Lashes brush against bare skin. Sticky against my cheek. Chase’s chest rising and falling beneath me.
I twitch at the sensation of something crawling on my arm. Push up, head pounding. Mouth like cotton.
Needing to pee.
I clumsily extricate myself from Chase’s arms. He’s sleeping so hard he doesn’t even move as his hand slaps back to his chest.
It’s smeared with dried blood.
I slide out of the backseat. We never bothered to shut the door. Glance down at myself as I unbutton my jeans.
Hands caked with blood like the murderer I’m supposed to be.
Squatting behind the Honda’s back bumper, I can’t help but wonder if somehow I am. If Otto would be alive right now if I’d stayed silent. Or if Chase had. Or I’d pointed to another exit. Or chosen a different car.
If we’d just all walked away.
Stop.
I notice something on the floor of the backseat as I come around the car.
Otto’s sketchbook.
I drop to sit on the ground beside the open backseat. Slide the sketchbook from the floor.
There’s blood spattered on the front of it.
I scratch it with a fingernail, brush a few bits away. After a moment, I open the book. Find myself looking at an older woman holding a casserole. Even though it’s a pencil sketch, I know her hair is gray. She’s laughing, in that bashful and self-conscious way people do when you compliment them. And I swear I can see the vivacious girl she once was in those wrinkled eyes.
I page through a few more until I come to the portrait of Noah. Wonder where he is now. If he had a contingency plan of some kind—a backup bug-out compound.
Surely he did.
I wonder if he planned to come back for Open Day.
And then realize it’s officially tomorrow. The same day the others are leaving. He could come back to find everyone gone.
Just Ezra, locked in the infirmary, raging with dementia.
Or dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
I flip through the rest of the pages, knowing we have to get going. That we’ve already lost far too much time.
But feeling like it’s only right that these drawings be seen, admired in Otto’s presence one last time.
I pause on the page he scribbled on. Was it really just yesterday?
I know kind eyes. Worried eyes. I see hurt heart.
There’s a line I didn’t see before at the bottom:
He loves U. U know. Dad loved Mom same look. His north always where she was.
I catch my breath and stare. How did I miss this?
And then I remember how I turned away when he started writing again, unable to take any more.
I become aware of Chase behind me.
“It’s true,” he says, his voice raw. “I love you, Wynter.”
I glance up at him, closing the sketchbook.
It’s always been this way between us since he learned about the night Magnus tried to rape me: that I come to Chase. The arm around me invites, but never pulls. His mouth opens in response to mine.
This time as I slide into the backseat after him, I hesitate, my mouth the span of a whisper from his lips. Close enough to feel their warmth like an electric charge, to taste the breath shuddering between them until his arm tightens around me, closing the distance between us at last.
• • •
I ALLOW MYSELF to drowse only a few moments. Because I can almost pretend we’ve stepped out of time to a place where only we exist. Needing the world to fall away.
And because it physically hurts to move.
But every minute skipping by costs more than the one before; we can’t afford to loiter.
Haven’t even discussed a plan.
I have one.
A bad one.
The cicadas are singing again.
I force myself out of the car. Shield my eyes against the sun as I try to get my bearings, the edge of the city to the east.
Something isn’t right.
“Chase.”
“Yeah,” he says, with forced alertness. He leans through the seats to peer at the dash. “Oh, my God.”
I pivot and squint directly at the sun shining a minute ago on my back. Search out the gravel road pointing directly toward it.
The color drains from my face.