Run To You

here.”
    He took a left exit toward the airport and asked, “How?”
    Really? She had to think of supportive things for him to say? “Like you could try, ‘Look, on the bright side, Stella.’ ”
    “You broke a guy’s already fucked-up hand. What’s the bright side?”
    It probably wasn’t broken and she wished he’d quit saying that. “Well . . . I could have smashed his good hand.”
    “So?”
    “So, this way he can still text.”
    He glanced across the car at her like she was the stone-cold one. “That’s the bright side?”
    It was the best she could do while trying not to freak out. To not pass out or worse, cry. She hated to cry in public. Much better to pass out. In the middle of her personal trauma, she suddenly became aware of her surroundings. They were on the expressway to Miami International Airport, and she looked out her side window at the signs. “Are you picking someone up from MIA?”
    “Dropping you off.”
    Her head snapped toward him, and her ponytail whipped across her bare shoulder and her sunglasses slid down her nose. “Am I going somewhere?”
    “Texas. I e-mailed your itinerary to your cell phone.”
    She looked at him over the top of her glasses. “Texas?” No one ever asked her if she wanted to go to Texas. She didn’t. Anxiety pounded in her chest even as her head felt light.
    “Is there somewhere else you’d rather stay for a while?”
    Where she’d rather stay was impossible. Not after last night. Or early this morning, rather. Not after G.I. Joe had knocked out Ricky and she’d made everything worse by smashing Lou’s hand. Not that she’d had a choice about that. He tried to break her lock, but she hadn’t enjoyed hurting him. Not like the man across the car. Beau Junger clearly loved kicking ass, taking names, and sniffing “flashbang.” Around the boom-boom-boom pounding in her head, she thought about her mom. She could go to her mother’s in New Mexico. She’d be safe from the Gallos and Ricky there. But her mother hadn’t always looked out for Stella. Hadn’t put her before Carlos, and Stella wasn’t ready to pretend everything was wonderful. To act like bad stuff had never happened, which was her mother’s way of coping. If no one talked in any real way about the past, then it could be rewritten.
    “I assume you have a photo ID on you.”
    She pushed the black frames up the bridge of her nose. “Yeah.” She always carried a Visa and her driver’s license in her backpack.
    “You fly into Dallas, then on to Amarillo.”
    To stay with Sadie. She certainly wasn’t ready for that. She shook her head. “This is kind of sudden.”
    “Did you want to stay and hang out with Lefty?”
    “No.” But she wasn’t ready to see her sister. Especially not now. Now that her life was a steaming pile of crap. She moaned and put her fingers to her temples above the frames of her glasses. Had she moaned out loud or just in her head?
    The Escalade rolled past vehicles and cabs parked along the curb of the north terminal and pulled to a stop behind a Lincoln Town Car. “Your flight leaves in an hour,” she heard the voice from across the Escalade say above the noise in her head. “American Airlines, flight four-eighty-four, concourse D. You’re flying first class and should have plenty of time to get through security.”
    “First class,” she heard her own voice squeak stupidly.
    “Thank your sister.” He got out of the vehicle and walked around the front of the Cadillac. He moved from a slice of bright Miami sun shining in his short blond hair and on the lenses of his sunglasses, and into the shade of the metal awning. He opened the passenger door and she unbelted her seat belt with a soft click. “Sadie knows about Ricky and the Gallos?”
    “No. She just knows to expect you.”
    Apparently, whether she wanted to be expected or not. She climbed out of the Escalade and threaded one arm through a strap of her backpack. Once upon a time, when she’d had various reunion fantasies of Sadie, Stella had always been a success at something. Whether it had been a princess at five, a unicorn trainer at ten, or a rock star at fifteen.
    “My brother, Blake, will pick you up at the airport.”
    A car honked somewhere and the noise and belch of shuttle bus exhaust filled the air. “How will I know who he is?” In none of her sister-reunion fantasies had she been a bartender.
    “You’ll know.”
    A bartender on the run from mobsters.