Page 45 of Beautiful Savage
From here, half a mile across the open field, the cottage sits on its slight rise. Lights flicker from the living room windows. The live oak in the front yard spreads its arms the way it has my whole life. The garden sprawls around the house. Maman's roses on their arbors, Papa's vegetable beds, the chaos of Florida growth barely contained by human intention.
A shadow passes across the window then stops at the next one, looking out.
Even at this distance, I know that shape. The way he bends toward the windowsill. Nicolas. My father.
I sit on the bike, feet on the ground for balance, helmet still on. Just watching.
He's real. He's there. He's continuing.
The last time I saw him was nearly a month ago, before I left for Miss Macie's. Before the massive stranger filled my living room and walked me out with barely a protest.
Ten minutes pass. Maybe more. The night settles around me, growing to pure black. I should take the helmet off.
A car passes on the road behind me. It continues on without stopping, the sound fading into distance.
Nicolas moves along to the next window then pauses again to look out. Is he looking for me? Or imagining Maman running across the garden toward him?
This is my father. The man who raised me alone after Maman died. Who taught me to mix pigments before I could write my name. Who sent me to the conservatory believing I'd become everything Maman couldn't. Who welcomed me back when I failed, never asking why I really came home, just making space for me like I'd never left.
The cottage smells like roses and oil paint and safety. Everything soft and known.
I think about the apartment that smells like cedar soap and gun oil. Everything hard and dangerous.
Gunner is probably tracking me right now.
The thought lands with perfect clarity. Of course he is. The bike has GPS. He's sitting at that desk with his laptop open, watching a dot on a screen that hasn't moved for ten minutes. Watching it sit half a mile from the cottage where he took me.
The GPS tracking should feel like violation. Instead, it feels like being held.
I could be in Papa's arms in three minutes. Could tell him everything or nothing. Could wash the last month away like it was just a bad dream, slip back into teaching ballet to eight-year-olds, eventually marry Jarrod and give Pristine exactly the story it's been writing for me.
Could be safe.
The woman who left this cottage twenty-eight days ago would have gotten off the bike already. Would have run across this field. Would have chosen safety and called it love.
But that woman never really existed. She was just another performance, like the wrap skirt and the careful voice and the downcast eyes. A character I played so long I forgot she wasn't real.
The real me painted my body with bougainvillea. Danced nearly naked for a man who kidnapped me. Came apart against his hand on a kitchen wall. Chose to stay when I could have left a dozen times.
Normal women don't choose their kidnappers. I'm trading roses for thorns, and the thorns are what I want.
I start the engine. Take one last look at Papa in his garden, then I turn the bike hard, gravel spinning as I gun it south.
The ride back is different.
It starts in my hands about thirty minutes south of Pristine. A tremor in my fingers that makes me grip the bars tighter. Then my shoulders. Then my whole body, trembling.
The shaking gets worse as the lights of Miami approach. By the exit for Aventura, I have to ease off the throttle, my control over the bike compromised by the tremors running through me. Cars pass in the left lane, drivers probably thinking I'm just another Sunday rider taking it easy.
They don't know I'm shaking with the relief of finally choosing my cage.
Because that's what it is, isn't it? A cage. Just one I'm walking into with my eyes open, key in my pocket, door unlocked. A cage that contains the only person who's ever truly seen me.
By the time I reach Little Havana, tears are streaming down my face inside the helmet. Not sad tears. Not happy ones either. Just the body releasing what it's been holding for almost a month.
I pull into the loading dock, park the bike with shaking hands. Pull off the helmet. My hair is soaked with sweat, plastered to my skull. My face is a mess. Tears, snot, the imprint of the helmet's padding on my cheeks.
The climb up the service stairs feels endless. My legs shake on each step, the adrenaline finally crashing. Through the hallway where I can hear the family somewhere below, laughingover their Sunday dinner. A dinner Gunner's missing because of me.
