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When the hazy orange skyline fades to violet and the first dusting of stars span out across the sky, Rio wordlessly rises from the dock, his eyes falling on Elizabeth when she remains motionless against the dark horizon. Her gaze is trained on the soft lapping of the water against the pillars of the dock, mind miles away from her physical state in regards to his own.
He leans forward slightly so that his palm rests on her shoulder, bestowing a firm squeeze on it before lightly dragging his fingertips across the narrow expanse of her shoulders. Her shoulders heave with the expanding of her diaphragm as she releases a deep sigh, eyes scanning the tranquil waters of the lake one last time before she rises to her feet.
He doesn’t lay his hands on her during the short tread back to the car, providing her with space to collect herself in her vulnerable condition. However, when she reaches the passenger side door, one of his hands comes to rest on the right of her hip of its own volition as he reaches past her to open it for her. She instinctually stiffens for a moment when the warmth of his palm seeps through her jeans and sears her skin, but in the next instant her muscles are relaxing against his touch and she’s permitting him to guide her into the passenger seat.
It’s after they’ve merged onto the highway and Rio’s maneuvering the car through a traffic jam that she next speaks up.
“I’m sorry for screwing up your meeting.”
Rio huffs out a laugh at that, his eyes not wavering from the road as he props one arm up against the window. “Wasn’t so much of a meetin’ as it was a waste of time.”
“It could’ve been,” she replies quietly, her habitual stubbornness making the end of his mouth lift into an easy smirk.
“You worryin’ your head over hypotheticals, darlin’?” He drawls, his voice dipping to a low rumble halfway through his sentence. It makes her shiver in a way that’s all too familiar.
They’re practically stopped dead in traffic now, digital signs alerting every driver of the construction taking place a handful of miles ahead. It’s half past seven when Rio’s eyes flicker to the clock on the dash; the sum of congested cars is odd for this time of night.
He observes her in his peripheral when her head falls back against the seat, her eyes slipping shut as the rest of her muscles go slack. Her breathing is more steady now than it has been for the past hour, and he’s subconsciously thankful for it.
“I’ve screwed up a lot more than a meeting,” she murmurs, and her voice is so faint he almost doesn’t catch her words. Almost.
His gaze flickers between Elizabeth and the car ahead of them; her eyes are still shut and her features are lax as if she hadn’t said a word. His jaw rocks, eyes wavering on her in minuscule intervals as he attempts to pry open her cover and read between her lines.
They haven’t discussed this yet, have barely even alluded to what happened between them in the scarce exchanges they’ve had over the past two months. Have never breached the subject of what took place that night and why it ended the way it did.
“Yeah, we don’t gotta talk about that now,” he assures her, offering to delay the inevitable until she’s less emotionally compromised. His tone is harder than it’s been as of recent, the topic of her past transgressions dangerous enough territory between them that even the insinuation of treading upon it appears to reinforce that mask of his that had begun to slip away throughout the night. Regardless, she doesn’t stir; doesn’t open her eyes nor supply a response as the car in front of them begins to move at a reasonably fixed pace again.
And then, a feather-light, “Okay,” burrows within the silence between them.
There are numerous instances regarding Elizabeth that have been disconcerting to Rio, the majority of which he can specify with ease. One instance in particular would be the night she attempted to repair a stop sign on her block, equipped with screws, a power drill, and a step ladder well past midnight. He had come to check up on her; intended to inspect her house for any signs of preparation for the loose end he had instructed her to take care of. The night took an abrupt turn when he had only made it so far as parking his car on the sidewalk before he spotted Elizabeth no more than thirty feet from him.
The cocktail of exhaustion and mental torment impeding behind her electric blue irises had dampened the enrapturing fire he had loved to rouse from within her. The deficiency of that flame had tugged upon his heart, drawing affection so often stifled for sake of his invincible façade from deep within him. He had a million reasons as to why he should’ve fought harder to tamper it; countless vindications as to why giving into his urges would only bring him more tribulation.
And yet, he couldn’t find it in himself to walk away from her, to leave her bare and exposed and exhausted because of him without offering a piece of himself to make up for the part of herself she had lost.
He’s reminded of that night now, the defeat lining her faint voice stirring up a storm of commiseration within his chest.
