Page 146 of Lethal in Pink

“You gave me my life.” The words drop out of me before I can catch them. Raw, unarmored, the particular honesty of a woman who has run out of places to put the truth. “Not in the dramatic sense. In the real one. I knew how to survive before I met you. You taught me how to actually live. How to want things. How to—how to sit in a library alcove and argue about case law and also steal your highlighter and also watch the way your jaw works when you’re trying not to laugh at something I said, and want all of it, want it so badly it felt like a medical condition.”

The rain picks up. Not much—just enough that the fine mist becomes actual droplets, fat and slow, hitting the pavement with the particular percussive rhythm of something that has decided to commit to the bit. We both laugh. Of course it does. Of course the universe, at this particular moment, decides that what this scene needs is more rain.

“I love you.” The words come out clean.

Certain. No hedge, no qualifier, no particular careful architecture of a sentence designed to reveal exactly what I want you to hear and nothing more. Just the fact, offered in the rain between two parked cars in a Koreatown lot at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, with the neon bleeding above us and the city doing its indifferent thing in the middle distance.

His face does something I am going to carry for the rest of my life. I don’t have a better way to describe it. His face does a thing, and the thing is specific and irreversible and lives in my chest like something I built by hand and cannot unbuild.

“I love you too.” Quiet. Absolute. The kind of certainty that doesn’t need volume to carry its weight. “I love you so fucking much, Amiyah. You truly are the best thing that's ever happened to me.”

Jae tilts his face up. Water catches in his hair, beads along his eyelashes, traces the line of his throat where his collar is open against the rain. He holds the pose for a second—chin up, eyes closed, the particular unself-conscious surrender of a man who is comfortable being looked at—and then he drops his gaze to me with the specific sideways expression that started everything in a lecture hall a year and a half ago.

“One of my favorite things,” he says, “has always been driving fast on a calm rainy night. The city slick and empty. No one watching.” A pause. The weighted quality of a man who is issuing an invitation he already knows will be accepted. “You ever try it, hotshot?”

God. If destruction had a face, it would look like him.

It does look like him.

I grin up at him. Rain on my lashes, in my hair, soaking through the satin at my shoulders in a way that would have annoyed me twenty minutes ago and now feels like the only appropriate texture for this moment.

“I guess there’s no time like the present.”

I reach into my purse. My fingers find the keychain—the pink one, the one with the small silver blade attached that looks like nothing more than a decorative charm unless you know what you’re looking for—and I curl my hand around it and hold it tight.

He pulls me in. One hand at the back of my head, his palm warm against my wet hair, his chin resting against my temple. His other arm circles my waist, and he holds me—not tight, not desperate, the particular steady pressure of someone who is certain of what he’s holding and sees no reason to crush it. I let myself have it. This one full second. Him warm and alive and mine, his heartbeat against my cheek, the rain on both of us turning everything slippery and close and real.

He pulls back just enough to look at me. Rain runs down his jaw, catches in the hollow of his throat, and his eyes are dark and focused and holding mine with the intensity of a man who is making sure I’m seeing this too. Then he kisses me.

The kind of kiss that does not leave room for anything else. No contracts. No clocks. No underground running out of patience twenty-four hours from now. His mouth is warm against mine, his hand still at the back of my head, his thumb tracing the curve of my ear with a tenderness that makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with the cold or the rain or anything external at all. I kiss him back. I pour everything into it—every unspoken thing, every saved photograph, every moment I have been collecting evidence for a trial that ends tonight—and he takes it, gives it back, and for one stupid, perfect stretch of seconds, the future does not exist.

When he finally pulls away, he holds my gaze for a beat. His eyes are dark, steady, and then—the smirk. The specific one. The one that has been driving me insane since that first semester, when he sat down across from me in class and stole my space and my heart.

“Catch me if you can,” he whispers.

He gets into the Audi. The engine turns over with a low, expensive growl that rattles my teeth, cutting through the hiss of the storm, and he launches out of the lot. His red taillights flare like open wounds against the wet black of the street.

I stand there for a heartbeat; my fingers wrapped tightly around my keys. Then I climb into my sedan, slam it into drive, and chase the red glow into the dark.

The road to Hurricane Point narrows with the kind of twists and curves of a place that was not designed for safety. Forty minutes of winding coastal blacktop, and with each mile the lanes get thinner, the guardrail gets lower, and the cliff face on the right rises into something that feels less like geography and more like a wall. On the left: nothing. Just the drop, the sheer, stomach-lurching void where the road ends and the ocean begins, two hundred feet below, invisible in the dark except for the occasional whitecap catching my headlights when the rain lets up for half a second.

I keep his taillights in sight. Steady red points against the wet black, maintaining a distance that is careful but not suspicious—close enough to follow, far enough that he wouldn’t think twice about it on a night when the road is empty and the rain is coming down hard enough to make the wipers work at double-speed. My hands are steady on the wheel. Ten and two. The textbook grip that Marcus drilled into me during night training on roads exactly like this one, except those roads were in Nevada and the stakes were hypothetical and the man in the car ahead of me was an instructor being paid to let me practice.

This is not practice.

The rain hammers the windshield in sheets that the wipers can barely manage. Each pass clears a semicircle of visibility that lasts approximately three seconds before the glass goes gray again, and in those three-second windows I catch glimpses of the terrain: the cliff face, wet and dark and rising; the guardrail, rusted in places, the posts driven into concrete that has started to crack at the edges; the occasional reflective marker throwing my headlights back at me in brief, blinding flashes of orange.

Two hundred meters before the final curve, the guardrail ends. I know this because I drove here three days ago, in daylight, with a measuring tape and a notebook and the particular cold focus of a woman who was building an exit strategy for someone she loved. The guardrail stops. The road continues. The final curve is a left-hander that tightens as it goes, and the shoulder on the ocean side is approximately four feet wide before it becomes gravel, and then air, and then nothing.

I accelerate.

The sedan responds faster than I expect. The engine—a V6 that I chose specifically for its ability to deliver torque on demand, a detail that seemed excessive until approximately forty seconds ago—sends a shudder through the frame, and the distance between us shrinks. Fifty meters. Thirty. Fifteen. I pull alongside him on the straight section before the curve, and for one terrible, perfect moment we are side by side on the empty road, his window down because he always drives with the window down in the rain, the particular habit of a man who finds weather interesting rather than inconvenient.

He glances over. I see it in my peripheral vision—the shift of his head, the particular geometry of surprise that rearranges his features before confusion has time to settle in. His mouth opens. I don’t let myself look at him for more than a second. One second is all it would take.

I swerve hard.

My bumper catches his rear quarter panel at the precise angle I mapped—driver’s side, just behind the wheel well, enough impact to disrupt his traction without deploying his airbags. The contact is cleaner than I expected. A metallic thud that travels through my steering column and into my palms, and then his car is fishtailing, the rear end breaking loose on the wet pavement, tires searching for grip that isn’t there.