Deanna Roy - Forever Innocent

“We’re coming,” Gavin said. He turned back to me and handed me my backpack. “You ready for the great escape?” he whispered. “I’ll go left, you go right, and we’ll meet in the stairwell.”

I nodded, only just now able to get my giggles under control.

“I’ll go first, distract him, then you bolt.”

“Got it.”

Gavin pushed through the plastic. “Hey there. I don’t think we were making any noise.”

“You’re not supposed to be in there.”

I waited a second, not sure when to leave.

“What’s in these crates anyway?” Gavin asked, and I could tell he’d moved away from the opening.

I took a deep breath, then pushed on the plastic and wormed my way out. As soon as I was free of the crates, I took off to the right, barreling along the interior wall that held the elevator shaft and stairwell. I didn’t look back, not even when the TA said, “Hey!”

I saw the exit sign and snatched at the door. I went down one flight, then looked up, waiting.

Gavin burst through it and said, “Go!”

I began running down the stairs, holding on to the rail. Gavin caught up. “Let’s not go to the bottom, in case he’s waiting there for us. We’ll kill time on one of the middle floors.”

We leaped out at the fourth floor, a busy area with full stacks and tons of students. Once we were safely away from the elevator and stairwell, we collapsed at a study desk.

“That was nuts,” I said.

“That was awesome!” Gavin’s smile was as wide as his face. “We never were troublemakers in high school. We have to make up for our well-spent youth.”

I swallowed, trying not to wreck the moment. I’d done enough bad stuff for both of us. All three of us, I amended.

“Hey.” Gavin reached over and squeezed my arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think about how worried you’d be about getting in trouble.”

“No, no, it’s fine. It was fun.” I faked a smile. “I just had forgotten about the giggle spells. It’s been too long.”

“I’ll say.”

“How long do you think we should wait?”

Gavin checked his phone. “It’s 10:30. I’m guessing he’ll go to the ground floor, wait a couple minutes, then he’ll have to get back to his duties.”

“When do you have to be at work?”

“11, but it’s not a big deal. I’ll call Bud if we get stuck. Meanwhile,” he reached for my hand, “I’ll just sit here and gaze at you lecherously.”

I felt a trickle in my jeans and realized that once again we’d gone without a condom. Might as well bring it up now. “So. I was thinking.”

“About doing me again in the elevator?”

I smiled. “Maybe. But also about how the shot failed us before.”

His expression sobered.

“So maybe we should do something extra?” My fingers gripped his. “Like condoms?”

He let go and sat back. “You think it will happen again?”

“Statistics seem to indicate that if you have a hormone birth control failure, you have a higher incidence of another. I might not be a good fit for it.”

His face was looking angrier as I talked, and I couldn’t understand it.

“You want to keep me at risk? You want it to happen again?” I stood up, ready to walk away.

Gavin jumped from his chair. “No! No. Of course not. I just don’t think it will happen again.”

“But it might. Are condoms that big of a deal?” A couple of students were looking at us, so I sat back down.

I could see him relent. “No, no they aren’t. I’ll buy some.” He walked around the desk and bent down to wrap his arms around me. “I’ll do whatever you ask on this.”

My shoulders relaxed. We would be all right. Surely lightning wouldn’t strike twice. 

The Harley’s engine was so loud I could barely hear myself think as Gavin handed me an extra helmet. “I’m not so sure about this!” I yelled.

“You’ll love it!” he shouted.

“It looks like a red bowling ball!”

Gavin laughed. “You’ll rock the look.”

I stuck the helmet on my head. “Now what?”

“Get on behind me.” He pointed to a footrest. “Your feet go here.”

I held on to his shoulders as I threw a leg over the seat. He revved the motor and I could feel the vibrations in my girl parts. “Hey, this is like a sex toy!” I said in his ear.

“Now you’re getting it.”

I found the footrests and clasped my arms around his waist. “Aren’t there any seat belts on this thing?’

“I’m all you’ve got,” he said, and he backed us away from the curb in front of my apartment.