His inhibitions overcome him as he glances over at her, thinking better of his impulse to rest a hand on her knee. His fingers twitch with the urge to feel her skin on his again and he smothers it by clenching the steering wheel tighter as the car ahead of him picks up the pace.
After ten minutes of silence tethered by unspoken words, Elizabeth is directing Rio to where she’s parked, two block down from the lot she had followed him to. He smirks to himself when he clocks the meter she had to fill up in order to park on the curb, but doesn’t mention it as he pulls up alongside the same curb. Tension immediately blooms in the small space between them when he shuts the engine off and turns his attention on her.
When she finally allows her gaze to meet his, her walls are being drawn back up in time with his own. The bubble of raw honesty and vulnerability that they’ve allowed themselves to exist in for the past hour is shrinking in on itself, as if the universe were realizing that it was never meant to exist in the first place.
And he catches it, the moment her lips begin to wrap around the first syllables of “thank,” and he cuts her off because for some reason he can’t identify within himself yet, he can’t bear to hear those words.
Rather, he reaches for her phone that’s currently clutched in her left hand, internally breathing a sigh of release when she allows it to slip from her grasp and into his. He types in the number to his burner phone reserved for personal matters, rather than business, with a practiced efficiency before handing it back over to her, his fingers purposefully ghosting over hers in the process.
“You need anythin’, mama, you just ring,” he drawls out. The timbre of his voice is light, yet it still manages to achieve a gravelly texture, and she thinks that it really isn’t fair how he executes that so effortlessly.
When Rio allows his gaze to travel over Elizabeth’s form one last time preceding her departure, the uniform insinuation behind it is not what she’s met with when it connects with hers again. In fact, it possesses the most abundant volume of chaste affection she’s seen in those chocolate orbs since she last shared her bed, and herself, with him. It throws her off kilter, how similar the emotion he’s displaying in this moment compares to that of the one he displayed when he empathized with her for the first and only time. When he expressed his familiarity with the loneliness of the lifestyle they were both far too prime on conquering.
He witnesses the transference of thought to action, given their close proximity, when Elizabeth opens her mouth only to close it again, trading in whatever she had planned on saying for nonverbal communication as she raises the hand not holding onto her phone between them. She hesitates for an indiscernible second, her hand freezing a few inches short of his face before she appears to make her decision.
The tension in the air between them reaches a boiling point as three of her fingers make contact with the slope of his cheek, smoothing across the scruff of the beard he’s grown out in the recent months. They trail downward until they reach the sharp edge of his jawline, at which point her hand shifts to grip the back of his neck, mirroring the flipped depiction of their position on the dock. Her thumb brushes across the skin of his throat a minute, and although her gaze is trained on the movement, she can feel the heat of Rio’s gaze on her as it burns a hole through her skull.
She’s reluctant to meet his eyes, daunted by the prospect of what she may find in them if she does.
So she doesn’t. Her thumb makes two more sweeping motions, a silent expression of gratitude, before she drops her hand altogether, the loss of his warmth causing something sharp to tear through her chest. She keeps her eyes downcast as she pops open the passenger door and slips through it without another word.
As per his usual tendency when his candid emotions peek through the cracks in his mask, Rio’s jaw tenses as he watches Elizabeth retreat back to her van. He releases a heavy sigh through his nose, scrubbing a hand over his face and, inadvertently, across the section she had briefly grazed.
Rio isn’t accustomed to having his own display of affection turned back on him. Especially when it ingenuously mirrored so many instances where it had been an act bred of selfish incentives.
He wonders, briefly, if they’ll ever come upon a time where the scarce yet intimate contact between them isn’t to some extent calculated and polluted by the bitterness of their past. If the occasions where he used the obscurity of her attraction as an angle in his manipulation could ever be nullified by new occasions nurturing wholesome intentions.
The lack of answers in regards to these uncertainties doesn’t bide well with him. He watches Elizabeth attempt to gather her bearings through his rear view mirror, and as he does so, he settles for the verity that if he wants answers regarding his limitations with Elizabeth, he’ll have to seek them out directly at the source.
||
Beth releases a weighted sigh as she watches Rio’s black Cadillac peel away from the curb in front of her, jamming the heels of her hands into her eyes in an attempt to barricade the fresh tears threatening to fall.
