Page 5
Every part of her goes absolutely still, the strip of blanket suspended between her hands, her back rigid, like a deer that’s just registered the specific quiet that precedes a pack of wolves chasing it through a field and disemboweling it before feasting on its still-living carcass. Then, slowly, she turns her head and looks at me.
Her hazel eyes are enormous. Deep.
I want to drown in them.
“Hey,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I intend. The back of my skull is a sustained, miserable throb.
She stares at me for a long moment.
Then she goes back to knotting the blanket strip.
“June.” I keep my voice level. Calm. The same tone I’d use talking someone back from something they couldn’t walk back from. “June, stop for a second.”
“No. Shut up. Fuck you.”
“June.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Uh huh.” She yanks the blanket strip so hard that the radiator pipe gives a metallic groan of protest. “That’s exactly what someone who was here to hurt me would say.”
“It’s also what someone who’s not here to hurt you would say, because it’s true.”
“Wow,” she says flatly. “Airtight logic. I’m convinced. Let me just…” She makes a show of continuing to knot the blanket. “Undo all of this. Because I’m an idiot and I want you to hurt me like you did so many fucking times before.”
I let out a slow breath. The cheese-lover on the television has moved on to something involving a pulled pork sandwich the size of a small child, and he’s describing it with the breathless reverence of a man who has found God in a bun.
“I left you that note,” I say.
That stops her.
Not completely. Her hands don’t go still. But there’s a hesitation, a fractional pause in the rhythm of her knotting, and I know June Wilder well enough to know that a fractional pause is significant.
“They know what you saw,” I say. “That was me. That was my note.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
The man on the TV takes a bite of the sandwich and lets out a bedroom moan while a thick trail of sauce runs down his chin.
“Why the hell are you watching this?” I say.
“It soothes me.”
“Guy Fieri soothes you?” I say. “So, what, now you ride the hot rod to Flavor Town whenever you’re feeling stressed?”
Those words hang in the air. I feel dirty.
She stops knotting.
She turns around and looks at me with an expression that is not warm, not soft, not anything close to the reunion I’d spent the last twenty-four hours constructing in my head while I was trying not to get myself killed by club brothers or the Twisted Devils. It is the expression of a woman who has just been handed an excuse.
She reaches into the open duffel bag on the floor beside her — the one with the glittery welcome note still attached — and roots around in it for a moment before pulling something out. What she produces is a pair of plain white cotton underwear. The kind that comes in a three-pack and always at a discount. Utilitarian. Inoffensive.
She looks at them.
She looks at me.
