When he met her, he was in awe. Her name was Carrie and she was just about the coolest thing since sliced pineapples. She was leaning against the bar at a local pub in some nameless town, looking grossly out of place in her black leather pants and black leather biker's jacket. She was drowning shots with her ass sticking out for all the barely legal cowboys to drool over. Her hair was a mess of dark auburn curls that had most definitely been stuffed under a motorcycle helmet.
It took him less than three hours to befriend her and less then two to learn her life's story. She was an only child like himself with an overbearing father and a mother that walked out on her as a child.
"My dad wanted a sweet little girl who would grow up to be a high class criminal lawyer; he had big dreams for me, what he got was a wise ass punk who didn't even stick around for her own graduation."
They were one in the same, one soul in two bodies. She even had a best friend back in her hometown (Orlando) who was in insurance sales and rather uptight. It scared him how similar they were.
Later that night they both stumbled into his motel room, clothes peeling from their bodies onto the floor. Their bodies melted together like gold and their mouths sparked with electricity.
It was a magical night.
The next morning she was gone, not a trace of her to be found except a note.
2025558900
A phone number, that was all it had, ten digits – no hyphens or parentheses or even a name.
He didn't call her. Not because he didn't want to see her again but because he was scared to. She was him fast forward eight years. She was reckless and dangerous and it scared him to death. He knew she was too far in her delusions to be saved and one day she'd do something to stupid to come back from. She was one of those people that was destined to die young, just like many had said about him. He had to believe he'd end up different than her. He clung to Gus, Juliet, his father, and even Lassiter because they were the only thing that made him different from her. He refrained from asking Juliet to check up on her because he knew she was dead by now, probably a bike accident.
He still kept the paper with her number. It was tucked away in his wallet, yellowed and crinkled. He'd thought about throwing it away, when he moved back to Santa Barbara, when he started dating Abigail, when he started dating Juliet, but he couldn't. There was something about it that made him keep it, something about her. He couldn't let her go even if she was a ticking time bomb.
If she was dead he wondered what had happened. She'd flat out told him she didn't carry ID with her, because she didn't have a home or state that she committed to and it was something you needed for an ID. So if she'd been in a bike accident and been killed, how would she have been identified? DNA, fingerprints? Was she just a Jane Doe in some nameless cemetery?
A part of him wanted to know.
A part of him wanted to find her.
A part of him wanted to run away with her and succumb to a life on the road again.
But a bigger part of him wanted to mean something. So he let her go in his own way, while still holding on to tight to her memory. She was the one that got away, and in a way he was more then happy to keep her that way.