I stood up with him, leaving my beer on the coffee table, and I hugged him long and hard. I wondered if it would be the last time I ever saw him, at least without a thick wall of security glass separating us.

I left my father that day with some extra cash to get us by for a little while at least, but more important, with his advice, which I always took to heart. He told me that I should try everything in my power to talk Bray into turning herself in before it was too late.

“Are you sure that’s what’s stopping you?” he had said. “Because you think it’s too late?”

“Yes,” I had lied. “We’re already in this too deeply to turn back now.”

But my father was a smart man. He could see right through me and I knew that he could. Bray and I still could’ve turned back and done the “right” thing, but I couldn’t lose her again, and Bray didn’t want to lose me. We had already established that before we left the ridge that night. And that was the way it was going to stay.

I went back to our motel room with burgers and fries.

We ate in silence. Silence seemed to be the norm for a while. And we watched television, both afraid we’d turn the news on at ten o’clock and see our faces staring back at us from the screen next to a reporter. But for the first several days, from Savannah to Fernandina Beach to Daytona Beach, we were still in the clear. Bray’s cell phone hardly ever rang. Just once when her sister, Rian, called to see how she was doing. Bray let it go to voice mail.

My mom, on the other hand, called me constantly. Not wanting to worry her any more than she already was, I ignored my own rule about phone calls and answered after the third concerned voice mail. I told her that I was on vacation and not to worry. I don’t think she believed me deep down, but she accepted it. My boss at Rixey Construction called only twice. After that, I was pretty sure that was the end of my job. But my mom was the only reason I didn’t get rid of my and Bray’s cell phones earlier. In the back of my mind I worried they’d eventually be what led the police right to us, but I couldn’t listen to reason. The thought of my mom worried sick to death over me kicked my reason in the ass. Until this day. I finally decided that it was time we ditched our phones, and so I stuffed them in a Burger King bag with our leftover fries and tossed everything in the garbage. Bray looked at me like I was crazy, but she understood.

By the end of the month, we were in West Palm Beach soaking up the sun and enjoying the somewhat warmer weather that a little farther south had to offer.

And we were already beginning to get settled into a false safe zone.

“We can’t afford too many more motels,” I said as I came out of the shower. “I have some money in the bank, but if I withdraw it or write a check, everybody will know where we are.”

It was the only reason I borrowed cash from my father in the first place. We left Athens so fast I didn’t think to stop at an ATM and withdraw the money before we left.

“How much do we have?” Bray said, coming up to me. She fit her fingers between the towel and my waist and pulled my body toward her.

“A few hundred bucks, but that’s it. We’ll need that for gas, unless we find a place to park it for a while.”

She kissed me lightly on the lips. “I say we find a place to park it then,” she said, but she wasn’t thinking much about the conversation. She was horny.

That was one thing that never changed about the two of us. Despite all that was going on, nothing ever ruined the many intimate moments we had on a daily and nightly basis. She seemed as addicted to sex as I was. But I’d never say that to her. And I definitely wasn’t going to complain.

“I don’t like all this driving around anyway,” she added, tugging on my bottom lip with her teeth.

I slipped my fingers down the front of her panties.

“I don’t either,” I said and found her wetness.

She gasped when I slid my middle finger between her lips and touched her clit.

“Then what do you think we should do?” she asked breathily.

“I dunno, we’ll figure it out later.” My mouth closed around hers and I sucked on her tongue, then I pushed her backward onto the bed, where I fucked her for a long time.

Chapter Eleven

Bray

It would seem that it was too early for Elias and me to stop being afraid and on edge about what happened. I admit it. But really what we were doing was looking for any way out of that mind-set, because if we didn’t, it would’ve killed us. We just wanted to live life. And, well, it’s easy to forget about the significant things when you find other things to cover it up. Partying quickly became our means of salvation, the way out that we longed for. We learned fast how to replace misery and fear with happiness and enjoyment, and with drugs and alcohol. We couldn’t afford much ourselves, and the last thing we wanted to do was waste what little money we did have on shit like that, but we got by with freebies usually. A joint passed around a room. A group of partygoers already lit on alcohol, offering to buy the table the next round. And occasionally guys would buy me drinks when they thought I was alone.

