“What are you talking about?”
I swallow. “It’s what I imagine. It’s how it could be. The other life.”
He’s silent a moment. “Did you just come up with that?”
Does he like it? Butterflies flutter inside my belly, trapped and frantic. I need him to like it. To not say it’s silly. Childish. Idiotic. Selfish.
He reaches out and touches my hair, slides a strand between calloused fingers—the same two fingers that were touching me in my most private part just a few minutes ago. But his eyes look sad.
Please don’t say it’s silly, I beg him in my head. I’ve never needed anything more. A car stops behind us and honks, but I don’t care. I’m gasping for air, for light, holding on by a fragile thread.
He watches me wordlessly, soft green eyes rimmed with the sooty lashes. He repeats the motion, running that strand of hair through his fingers once again. “And your hair would turn light from the sun. It would turn the pale yellow of the moon. And you would be even more beautiful.”
Tears crowd my eyes, thick and bittersweet.
“And we would take walks,” he says. “We would collect wood to make a fire with every night. Sit outside and watch the sparks rise into the sky.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“It’s beautiful,” he says.
I watch him, suspended in midair.
He nods his head at the highway. The road back home. “Come on. Your class starts soon.”
“You said it was beautiful.”
“It is, but we can’t do it. We can’t just drive south. That’s not how it works.”
“How, then?” I’m suddenly angry. Angry that he went along with me even in daydreams. “How does it work?”
“Right now, it works with you getting back on that highway.”
I wait, trembling, my heart beating a rapid pulse against my ribs.
“Come on, Brooke.”
I take my foot off the brake and turn. I head back, merging, putting on the speed.
“You know that’s how it works,” he says. “I shouldn’t’ve—”
“You shouldn’t’ve what? Given me ideas? A taste of something I can never have?” I grip the wheel so tightly, I think it might break. It’s not like me, talking back like this.
He says nothing.
“Is that what you mean?” I ask, all twisted up in my chest, because I’ll never have that life. He might have it, with some woman from his life. A beautiful streetwise woman to sit with him next to a fire in the forest.
“Come on, Brooke.”
I shake my head because I know the answer. He thinks he shouldn’t have done any of it. The certainty is a cold feeling in my chest. “Because I have to finish high school and be this person I’m supposed to be.”
“You have to finish high school, that’s for sure.”
I stiffen my spine. “You give me things just to take them away. You’re toying with me.”
“I’m protecting you.”
“I think I’ve been protected enough, thank you very much. My mother. My father. Even Detective Rivera. I’ve been protected practically to death.” So much that I’m suffocating, like the plant in the box.
“Look at me,” he says.
I shake my head.
He lowers his voice. “Look at me. Take a good fucking look. You think this would be a pretty look on you?”
Because I have to obey him, I look—hard. But I’m looking past the bruise on his cheekbone, past his fat lip and his puffy eye, nearly swollen shut now. I look past the carved lines of his face, the way he’s made from rocks barely smoothed. Rough, unforgiving rocks in the shape of a human, more object than person.
I see his green eyes, soft and beautiful. I still feel his warm touch on my skin.
He frowns as if he senses my small disobedience. “The people I’m dealing with,” he growls, “this isn’t what they’d do to you. Or at least, not all they’d do. Do I want to protect you? Fuck yeah. Was it fucked up that I came to you? Seriously fucked up.”
“No, it’s not.”
He makes a rough sound, as though it’s impossible to quantify how fucked up it is that he came to me. Like even numbers can’t express it. Not even formulas from Sister Aggie’s third-hour trig class. “I shouldn’t’ve.”
“Then why did you?”
He glares over at me, and my heart does a flip-flop. He knew he shouldn’t come to me, and he did anyway. Because he couldn’t stay away.
He couldn’t stay away.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “I shouldn’t’ve. I have things to do, and they can’t involve you.”
“What things?”
“Things.”
Doesn’t he see how free he is? “You don’t have to do anything.”
“You’re wrong there, little bird. There are things that need to be done that only I can do. I have people counting on me, same as you.”
The Franklin City exits loom ahead. “Maybe I can help you.”
“Yeah? You know how to kill the monsters that come after your friends in their nightmares? Do you know how to glue somebody’s world together when it was shattered into a thousand pieces?”
I grip the steering wheel more tightly, wishing I did, wishing I could help him.
“You know how to break a guy out of prison? When you can’t even communicate with him?”
I look at him wide-eyed.
“Oh, don’t worry, he’s not actually guilty. He was framed—very expertly framed for a crime he didn’t commit. That’s the power of our enemies.”
“Why are you fighting them?”
He shifts in his seat and rests his head against the headrest. It comes to me that he’s tired and probably in a lot of pain. “Something that happened…you don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.” I frown. “I’m not a child.”
He looks at me a long time. Says nothing.
Hopelessness washes through me. I thought we had a connection that rose above age and every other difference between us. Does he see me as nothing but a schoolgirl after all?
I could drive for miles with a gun to my head, with his hand between my legs. But I can’t keep driving with this awful hopelessness. A sign for a rest stop appears ahead, and I take the exit with a sudden pull of the wheel.
“What are you doing?” he asks, his voice harsh.
“I’m stopping at this rest stop.”
He glowers. “Get back on the freeway.”
His voice is gravelly with threat, but I know he won’t hurt me. I pull into one of the empty parking spaces and turn the key.
There’s no one around. A couple of half-empty vending machines stand next to the doorway to the restroom area. A few broken picnic tables off to the side, scrubby weeds all around. A line of 18-wheelers are parked along the far end of the lot, but I don’t see any drivers.
The car quiets, making expectation loud between us. I get out.
Stone gets out his side, glaring at me over the hood of the vehicle. “What the fuck are you doing?” He slams the door.
“You can trust me. I won’t tell Detective Rivera.”
“Fuck Detective Rivera,” he says with a hard glint. It feels like a threat.