“Honey, I tried. I did!” She sounded honestly regretful. “But he’s not picking up. And since I knew you were heading out Camden way, I figured maybe you could do a quick drive by and then get back to… you know, whatever you weredoing.”
Her dropped voice said she knew pretty muchexactlywhat I’d been doing. Or hoping todo.
“You’re killing me, Marci.Dead.”
“Hey! Don’t shoot the messenger. I’ll keep trying Mitch, too, okay? If I can get him, I’ll let youknow.”
I hung up and scrubbed a hand through my hair in frustration, probably making myself look like a porcupine, but who cared at this point? My evening wasshot.
I was ninety-eight percent sure Myrna Lucano had heard a car backfiring, or a tree branch creaking, or her own arthritic knee cracking; I would’ve bet my grandfather’s Porsche on it. And no doubt the camper had decided to simply hike on to the next location. But as long as there was that two-percent chance something else had happened, I had to check it out, just incase.
The hookup gods were cruel, and they wereflighty.
Reggie didn’t pause at his own stool, but came around the table directly to mine, resting his forearms on my chest in a proprietary way. “You ready to get out of here, hotstuff?”
I blinked. My dick was so on board with that, I could have cried. But at the same time, I wasn’t digging the whole PDA thing. I wasn’t closeted, but I had zero desire to parade my hookups around. Either this guy was new to small-town life, or he had no concept of keeping private shitprivate.
I grabbed his wrists and pulled him away from me a little more deliberately than I might have if I didn’t know sex was firmly off the table fortonight.
“Reggie, I just got a call from my dispatcher. There’s a situation back inO’Leary.”
Reggie frowned. “But it’s your nightoff.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “But small-town police officers are never fullyoff. Dates take a back seat to thejob.”
He took a step away and looked at me cautiously. “Is this, like, a blow-off?” hedemanded.
“No! No.Christ, no,” I assured him. “Literally, any night but tonight. I’m off tomorrow.”If my dick can hold out thatlong.
“Youpromise?”
“Yeah, totally. I’ll callyou.”
I put a hand on his back and ushered him to the front door. Outside, it was fully dark, and only the ancient red and white Dark Horse sign lit the parkinglot.
He pointed his key fob at a little red Nissan parked on the side of the building, and I walked him towardit.
“I could be free Saturday,” he announced, turning around to rest his ass against his car. He darted a glance at the front of my jeans and licked his lips in a way that was no doubt designed to make me regret leavinghim.
Itworked.
“Alright.” I nodded. “I’ll call youthen.”
I took another step closer and ducked my head to kiss him. His lips were warm as they met mine, and he gave an appreciative little moan. This guy was easy and uncomplicated, exactly what Iwanted.
* * *
Ten minutes later,I was driving down Route 222 toward home, my high-beams on and my windows wide open to the cool night breeze. I was trying to clear my head, but driving this road tonight did nothing to improve mymood.
O’Learians called this stretch ‘the Camden road,’ for obvious reasons, and we all learned to drive by negotiating its many switchbacks and tight turns. Tourists called it a scenic highway and stopped,illegally I might add, to take pictures, especially when the trees were decked out in scarlet and orange foliage. But for me, this was the road where my brother Matty had been taken from me while he and Molly, his best friend since preschool, had been driving back east to school after a weekend athome.
Matty had lost control of the car. That was the official cause of the accident. Swerved off the road for reasons no one would ever know, managing to careen down an embankment and into a tree with such force that Molly was thrown out of the car completely and Matty… Well, Matty managed to dislodge some part of the fuel system on his way down the hill, and the car went up in flames. That it was a nearly-impossible convergence of events — tragic mishap on top of tragic mishap — made it even harder to accept, especially for myparents.
It had all happened so long ago — nearly a dozen years now — that I could drive this road sometimes and not even think of it. And then, of course, there were times when I could see the burned-out wreck of Matty’s car imprinted on the backs of my eyelids with everyblink.
And tonight, as I navigated my truck around the final bend toward O’Leary, my headlights glinted off something shiny sticking out from the trees on the far side of the road that made me wonder if I was having some kind offlashback.
It was a car, goddammit. A little blue Toyota with out-of-state plates. And by the look of the skid marks, it had crossed the lane before wrapping itself around a huge-asstree.
