Page 39 of And Now, Back to You

“Yeah,” I agree, hoping I sound like I mean it. “Absolutely.”

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CHAPTER 9

DELILAH

“This is so much fun,” Jackson deadpans from the driver’s side of the news van, his hands flexing on the wheel. “This is the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”

I launch a peach ring at his head, smirking when it bounces off his temple and lands somewhere in between the armrest and the center console. He slowly turns, giving me the most haughty, offended look I’ve ever seen.

I immediately descend into giggles.

“You’re just mad I disregarded the timetable.”

“What timetable?” he grumbles.

“The one you think I didn’t see.”

Jackson picked me up in front of my tiny Hampden row home this morning just as the sun was edging its way over the horizon. He stood at the curb, two cups of coffee in his hands, and one of those sleek, efficient winter coats hugging the strong lines of his body. He didn’t let me haul my suitcase down the steps. He just wordlessly held out the coffees until I gave in, then slotted my roller board with the broken wheel and my doughnut sled neatly in the back of the van. He was surprisingly quiet about the sled, only sparing the doughnut a quick, scathing glance.

Then we bickered in the narrow street for seven minutes about who was going to drive. I only relented when Jackson pointed out that as passenger, I could control the radio and snack distribution.

“You’re going to let me eat in the van?”

He had placed his hands on his hips and leveled me with a stern look from behind his glasses. “I’m not a monster, Delilah.”

Unfortunately for me, radio control turned out to be a bust. The only two stations the van gets are NPR and a static-filled salsa mix. I vetoed the conga drums right away, but maybe I shouldn’t have.

“Not to be dramatic, but if I have to listen to one more second of BBC World Service Newshour, I am going to fling myself from this vehicle.”

Jackson snorts. “You don’t like NPR?”

“I love public radio, but I don’t like whatever medieval-medicine episode we’ve been listening to for the past one hour and twenty-three minutes.” I burrow down further in my seat, shivering. “It’s depressing.”

I don’t want to hear about holes in skulls and rare fungal diseases and whatever implements they used to use to crack people open. I want to eat peach rings off my fingers and sing along to Whitney Houston.

But this van is not outfitted with any sort of modern equipment. I can’t plug my phone into the audio system, and I don’t have any cassettes on hand to feed into the player. So it’s just us and the spotty radio, an utterly demoralizing NPR broadcast and bursts of static.

I curl my arms around my middle, shivering again. This van is also not equipped with proper heating. I’m about to dig out one of the silver thermal emergency blankets in the back and wrap myself like a burrito. “How much longer do we have?”

“If only we had some sort of timetable,” Jackson says.

I snicker. “Like you don’t have it memorized.”

He rolls his eyes and I turn my body toward the window, trying to imagine myself someplace warmer. But everything is cast in heavy grays today, the sun’s weak rays barely managing to peek out from behind the cloud cover. It’s only going to get colder as we head into the mountains, the storm’s icy fingers starting to reach toward the foothills.

Something heavy and warm lands on my lap. I glance down at Jackson’s coat spread across my thighs.

“Your lips are turning blue,” he says in explanation.

While I’ve been shivering in the passenger seat, Jackson has been pushing up the sleeves of his slate gray crewneck. There’s a tear at the collar I can’t stop looking at. A nick in his shiny armor. He balances one watch-clad wrist over the steering wheel and glances at me again from over the top of his thick-framed glasses. Sitting over there like that, he looks like some sort of hot calculator ad.

“What’s that about?” he asks.

“What?”