Thief

She flexed her toes lazily. Naked feet resting on the hot dashboard she kept having to readjust her heels, jerkily shifting them from side to side to avoid them burning on the baking plastic. It was everywhere. The heat hitting her all over like a playful punch. Even the breeze floating in from the hopefully open window was sticky and sat heavily in her lungs. She picked up the carelessly folded map and attempted to cool herself down by batting it softly in front of her damp face. They'd been sitting stagnant in this car for hours waiting for Lucas. She'd last seen the back of his balaclava clad skull disappearing into the towering bank building at about 4:56. This gave him just enough time to nonchalantly waltz in but was late enough in the day to avoid a high witness count. Normally she'd have worried if say, Buck had been absent this long. But she knew Lucas, she knew theatricality ran through him. He'd play up to the monstrous image of a thief these people expected him to be. Yet she knew how far that ideal was from reality. She watched a dragonfly coax leisurely by the window, ascending ever higher towards the molten sun, and thought about the week they'd spent together in rehab. She thought she heard sirens somewhere off in the distance but she ignored them, entranced by the jerky, partnered dance of the dragonfly and the sun. She remembered first how he'd introduced himself as Lucas - an atypical trait for addicts, honesty. She'd been Marie that week. They'd walked together along the banks of the clear lake until the sun set across it, turning the crystal waters into a raging liquid fire. She'd spoke frantically about nothing in particular but he'd saved his words. Using them sparsely, making them precious. She hardly knew anything about this man she trusted so infinitely. She'd saved things up over the years of course. Coating the snippets of him he bequeathed her so rarely in mental bubble wrap; storing them away in the ever-growing volt she'd made for him in the center of her war-torn heart. She'd never been one for cradling secret longings. She always found a way to posses what she coveted. But she'd never found anyone worthy of her all, worthy of lulling her into a guilty state of concealment. Yet those days spent by the dazzling lake and subsequently all that followed were the best of her previously insignificant life. He'd found the pieces of her scattered across her past and glued her back together by giving her ambition, giving her back a personality of her own - one that didn't belong to cravings and narcotics. The ghost of a smile touched her face as her glassy eyes followed the peaceful dragonfly - feeling they were closer in status to one another in this moment than she had ever been to any creature before. Then her quiet musings were interrupted by Buck's gruff mutter,
'What's taking 'im so dang long? Can you hear sirens?' he breathed. She frowned harshly, not wanting to confront the questions. For Buck to vocalize it meant it was real, meant it had become a legitimate worry. The visions in her head were fast changing, contorting and mutating into dark dreams of police and gun fire. Visions plagued her of mocking blood falling from an evil injury. She imagined the metal of handcuffs gleaming like a smile as they bit down on restrained wrists. That frown pressed harder against her features as she thrust her eyes to the ambiguous heavens and noticed for the first time a dark ominous cloud to the corner of the seemingly endless sky. As she allowed the darkened obscurity to enter her exploding pupils she thought back to the time before Lucas. She could find nothing there but haze; violent shame, consuming guilt - a furious, grotesque, lecherous haze. She longed to stop the rain, to waylay it so she could spend a few more glorious moments in the assaulting heat. But she could feel the chill already, billowing in from the east. Goosebumps rose on her frivolously bare skin and her whole body shook savagely. They heard two head-splitting cracks ring out from the direction where she'd last laid eyes on the man she adored.
