While talking, his hands have made their way under the hem of my shirt, onto my bare waist, and I cannot speak. I want to get impossibly closer. I want to back up to the far wall. I am full of want. He trails his fingers up my stomach, until they reach the fresh wound that had once been a scar on my third rib. “Tell me this story,” he says.
“It’s a long story,” I say. “And you already know it.”
“I like hearing you talk,” he says.
“I was a baby, just a baby in a nursery, and they stuck a needle in my back,” I whisper. “They said I was June Calahan, and so they cut, right here,” I place my fingers over his, over the scar, “and put a tracker there. Then my mother cut through the same line, and she took the tracker out. They came for her, threw her in jail, cut through the scar tissue, and put the tracker back. And it stayed that way for seventeen years.”
“You still had the scar,” he says.
“Mm-hmm. And then this boy showed up in my bathroom—”
“Boy?” he asks.
“Guy?”
“Good enough.”
“So this guy shows up in my bathroom, and he takes a freaking blade from his jaw, and I think, who is this boy—sorry, guy—with a freaking blade in his jaw? And he cuts the tracker from me again. And then he stitches me back up, even though he doesn’t know how, and then he touches the scar, and he asks how I got it …”
“You tell the best stories,” he says, raising my shirt off my stomach. “Let me tell you about this girl I met …”
I feel real and solid. I feel his heart through the layers of his rib and muscle and skin, and my own. I feel his lips, brushing against mine, as he is talking. And when I cannot take it any longer—of being so close, and yet not close enough—I make him stop talking. I press my lips more firmly on his. And his arms become solid around my back.
The moment is filled with all the never-haves and never-wills and every possible outcome of the day. In short, the end is coming—the end of this, whatever this is—and right now it looks like a cliff. Like the end of the world. I kiss him—even though I understand, like Casey said, that this is not the time—because we’re hurtling toward it. “We’ll be okay,” I say, waiting for him to say of course we will, but he doesn’t.
He moves away from the wall, rolls onto his back, and drapes an arm across his eyes. So I sit beside him, and I run my fingers up his stomach, and he doesn’t move—he stills. I trace the muscles, the skin, up to the bones of his rib cage, and I bring my face down to his chest, resting my cheek against him. His free hand goes to my hair, down to my shoulder, and he holds me to him like that. “Cameron,” I say.
My heart is in my head and my stomach—everywhere all at once—when we hear footsteps racing toward us.
I back away, back against the front seats, my hands groping for anything I can use to defend us. The back doors start shaking, and Casey’s voice carries through in panicked nonsense.
Cameron opens the double doors, and Casey doesn’t take a second to chastise us or even take in what was happening, or what was about to happen. “He’s here,” she says, and she can’t calm down.
“Who?” Cameron asks, but she’s staring over her shoulder, pulling us out the back. Cameron barely has time to pull his shirt back on.
“Dominic,” she says. “Dominic is here.”
We run along with her, to the side of an academic building. The doors are all locked, but Casey slides the ID through the card reader and pulls us inside. We race down the hall until we reach the next door, leading to a glass-walled atrium that spans the distance between buildings. There’s another hall, off to the side, but we stay where we are, contained in the safety of this building—two exits, one hall, and we can see them all.
“I saw him get out of his car,” Casey says, her voice shaking. “From the window of the computer lab. He was walking down the road in your direction. I ran—he didn’t see me, too busy staring at his GPS screen. I sprinted ahead through the trees to get there first.”
“Did he see the van? How did he know where we were?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. Maybe—”
The sound of the door being pulled against the lock echoes through the hall, and Casey grabs my arm. “Is that him?” I whisper.
“How the hell would he know we were here?” she whispers back.
Cameron creeps into an open classroom and cranes his neck around the window before diving back down behind the desk. He motions for us to stay away, out in the hall, and keeps low as he exits the dark room. “It’s him,” he says.
We don’t speak as we stay pressed against the wall, but we hear Dominic moving around the building. His footsteps pace the perimeter, he pushes at the windows—gently first, then with more force. It won’t take forever. If he wants a way in, he will make one. Brick walls and glass windows and locked doors are not enough.
I grab them both by the hand and start running down the long, dark hall. There must be someplace else. Someplace to hide. “Tunnels,” Cameron says. “In the winter, students use tunnels to get from building to building.” We can use them, too.
“Mason Alonzo’s office is on the fifth floor of the next building. We head that way. And then we get the hell out,” Casey says.
Where the stairs go up, they also go down. There’s a door at the bottom of the stairs, and it’s also locked. Casey uses the student ID to gain access, and we race down the murky hall toward the next building. There are a few computer stations down here, and a few storage units for A/V equipment. There are no windows. We stay in the tunnel, hidden underground. Safe, for the moment. But I worry.
I worry because he found us once, in the van.
I worry because he found us again, moments later, in the building.
“He’s tracking us,” I say.
Chapter 24
We stand, staring at each other, in the muted glow of the basement hallway. We look at the clothes that don’t belong to us and the shoes that we’ve been wearing since the sewer. “Shit,” Casey says as she strips them off.
Cameron removes the tooth from his mouth, flips the blade, and runs it through the rubber sole of his sneaker in sharp, harsh lines. He drops it to the ground, finding nothing, and picks up the next. He tosses each shoe, getting more frustrated each time, as he finds nothing. He checks Casey’s shoes. My shoes. Strips of rubber litter the ground. Still nothing.
We search each other frantically for things that came from our time together with Dominic. I take the blade from Cameron as he examines his watch—it’s sharper than I imagined. Cameron takes off his watch and uses the butt of the empty gun to smash it, his fingers sorting through the battery, the display, the metal pieces. He throws the fragmented pieces across the room with a grunt. He does the same with Casey’s watch.
Casey dumps her bag, June’s notebook and the papers in a heap on the floor, and runs her fingers through the fabric.
I take the blade to the buckles of the bag, tearing them off, but still, we find nothing. I fold the blade back in half, tucking it inside my closed fist.
I lift the bottom of my shirt, feel the patch of skin over my ribs, the fresh stitches done by Cameron’s hand.
He grabs my hand, pulls it away, his fingers sliding between mine, and looks into my eyes. “We got it,” he says. “I got that out of you. If there was something else, your guards would’ve noticed, or they would’ve found you. It’s not you.”
I should feel relief.
But I watch his mouth, the way his lips turn down in worry. I step closer to him as Casey takes apart the empty gun, which even she must know is a long shot.
“Cameron,” I whisper, and he freezes at the way I’m looking at him.
I bring my fingers to the bottom of his shirt and then underneath to his back. I run my fingers up to the scar running the length of four ribs. He sucks in a breath and takes a step back, tearing off his shirt as if it has the power to burn him. He spins, his back facing us, his fingers stretching, reaching, for the scar.
Casey’s staring as well. “Oh, God,” she says. “Please tell me you were conscious when Dom stitched you up.”