She can’t help but feel out of control. It’s recklessly destructive, the way he beckons her to expose her raw nerve endings to him with such calculated ease. The way he convinces her that doing so is what she wants with no more than one touch and a few well-placed encouragements.
She had gathered just how dangerous he was when she first met him; when he had broken into her home and waved his gun around like it was no more threatening than a cell phone. When he had proven to have gained undisclosed knowledge of the ins and outs of her daily life and her family’s routines without so much as asking her name first.
Ever the wiser now after months of wedging herself into his life, she’s privy to the dangers that she hadn’t been exposed to during their early encounters; she knows the consequences of entrusting someone so turbulent with her deepest vulnerabilities and desires. Knowing Rio as she does now is somehow far more dangerous than knowing him as the gangbanger who had threatened her life without knowing the extent of her value.
Her mind is heavily pre-occupied the entirety of the drive home, her muscles on autopilot and what scrap of focus she can muster only being committed to remembering the correct turns. In turn, Beth finds herself unbeknownst to the presence of a black Honda trailing behind her.
That is, until she pulls into the driveway.
Beth is made aware of the stranger’s presence by their declaratory knock on her window, her heart leaping into her throat at the sound. The person’s face is too blurry to make out through the dense fog coating the glass, a result of warmer-than-usual temperatures intermingling with the afternoon rainfall.
Her hand instinctually shoots to the passenger’s seat, her fingers fumbling for her phone where she had deposited it in her purse. Her efforts are futile, the lighting in the car too dim and the adrenaline coursing through her veins causing her hands to shake as she aimlessly sifts.
She doesn’t know who would be out of their mind enough to come rapping on her car window at this time of night, not to mention the fact that she had been sitting in the driveway for all of two minutes. She reasons with herself that the person may be a neighbor; that they’ve simply been locked out of their home and are seeking out a spare key from her. Perhaps they’ve lost power and are in need of a few extra batteries.
A swipe of her hand across the foggy glass shoots those naïve postulations straight to hell.
It takes her a moment for the familiarity of his features to spark her memory, but when they do, fear grips her like boa constrictor, extorting all of the air form her lungs. She finds herself taking shallow, ragged breaths and it’s like a flip is switched in her body as her mind shifts into fight or flight mode. She rummages more vigorously through her purse, her fingers just making contact with the smooth surface of her phone screen when a sharp, belligerent thump against the window has her head instinctually jerking to the left.
Panic strikes every one of her nerve endings like a match to candle wicks when she catches the wicked glint of metal through the fog. Her confirmation of its source settles like a dumbbell in her gut as a wave of nausea washes over her; the silver barrel of a gun is now resting against the glass not even six inches from her head.
Her mind is reeling, hysteria clouding her judgement because she’s one incorrect decision away from having a bullet placed straight through her skull. She needs to think, needs more time than she fathoms she has to come up with a plan, a lie, an attack, anything that will keep her family from discovering her dead body in the driveway.
Beth shakes her head forcefully with the wayward prospect of dismantling some of the panic muddling her ability to think straight. She hones in on her sense of touch, tries to identify her surroundings and how she can use them to her advantage in this moment. She takes note of the hand still resting within her purse, her fingers curling around the edges of her phone as one solution fastens itself to the forefront of her mind.
Using the tips of her fingers, Beth gently slips her phone into the sleeve of her blouse, heeding the necessity of keeping her motions hidden. Slowly, she raises her right arm above her head, the other moving to lower her window. She feels when her phone slides further up her sleeve in time with her motions, and she allows herself to feel a morsel of relief that it’s, for the most part, secure. The pungent scent of tobacco is the first thing she’s greeted with when the man opens his chapped lips to speak to her through the small opening she’s provided him.
He settles the barrel of his gun against the crevice in a deliberately threatening gesture.
“Evenin’, darlin’,” he jeers, the term of endearment revolting from his lips and contrasting so harshly to Rio’s charming drawl. “Why don’t’chu open up your door for me so we can have a li’l chat, hm?”
Beth can feel the tears brimming at her eyelids as she pops open the driver’s side door, but she’s determined to withhold from this man the satisfaction of making her cry. Instead, she does what she did the very first time she had ever had a gun pointed to her head; when she had no other choice to preserve her own life other than holding her own and leaning on her persuasiveness.
