“Here,” she murmurs. I lean down toward her, letting her affix the bandage to my cheek. Her cold fingers are like ice against my hot skin; hot for no reason, other than the fact that I’m burning up inside because she’s flesh and blood and here, touching me.
“What do you need?” I ask.
She takes a step back, biting on the inside of her cheek. “I need somebody to drive me to Lone Pine, California,” she says.
California. “I’ll drive you,” I say, a little too quickly. Then I realize how crazy that might sound — the guy who crashed his car and killed her mother, offering to take her on a road trip. “I don’t drink anymore,” I add quickly. “Eight years sober.”
“I’m not worried about your driving skills,” she says softly. I killed your mother. Maybe you should be.
“I didn’t think you were allowed to cross state lines,” she adds.
“I’m not,” I reply. “But I would. For you.”
I’d burn this whole fucking town down for her. “When do you need to go?”
She looks around the mostly-empty garage. “Now.”
“Now?”
Her face falls.
“Forget it,” she says, turning toward the back door of the garage. “It was a stupid idea to ask you.”
“Whoa,” I say, rushing to the door before she can open it. I cut her off, blocking her way to the door handle, and she just looks at me.
For some reason, I thought she’d be afraid of me. But she’s not. She waits patiently for whatever I’m about to say.
“Let me lock up,” I say. “Five minutes.”
Her whole body seems to relax. Again, somebody who didn’t know her probably wouldn’t notice. But I know Cassie. I love Cassie. And I’d drive her to the gates of hell and bust on through if that was where she wanted to go.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CASSIE
Twenty-five years on this earth, and I’ve never been out of Nevada.
It’s sad, really. The border is so close to Gun Creek. Up the mountain pass, back down onto the other side, and through miles and miles of old ghost towns and bare fields. Somewhere along Route 268, Nevada turns into California, a tiny sign denoting the border crossing, so small that if you blinked, you’d miss it.
I do not miss it.
We’re in Pike’s car, an old sedan that’s seen better days. I kind of wish we were in a giant truck where the center console separates the driver and passenger so wide, you have to yell to hear each other. In this car, we’re so close that Leo’s arm brushes against mine every time he touches the gear stick between us.
We don’t talk, except about the directions; which road to turn onto, how many minutes left. I don’t have my phone; too paranoid about Damon tracking the GPS, I’ve left it at home, underneath my pillow, along with a bunch of clothes assembled in a rough body-outline that could be mistaken for my sleeping form in the dark.
“This thing go any faster?” I ask, at one point. Leo smirks. “You sound as thrilled as me about this piece of shit,” he replies, eyes firmly on the road ahead. “I’m sitting on ninety. I get pulled over across state lines, your stepdaddy’ll be hauling me back to Lovelock before sundown.
My stomach sinks. I’m acutely aware of the risk I’m putting Leo at by asking him to go to California with me. I’m a selfish fucking bitch.
It’s going to be fine, I tell myself. We won’t get caught. By the time Damon even notices I’m gone, if he notices at all, we’ll be well on our way back to Gun Creek, and nobody will be the wiser about our little road trip to Lone Pine.
“So,” Leo says, as if reading my mind, “remind me where we’re going, again?”
“Nowhere special.”
“Nowhere special,” he echoes. “Okay. You think they have food and a gas stop in Nowhere Special?”
I look at him, and for the briefest of moments, it’s like we’re teenagers again, and the last almost-decade didn’t just happen.
“We’re going to Lone Pine, smart ass. And yes, they have food and gas there.”
“Good,” Leo says, a small smile remaining as he focuses on the road. “I’m starved.”
* * *
THREE HOURS LATER, Leo is sitting in a restaurant on Main Street that boasts the best burgers in town and a life-sized cardboard cutout of John Wayne. I leave him there with a promise to come back in thirty minutes, and drive his car down the street to the place I’m actually intending to go.
