Page 16 of Redline Baby

No notifications, no missed calls, just a lock screen with the time and nothing waiting for me.

I lock it, put it down.

Pick it up ten seconds later and do it again.

Nothing.

There's never anything.

There's no one who texts me at this hour and there's no reason to look and I look a third time anyway, just to have somewhere to put my eyes that isn't the back wall.

Soren doesn't say a word about any of it.

He doesn't comment on the bottle or the clipped sentences or the phone or the knee.

He doesn't ask if I'm alright, which would make me snap, and he doesn't glance over his shoulder to see what I saw, which would make me die.

He just sits there, steady, that bottle in his hand, and watches me.

And it's unbearable now.

A minute ago, it was the best thing in the room.

Now it's a spotlight.

Now I can feel the exact weight of being seen.

"I should do a lap," I say. "Haven't talked to Dex in a while. He'll give me hell."

"Sure," Soren says.

Just that.

He doesn't try to hold me. He tips his bottle a fraction in easy acknowledgment and lets me go.

I slide off the stool.

My boots hit the floorboards and I aim myself across the room toward the pool tables where Dex is leaning over a shot, and I make it maybe halfway before the whole plan dissolves in my hands.

Because going toward Dex means staying.

And staying means the back corner is still behind me, pulling, that black-hole gravity dragging at the base of my skull, and I cannot do another twenty minutes of holding my spine straight while Charles murmurs into someone else's hair twenty feet away.

I cannot.

It’s so motherfucking annoying. I hate myself for it.

So I change direction.

Mid-stride, clean, like I always meant to.

I veer off toward the heavy metal side door, the one the smokers use. I shoulder the door.

The cold hits me full in the face.

Then I'm moving toward the lot.

Chapter 7. Soren