“Yeah.” I took a step away but stopped and turned back. “Thank you.”
“You already said that.”
“I know.” My cheeks blushed as he stared at me so intently, as if waiting on my every word. If only that were the case. “Sweet dreams, Karson.”
“Then I’ll have to dream of you.”
I rolled my eyes, covering up the fact that a cheesy line sent a swarm of butterflies fluttering in my belly. “Flirt.”
He winked. “With you? Always.”
Chapter Three
Clara
“Forty-seven,” Aria said as she wrote it on the wall.
That should have been cause for celebration. We were only forty-seven days from freedom. Why the freaking hell wasn’t I more excited? I mean . . . there was a little bit of anticipation. A lot of nerves. And mostly dread that seemed to grow faster than Aria’s plants as the number ticked lower.
Because in forty-seven days, Karson would be a memory.
He didn’t think we’d ever see the girls again, and what scared me the most was that he didn’t seem to mind never seeing three people that we’d lived and survived alongside. When Aria and I left, would he feel the same?
He’d stayed here for us. He clearly cared, right? Maybe we were different. Maybe . . .
“I was thinking of asking Karson to go with us.” I blurted the thought that had been in the back of my mind for two weeks. “Wherever we go. If you don’t care. I just don’t want him to be alone.”
“That’s cool. I don’t think he will, but I don’t care if you ask.” Aria put the marker away and scooped her hair into a ponytail.
Even though my sister and I were fraternal twins, we had similar features. Our mouths. Our noses. Our brown eyes. And our hair.
Or . . . we used to have the same hair.
Aria had come home with a dye box from the grocery store yesterday. Every week we kept five dollars out of our pay to use on whatever our hearts desired. Mine was normally spent on books or a tabloid magazine—another attempt to be like normal girls my age and fawn over the latest Hollywood heartthrob. Aria had spent hers this week to become a brunette.
“It’s going to take me a while to get used to seeing you with brown hair.”
She smiled and stroked her chocolate strands. “Me too. But I love it.”
If I ever dyed my hair, I was going lighter. Like Londyn. I wanted hair like sunshine.
“Okay.” She sighed, letting her shoulders sag. “We’d better go.”
I stood from my bedroll and followed her out of the truck. We were both working today and even though my shift started an hour after hers did, we were walking into town together. Then she would come to the diner and hang out until I was finished so we could walk home.
The two of us had just started down the path toward the gate when the creak of hinges echoed across the junkyard from Lou’s shack.
Aria and I both looked over as he shuffled out, heading for the fence with a ring of keys in one hand.
We slowed, waiting and watching, as Lou unlocked the padlock on the chain wrapped around the fence’s posts. He hadn’t noticed us yet. Or maybe he had but was just ignoring us. When it came to Lou, I wasn’t sure how much attention he paid to his teenage squatters.
Lou was wearing a white T-shirt, the cotton thin and dingy. Like everything around here, dirt had become a part of its fibers. Aria and I didn’t own a light color, not anymore. Anything we’d brought with us that had been white or a pale shade had been ruined early on. Even with a weekly trip to the laundromat, it was simply too hard to keep whites bright.
Lou’s jeans bagged and sagged on his frame, the faded red suspenders he wore at all times the only thing keeping them up. He was a big man, taller even than Karson.
He would have been a mountain if he had stood straight and pulled his shoulders back. As it was, they were always hunched and curled forward. The gray scruff on Lou’s face covered his jaw. The white hair on his head was oily and stuck up in all directions.
Lou finished with the padlock and shoved the fence open a few feet. Then he turned and trudged back to his shack, not sparing us a glance.
“See?” Aria shot me a smirk as she continued on to the fence. “Told you he loves us.”
“Maybe he has a customer coming.”
“He totally opened the gate for us so we didn’t have to squeeze through the little one today. Because he loves us.”
I laughed. “You’re delusional.”
“You know I’m right.”
Aria wanted to believe there was an adult in this world who looked out for us. Maybe she was right and Lou did care. Part of me wanted to believe it too because we’d never really know.
Lou had hardly spoken to us in years and with just weeks left to go, I doubted we’d ever know the man. Not one of us had set foot inside his shack, even Karson.
Following Aria through the gate, I cast a backward glance over my shoulder to Karson’s tent, but there was no sign of him. I hadn’t seen him in two days.
That time seemed precious now.
I just hoped he hadn’t gotten into any trouble.
“How about Florida?” Aria asked as we started down the road toward town.
“Too far away.”
“But it’s so green and there’s the ocean. I think I’d like the ocean.”
“It’s on the exact opposite side of the country. Traveling that far is going to cost too much. Besides, if you want the ocean, we can just find another place in California.”
“No. Never. I want out of here.” She spoke in a way that said she wouldn’t be back either.
“Um . . . how about Vegas?” I held my breath, hoping she didn’t immediately nix the other idea I’d been toying with lately.
Aria looked at me like I’d grown another arm. “Seriously?”
“It’s not that far away. There are tons of hotels where we could work as housekeepers or whatever. And there’s money there, Aria. It’s Vegas.”
“True,” she muttered, thinking it over for a few moments. “I guess if we didn’t like it, we could leave.”
“Exactly.” A rush of excitement swelled, exactly what I’d been searching for.
We walked a few more steps until she nodded and said, “Okay. Vegas.”
I smiled and did a fist pump with the hand she couldn’t see. I’d thought it would take more convincing. One of the line cooks at the diner had visited Vegas a couple of weeks ago and had told me he was getting ready to move there. He’d spent an entire shift telling me about the Strip and the hotels and how he’d already lined up another job.
The way he’d described the neon lights of the casinos had been so vivid that I’d wanted to see them for myself. There was no way I’d go without Aria. Since I’d convinced her so easily, maybe I could convince Karson too.
He wasn’t set on a certain place, at least not one that he’d told me about. So why not Vegas? The three of us could find a place to rent, an actual apartment with a roof and bedrooms and a bathroom.
Hope for that future blossomed as we walked. Visions of a living room filled with Aria’s plants and a TV for Karson to watch swirled in my mind. Maybe one day, Karson would be watching a movie on that TV and I’d be curled into his side on the couch that we’d picked out together.