I’d done this dance with football boys, built thick like human walls. With basketball boys, long and delicious. A shy chess player approached me at a mixer, on a dare. I liked the way he rocked with nerves; there was an instinctive understanding in the sway of hip and thigh. I’d gone back to his dorm room, and there I’d made him king of all the dorks. I remembered a culinary arts major who cooked for me, and this same dance was in his deft hands, working the knife. I’d let him suck the butter off my fingers. And now this cowboy. Yes, I knew him. I knew a thousand of him, seemed like. He was a deep bell, tolling low down in my memory as we moved.
No one had sunk the nine ball, but I straightened up and slotted my cue into the wall rack. I had already decided. He would do.
He grinned, and his gaze got sharper and more eager.
He came around the table toward me, and I heard another bell, a real one: the ding and buzz of a text landing. I stepped back, reaching for the phone in my back pocket.
“One sec, I have to check this,” I said. “My little brother’s having a day.”
He eased back into a waiting slouch. We both knew we were done with the preliminaries; I was tempted to drop the phone in my bag and check on Julian later. Real life was not what I wanted buzzing and pinging in my pants just now.
But the last time we’d talked, he’d been acting as Birdwine’s hand puppet. Birdwine’s voice had rumbled in the background, and Julian parroted and paraphrased the details of their slow search as it crept toward Georgia. They had to check every route for any hint of Kai and Hana. It was painstaking and meticulous work, and my little brother sounded frustrated. He hadn’t wanted to stop, because the next lead might pay off, or the next one. Birdwine and I, more realistic, knew this kind of inquiry could take weeks.
“I’m going to call in sick again tomorrow and come back here,” Julian had told me at the end.
“Do you need me to get you and bring you back to your car?”
“No. Birdwine’s giving me a lift.”
It was the first time he’d called Birdwine by his name, and I didn’t half like the admiring tone. They’d apparently spent all day bro-bonding as they worked. Just what I needed—for disapproving Julian to join a pro-Birdwine faction the very day that I’d gone full and angry anti. Worse, Julian’s car was parked in my office lot. I hadn’t wanted to be anywhere nearby when they showed up.
I’d saved my file and said, “Good, because I’m going to McGwiggen’s.”
“Oh, what’s McGwiggen’s?” my guileless brother had asked.
“A pool hall,” I’d told him, but Birdwine knew that it was more than that. McGwiggen’s had a rep for getting its patrons laid efficiently; Birdwine wasn’t the only one who knew how to work a phone puppet.
I hadn’t talked to Julian since, and it had been a stressful day for him, no doubt. So I pressed the pause button on the cowboy, and I swiped my phone to life.
The text was not from Julian, though. It was from Birdwine. Directly.
Shoot me Julian’s cell number? Forgot to get it.
Just words. Nothing of consequence. But it was as if my naked foot had touched his chest, as if I’d felt his big heart beat against my instep.
I stopped. The whole world stopped. The air fell still around me, and I was still, too, unmoving inside silence. The buzzing of my body faded. The jukebox sounded like a distant, faded chiming.
I’d come here to wipe away my history with Birdwine, but in the moment of this simple contact, I fully understood that my foot was poised on something live. All I had to do was press down, stamp, and I would kill it.
I tried to remember the last time I’d gone to bed with a stranger. By the time I passed the bar, I’d had my dating life in hand. My last one-off had been—law school, when Nick started calling me sweetheart during sex. Love could be broken, in spite of what poetry and chick flicks said. I’d broken it much like this with William, then with Nick; it was what I did.
I couldn’t take this back, once it was done. I thought of Birdwine’s bruised face, silent and unforthcoming in his kitchen. He had a kid out there. A kid he never saw, that he had never mentioned. It was a bad bedtime story for a chick with abandonment issues, as he’d said, and maybe I could not forgive it. Perhaps forgiveness wasn’t in my nature.
I wouldn’t know. I hadn’t tried.
“You ready to get out of here?” Cowboy asked.
I blinked, reorienting. The world restarted. Now I could hear Guns N’ Roses blaring from the jukebox, but my internal song had stopped. I was done dancing. I gave him a rueful smile, and waved my phone at him.
