Tastes Like Candy

Eighteen

Eighteen

Candy

"Come on. We're bugging out early," he told Michelle, and swallowed her hand up in his, tugged her up from the place where she knelt on the floor, going over tentative interior sketches.

She had her pencil in her other hand, and her eyes stayed with the sketches. "Oh, but..."

"Oh but you can do it later," he insisted, and kept tugging.

"Candy," she protested, but it was weak, and there was a smile in her voice.

"No. It's fun time. I'm helping you learn how to have fun, remember?"

"You never let me forget."

He towed her to the door, calling to his boys as he went, leaving them with instructions. "Don't throw out the glasses after all," he told Cletus. "We might need them." Michelle had told him they didn't have the resources to go throwing glasses away.

"Hold down the fort," he told Gringo, and received a sharp mock-salute in return. "Dumbass," he muttered, earned a laugh, and dragged Michelle out into the blinding afternoon sunlight.

He slowed down when they were clear of the door, matching his pace to hers. She walked quickly, but her legs were considerably shorter than his. He still held her hand. It felt nice there.

"Where are you taking me, presidential man?" she asked, voice teasing.

"Vice presidential," he corrected. "And home."

"Hmm. That sounds ominous."

He squeezed her hand. "Oh, it is."

~*~

Candy had never been one for passengers. The extra weight behind him, dragging on the bike, frightened arms squeezing his diaphragm. He'd always equated it with carrying an unwieldy backpack, and that always put him in mind of his brief school career...and, well, that was never good.

But Michelle didn't fall into the backpack category. Mostly because she'd grown up on the back of bikes and knew how to hold on without getting in the way.

Also because any chance to get her pressed up against him was a good one.

They hit traffic as they were leaving downtown, intersections jammed up with the early homebound crowd. Candy was forced to follow a puttering taco truck – Best In The County it said across the back – before finally getting an opening to go around it. The bike leapt and his stomach dropped in a good way. Michelle's hands flexed against his shirt and he thought maybe she liked the speed too.

Finally they were out of the congestion, and then away from all humanity, about two miles from home, the sun and the wind burning their faces, little point of Michelle's chin dug into his shoulder blade.

It was idyllic.

Until it wasn't.

~*~

Michelle

She remembered the garish green lettering on the side of the truck. Tito's Tacos. Best in the county. Buy two, get the third free. The smiling cartoon taco. They'd passed it back in downtown, where it had trundled along slow as a bus, just another obstacle Candy had swooped around.

It came roaring up on their left, flying, its diesel engine roaring.

She twisted her head around, and then she saw the truck behind them, a pickup with one of those ugly camper shells over the bed. Through the windshield, she saw the sun strike metal in the front seat: a gun.