“I’m not calling you Hawk,” I snap. “This isn’t . . . I don’t know what. Basic training. Or a locker room.”
He blinks at me. “I was going to say . . .”
He trails off, swallows. I think this means we’re abandoning the issue of what to call each other for now, which is probably for the best.
“Tegan tells me you’ve had an itinerary set for some time,” I say quickly. “I want a copy.”
Because she didn’t ask for her own copy. Because she is naïve; because she is achild; because she has no idea what she was doing, I don’t add, even though things like that keep threatening to burst forth from me. Yesterday, with Tegan, I kept having to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself. There’s a small sore there now.
He awkwardly opens the binder with one hand, and from the front pocket, slides out a stapled-together stack of pages.
“I could also AirDrop it to—”
“No.”
As if I’d ever be searchable on AirDrop. As if I’d ever be searchable to him in any way, ever.
He hands the itinerary over, but the way he’s tilted his head slightly—I might as well be a pine cone sculpture. I duck my head, desperate to avoid his green, green eyes.
They make me feel searchable.
I concentrate on breathing slowly through my nose as I look over the first page of the itinerary: an overview, I guess. Five cities, in the order the postcards came from.
Chattanooga. Pensacola. Tulsa. Sante Fe. Olympia. I can’t picture anything from the front of those postcards. No pretty landscapes or landmarks. But I can see in my mind’s eye what she wrote on the back of each one.
“The first four stops, we’ll do by vehicle,” he says. “Then Santa Fe to Olympia, we’ll fly. We have someone back at the office helping us work on some schedule changes for that.”
“It’s not clear that they actuallystayedin these places.” My tone is irritating even to me. It sounds like I’m trying to score a point.
“The next few pages explain what we think are reasonable places to look into nearby, if we need to.” He clears his throat. “Based on some of the content of the postcards. And what we know about Baltimore.”
He has a nice voice. It doesn’t sound like point-scoring, but it feels like it all the same.
I don’t flip to the next page. “I’ll review this later. For now I want to talk about my conditions.”
He adjusts slightly on the couch. He’s wearing jeans and a light blue button up and I have the strangest urge to ask him where he buys his clothes. Does he have to get them custom-made to go across shoulders that wide?
“All right,” he says, but there’s a slight note of confusion in his voice. I think maybe I left too long a pause there, thinking about a man’s tailoring.
I lean forward and set the itinerary on a small empty edge of the coffee table. To keep it in place, I set my water glass on top. Then I straighten in my hammock chair.
“First, I don’t—” I narrow my eyes at him. “Do you want to write these down?”
“I have a good memory.”
It doesn’t sound smug; it sounds simple. True.I have wide shoulders. Green eyes. A nice voice.
I don’t know why I’m thinking of any of that. My mind grasps for a thought that will keep me more grounded. That will make him feel less true.
“Is that because you’re recording right now?”
He frowns. “What?”
“Do you really have a good memory, or are you recording this?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not recording this. I’m never going to do that without you knowing.”
“Will Salem?”
