HE SPENT THE EVENING DRIVING AROUND, TRYING TO get in touch with her, but she never picked up her phone. Finally he decided he would do what she had done. He would wait for her in front of her house.
“Hey,” she said, not looking the least bit surprised to find him sitting on her porch at one in the morning.
“I’ve seen Johnny,” he said.
“You mean at the Bowl.”
“No, I mean at the In-N-Out. Just now. He looked like he was on something. He was barely coherent.”
“Interesting.” So Sutton hadn’t lied—Johnny had left on his own.
“That’s it? You think it’s interesting?”
“What do you want, Nick?” she asked.
Neither of them was sure just what had happened between them, but the easy camaraderie between them had changed—shifted.
“What are they going to do with that kid up onstage at the Bowl? The pretender. Is he going to disappear too? Listen, I don’t know what you are doing, but I know you need to keep away from Sutton. He’s dangerous,” Nick said finally.
“Nick.”
“We need to find out more about TAP. That drink they give the kids—it’s dangerous. It’s fucked up Fish. She’s not the same person. We need to stop them. Will you help me?”
“No,” Taj said quietly.
Nick turned to her. “What do you mean, no?”
In answer, she showed him the inside of her wrist. Something that wasn’t there before. A tattoo. The angel wings. One million years of allegiance. It was a joke, she’d said. She’d dismissed it as nothing. But perhaps that was a lie too. She was one of them. She’d been Tapped.
“What does this mean?” he asked, holding her wrist up to the light and not quite believing what he was seeing.
She drew him closer, put her light hand on his cheek. He put a hand on top of hers.
She lifted up her chin and he leaned down. She kissed him. A long, passionate kiss. A kiss like the one they’d shared at the station. They kissed, and for Nick it was like time had stopped. He pulled her into his arms. Things were going to be okay. This was okay. This was what he had been waiting for.
Then she drew back. She looked at him sorrowfully.
“This is good-bye, Nick.”
“What?”
“We can’t see each other anymore.”
“Because of Johnny? Because you’re still in love with Johnny?” he asked, his voice tight.
“No. It has nothing to do with Johnny,” she said, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“But why then?”
“TAP is about loving everyone, not just one person. I’m sorry, Nick,” she said, as if she were reading from a script. Her eyes were blank and remote.
Then she walked into the house and locked the door.
This time, Nick could actually feel his heart breaking. And he realized that he’d been wrong. You could fall in love at seventeen. Desperately in love. No matter what she had done before, or why she was involved in the shadowy world of TAP, she was in something deep and scary and he needed to get her out. He needed to rescue her. He was going to find a way. If it was the last thing he did in his life, he swore he would do it.
Nick Huntington walked down the steps, took one last look back at Taj’s house, got in his car, and drove back to the Westside.