“What do you want?” She asks in a low tone, compelling her voice to sound sturdier than she feels. She still has her hands raised as she steps onto the pavement, back turned to the man, and she inhales sharply when she feels the familiar sensation of cold metal pressing up against her skin.
The man maintains his positioning of the gun against the base of her neck as he shuts the car door gently, and the sophistication of which he’s has been executing this whole affair perturbs her even further.
“Now, don’t get me wrong, baby. You’ve got plenty I’d want to sample,” he pauses, makes a show of running his tongue across his lower lip while leering at her in such a way that makes her feel as if insects were crawling beneath her flesh, “if this were jus’ about you.”
If this is meant to be reassuring, it doesn’t achieve the desired effect. Something tells her that this man doesn’t give a rat’s ass about her comfort, though.
“Is it money, then? Is that what you want?” She surmises, more than willing to do whatever it takes to have the gun currently sending tremors down her spine anywhere else than where it’s placed in that moment. Although it’s certainly not the first time she’s been threatened at gun point, it’s most definitely the first time she’s having trouble foreseeing an outcome that lacks any bloodshed.
“You’re gettin’ warmer,” he mutters, his face far too close to hers for comfort when he speaks. It doesn’t take her long after that to connect the dots that should’ve been pieced together from the moment she recognized him, and she swallows with immense difficulty given the lump that’s lodged itself in her throat because—
“You’re after Rio.”
“Well, would you look-y here?” He drawls, clicking his teeth and producing a sound that makes Beth shiver in disgust, “There’s is brain to balance out all o’ these goods.” He emphasizes his point by dragging his free hand up the curvature of her waist, his hands grimy even through the material of her sweater, and she chokes back a sob because she can’t give him the satisfaction of letting it slip free.
“If you tell me what you want from him I can help you get it,” she clamors out, maintaining a somewhat steady tone but the pace is too panicked, too revealing of her fear for her liking.
The rumble of laughter he releases at her offer is bone-chilling and cryptic. He nudges her forward with the barrel of the gun, directing her up the slight incline of the driveway before replying, “See, as helpful as you’ve been, baby, there’s somethin’ you ain’t picked up on yet.”
Beth wets her lips swiftly before chancing a shift in their position, steadily lowering her raised hands until they meet each other in front of her waist. Gravity drags her phone back down the inside of her blouse sleeve, and she briskly grips the hem of her sleeve to impede upon its expedition towards the ground.
Gradually, Beth turns one-hundred-eighty degrees where she stands, taking great care to delay the motion as much as possible, until she’s face-to-face with her aggressor. His despicable grin doesn’t falter as he angles the gun upwards, crooking it to the right so that he can slot it just beneath the catch in her jaw, and god, she thinks, this shouldn’t feel so familiar. She’s so caught up in the unwitting nostalgia sparked by her current situation that she barely registers the man is speaking again until he jams the gun further against her throat, recapturing her attention.
“You’re the message I’m gon’ send him. We’ll see how easy he brushes off his associates after it costs him his main assets.”
And Beth knows in that moment that her time is up, that she’s run out of minutes to formulate a plan. Her thoughts work themselves into a frenzy, attempting to sort out the best plan of action despite the panic muddling her logical reasoning, the strategy mapping itself out in her head as she lowers the phone into her palm because—
You need anythin’, mama, you just ring.
The next few seconds pass by in slow motion, the abundance of adrenaline fueling her minutely-thought-out solution as she allows her phone to slip from her grasp and barrel towards the concrete.
She hears when it shatters— it takes the man half a second to register what’s happened.
She feels the thundering of her heartbeat working its way into her throat as she clocks the diversion of his attention— another half of a second for his gaze to fall to her feet.
She witnesses the off-kilter motion of the gun with a dissociative gaze as it’s uprooted from the man’s hand— a full second, she reckons, for her hands to coerce its displacement with an upwards swing.
The next second feels longer, somehow, when she clasps her hands together, mustering up every molecule of energy she can harness as she reels back bodily before launching her joined fists directly at the man’s nose.
He staggers backwards, clutching his face with both hands as blood spurts out from beneath them.
She scrambles for the two items now lying on the concrete before cocking the gun back and leveling it straight at him.