39

After, Ben falls asleep, locking me in the cavern of his arms. It’s like eighty degrees in the room—that poor air conditioner coughing in the window is no match for the desert’s brutal heat—and Ben himself radiates warmth like a furnace. But I don’t move, even though I’m hot and sticky with sweat. I don’t want to move, and eventually I fall asleep. I wake up a bunch of times in the night, and every time I do, Ben’s arms are still locked around me.

And then I wake up in the morning, and they’re not, and I’m cold, even though the room, which never cooled down in the night, is starting to get hot again. I sit up. There’s no sign of Ben, though his stuff is in a neat pile in the corner.

I slip into the shower. There’s an achiness between my legs, my virginity freshly gone. Meg loved that I seemed tough and sexy, and was a virgin. And now I’m not. If she were here, I could tell her about it.

The shower goes icy, though it has nothing to do with the water temperature. Because I realize I couldn’t tell her. Because I did it with him. With Ben. And he was hers first, even if it was just once.

I fucked her. That’s what he said.

But I’m different. He and I, we became friends first.

The rest of that conversation hurls back to me. Before it all shot to shit, we were friends. And then: When you fuck a friend, it ruins everything.

No. This is different. “I am different.” I say it out loud in the shower. And then I almost laugh. Because how many other girls have fed themselves this line about Ben McCallister to make themselves feel better in the shower the morning after?

Faces flash before me: my father’s. The look of hatred for him on that teen girl’s face. Bradford’s look of fury when I said the thing about his son. The various shades of loathing I’ve seen on Ben’s face, which have no doubt been reflected on mine.

I think of one of the first emails I read from him. The one that got this whole thing started.

You have to leave me alone.

Through the cardboard walls, I hear the sound of the door opening and closing. I turn off the taps, now embarrassed to be in the bathroom with all my clothes out in the room. I wrap myself in as many towels as I can find, and tiptoe to my bag.

“Hey,” Ben says. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see he’s not looking at me, either.

“Hey,” I say back, eyes lasering in on my heap of clothes.

He starts to say something, but I interrupt. “Hang on. Let me get dressed.”

“Yeah, okay.”

In the bathroom, I throw on my dirty-even-for-me cutoffs and a T-shirt, and spend some time toweling off and trying not to think of how, out there, Ben would not look at me.

I take a deep breath and open the door. Ben’s busy mixing up some kind of drink. Without looking up, he starts talking superfast. “I was on a mission to find iced coffee. Apparently there are Starbucks here, but they’re all in the casinos, and I didn’t feel like dealing. But nowhere else had iced, not even the actual coffee shop. So in the end I got some fresh-ish hot coffee and my own ice, and I think that’ll work.”

He’s talking a mile a minute, babbling about iced coffee with the kind of caffeinated specificity I’ve only ever heard from Alice. And he still isn’t looking at me.

“I got half and half,” he goes on. “For some reason I like my cold coffee with milk. It reminds me of ice cream or something that way.”

Stop talking about coffee! I want to scream. But I don’t. I just nod.

“Do you want to hit one of those buffets, power up before we hit the road, or should we put some distance between us?”

Yesterday Ben said that the difference between him and me was that he learned from his mistakes. He was right. And I’m an idiot.

“I vote for distance,” I say.

His eyes flicker up for a second and then they skitter away, like I gave the right answer. “That’s cool. Whatever you want.”

I want you. I want to lie back down on the bed and have his arms lock around me. But I know that’s not how it works. When you fuck the bartender, the free drinks dry up. I learned this from Tricia. I learned it from Meg. I learned it from Ben himself. It’s not like he didn’t tell me exactly what he was.

“In fact, I need to get home,” I tell Ben.

“That’s where we’re headed.” He folds a shirt.

“Like, now.”

He stares at the bedspread on the mostly made bed we didn’t sleep in last night. “Car needs gas and probably oil,” Ben says. His voice is harder, that hint of a growl returning. “If you’re in such a hurry, you could take care of that while I pack up.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I say. His arms, the comfort of them, feel so far away now. “Meet you at the car?”

Ben tosses me the keys and I catch them, and he’s about to say something but then doesn’t, so I scoop up my crap and haul it outside. I’m gassing up, when my phone rings and I reach for it. Ben. This is so stupid. We’re both being stupid.