Mount Whitney Cemetery is easy to navigate. Most of the place is dedicated to a mass grave from a massive earthquake that leveled the town over a hundred years ago. If you didn’t look properly, you’d assume it was just a grassy field. I head for the individual gravestones on the opposite side of the road, already knowing which plot I’m searching for. The things you can find online these days — they have maps of cemeteries that show exactly which plot each body is buried in, right down to the satellite coordinates. It’s like a dead person GPS.
The Collins family plot is smaller than I expected but covered in more ornaments and trinkets than my eyes can take in at once. The whole space is only big enough for two coffins to rest side-by-side, but I guess they stack them in the ground these days.
And besides, I remind myself, there might be three headstones, but there are only two people buried here.
Richard and Adelie Collins, two people who fucked one night and somehow created the man who has been my singular nightmare for eight years.
I think of Jennifer as I stare down at the family plot, at each gravestone. I look around, making absolutely sure nobody is looking at me, and then, like the psycho I have become, steal every little ornament and trinket from Daniel Collins’ empty grave, shoving each piece in my bag as I struggle to hold back vomit.
Nobody ever talks about it, but cemeteries have this particular smell. Bodies, in various stages of decomposition, all rotting in their pine boxes under six feet of hard-packed dirt. People pretend that smell isn’t there, but I’m hardly one to shy away from the practicalities of death.
Beneath me, the ground rumbles, and I immediately wonder if the next earthquake is just now hitting this tiny town. Wouldn’t that be ironic, if I fell into this grave and was buried alive in the resting spot meant for Damon. I close my eyes briefly, partly because the sun is so bright, and partly to wait and see if the ground will split open to swallow me up, but when I open them again, the rumble is just an earthmover driving past me on its way to dig a fresh grave.
I don’t stay to pay my respects. That was a lie. There’s nobody to pay my respects to anyway because Daniel Collins isn’t buried there. He isn’t even dead. He’s a grown man, living in my house, sliding into my bed, making bruises on my pale skin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
LEO
Cassie’s gone for forty minutes, and for most of that time, I’m convinced she isn’t coming back. I don’t know why. It’s just this uneasy feeling that spreads through my limbs, that voice in my head that says why the fuck would she want anything to do with me after what I did to her?
Maybe she hates me so much she’s led me here, so I’ll break my parole and get sent back to prison. Her mother’s dead now, maybe this is her way of trying to make things right.
I mean, I probably deserve it.
So when she does finally come back, her expression unreadable, her green eyes stark against the black scarf she’s got wrapped around her neck, I almost cry with relief.
She doesn’t tell me where she’s been and I don’t ask. It’s enough to be here with her, to be able to look at her sitting across from me, to be within grabbing distance of her. I’m halfway through a burger and fries when her food arrives. I watch her mouth open, the way she loads her pink tongue with ranch-dressed lettuce, and I almost come in my jeans at the sight of her doing something as innocent as eating a fucking salad.
“You okay?” she asks, chewing slowly.
I nod, picking up my bacon burger and shoving it in my mouth before I can say anything stupid
.
Something suddenly occurs to her. “Hey, when did you get your license back?”
I swallow. “Two-thousand-nineteen.”
She shakes her head, but the expression on her face isn’t disapproval. It’s.... amusement. I don’t argue when she reaches her hand over the table and slides the keys away from me.
ONCE WE’RE BACK in Nevada, Cassie, the girl who used to tell me to slow down whenever I was driving, puts her foot flat to the fucking floor and wipes fifteen minutes off our previous journey. Speed demon. I kind of like that she’s driving; it gives me a chance to steal glances at her for three hours while she bites on the insides of her cheeks and searches through the radio stations incessantly, clickclickclick. Her hands grip the wheel tighter the closer we get to her house, and at the last minute, she turns down my driveway, not hers.
“I can take you to your door,” I say, looking back at her empty driveway as she comes to a stop beside my container room. I can’t fucking breathe, she’s so all-consuming.
