“What?” I picked up my head, yawning. “No, I think I fell aslee—where’s my purse?” I looked around frantically but Mr. Flip Phone reached out his hand to the bartender, and that guy passed over the little bag I’d carried tonight. “Oh, thank you!”
“Check inside to make sure everything’s there,” Stone told me, and the bartender glared but I did and said it was fine.
“Is it really two o’clock already?” I asked, yawning. When was the last time I’d been up this late on purpose?
“It’s after two. You’ve been down for the count on the bar for a couple hours,” he said, and that explained the pain I felt in my neck. “Let’s go.”
I hopped off the stool. The room was empty besides me and some employees. They were yelling back and forth and the house lights were on, but none of that had woken me. “I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” I explained as we went to the sidewalk. The summer morning felt much too cool so early, and I shivered. “What’s your plan?”
“We’ll head to my place. Is it supposed to rain today? I didn’t check any of the forecasts.” He stared into the dark sky. “Let’s go.”
But my paltry supply of street smarts also woke up and they waved a red flag about what he’d just said—not about rain, but the other part, how he’d wanted to head to his place. “Let’s go somewhere public,” I suggested instead.
“Like a city park with no one else around? Maybe a dark alley? An abandoned house? I kept track of you sleeping all that time and I’m not going to do anything bad to you now.”
In movies, this would have been the suspenseful moment where you would see that the woman was going to be an idiot and go with him. Was I that idiot? If something went wrong, who would be to blame? I heard the voice of my Contracts professor asking those questions in my mind.
Mr. Flip Phone stopped walking and looked down at me. “I’m not a bad guy, Camille.”
Maybe my street smarts had fallen back asleep like I wanted to, or maybe I just accepted his statement as fact because I wanted to believe that someone was decent. Maybe Stone really was, so I nodded and we set off again. “Where’s your car?” I asked.
“You can drive me home,” he said.
“Where’s your car?” I repeated.
“Where do they go to die? The scrapyard, right?”
“You don’t have one? Do the busses run this late?” I asked.
“I prefer to trick women into carting my ass around. No, I’m kidding,” he told me. “I can usually get a ride from the bartender, but he’s pissed at me.”
“Because you suggested that he stole something from my purse,” I said, nodding.
“He stole your credit card but I had already made him put it back before I woke you. I only told you to check your wallet as a reminder to both of you to be careful.” We’d arrived at whereI’d parked and he bent to look into my passenger seat. “This is a lot cleaner.”
“All the stuff that was in here before didn’t belong to me,” I said. My life was much emptier now. We got in, and he locked the doors before I remembered to. “What’s your address?” I asked. I put the destination he gave me into my phone and it let me know that we were eighteen minutes away (but that was always wrong).
“This is a nice car,” he said, and I remembered that he’d liked it before, too.
“Thank you.”
“But it has an engine problem,” he noted. “Something’s happening so that it won’t go over twenty miles per hour.”
“I’m going twenty-three!” I protested. “What if someone suddenly jumped in front of me? I want to be able to stop, don’t I?”
“Yeah, all these people lining the street…” He turned his head and looked up and down the deserted sidewalks. “I can understand your worry.”
“Why don’t you write a rap about what a bad driver I am? Wait, someone already did.”
He laughed, and I hadn’t heard that before. It was a deep, rolling sound and I started to smile, which turned into another yawn. “All right,” he said, and the next time I looked over, he was asleep in the seat next to mine.
It was only twenty-seven more minutes before we arrived at our destination, the home of Stone, Mr. Flip Phone.
Chapter 4
“Silas!”
The moment he opened his front door, a small figure with a large hat pelted down the stairs and flung itself at Stone. He bent as it approached and when he turned back to face me, I saw that he held a little girl in his arms. Maybe she wasn’t that little—more like seven or eight, I thought, but anyone would have seemed small compared to him. An eighteen-wheeler or a T-Rex would have, and a child sure did.
