“I, um . . .” Tell her.
The words clogged my throat.
Why was I so scared to confess that I’d been with Karson? I was in love with him. People in love had sex. But I couldn’t get my mouth to form the sentence.
“Um, what?”
“Nothing.” I swallowed hard. “Once Karson is done, I’m going to take a shower too. Then we should talk.”
“I’m just glad I showered before the cops showed up.” She plopped down on her bed. “They totally would have seen me coming out of the shop.”
“Maybe we should start showering at night.”
“Maybe.” Her gaze was focused on the truck wall, her forehead furrowed. She was staring at today’s number.
One.
It wouldn’t matter when we showered because today was our last day.
Tonight was our last night.
The urge to cry came on so strong I almost dropped to my knees.
The shop door slammed again, this time not as loud. I blinked the tears away and collected my soap and towel, then went to the shop, finally breathing when I was under the warm spray.
I hated the idea of washing away Karson’s kisses. His touches. My body was sore in places I’d never been sore before, and the tenderness between my legs was going to make work difficult today. It was my last shift at the diner.
Still, despite the ache, a smile toyed at my lips as I toweled off.
Karson and I had had sex. We’d been as intimate as two people could get.
Would he change his mind about Vegas now? Did he feel the same way about me that I felt about him?
Dressed in fresh clothes and smelling like my soap, I hurried to the truck, finding Karson already there, waiting with Aria.
“Hey.” I gave him a tiny smile.
With his back to Aria, he winked at me. “Hey.”
“So what do we do?” Aria hopped out of the truck to pace beside her buckets of plants.
Karson dropped to the truck’s edge, sitting so his legs could hang over the end.
And I took the space by his side, careful not to get too close. What I wanted to do was pull him aside, to see if we were okay. To let him kiss me again. But not until we talked.
“I don’t understand why she’s doing this,” I said. “Your mom. Why couldn’t she just let you go? You ran away. You’re done with her.”
Karson scoffed. “Like I told you last night. She’s crazy and desperate. Her life’s mission is to make mine hell.”
“I hate her,” I spat, fury racing through my veins.
“Join the club,” he mumbled. “She won’t stop. And I don’t like that look the cops had when they left. I think they knew Lou was lying.”
“If they come here again, they’ll find us.” Aria waved to our home. “Three teenagers are sort of hard to miss.”
Karson nodded and turned to face me. No. The look in his eyes made me want to scream.
I knew before he opened his mouth what he was going to say. “We’re leaving tomorrow anyway.”
“Yeah.” Aria ran her hands over a pink bloom from a bucket. “We’ll be gone first thing in the morning.”
My heart was breaking.
This had always been the plan. Always.
“Come with us.” My plea escaped before I could stop it. “You could come with us.”
The look Karson gave me was so gentle and kind, I wanted to die.
Because in that look was his answer.
No. He wouldn’t come to Vegas with us.
“It’s okay.” I waved it off so he wouldn’t have to come up with an explanation.
“Clara.”
“It was just an idea.” I got to my feet and went into the truck, folding up the clothes I’d worn last night. They were trash. I’d leave them behind. Still, I folded.
“What time are you going to work?” Aria joined me in the truck.
I glanced at my little clock. “I’d better leave soon.”
When I turned to Karson, he was staring at the number on the truck’s wall.
One.
Time was up. We’d just started this. And now it was ending.
Without so much as a glance in my direction, Karson jumped down and vanished.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to yell. I wanted to beg him not to leave us.
Instead, I blinked away the threat of tears.
And went to work.
“Hey.” Karson knocked on the side of the truck.
I tensed as he hopped inside. “Hey.”
“How’s it going? It looks different in here.”
“Yeah.”
After my shift had ended, Aria and I had spent the afternoon and early evening organizing. The items that were coming with us were stowed in our backpacks, ready for tomorrow. Everything else we’d moved to the front of the truck. The bedding. The books. The clothes. The forgotten pieces that would probably remain in this truck until the end of the junkyard’s days.
“Where’s Aria?” he asked.
“Moving her plants. She’s staging them beside Lou’s.”
“Does she need help?”
I shook my head. “I think she wanted to be alone for a while. She was going to write him a note.”
“Clara, about Vegas.”
“You don’t have to explain. I get it. You’ve done your duty and stayed to watch us. You don’t deserve to be chained to us anymore.”
“Is that how you think I feel? Chained?”
I lifted a shoulder. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Then why?” I asked even though I knew the answer. My voice was too loud and it bounced off the metal walls.
The emotion was bubbling up and I was about to lose it, so I gave him my back, not wanting him to see me cry. I’d had to take three breaks from the dishwasher today to run to the bathroom and cry. When my boss had given me my final pay, I think she’d thought the tears in my eyes had been because I was leaving.
“Because you shouldn’t be chained to me.” His hand came to my shoulder and his thumb circled the bare skin of my neck. “Would you look at me?”
“I can’t.” My voice cracked.
“Clara, you deserve this fresh start. I won’t risk ruining it for you. What if I got caught stealing? What if I got into another fight? What if someone asked when we started having sex and then I got put away for statutory rape?”
My hands fisted at my sides. He could stop stealing. He could stop fighting. “I would never tell.”
“I’m not going to make you lie for me. I won’t ruin you too.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I might. I don’t want to take that chance.”
My throat burned. “Even for me?”
“Especially for you. We all deserve to be set free.”
Yes, he did. Karson deserved to be set free.
No matter what I said, he truly thought of himself as a toxic person. Maybe if I’d seen it sooner, years ago, I could have convinced him of the truth. But after weeks, I couldn’t even persuade him to go exploring with me in Vegas. How was I supposed to convince him that he was not the person his mother had spent sixteen years telling him he was?
I didn’t have sixteen years to fix this. I only had a day.