She shuts the car off and hands me the keys. “I don’t think you showing up at my door is a very good idea,” she replies. “Especially not with me.”
“Right,” I say. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I guess you’re a little preoccupied, huh?”
“It’s been a strange day,” I say. “A good day,” I add quickly. “Just…”
“Not what you expected?”
“Right,” I agree.
We sit there in silence. I don’t want to say goodbye and watch her walk up to her house. I mean, I’m still not sure that today actually happened. Maybe I’m hallucinating. Because I’m sure as shit not convinced that I just drove to California and back with my ex-girlfriend whose mother I killed.
“Well aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asks finally.
The pressure inside my chest releases like a hot wave of lava. “You want to come in?”
She just looks at me. “You forget your manners in prison?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just — I didn’t think you’d ever want to look at me again.”
I look at the floor, at the creek line in front of us, anywhere but at her.
“Leo,” she says softly, putting a hand on my arm.
I cringe at her touch. It’s entirely foreign to me. I pull my arm away and open the door. “Come on,” I say gruffly, a lump in my throat the size of Nevada. “You’ll catch a cold out here.”
* * *
INSIDE IT’S WARM, and I don’t know what the fuck to do. It’s not like I have beer or vodka or a goddamn soda to offer Cassie. Having her walk into my shitty little home and sit down on the unmade bed reminds me of how much I don’t have.
“What’s prison like?” Cassie asks, kicking her shoes off and crossing her legs on the bed. I snort, sitting on the other end of the bed, as far away from her as I can get.
“You’d know if you read any of my letters.”
I’m staring at my feet, but that doesn’t stop me from catching the way Cassie freezes in the corner of my eye. I glance at her. “What?”
She lets out a long breath. “Letters?”
I’ve got that sinking feeling again. I don’t like it. I wish it would go away. “I wrote you, like, every week I was gone.”
“Bullshit,” she says, her eyes shining with tears. “Bull-shit.”
Sinking, sinking. Everything is sinking.
I’m drowning in the impossibility of reality. Damon. Of course. I killed his wife. Of course he’d hide the letters. He was fucking his stepdaughter while I rotted in prison. Of course he’d intercept any communications from me. What a fucking idiot I am, thinking that I’d been writing her for eight years without a single goddamn reply, not even a ‘return to sender’.
“He got to them, didn’t he?” I say. “He fucking got to them.”
Neither of us speaks for a long time. Cassie is crying, her mascara running in twin black rivers down her face. All I do is make this girl cry.
“What did they say?” she asks in a tiny voice. She sounds like a sad little girl. I didn’t mean this for her. I don’t want to make her despair like this.
I don’t answer. She slides off the bed, and for a moment I think she’s going to leave. She doesn’t. She stands in front of me, pressing insistently against my knees until I part them and she melts into the space between my thighs. She’s crying so hard, I bet she can hardly see me. “Cassie,” I say sadly.
I cup her chin with one hand and use the fingers on the other to wipe away her tears. My fingertips are rough, her skin like velvet, and I hope I don’t hurt her.
“They said sorry,” I whisper, putting my fingers to my mouth and tasting the salt of her tears. “That I wished I could trade places with her. And that I loved you. That I love you.”
She puts her hand on my shoulder and I almost recoil. Almost. I don’t know what to do with her touching me. It’s enough to drive a man to the brink of insanity, the way she touches me. It’s like our minds know the things I’ve done, but our bodies have forgotten. My head throbs. My dick throbs. I need air.
I stand, putting firm hands on Cassie’s shoulders and moving her to the side. I’ve got my sights set on the door and the cold air beyond, but Cassie doesn’t care about that. She cuts me off, staring up at me with eyes that dare me to try that again. I step to the opposite side, again trying to get around her before I do something stupid, and what do you know? She cuts me off again. She reaches up, coiling her hand behind my neck and pulling me down to her. Our faces are almost touching. I can feel her breath against my lips; fast, almost anxious. My heart is fucking hammering in my chest, my resolve like a finely-stretched elastic band about to snap.
