Cutting Loose Read online

  Contents

  Front title

  Copyright

  Mailing list opportunity

  Dedication

  Inner title

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Mailing list - don't miss out!

  Teaser Novel

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Teaser End

  Other Works by Samantha Westlake

  About the Author

  Cutting Loose

  Samantha Westlake

  Copyright 20189Samantha Westlake

  All rights reserved.

  Cutting Loose

  Book design by Samantha Westlake

  Cover Image Copyright 2019

  Used under a Creative Commons Attribution License:

  http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0

  Adult content warning: All characters are legal and fully consenting adults and are not blood relations.

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  Dedication

  For all my readers, both new and returning. I write it all for you.

  Cutting Loose

  Chapter One

  * * *

  Have you ever been halfway through a normal day, everything going fine, when you were struck by the daydream of just leaving? Getting up, walking out the door, getting in your car, and driving away. Driving until you’re almost out of gas, throwing your phone out the window, and cutting all ties to your old life.

  Have you ever felt that urge?

  For as long as I can remember, that urge has called to me, nestled into the back of my mind. No matter how many times I drive it away, I know that it doesn’t go far. It sleeps lightly, always with one eye open, waiting for the chance to emerge and attempt to seduce me once again.

  The urge teased me during elementary school, when I climbed to the top of the slide and managed to see over the thick hedges. I looked out at the forest beyond and imagined pushing my way through those hedges. The brambles would scratch my skin, catching at my clothes, but I’d keep going. Just when I was almost ready to give up hope, I’d break through. I’d leave behind private school, prim teachers whose wrinkles made them look ancient, and escape.

  The urge teased me in college, as I sat in a lecture hall along with a hundred other students, fighting the weights that pulled down on my eyelids. The teacher droned on endlessly at the front of the room. I could just get up and walk out, and he wouldn’t care, wouldn’t even pause in his rote lecture. I’d seen other students do it. I could leave, go have the entire campus to myself with no one to stop me from finding a ride that would carry me further away so I could escape for good.

  The urge teased me after college, as I passed through a series of flighty and flimsy jobs. I never cared much for work, except to serve as a distraction from the rest of my life. I drifted through my days, knowing that I couldn’t complain about my internal struggles to anyone else. They’d envy my life, insist that everything was perfect for me, that there’s no way I could ever feel trapped and frustrated and longing to just give it all up and escape.

  So many times, I drove off those urges. Just a little longer, I told myself in grade school, in college, in those pointless and useless jobs. I just had to keep going a little longer, and life would work out. It would all finally fall my way, and I wouldn’t feel drawn to just run away and quit it all.

  I should have known that I couldn’t tell myself this lie forever.

  I always imagined that I’d snap when something big happened. I figured that some huge cataclysmic eruption would go off in my life that would upend everything, that I wouldn’t be able to push it down and keep repressing everything. An atom bomb would go off, and I’d be shattered.

  In the end, it all came down to a dropped muffin.

  I remember standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, frozen, looking down at the little baked good laying sadly on the ground. It was right in the middle of rush hour, so the sidewalk was crowded; other young professionals on their way to work pushed past me on both sides, occasionally bumping me with an elbow or shoulder and not bothering to even mutter “sorry” under their breath.

  The muffin had fallen into a slight puddle, left behind by last night’s brief but furious storm. I could see that the dirty rainwater had already soaked through the useless wax paper wrapping. There was no saving the muffin.

  Standing there, paralyzed, an individual island in a sea of moving yuppies around me, I felt like I was about to break down into tears. The muffin didn’t mean anything on its own; I had enough money for a lifetime of muffins.

  But it had been my choice, the one little bit of my day that I’d chosen. The one action that was all my own, that hadn’t been driven by my family, my history, my mother’s desires to force me to be her perfect daughter and my own subservient desire to fit in and eventually, someday be deserving of her love. All I’d had was that muffin, now growing squishy and sodden as it soaked up the dirty water on the sidewalk, shoes falling all around it.

  That was the last straw.

  I just turned around, did a one-eighty on the sidewalk. I didn’t bother to call my office and let them know that I wouldn’t be coming in that day, or ever again. Hell, I immediately forgot all about my coworkers, put their names and faces completely out of my mind. I’d accomplished absolutely nothing of note at the office, mostly just sat around and browsed the computer. I didn’t feel that I owed them anything.

