Mine, All Mine Ch. 02

"All right, then." With a double-handed slap at her knees, Taylor stood. "Ready to head back?"

"Uh, yeah," Ian said, "I guess so." He rose to join her with a dazed chuckle for the five-thousand-word essay that lay unspoken on the desert floor around them.

She could feel the walls going up already as they shouldered their backpacks again. Here, it seemed, was another blowjob her friend Ian Killbourne would be relegating to the pile of Things Which Must Not Be Discussed.

* * * *

The first fifteen miles back on the highway, fleeing the scene of the crime, as it were, Taylor had adopted a new mantra.

What have I done? What have I done? What the fuck have I done?

They hadn't spoken a word since she'd gotten the Jeep moving again. This was a new kind of silence, now. Profane when compared to the sacred quiet of the summer desert they'd shared earlier. Before all this.

Every time she stole a glance in Ian's direction, he seemed to be making an intense inspection of his cuticles. Or the dash. Or the horizon. Or really anything except her.

How could she not have seen this coming? It had been pure willful ignorance that Taylor hadn't imagined it would get weird like this. And the longer they went without speaking, the more miles she put between them and the mine, the weirder it got.

Was she ever going to be able to hang out with Ian again in a normal manner? Somehow it seemed the comfort of their last four years in the buddy zone had been released to the wind like a box full of butterflies, never to be rounded up and contained again. She sure as fuck wasn't going to be able to look Amy in the eye anymore.

And, she continued to self-flagellate, the awkwardness with those two would probably now preclude her from doing stuff with the group as a whole. Chelsea would latch on right away to her not acting like herself, and who could predict how Ian would be now, after this.

Yup. Congratulations, Sharpe. In one blow-job you lost your entire group of friends.

Taylor flicked her eyes over at Ian again. He was making a serious go of picking a rock out of the sole of his shoe. There had to be something she could say. Something to make this less of a thing than it was.

Hell. She'd promised casual. No big deal. A favor between pals. She shouldn't have trusted herself. There was a reason she'd been flattening out any emotional thoughts about her best friend these past few years. They were more than she could handle and best kept out of reach where she couldn't hurt herself with them.

The sun tracked west as they fled down the highway toward El Paso, and Taylor searched for the right words.

Maybe ... maybe if I just tell him ...

"GOD! Dammit."

It didn't matter how many years went by. A vibrating phone in her pocket bursting into her thoughts still made her want to pee her pants.

They must have gotten close enough to relative civilization for cell phone signals to kick in again. Still, she'd have to wait until she wasn't driving to see what it was.

Pllling!

A different chime came from the passenger side of the Jeep and she saw Ian dig his own phone out of a pocket. After a moment, there was muttering.

"What?" It was quiet. He was talking to himself. "What does that even mean?"

"Everything OK over there?" At least this was a respectable 'in' to conversation again. Maybe she could springboard from this into repairing some of the damage.

"I don't know," he said, sounding genuinely confused. "Amy sent me this text, and sh—"

Pllling!

"What the ff..."

It took a fair amount of work not to focus all her attention on the situation happening on her right. Taylor had to keep her eyes on the road. "Umm. Ian?" she said to the windshield.

"Are you fucking kidding me?!"

An outburst like that from her mild-mannered friend was rare.

"OK, what's going on right now?" she asked, dumping her earlier concerns and snapping into crisis-management mode.

Her next few glances showed him staring at his phone's screen in a dumb trance. He was making her nervous.

"Ian. Seriously."

Like a zombie, he passed the phone to her across the cluster of shift columns, and she took it, gauging how far away the next oncoming car was before she risked a look.

Most of the rectangle of glass in her hand displayed an extreme close-up of a penis. A second quick look told her there were lips around one end of it. She scrunched up the right half of her face, handing him back his phone.

"Why would Amy send you porn?"

"That wasn't porn," he said, eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance, still holding the phone as though he didn't want to look at it again, but neither could he put it away. "That was Amy."

"WHAT?!"

"Jesus, Sharpe!"

Taylor got control of the wheel after nearly swerving them off the road, but then brought the Jeep out of high gear and braked to a more deliberate stop on the shoulder. The moment the gravel stopped crunching under the tires, she lost her shit.

"Ian! Amy sent you a picture of some dude's dick in her mouth?"

"That's right, Captain Obvious!" he said, brandishing the phone. "And you don't have to yell. I'm right here."

"Is she out of her goddamn mind?"

She stared at her friend, slack-jawed in the heat, Walt's engine pinging and ticking in the silence between the occasional car or truck whipping past.

For what seemed like at least several long minutes, Taylor watched him fight down the urge to look at his phone again. Maybe he hoped if he checked a second time, the image wouldn't be there.

"Do you know what she said?" he asked at last. "What the text said?"

Taylor shook her head. Two jerky, small movements.

"She said, 'I wanted it, just not with you'." His eyes never went back to his phone, the horrible words already committed to memory.

"Hoooly fuck."

He wouldn't look up from his glazed stare at the metal handle on the dash in front of him. The only movement Taylor saw was a subtle backward rock of his head and a light chuff of stymied breath to match.

She felt her cheeks heating, felt the blood boiling in protective fury.

"Ian," she started out, voice low, "I am going to fucking murder her."

He gave up a weary sigh. "Look. Just calm down, OK?"

Taylor made a valiant effort to keep her voice level. "Calm down? She texts you a picture of her doing to some other guy the one thing she wouldn't do with you for four years and you're worried about whether I'm calm?"

Her friend pushed his first two fingertips up the center of his forehead in a slow line, as if trying to squeeze out his thoughts.

"All right, first of all," he said, pointing his flattened hand at the windshield, "It wasn't the 'one' thing she wouldn't do. It was a whole situation. And second of all?" Ian sucked in his upper lip and inhaled. "You know what? I really don't want to talk about this right now."

"Ian, I'm sorry," Taylor said, scrambling for the right words. "I didn't mean to make it worse. If you want, we could—"

"Can you just take me home, please?"

He met her eyes, at last. The green was desperate, seeking shelter.

"Just take me home."

She nodded; a small movement as though a larger gesture might upset him further.

"OK."

Like making her way through a trail of broken glass, Taylor started the Jeep again and shifted down into first. Walt woke up and pulled back onto the highway, picking up speed to carry them back to a very different reality than the one they'd left that morning.

She couldn't even ask herself 'What now?' as they drove south into the afternoon. Neither of them spoke another word, and Taylor wondered if Ian was as numb as she was.

I just wanted help with my bat-cams. Instead I blew Ian and Amy apparently blew everyone else.

I think I need therapy. Or drugs.

Or both.