"I always drive the same way."
The sentence is the first full one he's spoken to me since he found out my name. My throat tightens at the normalcy of it, and I channel the reaction into something useful.
"We should leave within the hour," I say. "If Rainey's running the studio, she'll be there mid-morning. We show up during business hours, we look like customers. Less chance of spooking her."
"You think she'll spook?"
"I think a woman who's been hiding from the people who killed her boyfriend will spook at anything that smells like the circuit."
He turns away from the window. His eyes land on me and stay, and the weight of that gaze pins me to the chair with the same authority his body once pinned me to a motel room door. The anger in his face is a living thing, banked but pulsing, and underneath the anger is something worse: want. The same want I'm choking on, the kind that doesn't care about lies or betrayal or the fact that I wore his dead best friend's face while I climbed into his bed.
"Ground rules," he says. The drawl has gone thick, which means he's feeling more than he wants to feel and covering it with command.
"I'm listening."
"I'm doing this because Grant deserves justice, and Rainey is the path to that." He pushes off the counter and stands at his full height, all six-three of controlled aggression filling the kitchen. "I haven't forgiven you. I don't trust you. All it means is that I need what you know and you need what I know. We function as a unit or we don't function at all. Clear?"
"Crystal."
"One more thing." He takes a step closer, and the distance between the counter and the table disappears. I can smell the coffee on his breath and the soap on his skin and the faint edge of something hotter underneath, something that belongs to the dark and the sheets and the sounds I made when I stopped trying to be quiet. "When we get to Rainey, you tell her the truth. All of it. Your name, who you are, why you're there. You walk in as Kenna Corbin. I'm done watching you lie to people."
The demand stings because it's fair. Every cover story I've told on this circuit was a weapon I aimed at the people who killed Grant, but the shrapnel hit everyone around me.
"I was already planning to."
"Good." He holds my gaze for one more beat, long enough for the heat between us to register as a problem neither of us is going to solve this morning. Then he turns for the door. "I'll load the truck."
He walks out. The screen door closes behind him, the spring stretching and snapping back, and the kitchen is quiet again. My coffee is the right temperature and the right color and it tastes like a peace offering wrapped in barbed wire. I drink it anyway, and the drive north is an exercise in controlled silence, with a side of slow-burn torture.
Colt's truck cab was not designed for two people who have seen each other naked and are pretending they haven't. The bucket seats and center console put a barrier between us that should feel like enough distance. It isn't. Not with the tension radiating off his body like heat from a branding iron.
The landscape shifts as we climb, high desert scrub giving way to pine forest and then mountain terrain that makes you feel small and irrelevant. He drives with both hands on the wheel, his jaw set in a line that could cut glass, and the muscles in his thigh flex every time he works the clutch.
I keep my laptop open and my eyes on my notes and my awareness of Colt's thigh at a strict professional zero. I fail at this roughly every four minutes.
The silence between us is hostile in the particular way that silences become hostile when both people are choosing it. Careful and rigid. The quiet of two people sharing a vehicle with a grenade between them and neither willing to pull the pin.
Somewhere past the midpoint, I try. "Grant used to take me to rodeos when I was a kid." I say it to the windshield, to the road, to the aspens blurring past. "He'd help me climb up so I could see over the fence."
Colt doesn't respond. His nostrils flare on a slow exhale. His hands adjust on the wheel, a micro-movement that sends the tendons in his forearms shifting under the scars. I watch the motion before I can stop myself and then hate myself for watching.
I close my mouth and turn back to the laptop. The mountain air coming through the partially open windows smells like pine resin and snowmelt, and the temperature has dropped since we left the valley floor. I pull my jacket tighter and watch the road wind into the San Juans.
The only words he speaks for the rest of the drive are functional. A gas station in Antonito: "You want anything?" Approaching the pass: "Road narrows ahead." He delivers each one in the flat, minimal cadence of a man who has decided that the woman in his passenger seat exists for operational purposes only.
Which would be easier to accept if his hand hadn't landed on my knee during a sharp turn outside of Del Norte, a steadying reflex, pure muscle memory. He'd yanked it back like I'd burned him.
The ghost of that touch sits on my kneecap for the next thirty miles. I don't brush it off. I don't acknowledge it. I let it burn.
I give him logistics, directions, the Creede approach plan. Nothing personal. Nothing that bleeds. The part of me that aches to tell him about Grant and Dax at Thanksgiving, about the pumpkin pie and the tequila and the last good day I had with Grant, stays locked behind my teeth. Colt isn't ready to hear it, and I'm not going to offer pieces of Grant to a man who's still deciding whether to hate me.
Although, watching him brood behind the wheel with that particular combination of fury and contained violence that makes his jaw look like it was carved from something harder than bone, I'm starting to wonder if the hate is even the real problem. Hate would be simpler. Hate would be clean. What's between us isn't clean. It's the kind of wreckage that still smolders.
Creede sits in a narrow valley along the Rio Grande, a town of a few hundred people that swells with tourists and fishermen in the summer months. The main street is a single stretch of storefronts and galleries bracketed by mountains that look like they were dropped there by something ancient and indifferent.
The photography studio is at the west end of town, wedged between an outfitter and a café. The sign above the door readsWillow Light Photographyin hand-painted lettering, and the window displays a collection of landscape prints that are stunning in their precision and devastating in their loneliness. Whoever shot them has a gift for capturing isolation.
I recognize the composition before I recognize the name. From what I’ve seen of her work, Rainey Weathers always shot with her subject slightly off-center, the empty space carrying as much meaning as the focal point. These prints have the same signature.
