“Except the Sinners,” he mutters, finishing off his second glass of water and pouring more for the both of us.
“I did my best not to,” I say, unsure where this conversation is going, but I don’t think it’s any place good and I don’t know why.
“You did good back there with Cross,” he says with a grin. “Your info was solid.”
Somehow I feel like the only part he thinks I did good at was the info part, not something else, something that’s nagging at him, making him distant, making us strangers after all we’ve already shared. But I could very well be imagining it. I don’t have the best grip on reality. So I won’t ask either.
“So how’s your mom now? Is she any better?” he asks.
I shake my head, glad for the change of subject and distraction. “I doubt it. I haven’t visited her for a while. She’s in this depressing, run-down asylum about an hour out of Vegas, and every time I go there, I come out feeling insane too. She just sits there and stares at the walls when I do come. She doesn’t even know I’m there, so I only go very rarely.”
“Sounds sad,” he says, kinda woodenly.
“It’s all in how you look at it,” I muse. “I’ve decided a long time ago to just have fun and do only what I want and what feels good. Life’s too short for anything else.”
The look he gives me is so sharp it cuts. But it’s gone the next second.
“So what’s your story?” I ask kinda sharply too, because that look threw me.” I told you mine, but I know next to nothing about you.”
“Except that I’m from Nebraska and don’t ever want to go back,” he says with a chuckle.
“Except that, yeah,” I say.
“It’s not a nice story. My dad’s a total meth head. He’s not even fifty and looked eighty the last time I saw him. He started out cooking and selling, but then he started using it. My mom left us when I was ten because of it, and I haven’t seen her since, and my father’s a mean son of a bitch. I try not to think of him too much. He might be dead, for all I know.”
He’s playing it cool, talking like all that is water under the bridge for him, but his eyes say different. They say he really, really wants to have a better and happier story to tell. I wish that for the both of us.
He’s shredding the napkin and I don’t think he even realizes he’s doing it. I reach over the table and take hold of his hands.
“Between the two of us, we’ve got a pretty sad mess of a childhood, don’t we?” I say and smile. “How about we promise each other it’ll be better from here on out. Right here and now. Let’s make that promise.”
He looks at me skeptically and searchingly, like he’s trying to see if I’m telling him the truth. I am, and I reinforce it by smiling even wider. It finally paints itself onto his face too, making it shine bright and fresh and like a dream come true.
But it doesn’t last, because the waitress makes us break apart so she can set our food down.
The rest of our meal passes in a much friendlier way. I get no sense that he’s judging me, and I end up getting a second plate of fries and a chocolate milkshake because I seriously misjudged how hungry I actually was. By the time I tell him it’s because he’s made me burn so many calories last night, he’s all mine again and I can’t wait until we’re together again, alone in the moonlight, making love.
The president—Cross—and Ace return right on the dot, two hours later to pick us up from the motel. They arrive in a beat-up looking, dark blue pickup truck with tinted windows and no distinguishing marks on it, unless you count the dents and rusted parts. But I bet no one sees those, since all hard used pickups look like this one.
They put me in the back with Ace, while Cross and Colt sit in the front. It’s so none of the Sinners will recognize us in case they are in the town and watching, Ace explains once we’re all seated.
“OK, so which way?” Cross asks, his eyes piercing me even though he’s looking at me through the rearview mirror. Weird how that works. But the guy doesn’t scare me, not really. He just demands a high level of fearful respect and there’s no not giving it to him
“It’s better if we go to the Sinners’ bar first,” I stammer. “I know the way from there best. I don’t know the rest of this town very well, so I’d just get us lost if I tried to figure it out.”
Cross shakes his head. “That’s out of the question. We’re not going anywhere near that place. Try harder.”
I swallow, wishing I could. But I left the bar a grand total of three times. One of those was with Piston to go see the ghost town, and the other two times were visiting the nearby mall with Stormi. Normal life was so far out of my reach, while we were held there, I didn’t even want a taste of it, because I wanted it back so bad.
Colt is looking from me to Cross kinda protectively.
“You said it was along the same road we took to get to this motel,” he says, trying to help. “Was it in the direction we took?”
“I don’t know, we went over a field that time,” I stammer, still trying really hard to remember the route me and Piston took that night.
“There’s basically just the dirt road passing the bar,” Ace says. “Did you go down it to the left of the bar or to the right?”
“The left,” I say. “I know because it’s the opposite direction to than the way to the mall. Then we made another left onto the main road. And then just straight.”
I’m as sure as I can be about this, but I’m not completely certain. It was a long time ago, and my mind was on other things, I wasn’t watching the road very closely.
“It’s further down this road then,” Ace says after thinking about it for a while. “It’s gotta be.”
I hope so hard that he’s right because I’m not sure about anything anymore.
“It was surrounded by hills, and just a dirt road led to it, I remember that,” I supply. “And there was a tall rusty gate on the entrance to it, and I think a barbed wire fence around it. Piston had to unlock the gate so we could go in.”
Oh, man, this information I have is so useless. We’re just gonna ride smack into a bunch of Sinners, and then they’ll finish what Crow started before I killed him. What the fuck am I doing in this car.
“Was the town visible from the road?” Cross asks.
“Yeah, a part of it was, like one side of it was, but not the actual gate,” I say. “We should stay away from the gate, otherwise they’ll see us.”
Cross and Ace share an amused look. “We’ll make sure we’re not seen,” Cross assures me as he puts the truck in drive and takes off. “You just keep your eyes on the road and see if you can recognize any of the landmarks to tell us we’re near.”
“OK,” I say and turn my head to better see outside.
But that was easier promised than done. One shrub looks exactly like all the others lining this road and, besides, it was full dark when me and Piston rode this way. If it was even this way. I’m not sure about anything anymore.
But Colt is giving me very assuring looks and smiles each time I glance at him. So I am sure that whatever else happens, we’re in this together all the way. Man, I hope that lasts forever, because I really, really want it to.