"YOU REALISE YOU'VE MADE A GOOD NUMBER OF FOES TODAY RIGHT?" Jason asked, hauling her into his red Bentley. He went to the driver's seat, slammed the door, and hit the streets. "You're unbelievable."

"Please, the only enemy I made was Diana. And that doesn't make much of a difference. I wouldn't want her as a friend."

Jason chuckled. "And yet she has more friends than you will ever have in a lifetime."

"Her friends are stupid then. She's such a bitch. Did you see how she poured that drink on me?" Mallory humphed. "If not for you, I would've ripped the skin off her face. Stupid girl."

"Hey," Jason warned. "Watch your tongue. That's my girlfriend you're talking about."

"Too bad. How do you cope? I bet she's a handful."

Jason shrugged. "She's nice if you get to know her."

"And you?"

Jason took his eyes off the road to look at her. "Me what?"

"Are you nice? Well, if someone gets to know you?"

Jason's jaw clenched. "I don't know, what do you think?"

"I personally think you're a jerk," Mallory said, smirking to herself. 

"That's bad," Jason said.

 "Of course it is."

"No," Jason squinted hard at his side mirror, "I mean that's bad." He nudged his head towards his rear-view mirror

Mallory poked her head outside. Behind them, was a long queue of commercial buses. If Jason swerved to the right, so they did too. If he drifted, so did they. They were following them!

"Paparazzi," Jason whispered under his breath. 

Panic travelled through Mallory's veins as Jason struck the accelerator, transcending the speed limit. Frantic to lose the paparazzi, he swerved to a turning on the right, leading the car for a precarious tilt. Mallory's began hyperventilating when she realised that she might actually die, and it wasn't an honourable death at that. She was going to die by the side of someone she despised.

"Stop speeding! You're gonna kill us!" Mallory yelled. 

Jason launched his car into a highway, furiously maneuvering and overtaking cars like a maniac on the run from the police. A gush of wind rushed into the windows of the vehicle, throwing Mallory's hair into a disheveled state. In the wind, was a strong sulphuric scent. It smelt like smoke. 

Mallory poked her out of the car, the wind buffeting her face. She swallowed hard when she saw that one of the tires of the car was totally engulfed by fire. 

"The tires on fire!" Mallory screamed. "Stop the car. Stop the car!"

But Mallory needed no one to tell her that Jason wasn't going to stop the car. The paparazzi was still furiously chasing them, their resolve unfaltering, not even for a minute. 

"What's the big deal, anyway?" she asked him. "Just stop the car and deal with them. It's not like their carrying clubs and machetes."

"On any other day, I wouldn't care about them," he swerved. "But today's different. Think about all the possible lies they would create if they found me with you."

Mallory flushed. He was right. She couldn't risk exposure with him. 

Jason seemed accustomed to the chase. It appeared to be more of a thrill than a peril to him. He descended the highway and aimed for a vast market teeming with buyers and retailers who were oblivious of the car about to hit them. Jason jammed his horn to tell them to get out of his way. Panicked people fled to the side to make way for the deranged driver, bananas and apples, and other food items landing on the windscreen as they did. Jason's wiper flung them away.

"Have we lost them?" Jason asked, too focused on the road to keep watch for the paparazzi.

Mallory peeked out of the window and looked behind. They'd lost about four of them, but there were still some determined others who were following behind them. 

Mallory gulped. "No."

Jason sighed and struck the accelerator. He spun the car around a roundabout and surged for an open street linking far into an animated beach. Jason ignored the borders of the beach and crashed it. He drove through the sandy road, the tires spewing billows of dust upon the car. Mallory could tell, from the dimming crackles of fire, that they'd put off the fire on the tire. 

For the first time since the past five minutes, Jason halted and pull the brakes of the car. They were behind a large ice-cream truck that was large enough to hide them from the paparazzi. Jason leaned over Mallory and forcefully opened the pigeonhole, rummaging for something unbeknownst to Mallory. He pulled out a scarf, a fake moustache and a pair of glasses.

