The second the door shuts, I ask Logan to stay on the couch and run to the hallway.A hand sticks out of the guest room and curls, beckoning.She really is ridiculous.
I slip inside and she shuts the door without a sound.The room smells like cedar and mint tea.
“Why hide?”I ask.
“Because it’s easier.”
“Easier than what?”
“Being seen,” she says, like it’s obvious.
I hesitate, then push.I don’t want to ruin this friendship before it’s begun but I need to know.“Why do you stay away from his brothers?You clearly care about Cassius.You came here for me.”
Her shoulders go still.“Brother,” she corrects, voice flattening.“I avoidonebrother, because when you let people close, you hand them things they can use against you.”
I nod, throat tight.“Love is a weakness.”
Something in her eyes softens.“Sometimes,” she says.“But unlike Cassius, I’m not afraid of being weak.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Making him weak.Making him a target.”
The words land heavier than they sound.I don’t know Sava, not really, but from the way she moves, I’d bet she isn’t afraid of knives or blood.It feels more like she’s afraid of being the reason someone she cares about takes a bullet meant for her.The thought slides under my ribs.I think of Cassius, of all the ways I could be the soft spot that gets him hurt, and my chest goes hot-cold, hot-cold.
I realize it then.I’m not afraid of bleeding.I’m afraid of being a lever someone grabs to hurt him.Love is a weakness.And I don’t want to be the one they use to reach him.
And yet I can’t make myself walk away.Since him, I’m braver than I ever remember being.Even the dead seem to point me toward him, like every whisper and flicker exists to herd me to the same streetlight.Alone, I could be ordinary and safe.With him, I’m something else.We’re something else.Something bright, volatile, impossible to ignore.Maybe that’s how love outruns weakness.It won’t ever be harmless, but nothing worth risking everything for ever is.When both the living and dead both tell you to turn back, that’s when you know you’ve found something worth following.
“Will I see you again?”I ask.
“Count on it,” she says, stepping in, one arm sliding around my shoulders in a quick, bracing pull.She leans in, breath warm at my ear.“With him, you’ll never be alone again.With me, you’ll always have a friend.Lock up behind me.”
The overhead light doesn’t blink.The dead don’t argue with her.That scares me more than if they had.
The latch clicks a second later, and I’m left staring at the door, wondering how she already knows me well enough to say exactly what I need, like we’ve been walking toward this moment for years.
seventeen
Logan drivesme home after work and I spend Monday evening struggling to fit my things into Cassius’ space.It’s hard to put my life in his drawers, his closets, his bathroom cabinets.I wish he were here so I could ask his opinion on where to place things, but it’ll have to wait.He should’ve been home by now.Adrian calls me Tuesday, early, to tell me Cassius has been delayed and not to expect him.Because I’m up, I pick a book off the wooden shelf next to Cassius’s side of the bed and read until it’s time to get ready for work.
When I go downstairs, the ghosts crowd my kitchen.The Bolo-Hat man, who seems to have moved in when I did, is posted at the sink.The grocery-store creep is also here, with his collar forever blooming red, and so is a gaunt man who carries his own head in his hands.
“Morning,” Bolo-Hat says, brim tipping.“Don’t mind the crowd.This desert’s always been full of watchers.”
“Why are you suddenly talking?”I ask, because he usually doesn’t.
“Some days the veil’s thinner.”His gaze tracks the window, the light beyond it.“Name’s Gideon, because you’re answerin’.Wasn’t much here when I ran it.Railroad dirt and a string of shacks.By ’11 they’d blessed it proper and called it a city.”
He looks pleased at my silence, then goes on.“But when 1920 hit, the country went dry.This place?Fremont had its honest storefronts in the sun and its sins in the shade.Block 16 took care of both.You wanted a hand of cards, a girl, and a song, you found the right back door.”
“You were running liquor,” I say, before I can stop myself.
His mouth quirks.“The road that’d become Highway 91 was just a track scraped through cactus with Los Angeles one way and Salt Lake the other.We ran the desert by stars.City men drank our gin from coffee cups and called it medicine.”He taps his brim, eyes bright.“Then they started the big dam.Built a clean little company town downriver where a man couldn’t buy a beer for love or money.So the crews came here on payday.”
I picture the heat, dust, and hidden doors.His words paint it for me until I can almost smell it.Colored bulbs winking and laughter poured low so the law can pretend not to hear.Men in rough denim with dam dirt ground into the seams spilling out of buses from the government’s shiny, dry company town downriver, pockets fat, throats thirsting.They hide their pay in their boots and trade it for cards, for music, for women, for a coffee cup that steams like tea and smells like juniper and trouble.
Gideon fits there.Alkali dust rims his boots.A silver watch winks at his wrist before it disappears under a cuff.He doesn’t swagger.He occupies.He slides through the alley beside a bakery that pretends it only sells bread, knocks twice on a door that blooms a rectangle of lamplight, and sets oil-cloth bundles on a flour-dusted table.The “tea” is clear as a church confession but bites.Bathtub gin cut with citrus peel to hide the sting, rye that smells like the inside of a new wood barrel.
