“Like stars over Crothers or stars in Argentina?”
“God, you’re picky. You say you like romantic, and I give you stars.”
She says, “I’ve created a monster.”
“I was already a monster.” She has no idea. “Are you coming or not?”
I know she’s coming.
“Dress warm—I’ll be there in thirty. Make sandwiches, okay?” My throat feels like someone buffed it with sandpaper, but I’m hungry.
I spend five minutes throwing everything into my duffel, shovel the trash back into a black plastic bag, put the drawers back in the dresser and the cushions back on the couch. Cleaning up isn’t on my top ten list for the night, but neither is having the girl who rented me the place show up to what looks like a crime scene.
I go out the kitchen window for the second time in two days. That cop car that scared me into avoiding the front door and instead climbing over my sink and out the back window to get to Nicolette’s place is what kept these two guys from following me straight to her yesterday. Hats off to community policing. It’s the first cop car that ever did me any good.
I look around the side of the apartment. I’m pretty sure which car the two guys who threatened me are in, meaning they didn’t intend to kill me, just to leave the taste of death in my mouth so I’d know what I was up against: people who are better at this than I am.
I drop down behind the bushes that surround the building, then sprint to the side of the house next door. I don’t hear a car start or see one following when I shoot around the corner.
I cut through alleys and behind buildings to get to my junker. It’s parked far enough from my apartment that they can’t see it from where they’re sitting—but only just barely. Starting it up, it feels as if I’m pushing the button on a detonator. I drive without headlights, park between a couple of bigger cars in a lot a few blocks from her place. The only person who could have followed me would be an invisible guy with night-vision goggles and a jetpack. I close the car door so quietly, it’s hard to differentiate the sound from the ambient night noises—crickets, branches, muted traffic.
I approach carefully, making sure there’s nothing strange, no one watching the street or watching me. She’s good to go in sweats, toting a grocery bag full of food and the ubiquitous daypack. She leans up to kiss me.
“We could just stay here and have a picnic, say, on the table,” she says.
I look around the garage she lives in. I can come back sometime after and wash it down, but what’s the point? You can’t get rid of all traces. If anyone figures out what happened, I’ll be too busy exporting whatever you export from Madagascar, holed up in a tropical paradise fighting off poisonous insects, to care.
I tap her on the butt. “Let’s go.”
She finds this extremely annoying. She says, “Could you please not go all master-of-the-universe on me?” She does half an eye roll. “That’s what my friend says you are, too.”
“It was an accident. Sorry.” And then, damn, “You just talked to your friend about me?”
“Oh no!” This is her at her most tender. “Not about what happened to you. I would never tell anyone. Please trust me.”
Frankly, how bad it was with her running her fingertip along the scars, how naked I was, how much I wanted her to shut up, how important it seemed, how sorry she was—now it’s like it was nothing.
“I’m not the most trusting guy.”
Her face falls. I know I have to fix this fast, but all I have room for in my brain is getting her out of here and processing that she’s been talking about me, that when she goes even more missing than she is right now, somebody out there will know God knows what about me. At some point, someone—Olivia most likely—is going to put two and two together and get four, and this won’t be good for me.
I just want to get her out of here and into my car before we have company.
We’re leaving now, and we’re leaving fast.
55
Cat
It’s stars. And it’s the middle of the night. And it’s romantic.
The affection-binging camel is a glutton for this stuff.
Plus, how bad could one more night be?
The gym socks slither down my ankles.
J says, “Wait here. I’ll get the car.”
“I think I can manage to walk two blocks without breaking.”
He grins the hot grin. “Said the agoraphobic wreck.”
Really? He tells me his secrets. He comes apart. I stick him back together, plus pie and a lot of making out. But now it’s three thirty in the morning, and he isn’t being very nice.
“I never said I was a wreck.”
“You came very close.”
“Not that close.”
He seems nervous, looking around my room, pulling the curtains over the bed closed tighter. Switching off lights.
“If you’re looking for evidence of all my other boyfriends, I had a half hour to hide everything.” Exactly one half hour. J is punctual.
“Can we go?”