“Yeah, I’m going to have to cut out. This isn’t going to happen.”
“I’m sorry?” Cowboy said, his voice gone higher than he had been speaking. A little edge of pissed-off had come into it. “Are you serious?”
“Stand down,” I said, uninterested in temper tantrums. I was thinking of Candace again. Not her skill set or her propensity for misdirection, but her hungers. At least she’d known what she wanted. “I’ve burned less than thirty minutes of your evening, and the pool table is going on my tab. Have a nice life.”
I walked to the rail and finished off my beer, picked up my bag.
“Wait, hold up,” he said. He’d seen that the pissed-off-baby thing wasn’t working. He tried another tack, walking around the table toward me, leading from the hip. “We’re having a good time, yeah? Let’s not stop. I’ll get us some shots, or, hell, we can move this back to your place.”
I think I blanched, and I knew I’d made the right call. I’d imagined our bodies intersecting, but I hadn’t pictured it in my loft. I couldn’t picture it, not in any setting where I lived my life. If by some miracle we found Hana soon, the last thing I wanted was this traveling man’s CK One lingering on my sheets.
“Gotta go,” I said.
I walked away, already thumbing at the call button under Birdwine’s name.
“Are you kidding me?” he called after me, back to pissy. “Hey! Are you fucking kidding me?”
I kept walking, disappearing into the hallway that led to the bathrooms and the back way out. It was quiet enough here for me to hear the phone, ringing and ringing. Damn Birdwine, he let me go to voicemail. I waited for the beep.
“So I’m at McGwiggen’s,” I said, with no preamble. “I met this guy. Could’ve left with him, but no. I blew him off. I wasn’t even nice about it, and you have no idea how bad I want to lie to you.” I was talking loud, making myself be heard over the music. I slipped out the back door into the quiet alley. “I want to say, ‘Hey Birdwine, I’m calling from the top of reverse cowgirl.’ Then I’d get to hurt you without the risk of bad sex or chlamydia.” Ye gods, but it felt good to yell at him, though. Crazy good. If I had only thought to call Kai like this, back in the day, I could have saved so much money on birth control, maybe skipped a solid third of all that therapy. There was no one to hear me except the row of old-school silver trash cans where McGwiggen’s unfinished wing platters came to die. It smelled sour, like hot sauce and bones, with the nasty tang of ranch dip going wrong. “I ditched him like I owed it to you. Why is that? Why do I still feel like I owe it to you, when you are so patently an asshole? When you are—”
Light spilled into the alleyway around me, and I whirled to see that Cowboy had followed me. I stepped back as the door swung shut behind him.
“Are you running off on me,” he said, but it didn’t lilt up on the end into a question. It was a statement, both proprietary and weirdly emphatic.
I hit the button to close my call and slipped my phone back in my bag, instantly wary enough that I wanted both hands free. I wished I’d thought to palm my mace when I stepped out, but I couldn’t very well go digging for it now. I straightened up, tall enough in my high shoes to have an inch or two on him.
I made my voice cold as I could, which was pretty close to arctic. “I told you, it’s not on. Go back inside.”
“You don’t want to piss me off,” he said, as if
something was at stake here.
Very intense, considering we weren’t even the cost of a drink to each other. Adrenaline began leaking into my bloodstream. I could feel myself swelling with it. The air around us had charged, and it was charging still.
He took one step toward me, not quite into my space, but closer. He was between me and the door, and I’d be giving him an opening if I tried to duck around him. If he knew how to fight, if he leveraged his much greater upper-body strength, I didn’t stand much chance. But a guy like this—gym-made muscles, capped teeth, and a fresh, expensive haircut—he might start soft, a testing slap or grab. I could go after his soft bits, immediate and hard. Disable him long enough to get inside.
He took another step into me. I held my ground, because prey retreats, and hunger follows anything that runs. The lights above the door made his hair a yellow nimbus. A shadow fell across his eyes, so I could see them only as a gleaming. The light bounced off his sculpted nose, his narrow jawline. Elegant. Familiar.
