Because it was. Despite how much she was trying to make herself laugh, it was. She was breathing hard when she finally tried the door. The handle slipped under her sweaty hand. And she was right to be in such a state, too.
After all, he’d only actually escaped out of the fucking window.
Four hours she’d spent waiting for him to come out.
And he wasn’t even in there at all. He’d fled—and in spectacular fashion, too.
The window was the size of a letterbox. She had no clue how he’d even managed to get one of his feet through it, never mind the rest of his enormous body.Probably shaved off his own butt to do it, she told herself as she climbed onto the toilet seat to peer through.
Half of her afraid she’d find him splattered all over the alley below.
Half of her sure he deserved it, right at this moment in time.
But all she could see was the fire escape he’d clearly levered himself onto.
No sign of him.He’s probably halfway to a bunker in Nebraska by now, she thought as she eased herself back down. Then took out her phone to at least try to call him. Fruitless, of course, because he thought of phones the same way most people thought of Ebola. She hadn’t even known he had one until three days ago, when she’d heard muffled ringing and found his Nokia 360 swaddled in duct tape in the toilet tank.
But she felt compelled to do something.
Even though all it did was teach her that a phone could still make noise after you had disassembled it and stuffed it into one of your almost-girlfriend’s shoes. She found the pieces, and tried not to cry.
Then failed, of course.
And not just because she had clearly driven him away.
She had also mentally used theGword. Apparently, even in her head she was pushing him too far, turning him inside out, making him into something he wasn’t. She had really made a mess of all this. And so much so that she vowed, then and there, to be super not whatever this was the next time she saw him.
No touching, no kissing, no calling out his name.
Then she stepped out into the hallway, hoping to track him through the city like she was Jim Gordon and he was fucking Batman, and saw him at the end of it. She saw him, and watched him turn to go back the way hehad come, and just couldn’t help it. “Caleb, wait, okay,” she said.
Or called out, if you will.
And holywow, was that as big a mistake as she had imagined.
He stopped dead, his back still to her. Then he slowly, slowly turned around, like a badly broken revolving door, his face an absolute picture, once she could see it. One of his eyebrows was somehow raised and frowning at the same time. And the eye underneath looked massive.
While the other one somehow remained small.
This is how horror manifests on his face, she thought.
And that felt true before he even answered in a horrified voice.
“Did you just call me by my first name?” he said. Because, oh yeah, she’d done that, too. She hadn’t gone withMillerorMillorhey you. She’d said something intimate, that only someone he liked having sex with got to use.
Because she was pretty sure, at this point, that he hadn’t liked having it with her. How had he put it?You can be excited and still not want something. “Yeah, and I am now realizing that was a bad call, too,” she said.
Trying not to be bitter about it.
Probably failing.
“So you think you’ve made other ones, then.”
“I know I have. How couldn’t I have when you’re acting like this.”
“This is just how I am, Emmett. Everything else was pretend.”
Back to my surname, she thought.All the syllables there.
