“You don’t count,” I assured him.
I stomped into the bathroom, muttering under my breath about pig-headed men and how they should all be castrated with dental floss, and stepped into the shower. The water was ice cold when it first streamed out of the shower head, but I didn’t care, my anger filling me with enough heat to dispel the chill. The water turned hot soon enough, and tipping my head into the flow it was easy to pretend that the wetness on my cheeks was purely from the shower.
My skin was red and raw when I eventually emerged, irritation still burning in my gut like hot embers. Wrapped up in a scratchy, too small towel, I wound another around my hair before stepping out into the room, and immediately froze in the doorway. His cheeks still pink from being out in the cold, Holbrook stood at the small desk next to the TV, once again in the uniform black suit of the FBI. He stood with his back to me, doctoring a cup of coffee with cream and sugar, just the way I liked it.
“Ah shit!” I said, wincing when it came out far louder than I had intended.
“Everything okay?” he asked, turning to look at me over his shoulder as he pressed the plastic lid back on the cup.
“Oh, yeah. I just um…stubbed my toe. Hate when that happens,” I replied, making a show of hobbling towards the bed. I would have sworn that Loki rolled his eyes at me, but I’d never heard of a cat doing that so I shrugged it off as a combination of paranoia and guilt.
“Sorry it’s not much, the gas station across the street didn’t have a great selection,” Holbrook said with a lopsided smile as he crossed the room with coffee and a giant chocolate chip muffin in hand.
I felt like a complete tool for assuming the worst of him, and my cheeks warmed with shame.
“No, it’s great. Thanks,” I said, accepting the coffee and muffin, my mouth already watering at the smell drifting up out of the styrofoam cup. “I’m such an asshole,” I added under my breath.
“You say something?” Holbrook asked as he went back to fetch his own cup.
“Oh, ah…hot!” I replied, grimacing at my awkward response. Focusing on blowing on the steaming liquid I attempted to keep myself from shoving my foot any further into my mouth. As expected, I was only marginally successful.
***
Johnson drove the same way he did everything else—pissed off and angry. The drive through the mountains was filled with tense silence broken only by Johnson’s muttered curses as he weaved through traffic at break-neck speed. I put in my ear buds and turned the volume up on my iPod as I tried to smother the growing tension, but even a selection of my favorite rock tunes couldn’t ease the sense of wrongness pervading the car. I wished that I could be in the other vehicle in our little convoy. At least this time I wasn’t sandwiched between two agents who appeared about as cheerful as a rainstorm, and could distract myself by watching the world slip past outside the window.
Once upon a time, I would have relished the escape from the mountains and leapt at the chance to explore a life outside of my rural upbringing. Growing up in my grandparents’ cabin hadn’t exposed me to all the same things kids raised in the city experienced, but they’d done their best to make sure I had a normal childhood.
The small high school in town had the same cliques as any other school—the jocks and cheerleaders who seemed to lord over all the others like hormone driven royalty, the math nerds and science geeks who imagined a better world built on calculations and equations, the theatre kids who dreamed of alternate selves and different worlds, and what I’d always called the “anywhere kids,” the ones who wanted to be anywhere but there, trapped in a small town with a small life. I was one of the anywhere kids.
Going to college in Fort Collins was supposed to be my ticket out, my chance at being just a normal kid from anywhere USA rather than the quiet artsy girl whose parents were gone. But that was before I’d met Samson, before I had fallen for his charming smile, before he had torn into my belly with rending claws and gnashing teeth. It seemed like a lifetime ago, the girl I had been then a stranger to me now. It was hard to believe I’d ever been so na?ve.
I started to doze somewhere between Golden and downtown Denver, the rumbling vibrations of the tires on the pavement lulling me into a half sleep. I was distantly aware of Johnson and Holbrook talking up front as I hovered on the edge of sleep, my head cradled in the crook of my arm where it rested against the window.
Johnson spoke in a rough and accusatory tone as always, while Holbrook’s voice flowed in his melodic southern drawl. Not for the first time, I wished that I could just curl up in the warm, honeyed notes of his voice and slip away.
“…should tell her,” Holbrook was saying, his words heated with frustration.
“It has nothing to do with her,” Johnson replied in clipped tones.