With ungainly alacrity, he tied the scarf around his face, placed the glasses on and fastened the fake moustache on his upper lip, so he looked completely unrecognizable to the paparazzi. Jason sprung out of the car, and with Mallory, walked away from the car, trying the blend with the crowd. They sat on the sand and watched the settling waters. The sun cast its yellow rays on the surface of the water so that appeared as though the blue ocean was a pool of gold. 

"They're going," Jason said, looking behind the crashed borders. The occupants of the paparazzi buses surveyed the beach with their cameras, but not finding who they were looking for, they went back into the buses and drove away.

Jason got rid of his façade, earning the gawks of a few people on the beach. But he couldn't care less. "That was crazy." He lay against the sand and let out a deep breath. 

Mallory squatted beside him, playing with the sand. "Do you always go through this?" she asked with awkward diffidence

"Often." Jason rose up and brought his knees nearer to his body. He looking over his shoulder. Mallory followed his gaze and saw that he was fascinated by a family having an evening picnic, their contagious laughter making Mallory smile. Jason turned to her, a sadness colouring his features. He cupped his face. "I'm actually getting sick of it."

Mallory stared at him. Moments ago at the academy, she thought he was a jerk. Now she felt compassion for him. She didn't know him that much, but she'd gotten a taste of his capricious personality. Sometimes he was a selfish jerk, and other times, he seemed nice, human.n  It reminded her of Susan, Cole's ex-wife, and now a soon-to-be bride. She still couldn't believe Cole was going to marry Susan again. 

She still remembered the times when Susan would yell and scream at her, when she would smack her for the littlest of things. The times when Cole would believe Susan over her. Those memories were like leeches that burrowed through her heart and stole her happiness.

"Are you okay?" Jason cut into her thoughts.

She snapped back to reality. "Yeah, just thinking about home."

For a moment, they stared into each other's eyes.  She was feeling the same spark she felt when she first bumped into him.  It seemed like the world planned for that to happen, and she became more convinced of that the deeper she fed into his eyes. 

Jason looked away. "I-I'm sorry."

 "For what?"

"What happened in the academy? You know, with me and my girlfriend." Jason smiled wryly. "It was a jerky thing to do."

Mallory shrugged. "Y'all were drunk anyway."

He laughed, that guttural masculine laugh that was like music to her soul, filling voids that only her music was capable of filling. 

"That still doesn't justify my actions."

Mallory smiled. "I forgive you. I've done really jerky things myself."

"You? I doubt." Jason laughed. 

Mallory was laughing with him when her phone buzzed in her back pocket. When she checked it, she met the fifty-nine voice message her father had left on there. She begrudgingly listened to them.

"Come home Mal. I'm sorry."

"We're all worried."

"Susan's tripping all over the place. She thinks you running away was all her fault sweetheart."

Mallory paused her father's rants. She got the idea right from the first message. He wasn't taking her disappearance easy. 

Jason and Mallory shared a glance. 

"My father's worried about me," Mallory said.

Jason raked his fingers through his dark hair. "It's all my fault, isn't it? I shouldn't have urged you to run away from your father. That was—"

"No," Mallory interjected. "It was my fault. I would have run away even if I hadn't bumped into you anyway."

Relief spread over Jason's face.

Jason rose and helped Mallory off her sandy bottom. He held her hand, and led her to his car. There were scratches and dents on it, But it wasn't just the outward appearance of the car that was out of shape, the engine was too. Mallory could tell by the guttural and futile rev it made when Jason attempted to kickstart the ignition. He tried, twice. Thrice. It didn't take a genius to know the car was no good.

"Well," Mallory flicked beads of perspiration from his face, "I guess we're stuck here."

Jason sighed. "Don't just announce defeat like that. Let's go find a cab or something."

"At 5 pm in the evening? I don't think cab drivers are nocturnal animals."

"What? You don't go out a lot, do you?" Jason chuckled.

Mallory scowled. "I'm not joking Jason. I have to go home, and thanks to your stupid car, that probably won't be happening. My dad's gonna freak, and to make matters worse I have to have at least a 6-hour sleep to perform well at the academy tomorrow!" She pressed her face into her hands. The last thing she wanted to do was to cry,

"Um." Jason winced. "What the fuss about? There's a little something called Uber, you know?"

Oh. Uber. She calmed. She almost forgot that was a thing.