  I drove back home, back to the expensive loft apartment that no woman with my age and job could ever afford unless she had family connections or a sugar daddy. I grabbed a suitcase out of the closet, threw it on the bed and piled in whatever clothes were nearest to hand. I packed without rhyme or reason, feeling a sudden urgency. If I dallied too long, my mother would come in and discover my plot to run away – or maybe I just feared that I’d completely give up on the idea, and my last little spark of rebellion would be extinguished forever.

  With my suitcase packed, I hauled it downstairs, using the elevator which was part of the reason why I paid so much for the relatively sm
all bit of real estate. I loaded the suitcase into the backseat of my car with a grunt, jumped behind the wheel, and drove away.

  Even on the road, headed out of town in no particular direction, I still felt none of the freedom and lightness that I’d expected. Why was there still a weight pressing down on my shoulders? Was it guilt at running away? Fear of what might happen when my family discovered my abandonment? Concern over the uncertainty of the future that now stretched out blankly ahead of me?

  I tried to distract myself from those big thoughts by thinking smaller ones. I needed to make sure that I stayed hidden, that my family couldn’t find me at a whim. I rolled down the window and, with a slight pang of regret, threw my phone out of my car. I hated losing it, but I knew that my family could track it – and besides, everything was backed up online.

  What else? Credit cards. If I made purchases, my parents could look up where and when they’d taken place – the problem with being a trust fund baby, I thought to myself. One of many, many problems, most of which can’t be explained to anyone else without prompting envy and jealousy, not understanding.

  The credit cards followed my phone out the window. I probably could have been smarter about it – cut them up or used them to withdraw cash for living expenses like food and a place to stay. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was living in the moment, and with each bit of my former life that flew out the window, the weight pressing down on my shoulders grew a little lighter.

  Besides, maybe someone would find the cards scattered across the freeway. I entertained a brief but satisfying mental vision of a criminal scooping the cards up, cackling to himself, and racking up tens of thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges. That would be a great little parting gift to my family. Really, just the cherry on top of the shit sundae they’d made of my life.

  When the last bit of technology that could help my family trace me was gone, I finally managed to keep a smile on my face. Suddenly, that weight was lifted from me – and I’d been carrying it so long that I’d completely forgotten what it was like to just feel free. I looked out at the road stretching in front of me, warmly lit by the rising sun. I took a deep breath of the fresh air that streamed in through my open driver’s side window. I put on the radio, twisted the knobs and pushed buttons almost at random until it landed on a loud, lusty, unapologetic country song. I opened my mouth wide and sang along, screwing up half the words and singing horribly off-key and not caring in the slightest.

  I was free! For the first time in my life, I was free!

  That joyful, almost drunken exuberance carried me on for hours – probably longer than I should have allowed it to do so. I only started coming down from my high when I noticed that the fuel gauge indicator on my dashboard was dropping dangerously close to empty – and furthermore, my car was making a rather uncomfortable rattling noise every time I pushed the accelerator down.

  I’d noticed the noise earlier, I remembered, but had kept putting off taking the car to get it fixed. I’d get around to it, and what was the worst that could happen? It might break down somewhere, I’d get a tow, and my boss would understand that I had to deal with it. After all, she didn’t really ever need me in the office to begin with, so she wouldn’t be hurt by my absence.

  But now, out here? In the middle of almost nowhere, surrounded mostly by open fields? I didn’t want to get stuck, didn’t want to think about hiking to the nearest house to beg for a phone to call a cab. After all, no cell phone.

  Perhaps this hadn’t been the smartest idea, I now started to consider.

  Up ahead, a green road sign flashed past me. I was trying to feather my foot on the gas pedal, so I had plenty of time to read it. Twelve miles to the next city, it informed me.

  I could do this. I could make it to the next city. And there I could find someone to fix the car and get back to going wherever life wanted to take me.

  The car made another uncomfortable grinding noise.

  “Almost there,” I said aloud, fully aware that I was speaking to my own car, which definitely could not hear or understand me. “Just a little further.”

  Groan. Grind. Slower and slower as I tried to use the gas pedal as little as possible. More reassurances that I knew didn’t do a thing but still spoke anyway, just to get it out.

  As fun as the first couple hours of freedom had felt, this agony wasn’t worth it. Over the next half hour, my car managed to limp the remaining twelve miles. I didn’t know where to go in this new city to find a mechanic, and I couldn’t think straight as I tried to coast as long as possible and somehow, mentally, push the car further without physically touching the gas pedal. It almost became automatic, possible for me to go without any conscious thought in my head at all. I somehow had the idea that, if I just kept my mind clear, didn’t let any thought take root, I could keep driving this way forever.

