Get up, mayfly queen. There are things which need doing.
Delaney opened her eyes to find a red Matchbox car curving over the scarred roundabout of her knee. She lay perfectly still and watched as its brown-eyed driver steered the race car along her thigh, long fingers guiding it over the wrinkled hem of her shorts, the hard ridge of her hip. Beside her, Colton lay on his side, fully absorbed in his task.
“Good morning,” she said when he’d reached her ribs. She rolled onto her back in a stretch and watched as the tires slipped over her T-shirt and toward her navel. “I’m glad you woke me. I need to get back to campus today.”
He didn’t appear to have heard her. Softly, he said, “Ask me for three things that are true.”
“What, right now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She tucked a hand beneath her cheek. “Three truths. Go.”
“One.” He drove the car lower. “I am deeply, sickeningly, alarmingly obsessed with you.”
“I already knew that,” she said, and wrested the car from his grasp. “So it’s a waste of a truth.”
He snatched it back, drawing her into him as he did. They rolled together until she was astride him, her knees pressed into the mattress. Slowly, she gathered the short crop of her hair into a stubby ponytail. He watched her do it, his jaw working.
“Two,” he said. “I knew where you lived because sometimes I used to stand outside your house at night.”
She stilled. Her hair fell loose from its tie, knifing around her jaw. “When?”
“When we were kids.” His throat corded in a swallow. He tinkered with the car, his hands restless. “After the ice.”
Wait. Don’t run. I know you. I know you.
Her vision blurred. Her arms felt heavy. “Why did you stop?”
“Because,” he said. “You kept following me and following me. You’d creep outside, half-asleep, like you could sense I was there. At first, it seemed harmless. I didn’t know you’d get hurt.”
She closed her eyes and remembered the high-beam brilliance of the Buick, the feel of screaming brakes jarring the sleepy dark awake. Her knees had been bloodied, her chest robbed of air. The boy she’d been chasing after was gone, swallowed up in the dark.
She rolled away from him, drawing her knees into her chest. “It was you.”
“Yes.” He sat up, repositioning himself so they came face-to-face in the tangled nest of his sheets.
“All that time, I thought I was going crazy. I thought I’d dreamt it all up. But it was you the whole time.”
“It was.” Then, “Are you angry with me?”
“Not anymore,” she said.
“But you were?”
It was a simple question, but she found there was no simple answer. She recalled the implacable sadness of waking from a dreamless sleep, tucked safe in her bed with the dark empty beside her. The way she’d stare and stare into the woods and wish to see the face of a little shadowed boy staring back. A prince of dark, a king of shades, a small, grieving boy with no one to go home to but her.
She felt suddenly and supremely ridiculous, for failing to recognize him right away. Absurd, that she hadn’t known him from that very first moment in the elevator. Laughable, the way she’d spent years running, running after him in the dark only to slam straight into him in the light of day.
“I missed you,” she said softly, “once you were gone. Isn’t that stupid?”
“No.” He didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t need him to. They’d both spent a lifetime yearning for something they didn’t understand. And now here they were, and she had a hundred more questions for him. A thousand. They crowded in all at once. She ignored them.
“What’s the third truth?”
He pulled his eyes shut. “I killed my brother.”
“You didn’t.” She reached for him and thought better of it, fingers twisting in the hem of her T-shirt. “Colton, you didn’t. He drowned.”
