Page 6 of Live for Me

I almost laughed out loud at myself while I sorted through all the racing thoughts on my walk out to where Utah was waiting faithfully to continue our firearm lesson from yesterday. I was rationalizing my desire to go on a fucking trip to New Jersey with him. Essentially calling itresearchto get to know the person I would be working with. And I knew that was what I was doing.

I was fascinated by the man who acted like he was fascinated by me. And I had absolutely no explanation for it.

“Did the Internet make you an expert?” Utah asked from where he sat on the tailgate of his truck.

“I’d be willing to bet that I know everything there is to know about this particular gun,” I said and looked down at the one I was carrying. “Firing it is probably a different story though.”

The way he was smiling at me when I looked back at him suggested that his question was facetious in nature. I suddenly found myself wondering how far I’d make it if I just threw the gun at his face and turned to run.

Probably not far.

He looked like he could play professional football.

And I was about as frail as a flamingo.

Though, the thought of him chasing me did something inside me that I preferred to ignore entirely for the moment because that would be a dangerous box to open.

“Are we waiting on Indy?” I asked before the weight of his silent smile suffocated me. Much to the detriment of the rising panic inside me, his smile only widened.

“Indy stayed out here all day yesterday to learn.”

It couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees outside, but I definitely started sweating.

“Just you and me, huh?” I asked with what was probably a noticeable gulp.

“Just you and me, angel.”

He took the gun from me to run back through everything he’d shown me when we started yesterday. How to load the magazine, how to chamber a round, how to release the chambered round, what to do when the magazine was emptied. I’d watched ninety-seven videos that covered all these topics because I already knew watching Utah’s hands do these things would be distracting all over again. I had the information from the Internet this time though, so it didn’t feel horribly overwhelming when he looked back at me like he was expecting me to mimic the things he’d shown me. Once he was satisfied that I knew how to do all these smaller tasks, he fired every round in the magazine while I watched. Once again, I found myself staring at the ripples that coursed through the muscles in his shoulders and his back in response to each shot, rather than what I was supposed to be watching. But getting to see the way his body moved to absorb the energy of the recoil was…a sight.

“You’re up, sugar.”

He handed the gun back to me and had me load it another time to make sure I had to go through all the steps from the very beginning by myself. He stepped right in front of me as soon as I was standing where he’d been while he was doing the shooting.

“Put the tips of your shoes right against mine,” he said and nodded toward the ground between our feet. I looked down, too, and inched forward until the toes of my shoes just barely touched both of his boots. I held my breath before I ever looked back up at him because, holy shitballs, he was close enough for me to realize that he smelled like an odd combination of cedar and leather.

“Don’t move your feet,” he instructed and stepped off to the side of me. “Raise it.”

He waited until I had the gun raised, and then he placed the outrageously large protective ear contraption on my head. I watched him put his own tiny little earplugs in and considered asking him if he made me wear the giant Mickey Mouse ear thing just for laughs, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. He wasn’t laughing or smirking now. He walked around behind me for just a brief moment and stopped at my other shoulder to look down the barrel. He used two whole fingers just underneath my hands to raise the gun ever so slightly, and then he backed up again and nodded at me.

We repeated that processseveraltimes until I’d wasted an absolute ton of ammunition. I kept waiting for him to bring up the New Jersey trip again, but by the time he was packing everything away on the tailgate of his truck, I was trying not to feel disappointed about his silence on the matter.

“You think you’ll be able to use one to defend yourself if it was really necessary?” he asked.

“No,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t be able to stay calm enough to trust myself to touch one. I imagine if I needed to suddenly defend myself, it’d be because things got really bad really fast again. I don’t perform well under that kind of pressure if it’s in person. I’m top fucking tier in control if the danger is on the other end of a phone and in some other location though.”

Utah laughed and hung his head for a few seconds before he looked at me again. “Well, like you said, Kyle is always here. Indy’s itching for the chance to try out his newfound weapon skills too. I imagine you’ll be alright with the two of them here. I’ll just sleep better knowing you have the knowledge. I hope you don’t ever actuallyneedto do anything with it.”

“If I just stay wherever you are, you couldknowthat I wouldn’tneedto do anything with it.”

There it was.

Shot that shot.

Nothing smooth or clever about it.

Just tossed that shit right out there and I was about to find out if it worked.

He paused in the middle of locking the gun away in some briefcase-looking thing and stood perfectly still to toy with my panic for that much longer.

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