I’m breathing so fast I feel like I’m going to have a fucking heart attack and die right here. My skin is crawling from being this close to another person. After eight years without being touched by a woman, the night with Jennifer not withstanding, it’s almost unbearable to have affection. At the same time, it takes every fiber of my being to stop from grabbing Cassie and throwing her down onto my bed because that’s all I want to do.
Desire and avoidance are like opposing magnets inside me, making me flinch at her fingers on my arms, her breath on my mouth, the steely determination in her glassy eyes.
She lunges, her mouth devouring mine. Sharp pain stabs behind my eyes as I kiss her back, hungrily. Our hands fumble lower, to belt buckles and shirt buttons as we try our hardest to rip the material off that separates us from each other. It’s so good it hurts. I want to tear my fucking heart out of my chest and give it to her to make the pain go away.
I pull at her scarf, flinging it across the room somewhere; at the same time, she unzips her jeans and kicks them off, naked from the waist down. I grab her hips and pull her toward me as I fall onto the edge of the bed, Cassie straddling my lap. She grabs the front of my shirt and pulls, our faces inches apart, and then she kisses me so hard it rips the breath from my lungs and makes me think I’m on fire. Her cunt is resting against my cock and it’s so wet if I moved the right way I’d probably be able to slide in. I kiss her tits, suck a nipple into my mouth and bite down until she moans, trail my mouth up her neck — and that’s when I see the bruises.
“Cassie,” I say. I hear the hard edge my voice has taken on; the worry. She is bruised black and blue from the top of her neck all the way down her sternum. I place my hand against the bruises and it fits; somebody did this to her with their bare hands.
“Who did this?” I ask, even though I already know. I know because I saw them. The night of the funeral, I saw them. Some girls like it rough, but this is more than that. This is terrifying.
“It’s nothing,” Cassie breathes, jerking my face back up to hers, kissing me as her hand finds my cock and guides me into her.
She’s so tight… so hot… it’s almost unbearable. I am burning alive inside her.
If I could choose a death, it would be this one right here.
Cassie lifts her hips up and b
ack down, the friction fucking intense. Electric.
It takes every ounce of my concentration not to blow my load in her. But at the edge of my mind, those bruises linger. I mean, fuck. They’re right in front of me. I’m practically fucking hyperventilating as she bounces on my cock, her little moans only making it harder to hold off, her tits warm as they press against my chest.
“I saw you with him,” I murmur. She barely slows. I didn’t imagine having a conversation like this while I was inside her. Jesus.
“What do you mean?” Cassie asks breathlessly.
“I saw you with Damon,” I pant. “In the window. You were fucking him.”
“It’s not what you think.” She pauses for the briefest of moments as I’m buried inside her, up to the hilt.
I should shut up. I should know better. “What are you doing with him? What happened to you?”
“You were gone for eight years,” she says angrily. “And then you came back,” the anger fades, “and I tried so hard to be the girl you left behind.”
“He’s your—”
Out of nowhere, Cassie hits me in the jaw with her fist, so fast I don’t see the movement of her hand until my cheek’s already on fire. “Shut up,” she hisses, lifting her hips and falling down on to my cock again. “Shut up and fuck me.”
I am buzzing and shocked and her violence only makes my need for her burn hotter. Look at her. She’s an animal. We both are. And I decide I don’t care what she was doing in the window, not now. I force all thoughts of Cassie and Damon out of my mind. I’ll care about it again after we’re done here.
Some girls like it rough. The Cassie I left all those years ago didn’t like it rough. She liked flowers and sweet nothings and soft, tender lovemaking. The Cassie I have returned to wants none of those things, not now, at least. The Cassie I have returned to demands something far darker.
“I’m close,” I mutter against her mouth. I lift her up, trying to pull out of her before it’s too late because I’m not wearing a condom and it’s the right thing to do, but she clamps her thighs tight and continues to rock deeper on my lap.