“Cody! Where the hell are you? You were supposed to be home two days ago.”

It’s not him. It’s Tricia. As soon as I hear her voice, my throat closes.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Mom?” I say.

“Cody, where are you?” I hear the fear in her voice. Because I never, ever call her Mom.

“I need to come home.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. But I need to come home. Right now.”

“Where are you?”

“Laughlin.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“Nevada. Please . . . I want to come home.” I’m about to lose it.

“Okay, honey, don’t cry. I can figure this out. Laughlin, Nevada. Cody, hang tight. I’m gonna work this out. Leave your phone on.”

I have no idea how Tricia is going to figure this out. She’s as broke as me. And she doesn’t know how to use a computer and she probably doesn’t even know where Nevada is, let alone Laughlin. But I feel better somehow.

x x x

Ben’s waiting downstairs in front of our room when I get back. I dig my sunglasses out and put them over my red eyes. I pop the trunk and he loads everything in. “I’ll drive,” I say.

It’s maybe not the best idea. I’m shaky, but at least if I’m driving, I’ll have something to focus on.

“Okay,” Ben mumbles.

“Tell me when you would like to stop and eat,” I say formally.

He just nods.

In the car, he focuses on the music, but the iPod adapter has died, so there’s only radio, and it’s all crap. He finally lands on a Guns N’ Roses song, “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” I used to like the song, but now, like everything, it’s digging a crater into my stomach.

“My mom loved this song,” he says.

I nod.

“Listen, Cody.” It sounds exactly like the Garcias and their And, Cody’s.

Before I can answer, my phone rings. I reach for it and it falls onto the floor. I swerve.

“Watch it!” Ben shouts.

“Answer it!” I shout back.

He scrambles for the phone. “Hello,” he says. He turns to me. “It’s your mom.”

“Tricia,” I say, taking the phone.

“You shouldn’t drive and talk at the same time,” Ben scolds.

I roll my eyes at him, but I pull on to the shoulder.

“Where are you now?” Tricia doesn’t ask me who answered or why I’m not in Tacoma like I said I would be. It’s never been her way to worry about the details.

“I don’t know. About twenty miles outside of Laughlin. On Highway 95.”

“Have you passed Las Vegas yet?”

“No. It’s not for another forty miles or so.”

I hear her sigh with relief. “Good. There’s a one-thirty nonstop flight on Southwest from Vegas to Spokane. Think you can make it?”

“I think so.”

I hear Tricia say something and in the background, lots of voices. “Okay, we’ll book you on that. If you miss it, there’s another after, but it connects through Portland, so you’d have to change planes.” I listen to her talk, like she’s some kind of travel agent, like we do this all the time, when in fact I’ve never been on an airplane before.

“Call me once you’re on the plane so I’ll know when to pick you up. They don’t let you go to the gate anymore, apparently, so I’ll meet you down at baggage claim.”

“Okay,” I say. Like any of this makes sense to me.

“I’ll text you the flight information,” she says, and I’m at once grateful to Raymond for introducing her to this technology. “And I’ll see you this afternoon. I’ll get you home.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“What are moms for?”

I hang up and look at Ben, who’s looking at me, confused, though I can tell he heard both sides of the conversation.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m gonna get out in Vegas, fly the rest of the way home.”

“Why?”

“It’ll be easier, faster for you; you won’t have to go out of your way.” The route from here to Seattle passes right through my part of eastern Washington, and now he’ll have to drive those thousand miles alone. But I am making it easier for him. That part is true.

We spend the next hour in silence. We get to the Las Vegas airport around noon. I pull in to the loading zone, where the cars are parked two abreast. Behind us, there’s beeping, mad rushing, like cowboys, moving the cattle along. I grab my things and Ben gets out of the passenger side, watching me.

I turn to him. He’s standing there, leaning up against the car. I know I have to say something. To thank him. To release him. Maybe releasing him is the way to thank him. But before I say anything, he asks, “What are you doing, Cody?”

It hurts. It all hurts so much. But this is wrong. In so many ways. So I say to him what I said all those months back, though there’s nothing flip about it. It’s maybe the most you can wish for anyone.

“Have a good life,” I say. And then I slam the door shut behind me.