Page 19

“That’s it,” I said. “You’re patched up.”

He stood. His hands were wet from where I’d washed the wound. I handed him the towel. As he took it, his other hand reached around my shoulder and pulled me close, and for seconds I could count on one hand, we stood like that, holding each other by the buried fox, the whole world dissolving to his chest pressed against mine. It took everything in me not to lean in and hold on tight. He had, after all, shoulders built to lean against. It felt like standing upright against a tide that wanted to take me, and my legs were starting to give.

Callie was staring, her mouth a little open.

Damian released me, and the absence of him was so loud, it made me feel cold.

But I also wanted to ask him what the hell had just happened. Why, after all that chivalry the night before and the standoffishness minutes ago, he’d held me as if it wasn’t the first time. But I didn’t, because Callie was staring, and the moment was strange enough.

We got back into the jeep. I put my backpack on my lap, just to feel the weight of it, and for a place to rest my hands. My fingers fiddled with the strap. We glanced at each other more easily now. It didn’t feel like shoplifting when I took the liberty anymore. But mostly there was silence.

We rolled into Humboldt Bay, where the tidal flats were a sheet of tarnished silver hammered flat. The drive would soon be over. It filled me with an unreasonable amount of regret. This couldn’t suddenly be over. That wasn’t fair. Not when he’d made me boneless with lust and annoyed as hell all in the same morning.

I glanced at him and saw how much he was carrying: in his shoulders, in his jaw, in his grip on the steering wheel. Of course I’d be drawn to some guy who was maddeningly mysterious and probably had baggage as heavy as a fully furnished haunted house.

“What happened, back there?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”

A small smile played at the edge of his mouth. It was the first time I’d seen him anything but stoic.

“It reminded me of something.”

“What?”

He inclined his head, subtly, at Callie. “It’s not something I can talk about right now.”

“Okay,” I said. “Weird, but okay.”

He glanced at me. This time he caught me looking right at him.

“I’m not trying to—” he began, then flexed his thumb against the wheel.

“What?”

“To be complicated. To confuse you.”

“You one hundred percent are.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and the way he then looked at me, like he was about to lose something he’d only just found, made me want to kiss him. It also made me want to thump my fist against the dashboard.

“You have a girlfriend,” I said, because it was the most logical explanation. The answer he couldn’t give me the night before. “Or you’re still sleeping with your ex, and you’re a mess.”

“Neither. I’ve been single for…a year,” he said, his voice low, glancing out his side window.

A year. I asked myself how a man like this could have possibly been single a year. I’d been on all the dating apps. I knew what else was out there. It was the stuff of nightmares. It was scientifically impossible that he hadn’t been snapped up. Unless he had some very dark secrets. In fact, at this point, I was pretty sure the man was composed of fifty percent lean muscle, blood, organs, and bone, and fifty percent secrets he was arguing with himself about.

“You’re a serial killer.”

He looked at me. He didn’t laugh. A cold little warning moved across my shoulders. “No. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

There was a stretch of silence I hated more than a man on Hinge holding a fish.

“What about you?” he said at last.

“What about me?”