The night we stop in Moab, I take the sutures out of Fallow’s face because it seems closed enough and he won’t stop complaining about them itching. He makes a big fuss abouthating it, but wakes me up in the middle of the night with a gentle, luxurious blow job that would only have been better if I could have run my fingers through his hair the way I wanted.
He spends a lot of time covering the wound with careful makeup. He’s clearly still concerned about his appearance, even though it’s just the two of us on the road and I’m obviously already under his thumb, but I don’t call him out on it.
We’re in the final leg of our journey when Fallow sits up sharply, pointing at something out the window that I can barely see in the dark.
It’s late, and this is a lonely stretch of freeway, so it’s easy for me to pull over and ask him what the fuck he’s pointing at.
“Can we go in there?” he asks, his eyes bright with excitement, even in the dark car.
“What is it?”
All I see is a big fence, a sign I can’t read and a squat but sprawling building edging onto the desert.
“An animal sanctuary. The sign says they have a nocturnal desert exhibition. I bet they have some very fucking cool lizards I’ve never seen before. Let’s stop and go inside! We can be fast.”
I look at it again with a frown.
“It’s the middle of the night, Fallow. It’s closed.”
He looks at me like I’m stupid, and maybe he’s right.
“Well then, it’s a good thing neither of us is a dastardly criminal capable of doing something as heinous as breaking and entering. In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.”
I pause, immediately weighing the pros and cons.
There are a lot of cons. It’s a waste of time, and as much as this place looks like a run-down lizard shack with minimal security, it’s an unnecessary risk to take that could potentially attract police attention to us.
The only pro is that Fallow looks like he might burst at the seams with excitement, and I might be powerless to say no to him. He knows it, too. I can tell.
This does seem like the perfect time to ask him the one thing I’ve been holding back, though.
“Why aren’t you in more of a hurry?”
He slow blinks at me, absorbing the question.
“Why aren’t you?”
I consider lying, but it sounds like too much effort.
“I don’t really think we need to be here. I think this trip is bullshit, so as long as you were content to wander, I was happy to take the break. I haven’t exactly had a lot of road trips and vacations in my life. Once we got a little distance from home, it felt nice. Peaceful. Apart from the Aryans busting in on us at the beginning, obviously.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t my favorite part,” Fallow says with a wince, grazing his fingers over his camouflaged cheek.
“Look, we both know I’m only tagging along because you wanted me to. Which is fine. I’m honestly starting to not give a fuck if we spend the next decade driving around the back roads of the desert, I’ve literally never had this much time in my life to just… be. But you had a plan, even though you lied about what it was, and you were the one saying we’d be there in two days. That was a week ago. So, you need to tell me what changed. I should be in on the plan before we risk ourselves on a lizard-related B&E.”
Most people would say he was staring at me blankly right now, but I’ve gotten to know him. I can see the conflict he’s working through, and I’m happy to wait.
“Fine. I don’t care about the human trafficking thing. Well actually, that’s not true. If we find human trafficking, I’d be delighted to murder the perpetrators. But that’s not why Iwanted to go. My sister’s name is Ellery, and I think that she’s your stripper den mother’s contact in San Francisco.”
I pause, then slowly interject, “Them. I thought it was them.”
“She’s my fucking sister! I’ll say what I want.”
His eyes flash when he says it, and he’s looking at me more threateningly than he has since we met.
Ooookay.We can unpack that in a later conversation, I guess.
“She—they—always hated living with Murphy, but they stayed for me. I don’t have anyone else I can trust, and they know it. Ellery was always kick-ass at the business, while I’m only good at the murder part, but Murphy is old fashioned. He didn’t want me to be a killer; he wanted an heir. He had one right in front of him, but Ellery has tits, so I guess that ruled them out. It was all getting tense and weird, and then he sprang it on us that he arranged for Ellery to marry some asshole from another crime family. Like medieval royalty securing a dynasty. No warning, no asking, just said it as if Ellery would automatically comply. I was ready to kill anyone I needed to in order to fix it, but I was too late.”
