Page 51

Santa Monica Pier. Pacific Park Funnel Cakes. $14.50.

I stare at it.

Then I start laughing so hard Misha takes a step back.

* * *

I find her on a bench at the end of the pier.

It’s past midnight. The rides are shut down. The Ferris wheel’s dark. It’s cold and windy and the ocean’s black and loud underneath the boards, and there’s nobody out here but a couple of fishermen and a guy asleep under a blanket and her.

She’s sitting with her knees pulled up inside her gray hoodie, hood up, braids spilling out the sides. There’s a paper plate in her lap. A funnel cake on it, half gone. Powdered sugar all over her hoodie and her hands and her mouth.

I stop twenty feet away and look at her.

Just look.

My heart’s going like I ran here. My hands are shaking. I’ve been fucking shot and my hands didn’t shake. I stand there in the wind and look at her, alive and whole and stuffing her face with fried dough, and the thing that’s been clawing at the inside of my chest for two hours turns into something worse.

I’m gonna put her in a room with no windows. I’m gonna chain her to my bed. I’m gonna put a tracker under her skin.

I’m gonna fuck her so hard she forgets how to walk.

I walk over and sit down next to her on the bench. The wood creaks under me.

She doesn’t look at me. She takes another bite of funnel cake.

“Took you long enough,” she says, with her mouth full.

I look at her profile. At the powdered sugar on her lips. At the wind blowing her braids around her face.

“You cut my lock.”

“Your lock was stupid. It was a gardener lock.”

“With my shears.”

“They were right there.” She licks sugar off her thumb. “If you didn’t want me to use them, you shouldn’t have left them in the shed.”

“You used my card.”

She finally turns her head and looks at me. Her eyes are huge in the dark. They’re shining. She’s scared. She’s always a little scared when I find her. She’s also lit up like she just won the lottery.

“I wanted a funnel cake,” she says. “I didn’t have no money.”

“You knew I’d see it.”

She looks at me for a long time.

Then she tears off a piece of funnel cake and holds it up to my mouth.

I look at it. At her fingers holding it, sticky and white with sugar. At her face.

I open my mouth. She puts it in.

It’s hot and greasy and too sweet. Her fingertips brush my lip. I bite down on them before she can pull them back. Not hard. Just enough. I suck the sugar off her fingers, slow, and watch her breath catch, and watch her pupils go big and black in the dark.

She pulls her hand back. She’s breathing hard.