Page 89 of The Lies We Tell
She winks at me and walks in the direction of the front door. And yeah, I track her ass as she flounces away.
“What the hell kind of shit is this?” I ask ten minutes later, as Briar leans back in her seat after connecting her phone to my truck’s sound system.
“It’s called pop music, old man. Let me guess, you want easy rock. A bit of Elton John? No, Chicago.” She starts singing one of their popular hits.
“I don’t know what bothers me most. The fact you keep calling me an old man, or the fact you know the lyrics to ‘You’re the Inspiration.’”
She smiles and makes no effort to change the music that will probably make my ears bleed in an hour. With her elbow resting on the door, she runs her fingertips over her lips. Lips that I love. When they’re speaking, when they’re laughing, when they’re wrapped around my cock. I shift in my seat and try to focus on the highway ahead of us. A boner would not be helpful right now.
I’m surprised it’s even stirring, because I fucked Briar on the stairs up to my bedroom last night. Couldn’t wait once we got home. Call it an adrenaline high or something. Made love to her this morning and kissed the bruises the wooden stairs had caused.
“I’m scared,” Briar admits. “Aren’t you?”
I reach for her hand, glancing over at her briefly. She’s curled up on the passenger seat in one of my hoodies she found in the house and claimed.
“Fear exists in each and every one of us,” I say, even as I acknowledge the sparks of fear in my stomach, waiting to detonate. “But it’s how we deal with it that defines whether we act scared or not. Whether we let that fear erode our ability to make good choices.”
“What do you mean?”
I pull out and blast by a white sedan that can’t decide which lane it belongs in. “They say there are three key steps to staying calm during explosive ordnance disposal.”
Briar squeezes my hand. “Jesus, I almost forgot you did that for a living. I’m lucky you’re even here.”
I smile. “The first step is to avoid the panic hole. Kill the what-ifs. Instead, you need to ask what kind of problem you’re facing. It requires objectivity. You need to think through the catalog of times you’ve faced something similar for insight. The second step is to simply look on the bright side. You’re still alive. It’s just a bomb. You’re trained for this. It’s optimism, but it fires something in your brain that makes you believe it’s possible. And the final one is to get comfortable with not knowing how it all ends, but how to get through the next step. So, what are your what-ifs?”
“I’ve got a lot of them. It’ll take forever.”
I point out the windshield to the long road ahead of us. “Babe, we’ve got thirteen more hours in this car. What else are we gonna do? Play I Spy?”
Briar smiles. “That would be funny, given spying is basically what got you into this mess. Okay, here I go. What if the people who took me come for me again and you never find me? What if King kills you for what you did? What if the ATF arrests you or sends you to prison? What if we—”
“Briar, take a breath between sentences.”
She stops and does as I say. “You get the idea.”
I nod. I do. “Okay. So instead of all the what-ifs, let’s reframe them, see what we’re facing. What did you say first?”
“What if the people who took me find me again and you never find me?”
“Right. Good to know you realize I would come for you. But there is no one left to take you. We left all those dead bodies in the warehouse. I know Spark. He won’t let what was done to Iris rest. With Vex’s help, they’ll shut down the rest of them. But even if they didn’t, your experience tells you that you can escape. Your experience tells you someone will help. The second key step is optimism. You’re safe right now. You are more informed than you were before. We believe the Iron Outlaws will take out the rest of this ugly chain. And the third step is realizing we can’t control whether everyone is caught right now, but we know all the right immediate actions have happened. We’re hiding you, and the club is on it. So the first what-if isn’t a fear we need to give in to right now.”
“That makes logical sense. But the man, the one I was supposed to go to—he still exists.” The scratch of fear in her voice reaches the tight bands of my heart.
“Maybe. But he has no team left to get you. These kinds of rings aren’t easily replaced. He can’t call up another trafficking ring and get them to grab you again. So, let’s tackle the next thing on your list. What was it?”
“What if King kills you for what you did?”
I pause and think about it for a moment, and I realize that never getting to be an Iron Outlaw again would suck more than dying. “Okay, what was the first step?”
Briar bites down on her lip. “Avoiding the panic hole. Asking what problems you’re facing. Reframing.”
“Right. I’m facing an appropriate response to my actions from King. A man who is so angry, he wants to kill me. I’ve been there before. Every time I walked out to diffuse a bomb, there was a real risk that insurgents or locals would go to the nearest tower with a rifle and take me out. I have skills to help me avoid that. Right now, the ATF has my back. That might change, but right now, they are still with me. I think I have Spark as an ally. What was the second step?”
“Optimism,” she says, but she rolls her eyes.
“Why the eye roll?”
“I don’t know, it seems hokey.”
