“You okay?” she asked, and he nodded.
It occurred to her with a sinking heart just how much she liked him. She should have realized at Barb’s house, when she’d been so angry with Suzie. Or when she continued to check for the photo in his wallet. Or at any moment before this one, when she’d discovered how little she knew about him.
He tipped his head up. “Do you think that stars have shadows?”
She followed his gaze. They were close enough to Springfield for light pollution to dull the night skies, but galaxies still spangled above them. The moon had marched nearly to the end of her night, ready to stagger to her own bed at dawn.
“I guess if there’s some brighter star,” she said, thinking of lying on the couch months ago, a deep-voiced man explaining the universe on her television while she tried to convince herself to apply for a new job. “Like the kind that’s about to become a black hole. Don’t they flare first?”
Vince nodded. “Quasars. They flare as they’re dying. I guess that would give any other star nearby a shadow.”
She thought about the struggling, squirming thing attached to the bearded man. She thought about just how sideways Vince’s night had gone—from attempted good deed to body disposal. Just because he’d lied to her, it didn’t mean she wasn’t sympathetic to how terrible the last few hours must have been. Even if he’d seemed calm, even if he’d killed before, that didn’t mean he was okay. Maybe she wasn’t the only person pretending to be fine. Reaching over, she took his hand.
He flinched a little, as though she’d surprised him.
“That guy could have killed me.” It was hard for Charlie to judge how long she’d been unconscious, but it had been long enough. “So, if you’re feeling guilty, you should stop.”
“That’s not what I’m feeling,” Vince said.
She looked over, trying to read his expression. It bothered her that she couldn’t.
“You should come inside,” she said. “It’s cold and Posey made spaghetti.”
He gave her a sideways glance, and she was tempted to push for answers, to tell him she’d heard what he’d said to Hermes back in Rapture. To demand he tell her all his secrets.
You’ve let your shadow feed for too long tonight. There’s not much of you left.
He turned his hollow gray eyes on her. “I’m angry,” he said. “I am still so angry.”
Surprised, Charlie started to open her mouth and then closed it again.
“Last night, after you fell asleep, I couldn’t stop looking at the swell of your cheek. The snarl of your dark hair. The chipped black nail polish on your toes, curled up against whatever dream you were having. The way you pulled loose the bottom sheet with the violence of sleeping. I looked at you and had a feeling so intense that it made me dizzy and a little sick.” His gaze was on the silvery grass of the lawn. “It’s no good to feel that way.”
Charlie’s heart hammered. He had never spoken to her like that. She didn’t think anyone had spoken to her like that. “Vince?”
“When I saw you tonight—what he’d done, what he was doing, I wanted to kill him. I was furious and I haven’t stopped being furious. I don’t feel guilty. I wish he was alive so I could kill him again.”
Astonishment robbed her of breath. Vince didn’t get angry. He didn’t talk about his feelings. He didn’t sit alone in the dark, talking about shadows and stars.
He turned to her. “Pretend I didn’t say any of that. If you can, pretend tonight never happened, Charlie.”
She smiled a little, trying to regain her equanimity. “Then what are we doing together out in the cold?”
“Whatever you want,” he said, and kissed her. A desperate kiss, his mouth bruisingly hard. Nothing like the way he’d kissed her before. Charlie’s body reacted, the sharp shock of her desire unexpected. His lips moved along her cheekbone to her throat and she swallowed a moan. Her nails sank into the muscle of his arms.
She wanted him, right then, against the concrete steps. Despite everything that had happened that night. Maybe, horribly, some part of her even wanted him because of it.
Nothing about him was careful as his body bent in a cage over hers. All she had on was a robe, easy to part.
“I need to…” he began, hesitating. “You must be…”
Hurt. Tired. Uncomfortable.
She kissed him before he could finish the thought.
One of his hands stroked along her rib cage, his finger skimming the edge of the old bullet wound before moving to her thigh. Parting her legs. His desire was raw-edged, vulnerable. As though he’d shown her something true about himself for the first time.
She dug her fingers into his hair. Bit his lip.
Anger confused her body, making her desire burn brighter, making everything faster and sharper and hotter. Better. His hunger answered her ferocity. Blotting out the night and the fear and the cold and everything.
As her thoughts spiraled away, her gaze fell on the aluminum siding of the house. She watched as her shadow-self arched her back and rose up off the stairs at an impossible angle. Without Vince’s shadow, it was like being in the grips of a demon lover. Possessed. Reaching for someone who wasn’t there.
12
THE PAST
Hall Pass, they called her in junior high, as in “Did you get your Hall Pass?” Asked to the boys by one another, snickered about by the girls. There was some glory in it, to be thought of as the girl with all the experience, especially when in fact Charlie had absolutely none. But it was mostly humiliating, her body drawing boys to her and repulsing them at once. It made group assignments fraught. Push your desks together and Matt Panchak spent most of his time sliding one sneakered foot up your leg, taking your lack of complaint for desire.
Never mind that you’d gone to kindergarten with him.
Never mind that once, during PE, he’d gotten a soccer ball kicked into his stomach so hard that he threw up, and you were the one who walked him to the nurse’s office.
No, now you were a pair of legs with boobs on top, with the ability to banish all his insecurities. Venus on the half shell.
In gym class, while she was changing, Doreen Kowalski asked Charlie all kinds of questions about when she’d gotten her period and whether she shaved her underarms and what size bra she wore. At first, she wondered if Doreen wanted to be friends, but once Charlie answered, Doreen rushed back to her knot of buddies, giggling.
They didn’t understand how her bra straps cut into her shoulders and underwires cut into her ribs, and that the bras that fit looked like ones a matronly nurse would wear in an old war movie. There was no way to make them understand.
Charlie put on darker eyeliner and wore baggier clothes and stompier boots.
Rand didn’t seem to know what to do with her either. When he’d recruited her at twelve, she’d already looked older than her age. By the time she was starting high school, her body let her pass for a grown woman.
It didn’t help that Charlie got a little too good at all the wrong things. She had a nose for where an unlocked window or door might be when she approached houses. Her pickpocketing was deft enough that Rand didn’t let her get close to him. And when she played a role, she disappeared into it.
He liked the idea of passing on his knowledge to a kid with some natural talent, but he didn’t want her to be better than him. And he definitely didn’t want her as competition.
“You and me, we’re the same,” he’d remind her again and again, in case she forgot. “We pretend, so that other people will like us. But they wouldn’t like us if they knew us, would they? That’s why we’ve got to stick together.”