Our first night hitting the bars and nightclubs in Florida was the first domino to fall in a swirling maze of hundreds of dominoes.

And every fucking one of them would later prove to be a bigger mistake than the last.

“Hey, that’s our song!” I said over the music bumping through the speakers inside the club.

I grabbed Elias by the wrist and tugged. He slid down from the bar stool and hit the dance floor with me. He had always been a hot dancer, and it helped that he had the body for it. But usually, it took a few drinks for him to loosen up enough to dance in public. He wasn’t afraid of it; he just never cared for it much.

Even that started to change with our new lifestyle.

“Since when did this become our song?” he shouted over the music.

I danced my way around, putting my back to him, raising my arms up and around both sides of his neck.

He ground his hips against me from behind, his fingers splayed against my thighs.

“Since that time at Matt’s party, remember?”

The beat picked up, and his grinding hips moved with it flawlessly. I about fucking died. The boy could dance.

I danced back around, facing him again, moving my upper body in a lithe, swaying motion against his.

“Oh yeah, I remember that night,” he said, leaning toward my ear. “But if I recall, after we danced to it in front of everyone, you left with Dane Weatherby.”

“Dane was just a friend,” I countered. And he was just a friend. “I was his shoulder to cry on that night. Nothing more. But you and me, we had the whole room. We owned it!”

Elias grinned and fit my hips in the palms of his hands, his long fingers spread like claws as he grinded against me some more.

He was so getting laid tonight.

“I guess we did, huh?” he said with a grin.

Suddenly Elias snatched me forward, his arm around my waist, and pulled me out of the path of a tipsy couple barreling through the crowd.

“Oh, sorry about that, man!” the guy said.

He was as tall as a tree and had short brown hair buzzed around the back. He grabbed hold of a strawberry-blonde woman’s elbow to keep her from falling over. She laughed and fell into his arms on purpose. Her huge boobs bulged into view from the force of his arm, which he held across her chest.

“I think I’ve had too much,” she said, raising her wine cooler out in front of her and then happily taking another drink.

The guy apologized again. And again. I wondered if he was just too drunk to remember he had already gotten that much out of the way.

“It’s all right,” Elias said, still holding me around the waist. “No harm done.”

We started to walk away from the dance floor and back toward the bar, but we only got halfway before the couple came up behind us.

“I’ve never seen you in here before,” the guy said.

“You must come here a lot, then,” I said, still being pulled along by my fingers. “To remember every face in a place this populated.”

A small part of me was worried he’d seen my face on a Most Wanted poster somewhere. But it was just the paranoia kicking in.

“We’re here every weekend,” the girl said.

She never stopped smiling. Neither of them did. They wore permanent, drunken smiles.

We finally made it back to the bar. Elias put his hands on my hips and lifted me onto the stool. He then sat on the empty stool next to me.

“I’m Anthony,” the guy introduced himself. “And this is Cristina.” He smelled of musk cologne.

I started to show them the same courtesy, but Elias jumped in a second before. “I’m John and this is my fiancée, Julia.”

Fiancée? That certainly got my attention. So much so that I had already forgotten the fake name he gave me.

“You live around here?” Anthony probed. He leaned against the bar next to an empty bar stool rather than sit. Cristina, who I assumed was his girlfriend, continued to use him as her makeshift crutch.

“No, we’re from—”

“—Indiana,” Elias jumped in.

I narrowed my eyes at him secretly from the side.

He softened his baby-blues, as if to say, Sorry, babe.

Instant forgiveness. He was in the right, though, because I had been about to say Georgia, just as I had been a second away from telling them our real names.

I didn’t know if I’d ever get used to this covert lifestyle of lies and highways and shitty motel rooms. But Elias was with me, and that made it all OK.