THE BALTIMORE, it reads.
I try to imagine what’ll happen when we go, but I can’t seem to do more than the basics. Jess and Tegan first, and then Salem and I to follow. We’ll get answers about Lynton—about Charlotte—or we won’t, and I can’t seem to care either way.
Mostly I’m heavy with thoughts of what’ll happen after.
I give up and reach for my phone. It’s way too early to text, but since she’s got Tegan with her, she’ll have turned her phone to silent. I try to be comforted by the fact that I know that—that I know lots of things about Jess now that have nothing to do with whatever is on that boat.
Are you asleep
No, comes her near-immediate reply, which tells me all I need to know about the state she’s in. She doesn’t evenlikeher phone. If she’s up scrolling on it, she must be struggling.
My thumbs hover over the screen. There’s a dozen potential texts crowding my brain, all of them too big, overweighted with worry over what she and I don’t have settled between us.
But this sleepless night isn’t about that for her, and I know it.
So I type,Want to go for a walk?and press send.
Watch her typing bubble appear, disappear.
Reappear again.
Two minutes, she replies.
* * *
INthe lobby, I wordlessly hand her the sweatshirt I brought down with me, because this place doesn’t feel like any kind of July I’ve ever experienced. When she takes it, she holds it up in front of her, and it’s basically a blanket.
She smirks, and it feels as though I’ve managed to flatten the whole entire world for her, if only for a second.
But after she’s tugged it over her head—even though it falls almost to her knees and she has to shove the sleeves way up—there’s no trace of a smirk, only the sense that every part of her is being pulled down by the same weight I brought her out here to escape. If anything, seeing her swamped by a piece of my clothing makes me feel worse. Everything about me is too big right now. My body, my boss, my job.
Most of all, my feelings for her.
We venture out into the misty air and are confronted by the bleak, boring outdoors of a chain hotel parking lot: too-bright lights overhead, the unnatural glow from the nearby strip mall’s signs in the distance.
I look over at Jess, who’s watching her feet at she walks beside me on a blacktop sidewalk that runs along the road into the hotel’s entrance, a few newly planted, spindly looking suburban trees lining the way, unnaturally perfect circles of mulch surrounding their thin trunks.
I wish I could take her anywhere else.
“You okay?” I ask her, desperate to break the silence.
She gives me a quelling look.
Of course she’s not okay.
“What can I do?”
She shrugs.
Can’t fix her, I hear my dad saying, and I have to shove my hands in my pockets to hide the fists I automatically make at the memory.
“In a way, it’s a relief,” she says, but I’ve never heard anyone say something in a less relieved tone. It’s as though I can hear her jaw grinding through the movements required to get this lie out.
Still, I play along. “Yeah?”
“It’s what we came for,” she says. Then she corrects, “What Tegan came for.”
I make an effort to match my steps to hers. I say—knowing it’s a risk, but unable to stop myself—“You’re not curious at all?”
