This close, the flecks in her eyes surface, blue-green. I look down at the badge on her chest, the rise and fall of it, and drag my gaze back up before it becomes anything I'd have to name.
"I'll need that back," she says.
"Then come get it."
She holds my gaze long enough to make it deliberate. Then she turns and walks out at an even pace, and the heat that crossed the inch of air between her hand and mine hasn't faded out of my palm yet.
Cole's voice reaches me from the table. "Truck's out back," he says, on his feet now, his voice easy as he looks at the recorder in my palm, then at me. "She's coming."
"You said."
"She doesn't miss things."
The drawer in her desk. Her eyes dropped there for half a second, her hand stilling on the desk. The recorder sits heavy in my hand, and the weight of it feels like a dare.
I slide it into the inner pocket of my coat, the weight settling against my hip, constant and deliberate.
"Let's go," I say.
We leave the press room and head down the corridor to the tunnel, out into the parking lot. The sky has gone purple at the edges, the air biting deeper now. Cole's truck is the third vehicle in the row. He unlocks it and rounds the hood to the driver's side. I open the door and drop into the passenger seat, slam it behind me. The recorder presses against my hip through the coat, a small, insistent heat.
He pulls out of the lot. Elm House is twenty minutes away, fifteen if he runs the light at Briarcliff and Wycombe—and of course he runs it. Streetlamp light stripes his face and slides off as we pass each pole, and he never once glances my way.
"You took her recorder," he says.
"Yeah."
"On purpose."
"Yes."
The quad on my right side cramps where the lap belt cuts across the top of it. I work the muscle with my thumb until it lets go, but the ache lingers.
Cole flexes his grip on the wheel and eases it, and the movement stays in my peripheral vision until he turns onto the Elm drive. The porch light is on. A second-floor window glows. Elm House sits on a corner lot at the edge of the residential strip, the porch wide and the front door painted dark green.
Cole kills the engine. Neither of us moves.
"Okay," he says, like he's decided something.
I unbuckle and get out. The cold hits the back of my neck where the hair is still wet, a shock that goes straight down my spine. The driver's door shuts. The recorder rests against my hip. The drawer in her office. The half-second her eyes dropped to it.
I head up the walk. The porch steps creak under me. Cole comes up behind, key already out. He steps past my shoulder to the door, fits the key in the lock.
A car turns onto our street from the cross street, headlights cutting through the dark toward the porch where we're standing.
Chapter 4
Dante
Elm House is dark after midnight, the common spaces empty and the house settled into a quiet so deep I can hear my own fucking pulse in my ears.
Maya left an hour ago. Her car was the one that turned onto the street while Cole and I stood on the porch, and a little after eleven, it pulled away from the curb, the headlights cutting once across the upstairs hallway through the front window before she turned at the corner.
She'd been here forty minutes, most of it downstairs with Cole pretending the Michigan-Denver game mattered. Then she came up to the second floor when he offered, and she stood in my doorway without crossing it, framed in the light from the hall like a silhouette I couldn't look away from. The recorder sat on my desk where I'd left it. She glanced at it once, a flick of hereyes, and said, "I'd take it back now." Her voice was even, flat, a fucking challenge wrapped in calm. She didn't reach. I didn't offer. She left without it, and the air in the doorway stayed charged for a full minute after she was gone, like the ghost of her was still watching me.
She'd stood in that doorway like she was clocking sightlines—where the bed sat against the wall, where the desk faced the window, the angle from my doorway down the hall to Cole's, the window, the corner of the desk where the recorder sat. Her eyes passed too fast over each, but every glance landed like a touch. She'd come without the notebook. The press badge was off her chest. It was her in a coat I hadn't seen before, standing where she could see the way out.
Cole watched from the bottom step, half in shadow, head angled up toward the second floor. He didn't come up, and the weight of his watching pressed against the back of my neck the whole time she was in my room.
