The intimate look fell off of Asher’s face.
“Dawn…” he started to say. Then suddenly, he stopped, his eyes refocusing on something over my shoulder.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. And I almost wasn’t surprised to see who he was looking at when I turned to follow the direction of his gaze.
Victor. Victor stood at the place where the paths to our grad building and the one that led to the parking lot intersected.
Without another word to Asher, I rushed away from him and towards Victor.
“Hey, Victor!” I called out, waving at him happily as I approached. He was dressed in the same suit as this morning. Black-on-black. It made me feel like a raven had just set down on our arty campus.
A very serious raven.
“What were you talking to that guy about?” he asked without smiling or waving back.
“I’m hosting the Group B soft thesis presentations this Sunday,” I answered, the lie seamlessly flowing from my hands and mouth. “He needed the address since he’s never been over to the house.”
Victor paused, looking somewhat mollified. “He’s never been to the house?”
“No, never,” I answered quickly, so happy to be able to tell him the truth for once. “I was actually planning to ask you about Sunday. I don’t know what your situation is with big groups. And I didn’t want to surprise you with everyone from my grad program suddenly showing up on Sunday at 1 PM., for like, six hours’ worth of presentations.”
He considered my words, then signed. “I will remain upstairs while your group is at the house. I have a few things I can do for my import/export business.”
I laughed at his reference to his fake career and started us walking. In the opposite direction of Asher, thank goodness. But then it occurred to me to ask, “Wait, what are you doing here?”
“I want to take you somewhere,” he said.
“Where?” I asked. “Grocery shopping?”
“No,” he answered with a smug smile. “It’s a surprise.”
27
VICTOR
“Does this surprise include bathroom breaks?” Dawn asked Victor after the third hour of driving.
A fair request. They had been on the road a while, and he needed gas anyway. He pulled into a station. However, Dawn didn’t immediately get out.
“So I know we’re going south. The highway signs told me that much,” she said, turning to face him in her seat. “But how close are we to our final destination?”
“Another couple of hours of driving,” he answered.
Dawn squirmed, and he didn’t think it was because of her need to use the facilities.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s just…that soft presentation I mentioned earlier is, like I said, on Sunday. And this surprise of yours is really far away. I just want to make sure this isn’t….”
She cut her eyes to the side and trailed off, not finishing. And Victor suddenly understood why she was acting so wary and hesitant.
She thought he was sabotaging her. That this surprise was actually another punishment in disguise.
Guilt hit him like a gut punch. Hard and without warning. So it felt like he was choking a little when he rushed to assure her, “I’ll have you back home by tomorrow. You won’t miss anything. I promise.”
The word promise brought up an old memory. And without thinking about it, he added, “no cheat.”
Her eyes widened, and she let out a surprised laugh. But then a suspicious look came over her face as she signed-asked, “Is the surprise fruit?”
He’d forgotten this about her. How much she made him laugh.
“It’s not fruit,” he vowed, his shoulders shaking.
“It had better not be,” she mock-threatened before finally getting out of the car and heading into the station to use the restroom.
As soon as she left, the smile disappeared from Victor’s face, however. And his eyes went to the oversized tote she’d dumped in the backseat. It had a cartoon red panda on it. And she’d used it over the last few months as most would a school backpack.
He made a big show of getting out of the car, grabbing the gas nozzle, and jamming it into the Audi’s tank. But as soon as she was out of eyesight, he opened the car’s back door and rummaged through her tote.
The item he was looking for didn’t take long to find. After just a few seconds of searching, he found a burner smartphone in the tote’s inside pocket, the kind that required cards with minutes as opposed to a formal plan. It was so cheaply made, it looked like a toy.
But it wasn’t a toy. It was just as he’d suspected. She had a secret phone. That was how she’d been in contact with her brother, whose number hadn’t appeared in the history of the iPhone X he’d had Wayne give her.
Who else had she been calling on it? Her father? And perhaps someone else…
The memory of how close Asher Peretz had been standing to Dawn before he saw Victor came back to him in a rush. And it made his chest burn.
Nonetheless, he returned the phone to the tote. He’d do the necessary work to unlock the cheap device later. But for now, he’d have to trust Dawn enough not to let this discovery derail his surprise.
He was just putting away the nozzle when Dawn returned to the car.
“When’s the last time you actually had to fill up your own tank with gas?” she asked with a teasing tone.
“It has been a while,” he admitted. “But I remembered how to, don’t worry. There will be no Z-O-O-L-A-N-D-E-R accidents.”
She burst out laughing after he spelled out Zoolander. That had been her brother’s all-time favorite movie for some reason. And Byron had somehow convinced Victor to watch it during one of their coverup hangouts at his place. The movie had been in English, but the comedy had been so baffling. It had taken Dawn and Byron more time for them to explain to him why it was supposed to be funny than to watch it.
“So you’re really not going to tell me where we’re going,” Dawn asked, still laughing as I got back into the Audi.
He paused in restarting the car to remind her, “It’s a surprise.”
“Is it vegetables?” she demanded. “Because the only thing worse than fruit would be vegetables.”
“It’s not vegetables,” he answered, his shoulders once again shaking with laughter.
Many of The Silent Triad members had never seen Victor smile. But he’d laughed more with Dawn over the last few weeks than he had over the previous ten years.
Really, over the last fifteen years.
And he was beginning to get used to it.
That realization gave him pause as he waited for her to finish buckling up her seatbelt. They were only pretending. But somehow, she was doing it again. Making him laugh. Making him happy. Making him feel more alive than he had since…
Well, since her.
“At least tell me where we’re going?” she bargained as he pulled out of the station.
He raised one hand from the wheel to once again say, “It’s a—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dawn cut him off with the roll of her eyes. “It’s a surprise.”
He was saved from answering any more questions when he got back onto the highway and needed both hands to drive.