  My car finally decided that this wasn’t the case. With one last gasping rattle, I felt the whole car shake beneath me – and then, horribly, silence. The engine had completely died. I didn’t even know it had run out of gas, or if that increasing rattle finally killed it.

  With the last bit of forward motion, I managed to pull the suddenly stiff steering wheel and angle into a parking lot. I had just enough energy to get up over the curb and into the lot.

  Not enough energy, unfortunately, to coast into a parking space.

  Now what? I’d seen people pushing cars, occasionally, on the side of the road. I climbed out and looked ahead. Just ten feet or so to a parking spot. I could do this.

  Twenty minutes later, the swarthy middle-aged man gave me a nod and walked away, dusting off his hands after pushing my car into the parking space. I gave him a wave and a fake smile, then bent over and groaned, hands on my knees.

  I’d tried every manner of pushing the car for fifteen minutes, managing to scrape both my knees, before he stopped by. He’d pointed out, probably intending to be kind, that I’d left the car in Park, not in Neutral.

  Figured.

  And now…

  …now what?

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  Let me take stock of my situation.

  I was relatively broke, compared to my normal level of available funds. I probably had a few bills shoved into my wallet, but I’d gotten rid of my credit cards – and if I went to the bank to withdraw any cash on my account, my family would know where I’d ended up.

  I have no idea where I am.

  I have no idea where I’m going to stay for the night.

  I don’t have any food, and my stomach is already starting to grumble about how long I’d been driving without bothering to fill up or even pause for snacks.

  Oh, and my car is now dead.

  First things first. I climbed back into the driver’s seat, closed the door most of the way, and had a good cry. It took a minute or two for the tears to start, but they really came hard and fast once the dam broke. I sobbed into a tissue I found on the floor of the passenger side of the car, ruining my appearance and leaving my eyes red and my face puffy.

  (That’s how you know that it’s a good cry, by the way. A good cry doesn’t care about how you’ll look afterwards - in fact, it wants you to look like a complete mess. That’s when you know that you’re really getting emotion out, and not just letting out a couple of dramatic sobs to get first class boarding or a better seat at the restaurant.)

  I cried for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, until the flow of tears slowed to a trickle. I sniffed a few times, used the sodden remains of the tissue to try and mop the worst of tears and snot from my face.

  I took a deep breath, felt my whole body shudder, and then let it out. Did it again, and this time managed to breathe a little more smoothly.

  “You’ve got this, Alice,” I told myself aloud, hoping that bravery would help me swallow the false words. “You can handle being on your own. You’re free of your family. You can do this.”

  I climbed out of the car, looked around. I’d ended up in a parking lot
for a restaurant, I noticed – a fairly upscale looking place, the kind of place that I’d normally breeze into without a second thought, plop my credit card down on the bar, and order an entire pitcher of mimosas. I’d easily, lazily chat with a few of my friends about how stressful I found life as I drank the night away without a care as to the total of the bill.

  Not so on this visit. Somehow, I imagined that the employees of the restaurant could smell my desperation and newfound poverty, as if I’d stepped in a dog turd and didn’t realize I was carrying it around on the bottom of my shoe. I took one more deep breath, tried to summon up that breezy confidence that I hadn’t realized I possessed all my life until it was gone.

  I climbed out of my car, hit the button on the key fob to lock the doors behind me and stifled a hysterical giggle. Good luck trying to drive off in this broken pile of bolts, car thieves of the world!

  Inside the restaurant, I made my way over to the bar. Thankfully, the place was fairly empty, as it was still a bit early for dinner, and so the bartender took his sweet time in ambling over to help me. Surreptitiously, while I waited, I set my purse on my lap and dug through, trying to get a sense of how much money still belonged to my name.

  Sixty-eight dollars, mostly in crumpled bills. I didn’t bother counting the small handful of change at the bottom of the purse, in amid occasional food crumbs. Enough money to pay for dinner, but it wouldn’t get me much further.

  The bartender finally made his way to me. “What can I get you? Menu?” he asked, leaning over the countertop at me.

  I hesitated; if I ordered, I’d have to pay some of my precious money. But if I didn’t order anything, I might get kicked out. And then where would I go? In that moment, this restaurant was the only place in existence where I felt like I could be myself. I’d just decided to run away from the rest of the world. I didn’t want to go out and face it again.

  “I’ll take a glass of white wine,” I said at last, hoping this wouldn’t prove to be too expensive.