I recognized him then.
He wasn’t pinging in my memory against every one-off frat boy I’d ever taken off behind some trees. He’d seemed familiar because he was familiar. I’d seen him before. Just once, in a picture. I hadn’t recognized him without the demon horns, the red eyes, and the Hitler mustache.
My pickup wannabe was Oakleigh’s husband.
“Clark?” I said, so shocked that I stepped back, banging into the row of silver trash cans. I reached behind me, put one hand on the edge to steady myself. “Clark Winkley?”
“Shit,” he said, angry to be recognized, but he did not back off.
He took another step in, shifting how the light fell, and I could see his eyes again, shining with something purely ugly. I thought he’d make his move, and my body coiled in on itself. I couldn’t allow him to get a solid grip on me. I had to hurt him bad enough to get away.
But he stayed where he was. Instead of reaching for me, he slipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket, where he balled it in a fist, grabbing something. Then I realized why he hadn’t done the cliché move tried by every man on earth who’d ever shot pool with a woman: the lean-over from behind to help line up a shot that didn’t need relining. It wasn’t because he hadn’t been happy to see me. He hadn’t wanted me to feel the gun.
“Clark, this is not about me,” I said, as cool as I could with my mouth gone suddenly so dry.
“You should have gone to bed with me. But no, you had to be a bitch about it,” Clark said. His pretty-boy face was twisted, sculptured nostrils flared. Oakleigh had picked out that nose at the plastic surgeon’s, I remembered. The sides of his mouth were wet, spit leaking out, and he didn’t even notice. “Jesus, everyone who’s ever met you says that you’re a whore. You should have gone ahead and been a whore.”
So I had his lawyer, Macon, to thank for this. That sackless piece of crap must have talked about our past. Ye gods, how small men hated to be beaten by a woman. Especially a woman they were sleeping with. So his lawyer had called me a slut, and Clark had come up with a plan to get the easy lawyer into bed. And if I had brought him home with me?
Of course. I’d show up for the meet on Monday to find last week’s nameless cowboy was the opposition. I’d have to recuse myself.
“Clark,” I said. “Nothing has happened. Not yet. Right now there’s no big story here. We played some pool. I realized you were my client’s husband, you realized I was Oakleigh’s lawyer. We walked away.”
It was an error, saying Oakleigh’s name.
“No. No, no, dammit,” he said, and that spittle leaking out around his lips hit my face in pinprick sprinkles. “You’re bitches, and neither of you gets to walk away.”
Why had I plugged his rat hole? He’d been perfectly happy to stalk Oakleigh, to risk death climbing trees, creeping along her roofline, peeing in her makeup case. I’d claimed his attention for myself when I’d locked him out. All of his attention. He’d come into McGwiggen’s not half an hour after I did. He’d known right where I was, the same way he’d known whenever Oakleigh left the house. He’d been following me.
For days now, I’d felt watched and followed. Even Julian had felt it, back at Birdwine’s place. Tonight had been the first real opening he’d had, and he had taken it. I put one hand up, propitiating, my other hand still braced on the trash can’s greasy edge, holding me steady and upright.
“Clark, let’s take a breath, okay?” I said, almost lilting, the way I’d talk to a dangerous dog who had backed me in a corner. “I know you’re really angry.”
“Bitch, you don’t know a damn thing, yet.”
He took his hand out of his pocket.
Then all I could see was the snub-nose pistol.
It didn’t look real. I felt an absurd bubble of laughter rising up. He was holding a lady gun, bright silver with mother-of-pearl glinting at the handle. It was a silly little thing, too slight a weight to make his jacket hang wrong, crafted to rest between a compact and a purse dog. It was exactly the sort of gun a girl like Oakleigh would find darling. And yet this shiny bit of nonsense was pointed at my middle. It could put a hole in me. It could kill me.
“Wait,” I said, though other words were crowding in my throat. Useless ones. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t die right now, not with so many things unfinished.
Hana unfound. Kai’s fate unknown. My best friend’s new baby, named Paul after me, would never know my face. My new brother would be hit with yet another loss. The last words I’d ever say to Birdwine would be the ones I’d just recorded, angry, unforgiving, calling him an asshole.
