Fallow crosses his arms over his chest and looks out of the window for a second. When he looks back, I can see tears shining in his eyes, which is not something I ever expected to happen.
“She just left me,” he says, his voice rising in a wail.
I’d correct him again, but I’ve never seen him in anything like this kind of emotional distress, and I’m scared to make it worse.
“The next morning Ellery was gone and I was alone. The only reason I know they hadn’t been kidnapped was that they left a note. And that they would rather die than be taken. Again.”
Fallow isn’t crying, but he sniffs, and I can tell that he’s right on the edge. All I want is to reach out and touch him, and I’ve never felt so fucking neutered as I do in this situation right now.
He shrugs, still not looking at me.
“I followed the trail here. They always wanted to come home, anyway. I was okay with Murph taking us with him after our parents died. It was a whole Banna drug deal gone wrong, and I think he took pity on us. We didn’t have any other family, and it beat the hell out of child services. Be some fancy crime man’s spoiled pet, have plenty of money as long as we performed tricks on command. As long as everyone mostly left me alone, I was fine. Ellery said it was a trap, though. That we didn’t belong. They wanted freedom the whole time, and I guess that was the final fucking straw.”
Fallow looks at me, still with his arms tight over his chest, rubbing his own arm absently with a thumb the way I wish I could do.
“I would have come with her if she’d asked. But she must’ve wanted to be free from me as well as everyone else.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, because there’s nothing else to say. But it’s making a lot of things fall into place. “Are you scared that once we find them, they’ll run away from you again?”
“Fuck off,” he says in a quiet voice, which I take as a yes. “Honestly, I never got the whole freedom thing. But once we were out here, I started to feel it. The lack of expectations. Being able to make all your own decisions. It’s tempting. It makes a little more sense to me, I suppose.”
There’s a deep, dark undercurrent of sadness in his voice, and I don’t know what I can do about it.
“Look,” I say, not really knowing where I’m going with this. “I think it’s clear that I bought my ticket for this ride. If you want me to keep driving around and looking at lizards, we can do it. Fuck the Banna. We’ll go back when we feel like it. But if you want my opinion, we should get the Ellery part over with. They might surprise you, and at least you’ll know they’re okay, so you don’t have to worry.”
“Fine.”
Fallow stares at me for a minute, and I feel like he’s waking back up from wherever he went while he was telling me that story.
“You’re ridiculous,” he says, prompted by nothing. “You understand that, right? Absolutely absurd. This—” he waves a hand at me, “is not a combination of attributes that is supposed to go together.”
It’s probably the closest to a compliment I’ve ever gotten from him, so it’s hard to suppress my smile.
“Maybe you’re not the only one who’s a contradiction. I’m just not as much of a show-off about it. And I don’t have a butterfly knife.”
Fallow nods slowly, like this is a critical issue.
“You would look fucking sexy with a butterfly knife. We should get you one.”
“Yes, dear.”
That almost makes him laugh, and I take it for the win that it is. In a normal way, of course. Not a heart-clenching butterflies type of way, because I’m a hardened criminal and I don’t get butterflies.
“Okay. We can go see the lizards. But if we get arrested for this, you’re calling Murph to bail us out.”
His smile widens, and he looks like a beautiful creature that might consume me.
“Grand.”
Chapter Fifteen
Fallow
This is fucking incredible. Security here is a joke, so it took us just a few minutes to break in, and now we have the whole place to ourselves.
It’s not a huge facility. About the size of one of those creepy roadside zoos you see in middle America, but it looks like it’s an actual sanctuary, not a tourist trap. If we’d come in here and found someJoe Exoticshit, I would have been very tempted to free all the animals and burn the place to the ground, but silently exploring is much more satisfying.
It’s peaceful. Not in a passive way, but like the smells and soft sounds of critters in the dark are combining to reach their tendrils inside me, wrap around my bones and squeeze in reassurance. I feel like I can breathe.