The butterflies still twinkled in the trees. I got a notice from the management yesterday that they had to come down, but I’d ignored it. I kept Finn’s blue butterfly inside the house for safekeeping, but the others would stay. The apartments were cheap. The overworked maintenance guy would probably be too busy to take them down. I couldn’t imagine Lorna, the stuffy and perpetually stiletto-heeled office manager, sinking into the damp ground to yank them out of the trees herself.

We lurched forward, and I screamed in Gavin’s ear. I could feel his laughter in his ribs, even though the motor drowned out the sound. When we paused at the exit to the complex, he turned his head. “You’ll be fine.”

Maybe. So far we’d only been going five miles per hour. I wasn’t sure I could hang on at sixty.

We jetted onto the street, and I screamed again. I felt like I might rocket off the bike at any moment.

Thankfully, we hit a red light almost immediately. “I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

“Sure you can. Just relax into it. Sink into me a little rather than being so stiff.”

He took off more carefully this time. I tried to be like Jell-O, and fitting loosely against Gavin seemed to help. I could sense when he was about to lean one direction or the other and could move with him. The ride became less bumpy.

We swung onto the highway, and I tried to stay relaxed as we merged into traffic and really got going fast. I could see so much, every direction, unlike the fragmented view through windowpanes in a car. I could smell the ocean as we rode along the harbor. The air was exhilarating, flowing around my neck and tossing my ponytail. Okay, I was getting it. I could see the appeal.

We exited to go east on I-8 toward the mountains. The drive would take a half-hour just to clear civilization. Gavin had packed some sandwiches. It would be a good evening, even if we never got around to the assignment.

As the minutes passed, random body parts began to get tired of their position, and I would adjust. First my neck, then my foot, vibrating on the rest. Eventually I found the right place to fit, and I could just hang on, my head against Gavin’s back, and watch the landscape change from city to suburbs to open road.

We slowed down past Alpine, and he turned off the freeway onto a dirt trail.

“I don’t think this is a real road!” I said.

“I know!” he yelled. “That makes it better!”

We followed the path for another mile through scrub brush and dirt, until we were in the foothills. The going got slower, as the road was bumpy. I thought my guts were going to get jarred right out of my body.

Finally Gavin turned onto another path. Cars couldn’t come here. We hadn’t seen anyone for miles and I didn’t expect we would.

Gavin revved up a hillside until the path broke down into nothing but rocks and dirt. When he killed the engine, I realized my ears were ringing.

“We can walk it from here,” he said. “Just make sure we have the flashlight for getting back.”

I tried to lift my leg from the bike, but it wouldn’t quite go, stiff and locked into position. Gavin laughed and slid his hand beneath my thigh to give me a boost. I managed to swing back over, my muscles protesting. “I hope you didn’t have any wild ideas for that flat up there, because I can barely move.”

“We’ll start with a full body massage,” Gavin said. He tugged off his helmet and hung it on the handlebars. “We should have a good view here.”

“I’ll say.” I handed him my bowling-ball helmet. “I can’t even imagine how far it is to electricity, much less lights that would interfere with the stars.”

Gavin unpacked the leather satchel with water and sandwiches and the folder with our assignment. He handed these to me and untied a blanket from the other side.

“Flashlight?” I asked.

“Right.” He dug around in a little box attached behind the seat. “Got it.”

We tramped across the parched earth that crunched with dried grass punctuated with tumbleweeds. “Looks like a good place to leave a body,” I said.

He laughed. “You might want to learn to ride the bike before you bump me off in the middle of nowhere.”

“Point taken.”

We scrambled up an embankment to a plateau, which was only a few yards wide but plenty big enough to spread a blanket and our meager things. The wind whipped in random bursts. I tucked the folder beneath the edge of the blanket to keep it safe and laid the food on a corner. “Now we just wait for dark?”

“Time for that body massage,” Gavin said and sat next to me, pulling me between his legs.

His hands worked the muscles of my shoulders, and I relaxed into him. The sun burned yellow on the horizon, just taking its first tentative dip behind a set of hills to the west. The ocean was long gone from our view, but the rolling landscape, barren and edged in scrubby trees and rock, offered a different brand of beautiful.

“We should have brought a camera,” I said.

“I can snap a shot with my phone,” Gavin said. “Crappy though it is.”

“Mine won’t take decent pictures at all. It’s too old,” I said.