By the time she figures it out, it will be too late. She'll already be mine.
CHAPTER THREE
ROXY
I drive for two hours before I’m able to breathe properly again.
The van hums beneath me, that familiar rattle in the engine that I'd stopped trying to fix months ago. It’s a comforting sound, it has become part of the daily routine, acting like a white noise. The fairy lights strung across the ceiling cast soft purple and gold shadows over the dashboard, and somewhere behind me, a cassette tape clicks and whirrs, playing The Cure for the third time since I left the roadside.
Boys Don't Crybled through the speakers, Robert Smith's voice filling the small space with that particular brand of melancholy I've always loved. The 80s understood something that modern music doesn't, it had that sadness that didn't need to be dressed up or apologized for. It just lived in that moment with you.
I should be thinking about where I’m going and planning my next stop, checking my phone for messages from collectors, or maybe pulling over to edit the photos I'd taken of the fox before the light died completely.
But I’m not thinking about any of that. I’m too busy thinking about him.
Dom.
The name rolls around my head like a marble in an empty room, bouncing off the walls of my skull. I don’t know his last name, or know where he is from or where he is going or what the fuck he does when he’s not appearing out of nowhere to compliment dead things on the side of the road.
But I know his eyes.
Dark brown, almost black in the fading light. The kind of eyes that have seen too much, that have looked at things most people spent their whole lives avoiding. I'd seen eyes like that in mirrors, in the faces of the subjects I photographed when they didn't know I was watching. Eyes that had stopped pretending the world was a good place.
I wiggle in my seat, trying to shake off the feeling crawling up my spine. This is stupid. I don't do this, obsess over people, replay conversations in my head and wonder what someone thought of me after they walked away. People are background noise to me, extras in the movie of my life. They come and go, and I don’t give a shit either way.
But he wasn't background noise.
He'd looked at my drawing andseenit. Not the technical skill or the composition or any of the surface level bullshit art teachers used to drone on about. He'd seen what I was actually drawing, the purpose behind it. He'd understood it in a way that made my chest tight and my hands shake.
"That's what death looks like," he'd said.
Yeah. It fucking was.
I reach forward and eject the cassette, fumbling through the milk crate wedged between the seats until I find what I’m looking for. The Depeche Mode Album,Violator. I shove it into the player and fast-forward until "Waiting For The Night" kicks in. The synth washes over me, familiar and grounding, and I let myself sink into it.
The highway stretches out ahead, a sense of eeriness with the occasional car or truck passing by, but I’m mostly alone where there are no lights except my headlights cutting through the blackness. This is my favorite time of day to drive, when the world feels abandoned, when it’s just me and the road and the night pressing in from all sides.
Alone.
Nothing new there as I've always been alone. Even when I was a kid, surrounded by other kids at school or sitting at the dinner table with my parents before they left for whatever business trip was more important than being at home. I'd been alone in every way that mattered, locked inside my own head with thoughts that nobody else seemed to have.
Why does everyone pretend to be happy when they clearly aren't? Why do people lie about everything? About their feelings, their desires, their fears? Why does the world insist on this performance of normalcy when everything underneath is rotting, broken and dying?
I'd asked my mother once, when I was maybe ten. She'd looked at me like I'd grown a second head, then told me I needed to stop being so morbid and go play outside like a normal child.
Normal.
I chuckle to myself at the word. I'd stopped trying to be normal after that. Stopped faking that I cared about the things other kids cared about. I gave up forcing smiles and fake laughs, and pretending to have interest in conversations that made me want to claw my own skin off. So I'd retreated into my drawings, into the truth I could capture on paper, enjoying the silence of my own company.
And it had been fine, better than fine. I didn't need people and I didn't want them. They were exhausting and fake and so goddamn draining in their desperate need to be liked.
So why can’t I stop thinking about him?
I pull my bottom lip between my teeth, biting down hard enough to hurt. The pain helps, grounding me, pulling me out of my head for a second. But then the song shifts to "Policy of Truth" and I’m right back there, replaying the moment he'd crouched down beside me. Close enough that I could smell him, cigarettes and leather that made my pulse quicken in a way I didn't want to examine too closely. He hadn't invaded my space exactly, but he'd tested the boundaries, seen how close he could get before I pulled away.
I didn’t pull away.
Maybe the right thing I should’ve done is told him to fuck off, should've packed up my shit and gotten in the van and left him standing there in the dust. That's what I would've done with anyone else. But for some reason I'd stayed. Let him look at my drawing, let him see life through my eyes, let him speak the truth I'd been carrying around my whole life without anyone to share it with.
