“But?”
“You also smell like witch and vampire.”
I grunted. So she’d known, or could have known, exactly where I’d been and who I’d been with the moment she’d walked into the room.
“Might need some help with this,” I gestured at the brace.
She lifted her head off my shoulder. “Go on in. I’ll get some tape.”
She knelt next to our duffles and unzipped the side of hers.
I plucked the plastic bag used for ice out of the ice bucket on the top of the dresser and took it with me into the bathroom.
The room was still warm from her shower, and her perfume—honey and roses— hung sweet in the air. I inhaled, filling my lungs with the scent. Filling my mind with memories of her.
My body—my very flesh and blood body—responded to the sensation of warmth, heat, and the familiar scent of the woman I loved.
I chuckled. We didn’t have time for fooling around, no matter how much I liked that idea. Instead, I put my mind to reciting baseball stats to calm my blood.
I turned on the shower spigot, then tugged off my T-shirt. When I turned around, the bathroom door closed.
Lula stood there, her eyes filled with a hunger I hadn’t seen in a long time.
“Hey, handsome,” she said.
“Hey, yourself.”
She held up a roll of duct tape. I pulled the plastic bag out of my back pocket and put it over the brace on my arm.
We both knew there wasn’t time for us to linger with each other, to explore.
But we moved a little slower while she sealed the edges of the bag to waterproof my arm. We stood a little closer, breathed each other in, silent in our apologies, gentle in our touches, making promises to each other that we still had time. We werestill here, alive, and were more than just two people grieving a past, craving revenge.
There would still be time for us, for our lives, for our future. Because we wanted more than revenge, hardship, and fear. Because we had not given up on hope.
The night sky was cloudless,stars simmering like drops of water on a cast-iron skillet. Bug song filled the air with constant, hard whirring that irritated more than soothed.
We had the windows down, Lula guiding the truck to an empty spot on the concrete and gravel parking lot. Lorde sat at my feet, and Abbi perched between Lula and me.
The tires crunched as Lu slotted Silver into the farthest spot and turned off the engine. Sodium lights burned dust into yellow cones, spotlighting cars, trucks, motorcycles.
TheBuckin’ Bronc Honky Tonkwas a flat-topped concrete box that could have been a repair shop before it had gone bar. And while it wasn’t big, out here between towns, it was popular enough to half-fill the lot, including a couple 18-wheelers parked in the pullout just down the road.
Neon pentagrams shone in the small dark windows, and the bigger sign across the roof line spelled out its name next to a stylized horse kicking up its back hooves.
Each letterOin the sign had an upside-down five-pointed star in the middle of it.
“Do you smell vampires?” Abbi asked between long sniffs.
“Yes, but I’ve smelled them since we hit Texas,” Lula said. Then to me, “What?”
“You didn’t tell me that,” I said. “You smell them?”
“I didn’t think…I forget, sometimes what it’s like to be human.”
“I’m not human.”
“Closer. You’re closer to it than I am.”
