“Everyone likes Led Zeppelin,” she says. “More importantly, men like a woman who likes Led Zeppelin. Sendit.”
7
Dara’s instincts are right. After I texted Edison that song, he asked me if I’d like to go hiking. Just the two of us alone in the middle of nowhere.
There are parts of the Arizona desert that are an unfinished painting. Rocks, gravel, and sky without so much as a cloud. Like the artist stopped here, afraid of making a single mistake. Edison, though, is not as simple as the landscape. As we trudge up the hiking trail, breathing hard in the dry late-morning heat, I smell the fragrant sweat of him. The cotton of his shirt, the sharp, sweet cologne in his deodorant. I can’t identify it, but I’d bet the packaging is all black, marketed for men and offering the promise of mystery.
Sweat beads the back of his neck, and I wonder what his skin tastes like. He already knows the taste of me—my skin, my blood.
I’ve fallen a pace behind him and he turns to make sure I’m all right. I shake the daze out of my head and give him a smile. He thinksI’m tired, that maybe I can’t keep up. That’s good. I want him to feel stronger than me. In control.
“Here’s as good a place as any to stop,” he says.
I nod, breathless. Not because of the heat or the hike, but because of his nearness. The way the air changes around him.
I slip out of my backpack and sit on the flat top of a boulder that’s big enough for the both of us to have our makeshift picnic. I don’t talk, not even to ask him what he’s packed us for lunch. Instead, I listen to the hard and steady gulps he takes from his bottle, the plastic crunching in his palm. His stomach gurgles as the water rushes in. When I kill him, there’s no need to make a mess. Not like Moody, who treats her kills like a low-budget slasher flick. No, when I kill Edison, I think I’ll find a pretty way to do it. Just a sharp purple line across his throat, or a ring of mood-ring blue around his mouth where I’ve smothered him, his eyes dark and open, their whites gleaming in the moonlight.
Still, I think about cutting him open. Finding the chambers of his heart. Observing his stomach and whatever contents are left there. The parts of himself so deep that even he has never seen them.
When I look up, his eyes are on me. The depth of his gaze disarms me, and a moment later, he blinks it away. I wasn’t meant to see his interest. His intrigue. I smile coyly like a church girl with a crush, but I don’t say anything. I rambled about music during our first date at Still’s, and I sent him my cover of “Stairway to Heaven,” and now it’s his turn to talk. He unpacks our little picnic in silence, though. He doesn’t want to waste time with pleasantries or insult me with small talk. He’s trying to find the right words—something that will be worthy of me.
My sisters have never had this problem. Iris, confident and regal, can transform herself into anything that attracts her victim. She cangiggle like a lovesick teenager or wield her sexuality like a lingerie model. Moody has an eye for chaos. She finds the men who will fall hard and fast for her, and they spend most of their time with their tongue in her mouth. And if either of them were here right now, they’d lose patience with Edison. They’d tell me to find someone who finds me irresistible. Someone who doesn’t waste my time with all this caution.
Patience, I tell them, and myself. He’s the one. I can feel it. I’ll coax it out of him.
He looks at me when I stand. “Where are you going?”
“I dropped my hair clip,” I say, taking a few cautious steps down the trail.
I glance up at him as he abandons his task and rises to join me, and I catch his perplexed expression. There is no hair clip. My hair is pulled into a simple ponytail, perfect for hiking. It’s long enough to fit into the hair tie without the help of any clips, but I’ve worked a couple of strands loose. He’s noticed.
“What does it look like?” he asks. He doesn’t believe me. He knows something is up, but just as he noticed the way I wore my hair, he observes me now with curiosity. He second-guesses himself.
“Gold,” I say. “With little rhinestones.”
He’s close to me now, his head bowed as he looks at the nondescript pebbles and dust at our feet. So close that I can feel his warmth, different from that of the rising morning air. He’s so alive in this barren place. His smell fills me and I can taste it.
We’re close to the edge of the trail; if I let myself fall over the edge, I’ll go rolling down a steep incline and my fall will eventually be broken by some dying shrubs or possibly a cactus. I’ll sprain something for sure, possibly even break a bone. I think of Moody slashing furiously at the jugular of her last lover, all those months of passioncoming to an ugly head. I think of Iris, cool and calm, but with rope burns cutting into her palms, the only proof that she lets herself get lost in the heat of her kills.
I kick at the crumbling edge of the trail, and I let myself topple backward. Best to find out right away if he’s the type to pick me up and dust me off, or if he’s vigilant enough to save me before I hit the ground. It will help me plan my next moves. The shriek I make isn’t an act—even though this was deliberate, some part of me is still afraid to let go. Survival instincts. I feel the open air, the absolute nothingness all around me, and I brace myself for the crash.
Fingers coil around my forearm, grasping me down to the bone. And then I’m reeled back to earth. I feel him before I feel my own feet on the ground. I open my eyes and I’m staring at the sharp angles of his throat and jaw. His open mouth. He’s grasping both of my arms as though I nearly just teetered off into a bottomless abyss, rather than a little hill.
When I bring my gaze up to his, his brown eyes have gone all dark. Worry? Desire? No, something else. Something that’s been there all along and that doesn’t have words, but I understand it, because I have it inside me too.
Breathless, I can’t help but smile. Today’s mission was to make him speak to me so that I could learn more about him. But all this time, I haven’t needed words at all. Neither of us do.
He raises one hand and tucks the loose hair out of my face, his touch cautious and slow. I feel the calluses of his fingers, his palm. He works those hands. The tendons within them connect to all his muscles and flesh, all of him taut and carefully constructed.
“Edison,” I say, at the exact moment he says, “Jade.”
His heart and mine are beating in a hard tandem gallop. His handtrails down the side of my face, and my breath catches when his thumb traces my lip. He takes his time exploring the length of it, where the skin turns soft and damp the closer he gets to my tongue. It would be so easy for me to open my mouth and taste him, but I don’t move, afraid to break this fragile line he’s casting me.
He’s like me. If I suspected it before, I know it now. It’s about the space between the words. What he does, not what he says. Most of the time when I say anything at all, it’s an act—I’m playing a part to run point for my sisters, and now, to reel in my first kill. He’s playing a part too. The dutiful churchgoing man whose smiles are congenial, but whose real self is hard-won.
This is him, now, touching me. This is me, not Jade, looking back at him. It’s reckless and stupid to let him see what’s really there. He might realize the monster I am if we stay in this place for too long, but I can’t look away.
“You’re all right,” he tells me, a rasp to his low voice. It’s a command.I’ve got you, he’s saying.Nothing will ever happen to you while I’m here.