Clark laughed then, a hoarse and breaking sound. He swept the gun up until it was pointing directly in my face. It gleamed like a bright toy in his elegant hand.
The small, dark hole at the end of it looked into my left eye, promising oblivion. I looked back, and time slowed. Stopped. I saw my end inside that pinprick darkness, saw it as if it had already happened. As if it had happened a long time ago, and was still happening now.
CHAPTER 11
This is the dangerous time.
Outside, the sun is shining, and yellow light streams in the window. Outside, Kai is on her way to me. This morning we have our first visit in the flesh since her release, and I feel like I am filled with butter-colored sunshine, too. Inside my body, I am bright with it, barely able to stay inside my skin. Even so, I keep my face blank and lie still. I am beside a bomb.
My mattress is shaped like a long, narrow valley. Candace lies in the center trench, staring up at the ceiling. The depression in the middle is the weight of history, shaped over time by every kid who ever slept here. Candace’s slight weight has not changed it in any way that I can feel on those rare moments when I have my bed to myself. She doesn’t seem like a bomb right now. She seems like a girl who is about to fall back asleep in the choicest spot.
I lie along the raised edge on my side, my back to the wall. Even now, I can feel the two depressions in the ridge that Joya and I made, back when we used to sit here every day. It is a solid proof that we were here, as personal as a graffiti sign or a fingerprint. The last time Joya fit herself into her space here, she was readying to leave me, and we burned each other to the ground.
“What’s she look like? Your mama?” Candace asks.
Candace has gone spelunking in my private lockbox often enough to see my mother in pictures from every angle. I answer anyway, to placate her.
“She’s tall and pale,” I say, offhand. I don’t say how beautiful she is. I don’t say, I used to put my bare feet on top of her bare feet, and she would spin while I yelled, “Dance me, dance me.” “She has long hair. Or used to have.”
It’s Saturday morning, and Mrs. Mack has sent the other girls to watch the TV in the center building’s rec hall, so Kai and I can have the common room. Candace wanted to wait with me, and I didn’t fight her. I will not fight Candace on anything. Not now.
My mother and I have made plans during our court-mandated phone calls.
I know she is already job hunting, apartment hunting, working to meet every requirement to regain me. Soon, I will be going home with her. Every step I take between now and my departure, I am walking on a knife edge with this crazy girl who knows enough to ruin me.
“I think it’s weird your mama is a white lady,” Candace says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I can’t imagine what all your daddy was, huh?” Candace tells the ceiling.
I feel a lightning flash of temper, but I let it pass and fade.
“I don’t know.”
That puts us on more common ground. Candace only ever had a stepdad, and he was bad news. He’s one reason that her mama has lost parental rights forever and Candace is available to be adopted. She’s white, but she’s also an adolescent who’s been broken in ways that make people uncomfortable. Outlook not good on adoption.
“Here’s a weird thing about cats,” Candace says, abruptly. She shifts in the bed, rolling on her side to face me and scootching back. Now she teeters on the opposite edge of the mattress. The trench is between us, tipping us in toward each other. We both have to brace. “A mama cat is whatever kind of cat she is. Maybe she’s a calico. But she can have a litter with three kittens and one will be black, and one yellow, and one stripy, because they all have a different daddy.”
“Yeah. So?” I say, not following.
“Maybe you’re like that,” Candace says. “Maybe you’re all three kittens.”
I can feel my face flush. I’m pretty sure that in her crazy way, she’s called Kai a whore and me some kind of mutant. But all I say is, “That could be kinda cool, if I got three child supports. I’d be so rich. I could go to Disney World and stay all summer.”
Candace was hoping for a rise, and my attempt at humor agitates her. She blinks rapidly, then slithers in closer. Her breath is sweet, milky and butterscotchy, as if she’s been eating pudding.
“I had a secret dream,” she whispers. “In the nighttime. I was dreaming that your mama took us both. We both went home to live with her, and you let me pick out the color to paint your room. Isn’t that weird?”