'Those weren't them.' Buck spoke - stunned. 'Those weren't his shots.' The first few drops of rain began to hit the dusty windscreen, making tracks like dirty tear marks as they raced to their deaths on the thirsty ground. Buck spun the wheel hectically and the car roared into life. As it jerked forward she let out a gasp of pain as the movement sent her head sharply back against the hard leather seat. She slid her cracked heels down the dashboard as she curled in on herself, wrapping her shaking arms around her nude knees. They raced away from the scene in silence but she could feel Bucks eyes flickering onto her at every traffic light, surveying her with a frenzied apprehension. He drove her out into the field, the place they'd camped during the third summer - and parked the car. He stared straight ahead through the smudgy windscreen and breathed a heavy sigh but said nothing. By this point the rain had become so violent that the furious beat of the wipers had no chance against it, their pathetic fight yielding no leeway. She delicately lifted her fingers to the handle of the door and gently pulled it towards her, she pushed the door forward and walked out the car.  She moved heavily forward, dragging her feet slightly as she waded through the deep mud. She stopped facing the trees, bent slightly forward and vomited violently. The bile burned her throat as it flew from her heaving stomach. She then raised her head towards the open sky and allowed the water to beat against her face. The icy wind was so powerful it slapped her as it passed, mischievously changing direction to catch her off guard. She embraced the pain of it all like it was an old friend, laughing into the rain - allowing droplets of it to fall down her throat as she cackled. She fell to her knees in hysterics, sinking into the soil as she did so. Her stomach throbbed but still she laughed, the muscles in her face aching powerfully from her stretched, manic smile. Tears started to fall from her scrunched up eyes yet she continued to laugh insanely through them. She held her hands to her rib cage, struggling to breath through the deranged howling. The tears combined with the rain and both leapt together from her face, pooling beneath her on the drenched ground. She was laughing harder now, the chuckling becoming more indistinguishable from shrieking the more it occurred. Then as the laughs became shrieks, they then became screams. Screams so loud they broke through the deafening wind. Screams absolutely riddled with horror and filled to the brim with loss. Screams that froze her blood as it entered her weakened heart. She screamed at the wind, pushing at it with balled, tight fists. She fell forward and allowed her face to bury into the warm mud, willing her tears to feed it. She could think of Lucas now. She had been trying so hard to keep her thoughts on the heist alone, on their failure. She had tried so hard she had almost tricked herself. Now however - she thought of Lucas. She thought of his deep brown eyes looking at her on that first perfect day, the water reflecting onto his irises, making them shine. How they'd seemed to ripple along with the lake. How everything he'd said had made so much sense to her, had been modest genius - perfection. She'd fled from one addiction to the next, allowing herself to become irreversibly dependant on his particular brand of platonic, protective love. She thought about the day he'd found her high out of her mind on the toilet floor of their hotel, the day she'd plunged off the wagon. She remembered disgustedly how she'd screamed at him as he'd picked her up, peeling her off the chilled dirty tiles. How she'd hurled vile insults and threats at him. How he'd just stood there, taking it. And then she thought of his warmth, how he'd cradled her like a baby until she sobered up, allowing her to nuzzle her damp face into the nape of his muscular neck. He'd never seen her how she'd wanted him to, never loved her the way she longed for him. He did not believe he was worthy of real love, after the things he'd done. And now she'd never see him again, never be able to make him hers - to force him into believing he could be. Everything inside her head faded into darkness and all she could see was Lucas' smile, hear his soft silky chuckle, feel his strong arms, his safe embrace. She noticed with numb surprise that she was still screaming. She could taste blood in the back of her throat and she swallowed it down. She couldn't tell if she was crying or not, she couldn't leave the fantasy that she was with him. She screwed her eyes shut and thought about every detail of that day. She could feel the muscles of his arms pushing against her damp cheek, feel his hot breath on the back of her downy neck, feel the drug induced nausea that rose through her every time he rocked her shaking body. She'd almost forgotten where she was, almost become completely engulfed in the beautiful delusion, when a car door slammed and ripped her from it. The rain had stopped and she could hear Buck's heavy footsteps approaching her. She unscrewed her eyes and allowed them to open, her face still half coated in mud they stung a little. He reached a hand down to her and she grasped it desperately, her legs trembling as they strained to a stand. They walked back to the car together, her head still spinning she got in the passenger side. Buck shot her one more uneasy look and started the car. She knew she could not think of Lucas again. She had no choice but to force him into the black box in her mind where she stored all the sordid things she'd ever done to score drugs. She knew she'd have to deal with it all one day. With every passing moment she survived in this world the box grew larger. One day she'd have to open it and confront it all, battle her maliciously grinning demons - probably by drinking a bottle of vodka and a packet of aspirin.  But for now it could be hidden away, Lucas engrossed within it. She leaned back against the cracked leather peacefully and wondered if the dragonfly survived the rain.