought them at every turn, too, especially when the asshole wouldn’t uncuff me to go to the bathroom. He made me squat behind a tree while he stood behind me—back-to-back, at least—and relieved himself. When he made a joke about how we could bond by holding hands, I yanked my arm and he fell to the damp dirt with his pants sliding down his hips. I thought it was hilarious. That’s when I found out we have different types of humor.
Stilling my fingers, I look over at my captor. The man I’m handcuffed to. The man who put me into the trunk of his car to “save my life”, when any seat inside of the car would have been perfectly fine. The man who doesn’t twitch or make a sound when he sleeps. I’ll never understand people who could fall asleep the moment their head touches the pillow. Or the ground, whatever.
Turning my body, I slowly lift myself up so I’m hovering over him, hands on either side of his torso, and slide my free hand into his pocket. My movements are agonizingly slow in order to keep the handcuffs from clinking together. To my relief, he doesn’t move. He’s definitely asleep. He’s also hard as a rock, holy crap, wrong direction. I freeze. He twitches. Oh no, abort. I slide my hand out.
Now let’s try this again without unintentionally feeling up my captor. I move to his other pocket, careful to avoid brushing against him again.
My fingers slide against a small piece of metal and elation fills me. I’m about to close my fingers around it when a hand wraps around my wrist and pulls it out of the pocket. My eyes lift to see the empty gray eyes of Griffin, wide open and staring straight at me with a look of mixed disappointment.
“You don’t give up, do you?” His voice is raspy and still filled with sleep.
“Never.”
He lets go of my wrist and reaches into his pocket, pulls out the key, and tosses it to the far end of the tent so it’s out of reach. Now I would have to drag his entire body along with me. Anger replaces the panic and I stare daggers down at him. Too bad I don’t have any real daggers. These metaphorical ones don’t have the same effect.
“Asshole.”
“Troublemaker.”
“I have a name.”
“So do I, princess.” He pulls me down so I’m flat against his chest and then closes his eyes. He’s still hard as a rock. How does he sleep with this thing?
“I’m not a princess.”
“Good, because I’m not a king,” he whispers moments before his breathing evens out.
I slide down to the side and flop to the ground beside him, back to where I started. His arm around me is loose and doesn’t hold me back. I lay there on my side for a moment, facing him and studying his features. His stupid features. His stupid short, dark brown hair. His stupid face with the scar running down his left cheek. And the stupid way he makes me wonder how he got that scar, when I wouldn’t give a second thought about it to anyone else.
Holding in a groan of frustration, I decide I’ve waited long enough. Watching his face for the slightest change that shows he’s waking up, I reach my free hand down to my cuffed one, bite my lip, and pop my thumb out of place. I swallow down my cry even when my eyes water. Sliding out of the cuff, I lower it to the ground, careful to not make the metal clank together. I taste blood and realize I bit my lip a little too hard. At least the sting on my lip helps dull the pain in my hand a little. Not much, but a little. Bright side and all that.
I reign in my excitement at my newfound freedom when I climb out of the tent and then tiptoe across the grass. The air is silent. Everything is still so quiet. The others must still be sound asleep in their own tents. It baffles me how they can all sleep so calmly like this when danger lurks around every turn, regardless of all the fires surrounding them, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not my problem. I’m free.
Stopping at the edge of the little campsite, I look back at the tents. They’ll wake up in the morning and realize I’ve slipped away, but by then I should be far enough away that they can’t find me.
Griffin hid the key to the car after my failed escape, so I’ll need to travel on foot until I come by a vehicle I can drive. I haven’t learned how to hot-wire, but I’ve found that many people have left their keys inside their abandoned cars. Then I’ll figure out where exactly I am and start heading back to where I left off. I’ll be a day or two behind, but at least I won’t have to waste any more time on this ridiculousness.
With a relieved sigh and a grin on my lips, I turn and run for my freedom. Too bad my freedom feels like a brick wall.
I stagger backward, and something grabs my arms to keep me from falling. I don’t know when these guys erected a brick wall with tentacles at the edge of this campsite, but a warning would have been nice.
My vision clears—as does my head, and that nonsense about tentacles—and all the excitement I had moments ago fades when the face comes into view. I rub my sore nose and my bleary eyes, then blink up at the grinning face again.
Yup, it’s a face. Not a brick wall. What a disappointment.
The man leans forward until the faint light from the nearest campfire illuminates his long dark hair falling over the shoulders of his lithe form, as wild and untamed as his grin when he looks down at me.
He reaches out and wipes a drop of blood from my lips, his eyes sparkling when he sucks the red liquid off his thumb. “Sleeping beauty awakes.”
Shit.
