All at once, I couldn’t see the guy behind the gun as anything more than a vague person shape. I only saw the shine of fluorescent light along the silver barrel, only heard a voice behind it saying in a redneck twang, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground right now, before I put shoot holes in you.”
His voice was low and raspy, like he was talking in a growl on purpose, but very loud, and I believed him. He would do it.
“On the ground!”
I couldn’t move, though. My joints refused to bend and take me to the floor. I was closest to the gunman, by the register, then the big guy in the detergent aisle, and beyond him, standing tiny and alone in the path of the gun as it swept back and forth, was Natty. Natty gone still with his plane clutched in his hand.
I felt my head shake, back and forth. No.
A gun had come, rusted with anger and ill use, loaded and alive in human hands, into the same room where Natty stood in his honorary pilot’s cap, hovering his Blue Angels plane over an ice bucket full of Cokes. Natty looked at the gun, his eyes so round that his fringe of thick, ridiculous lashes made them look like field daisies. The gun looked back.
It was not okay. It was not allowed. That gravelled voice told us all again to get on the ground, but I couldn’t get on the ground. I couldn’t move or breathe in a room where Natty stood far, so far away from me, too far for me to get there faster than a bullet could, under that gun’s shining gaze. His little fingers were white, clutched hard onto his plastic jet.
Then the guy by the detergent moved. Just a couple of steps. A step and a half, really. Barely a move at all for a guy that tall and big, but it changed my life a thousand ways.
It wasn’t a threatening move. He moved parallel to the gun, and his palms were up and pointed forward in surrender. He sank down, folding into the seated shape that Natty called crisscross applesauce, palms flat on the ground, spine straight.
That sliding half step put his big body between the gun’s black, unwinking eyehole and everything that mattered to me on this green earth.
And that was it. That was when it happened. I lowered my body to the ground, and all of me was falling, faster than I could physically move, way further than a glance or an attraction, falling so hard into deep, red, desperate love. I lay flat on the Circle K’s dirty, cool floor, but the heart of me kept tumbling down. It fell all the way to the molten center of the earth, blazing into total, perfect feeling for the big blond wall of a man who had put himself between my child and bullets, before our eyes had ever met, before I so much as knew his name.
About the Author
JOSHILYN JACKSON is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, including gods in Alabama and A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. A former actor, Jackson is also an award-winning audiobook narrator. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband and their two children.
Visit her website at www.JoshilynJackson.com.
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By Joshilyn Jackson
Someone Else’s Love Story
My Own Miraculous
gods in Alabama
Between, Georgia
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
Backseat Saints
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Someone Else’s Love Story copyright © 2013 by Joshilyn Jackson.
MY OWN MIRACULOUS. Copyright © 2013 by Joshilyn Jackson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062300539
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062307323
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Jackson, Joshilyn, My Own Miraculous: A Short Story
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