Continuation: The Devil’s Last Chance... Part 2

It was, indeed, next Saturday night and Lainy Frost was ready, the breeze picking up the waves of her dark heat-straightened hair. Standing there on the corner, beneath the willow that shaded the stop sign, only someone who suspected she might be waiting around, would see her. Gideon. Noah. She missed the excitement of those stolen days. Her dark velvet dress and leathery bolero jacket stood as miniature monuments within the cityscape blackening the horizon. The sky itself was quickly draining like a gasp of danger. A bat escaped from the mouth of the valley, like a reminder that maybe she too should get the hell out of there.

Too, late, her heart leapt off the cliff. That all too familiar rumble of the '57 was pressing steady on her ear drum, so faint. She turned towards to curve in the road. She'd see headlights soon, like stars in the bumper gaze of a Chevy lover, halogen and heavy.

What would she tell Gideon? Noah.

She'd been rehearsing it all week, but now that gravel baritone just had its way of taking over her mind and body. It's only a ride. No biggie. They'd take a little drive. She'd say, after a while, melodiously, "...Gideon. I can't."

The car pulled up smoothly side by side and she reached for the shiny handle without second thought, slipping a hip cooly into the dark embrace of leather bench-- Princess invisible.

"Lainey." Mr. Galloway?! Noah and Gideon's father... what the.

Suddenly the devil was in the calamitous changing of details, and the make and model of the car didn't amount to much more extravagance than a trap of cold steel and hot ball bearings. Romanticism shattering into something sinewy and muscular, something she was sure she didn't mean. No not at all, her heart racing and warmth in her face fading. This was not the carnival ride she was staking.

To him she smelled heavily of musk and dried-up tears; and he himself of too much history, sunk into old, faded blue jeans. Suddenly, her cute little black nothing of a dress was a mile too short, her proud legs stuck out like faithless pillars. He put a cold bleached hand on her raw black thigh, pejoratively: "I don't want you hanging with my son."

His words rolled with conviction, but the shifting pressure of his touch was thunder and lightning between them. He pressed his lips together tight and shot his eyeballs of steel blue into the fear aroused hollows floating now in the white of hers. This was far from Heaven and an even farther cry from Help.

She was already picturing a torn leather jacket, and the pathetic walk home, of shame, regret, self-loathing. For what? Fire and ice.

She had only wanted to experience, one more time, that taste of Privilege. Noah had understood. Gideon would understand. Maybe she was saying implicitly he's a boy, not a man. And this man was staring her down, down the cheek bone, down the angular black jaw, the hollowing neckline...

"Girl, this car ain't movin' ... "

She got out-- Truly a woman now. No longer invisible, to herself.