My stomach lurches, and I’m surprised at the fact that it doesn’t burst through my esophagus. Accidentally on purpose, I tighten my arms around Aiden’s abdomen. If he feels my grip at all, he doesn’t show it. He just continues to speed away from the apartment building, my parents; my life.
The wind howls through my ears, and my hair whips every which way. I glance down and realize that my feet have been bare for all this time, completely vulnerable to glass and other hazards.
“Any place is mind?” Midnight Arrow yells over the wind, stealing his voice away.
“No,” I answer, my response unchanging from the last time he asked me this.
“Well, I do.”
“Does it involve weed, alcoholic beverages, drugs in syringes, and/or sex?” I ask, my voice desperate to be heard.
“Hardly.”
“Do you want to tell me where we’re actually going?”
“My parent’s house,” he says, as if I should have already known this.
“But---”
“Just to see my sister and to get a change of clothes. I can’t walk around New York looking like this, I’ll go to jail. Plus, we definitely can’t go back to my apartment,” he reasons, forcing the motor bike to go around a car that he deems as not-moving-fast-enough-for-Aiden Ryder.
“What about your parents?” I inquire, clutching ever-so-tightly to his stomach as he seems to push the poor motorcycle passed its limits.
“What about them?”
“Won’t they like, I don’t know, rip your spleen out?”
“What they don’t know won’t kill them. Or me.”
“So you’re just gonna---you’re just gonna break into your own home?”
“It’s not my home anymore,” he snaps in a defensive tone, a tone that I can still hear over the roar of the air.
“Sorry,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything, so I continue on my original thought.
“And how exactly are you planning on doing this without waking them up?”
“I did it with you, and I’ve done it countless times before.”
“Yeah, but that was when you weren’t with a total idiot who has no sense of hand-eye coordination,” I counter with a laugh.
“Well then, here's your first lesson in stealth.”
For the rest of the way, we drive in comfortable not-so-silence. Although we don’t say anything to each other, his presence is enough to ease my adrenalined nerves, and even though it’s so cold that polar bears would ask for jackets made of their own fur, I nestle my head into the crook of Aiden’s back, but not because I need a shield from the temperature.
***
I’m not sure, exactly, how a person can doze while riding around New York City at a motor vehicle's top speed. Apparently, I managed to do just that as Aiden shakes me awake.
“You literally sleep like a kitten, too.”
“Shut up with the ‘Kitten’ thing,” I order grumpily, slumping off of the motorcycle.
“I would if you wouldn’t make the comparison so easy,” he retaliates cleverly, shutting off the rumbling bike.
I scan my surroundings, curious as to how Aiden’s neighborhood looked like during his childhood.
YOU ARE READING
Midnight Arrow
Teen FictionSixteen-year-old Addison Munro, nicknamed Addie for as long as she can remember, is a simple girl with simple desires. She loves the sunshine and quietness that is her small town of Orange Grove, Florida. But then, her parents receive a perfect job...
