Maybe I would have thought that, before I knew her. That first night, when all I had been able to see was a pretty dress and wide eyes. “Did you know that birds have different meanings?” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“The cardinal, for example. It symbolizes truth and beauty. And the crane. It represents integrity. Honor.”
“Which one would you be?” she asks, almost cautious.
“Me?” I consider a moment. “The eagle, maybe. Freedom. And pride.”
“And a bald head?” she asks, a teasing lilt in that voice.
Her teasing note does something strange in my chest. I feel energized, suddenly. Too large for my body. She trusts me enough to play.
We’re stopped at a light. I look over. “I’m not that old,” I growl.
“Older than me.”
That sobers me up quick. I’m older than her, both in years and in spirit. I lived an entire lifetime before I stepped foot outside that basement. “Older than you,” I agree softly.
She gives me a curious look. “What bird would I be?”
I pull the broken bird from my pocket and hold it out. Her breath hitches. She takes it and runs her fingers over the wood.
“What is this?” she asks, holding the little thing in her palm.
“What does it look like?” I say, too harsh. “It’s a hummingbird.”
“You made it?”
I shrug, heart hammering inside my agonizingly painful rib cage. I spent the past twelve hours at the mercy of guys who wouldn’t blink to see me dead, but somehow the stakes feel higher right now.
She looks into my eyes. “It’s beautiful.” She reaches over, touches my arm, sending ripples of warmth through me.
I shrug, like it’s nothing, like her words and her gentle touch don’t do things inside me. Like I’m not dying a little from it. I can force myself on her, the way I did through the phone, but it’s another thing when she reaches for me. It’s more raw somehow.
“What does it mean?” she asks softly.
“The hummingbird symbolizes movement. Change.”
“Oh,” she says, more a shape of her pretty lips than a sound. She takes her hand from my arm and touches the place where the end of the wing got bent. She tries to straighten it, but stops, seeing that will just break it more.
“In some Native American tribes, it means good luck if you see a hummingbird,” I say.
Her eyes meet mine. “What if the hummingbird is injured?”
“Then you nurse it back to health,” I say, my voice low. That isn’t part of any bird symbolism that I know about, but it’s the only answer I can give her. She’s still looking at me, and I can’t look away from her.
My lip throbs. My eye feels half-closed. No doubt I’m a sorry-ass sight, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she looks at me.
The traffic around us starts to move. The light has changed.
“Am I broken?” she whispers.
I take the little thing from her and set it on the small ledge by the speedometer. “Drive,” I tell her, not taking my eyes off her.
Her gaze returns to the road, her hands to the wheel.
She takes the left like I told her, heading for a long stretch of road out of the city. There are tears in her eyes, but I ignore them. There’s grief in her body, but I ignore that, too. Or maybe I’m not ignoring her. Maybe this is the only way I know how to make her feel better.
My hand returns to her thigh, pushing up her plaid skirt. Suddenly I’m touching skin. I thought she was wearing tights, but they’re thin socks. They go way up her leg, until they stop. She’s whisper-soft, like I’m in a dream.
“Oh God,” she whispers.
It’s as though she’s whispering what I’m feeling. Because her skin is unbelievably smooth. Warm. I watch her face in profile, the rise and fall of her chest.
“Stone,” she whispers.
“What? You want your leg back?”
“No,” she says.
My pulse races. No. She doesn’t want her leg back. I inch my hand farther up.
She turns to me. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know.”
She stares at me a beat, wondering what kind of madman she’s with, maybe. “You don’t know?”
“Eyes on the road.”
She turns to the road.
“I don’t know a lot of things,” I say. “Like whether you’ve fucked. Have you been fucked, sweetheart?”
The line of her throat moves as she swallows.
“Have you?”
“No,” she says.
But she was kissed. She told me. It burns me up to think about other guys kissing her. Wanting her. Seeing her. I want to lock her up in a tower, like some kind of fairy-tale princess. I guess that makes me the dragon.
She turns back to the road. Says nothing. Drives.
“Have you been touched?” I move my hand higher. I feel her skin, alive with electricity under my rough calluses. “Like this? Anyone touch you like this?”
Her chest rises sharply. The air in the car seems to thicken. “Are you asking if I ever had a boyfriend?”
Right. Of course. I guess if you’re a good girl like Brooke, it’s your boyfriend or girlfriend who touches you. You don’t have the touching without the relationship. “Just answer the question. Have you?”
Her words, when they come, are wild, breathy. “Not like this.” She glances at me, and I feel her all through me just then. I feel her eyes burning into mine. “Not like this,” she says again, emphasizing the word. As though this—what’s happening with us right now—feels as amazing to her as it does to me.
I want to kiss her so bad it hurts. A physical ache in my chest worse than any broken bones inside there. I tighten my grip on her thigh. “Take the next left.”
She flips on her blinker, takes the turn.
This next stretch is a straightaway south out of town. She takes a breath like she does when she’s about to say something hard. I steel myself, sure she’s going to ask for me to stop touching her. Or to go home.
She turns to me. “Do you ever think about just driving?”
“Driving where?”
“Nowhere. Get in a car and drive forever. Or at least, you know, until you’re somewhere so far away that you’re just new. A new person with a new life.”
My gut twists a little, because that’s something you say when you’re unhappy. That’s what you dream about when you want to escape. I know the feeling well. “Do you want that?”
“Sometimes,” she says.
I think back to the basement. Us boys imagining all the things we’d do if we were free. Each of us with our own specific idea of how things would be. Knox imagined his own workshop full of robots and blinking lights and computers. Calder wanted to be on a mountaintop, seeing the sky all around. Nate wanted to be a doctor, a vet, and he would have his own farm, too. I didn’t imagine things for myself, though. I just thought of my guys, safe. Free.
“What would the new life be like?” I ask her.
She says nothing for a long time. So long that I think she’s not planning on answering my stupid question at all. Then, in a voice that sounds small and strained, she says, “I don’t know.”