Damsel[ed]: Rescue Required (#3 of the Damsel[ed] Series)

Chapter Eight: Relationship Talks and Free-Falling Death Traps

 When Jaylin takes my hand in the elevator, so much pressure fills my chest I think my ribs might crack. "Hey," she says, blinking up at me with those big brown eyes of hers that must break hearts. "You good?"

My mouth opens to shape words, but no sound comes out.

I thought it would be Heaven. As my first "lover," I mean. If there was someone I didn't expect in my life, it was Jaylin. When we were kids, I thought I'd fall in love with Hev. She's tough, blunter than a mallet to the side of the skull, pretty. Maybe I did love her, as a kid.

"Ang?"

When I swallow, my throat is dry and my tongue is like sandpaper. "Mmmm...hmm?"

"Not really the response I was looking for." She steps so close to me I smell faded perfume and stale coffee on her skin. Her hand slips up the back of my shirt and combs the brittle feathers of my wing. The touch is surprisingly tender, and I'm lost to it, caught in my own panicked spiral of thoughts.

When I grew older, say, fourteen, I thought it would be Gats. Not now. Not it two years from now, but like, as adults. I even had a fantasy attached, though that word holds all the wrong connotations. A story, I mean.

Jaylin frowns. "Are you with me?"

"Huh," I say, "yeah."

We'd be sitting alone in a dim-lit bar, him, squinting at a dented wedding band before flicking it into the ice at the bottom of his drained bourbon, me, wiping my hands on my crisp white jacket, shaken from the day's list of patients.

"Look," Jay says, "it's been a rough... couple of weeks. Been a pretty rough month, actually."

I'm already lost, thinking forward to the smell of bar cleaner and harsh alcohol.

"Hey, Angel," Gatsby would say with his face in his hands. He'd have lost some of his accent by then, taken on an edge to his voice. For a reason I still can't explain, I always imagined he would become miserable as a grown man. The glamorous "teenage experience" would give way to monotony. Just under the facade, though, he'd stay the same: charismatic, spontaneous, handsome. "Want to get married?"

"Yeah," I'd say, feeling all these adult emotions I didn't expect to have felt by now. Something like love, something like exhilaration, something like fear. "Why not?"

"I think we should run away," Jaylin says, bending down to grip her hobbly knee. "Like in the movies. I dunno. Cash out whatever's in your college saving's fund, take Gats' car, get a fake I.D. You look older. We could get jobs. Hide out for a little."

I start to shake my head, but then her words click. Run away. Escape this war, my fate, the torture I've put my friends through.

All at once, I wish I could read her. Her expression, utterly calm and utterly blank. Dark hair tumbles over her shoulders, framing a pale, relatively scarless face. It's hard, in it, to see the girl I fell in love with, the girl who hurt me.

"Are you scared?" I ask her.

She levels her gaze to her feet. "Of your dad? Yeah."

"If you want to leave, I'm not gonna stop you."

"It's not that!" She slams her hands on the buttons.  When she juts her chin out like that, she looks like she can rule the world. "If I leave, where do 

"I don't want protection." I'm crossing away from her, her fist still wound up in my feathers. The words come out heavily, like a huff. "I'm tired of people trying to push me around, force me to go here, do that. I like you, Jay, but I still remember—"