A silhouette moves on the other side of the glass door, tall and narrow. I’m walking toward him before the door is fully open.
Arthur doesn’t look hurt, but there’s something weird about the way he’s moving. His shoulders aren’t hunched around his collar, and his stride is wide and easy, as if he recently put down some immensely heavy object. He meets my eyes across the parking lot and I catch the white sickle of a smile. If he’s trying to reassure me, it doesn’t work. A chill skates down my spine.
He stops beneath a streetlight and waits, hands tucked in his pockets, wearing the fey smile of a man who has recently pulled the pin from a grenade. The indentation in his left cheek is deeper than I’ve ever seen it. I scowl at it.
Arthur is unfazed. He tucks a gritty, ashen lock of hair behind my ear, casually possessive, as if he’s done it a hundred times before. As if his fingers don’t leave a phosphorous streak across my cheekbone, white-hot. “Nice cardigan,” he says, and I restrain myself from grabbing his shoulders and shaking him very hard.
“Did she drug you? Are you alright?”
He answers with a shrug, loose-boned and easy. I am going to shake his teeth loose from his skull. “What happened in there? What are they going to do now?”
“Nothing.” There’s a calm certainty in his voice that makes the hairs on the backs of my hands stand up. “To you or to Jasper. Ever again.”
“Arthur.” I’m close enough to see the tiny flicker in his eyes when I say his name, a flash of something like physical pain. “What did you give them?”
Another smile, and I resist the impulse to set my thumb in the black curl of his dimple. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it? Don’tworryabout—”
A muffled ringtone interrupts me. I whip back to face Bev and Charlotte. “Is that my phone?”
Charlotte is already holding out a plastic baggie, lit pale blue by the glow of my screen. “We talked the receptionist around.”
I run back and rip the bag open, swiping up without looking at the caller. “Where the fuck are you?”
“Wow, okay, where the fuck areyou?” At the sound of Jasper’s voice, my legs go for the second time this evening. I catch myself against the Volvo, my back sliding down hot metal, my throat clogging with tears.
“Jesus, Jasper.” My voice comes out thin and wavery. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
His sigh is a gust of wind through the speaker. “I turned off my ringer for like one hour and everybody has a heart atta—”
Then both of us are talking, trampling one another’s sentences. “Listen, I’m so sorry I said—”
“Did you really burn down the motel? Because—”
“Who said that? OfcourseI didn’t, God, Bev would murd—”
“Is she okay? Did she—”
“Yeah, Bev’s fine. She’s right here. Where are you now?”
“The library.”
“Why are you—never mind.” I inhale carefully, forcing my legs to take my weight. “Stay there, I’m coming to get you.” I hang up before I can do anything I’ll regret, like cry, or call him terrible names, or tell him how it had felt to see the smoke and know I was too late.
Bev and Charlotte both start asking questions, but before I can answer I hear a faint, metallic jangle. Arthur is facing me with his arm outstretched, a key ring dangling from his fingers. I see the faded Chevy symbol, the tiny plastic flashlight that doesn’t work.
I reach for the keys, but pull up short. I keep a careful ledger in my head, a tally of debts and favors, but I no longer know what he and I owe each other. He ruined my life and then tried to repair it; I saved him and then ran from him. We’d achieved a miserable but tolerable species of balance between us, until tonight. Until he showed up at the detention center and made some terrible bargain on my behalf—I don’t know what kind of deal he made, but I know a devil when I see one—and offered me his truck. Again.
I meet his eyes, looking for the catch, the price. He looks steadily back at me, asking nothing, offering everything.
I take the keys.
Charlotte touches my shoulder before I turn away. “We need to talk, after you get Jasper. I found something in the Gravely papers that I think you ought to—”
“I already know,” I interrupt her, gently. “Everybody did, apparently.”
Her face crimps with confusion. “I’m not sure they did, Opal. I have to take it up to my lawyer friend in Frankfort but I really think—”
