The Runaways

Chapter 33

Caleb

I would’ve waited half my life for that girl.

I would’ve stood on that porch ‘til my legs gave out just to see if she’d come back down that dusty driveway.

She could’ve hitched a ride to Charlottesville easy if she’d told Georgia the truth. Maybe she already had. She’d be stupid not to run as far away from me as common sense would take her.

She had millions of places to disappear to and no reason in the world to come back. But I needed her to. I guess you never really grow out of wantin’ certain things, even if it kills you when you can’t have ‘em. 

Nothing good ever stays, not around me anyway and I didn’t have the right to pin my hopes on anything, especially her. But even so, I stood around for hours looking for her, staring out at nothing, just waiting to breathe.

If she hadn’t left, I would’ve spent the day lying in bed with her—or most of it, anyway. Up until last night, I’d never really figured out why Liam didn’t let girls come around the slaughterhouse. But after spending four days with one, I understood him a little more.  Hailey’d somehow ended up in the center of everything.

Everything I thought about, everything I did, everything I didn’t do.

Sometimes going back on my promise seemed easier than following through. Having her around was starting to get comfortable, a little too comfortable, enough to make me rethink taking her home. But she didn’t have any kind of future with me.

Hell, she wouldn’t have a tomorrow if things went wrong today. But, hoping felt better than hurting over the truth, at least for a little while.

The mornin’ melted into the afternoon, and the mid-day heat died away around six o’clock. Once the sun disappeared behind the lonely barn on the edge of Georgia’s property, I thought about goin’ out to look for Hailey myself. 

There wasn’t any reason in the world for either of them to be this late. If the cops were headed my way, I had a better shot at seeing em’ coming from the top of that old barn than from the front porch. So I popped a couple pills, grabbed a quilt, and stuck out the walk.

Shufflin’ all that way through the tall grass and shale, would’ve been a hell of a lot less scary if I hadn’t been alone. All kinds of rustles and clicks rattled out of the wheat patches, and I held my breath whenever the sounds got too close.

The long shadows from trees blocked out what little light was left for me to pay attention to where I put my feet. Copperheads loved fields like these. Cillian used to kill loads of em’ around our place, so the idea of running into one solo scared me half to death.

No girl, no BB gun, no bravery.

I’d wandered too far from the house to try going back, so I hugged the hell outta that quilt and prayed to God that I would make it to edge of Georgia’s property in one piece.

Up close, that barn looked at least a hundred and fifty years old, but I could pick out the places where Georgia and Dean’d put in a little love and whole a lot of work. They’d fixed up a couple of the rotten boards, but the outside walls still looked rough enough to spit splinters.

The hinges and handles looked younger than the civil war, but the rusty red paint had chipped off and faded a long time ago. The front door needed a little pushing but rumbled open in it’s own time. 

Bits and pieces of light got in from the outside, but not enough to see too far into the barn. I tripped around in the almost dark ‘til I knocked into a propane lamp hanging from one of the rafters.