Chapter 4
Carrie
By the time I got to the table, he was already gone from it.
Halfway out of the booth, sliding past his friend, not looking at me. Moving with the specific efficiency of a man who wanted to be elsewhere. Not just elsewhere in the room. Elsewhere from the entire category of places that currently contained me.
"Wait—" I said.
He did not wait. That was becoming a theme.
He cut through the crowd like he'd mapped the place, every gap, every exit, every route a person could take to leave without becoming the story. His friend called something after him, still laughing, and he didn't break stride for that either.
I went after him. Of course I did.
Because I had questions, and a day this unhinged had earned me at least one straight answer.
Because a man does not kiss you in a storage hallway like you're the only fixed point in a spinning world and then file you under Resolved.
That's not a thing you get to do and walk away clean from. Somebody should tell him.
I'd be somebody.
He pushed through the front door and cold air came rushing in to meet me, and then I was outside, on his heels, in a parking lot doing its best impression of art.
The earlier rain had left puddles everywhere, and the bar's neon bled down into them, red and blue and gold, the wet asphalt holding the colors like it had been staged.
He was making for a dark sedan parked at the back, well away from every other car.
Of course it was away from every other car. The man parked the way he kissed and ran. Keep a buffer. Leave yourself an exit.
"Hey!" I called.
He kept walking.
"Seriously?"
He sped up.
So I jogged, shoes throwing up the parking lot, cold biting at my face, and somewhere behind me my friends were almost certainly at the window narrating this for each other.
I'd think about that later. I'd already chased this man across one parking lot today.
A second one barely registered as a new decision.
"Would you just stop for one second?"
He reached the car. Fumbled the keys, metal jingling, and then — finally — turned around.
"Are you stalking me?"
That was not the opening line I'd prepared for.
"What?"
"The gas station. Now here." Flat. No temperature to it at all. "Are you following me?"
"Am I—are you serious?"
He didn't answer. Just stood there with the keys in his fist, half his face lit by the lot lights and half of it dark, like he genuinely could not decide which version of himself to put on the table.
And that was the moment I actually looked at him. Not reacted to him, not braced against that pull I had no working explanation for. Looked. Read the face instead of just feeling it.
Strong jaw. Sharp cheekbones. Eyes that read gray out here but I knew were blue, I'd had them up close, the kind of blue that takes in more than it gives back. And how he held himself. The set of the shoulders, the careful, deliberate distance, a body braced for contact it had decided was coming.
I knew him.
Not from the gas station. From before the gas station. From somewhere with a frame around it.
I just couldn't land it.
"I'm Carrie," I said, keeping my voice level, professional, the tone I used on people who were about to be difficult. "Carrie Wilson."
Nothing.
"And you are?"
Nothing. Just the hiss of traffic on the main road behind us, filling the space where a name should have gone.
"Can you at least look at me?"
His eyes came to mine for a second and left again, fast, like the contact cost him something. Like I was a thing that was easier to be near if he didn't have to confirm I was real.
"Why did you leave?" Sharper than I meant it. "At the gas station. You just vanished."
"I had to go."
"That's the whole statement? 'I had to go'?"
"What do you want from me."
"An explanation. An apology. Genuinely anything that isn't you relocating every time we end up in the same room."
A muscle moved in his jaw. He shifted his weight and looked at his car like it might intervene on his behalf. Like if he stared at the door long enough it would open and absorb him and end this.
"I don't owe you anything."
That landed harder than it should have. Harder than the math supported, given that I'd known this man for the length of one genuinely deranged afternoon.
"You're right," I said. "You don't. Not an explanation, not an apology. Not even your words, apparently."
He still wouldn't look at me.
And that — the not-looking, the hiding, how he'd tried to disappear his own face inside the bar — that was what finally tripped it. I'd seen this face somewhere with stakes attached. Not today. A screen. A headline. A something.
"Have we met before?" I said. "Before the gas station."
His jaw tightened. The muscle jumped again.
"Because I know you from somewhere and it's going to drive me out of my mind until I—"
"We haven't met."
"You're sure? Because you are extremely familiar and I—"
"I'm sure."
Clipped. Final. The verbal equivalent of a door being closed in a measured, polite, unmistakable way.
He turned back to the car and reached for the handle, queuing up escape number two for the evening, and the worst part was he was right. He was leaving and I had nothing that could stop him.
Except.
"Wait."
I grabbed his hand.
He went still.
The contact ran straight up my arm, the same current as the hallway, the same one I'd had no name for then and still didn't. His skin was warm despite the cold, rough, callused.
A working hand, a hand that got used hard for a living.
I filed that away with all the other facts about him I was collecting and could not yet assemble into a picture.
"I need your help," I said.
He looked down at our hands. At my fingers wrapped around his wrist, like the sight was a problem he was solving.
"With what."
"The dog."
Something moved across his face. I couldn't read it. I was starting to suspect that was deliberate, that the unreadability was a skill he'd practiced.
"I had to take him home," I said, and now it was coming out fast, the way it does when I can feel an audience deciding about me.
"The owner never came back, I couldn't leave a puppy out in that, and the thing is my job — I just started, I genuinely cannot be the new hire who's never at her desk, and a dog needs walks, needs—"
"Take him to a shelter."
Cold. Practical. Stripped of anything resembling a pulse.
I stared at him.
"That's the pitch? Hand him off at a shelter?"
"They'll place him."
"Or they won't, and then—" I stopped. Breathed. "Do you care what happens to him at all?"
"It's not my dog."
"It's not mine either. I'm still here."
"Then keep him."
"I can't, I just told you, my job—"
"Figure it out."
I dropped his hand like it had gone hot.
"Wow."
"What."
"Do you give a damn about anything?"
It hung there between us, and it was not really about the dog, and we both knew it.
It was about the hallway. About a man who kept exiting.
About how he kept looking at me like I was simultaneously the best and worst thing his day had produced and he resented the schedule that had introduced us.
About how hard he was working, right in front of me, to feel nothing.
He laughed.
Not a real one. Nothing with warmth in it. Short, dark, hollowed all the way out. The laugh of a man who'd been asked this exact question before and had landed on an answer he wasn't proud of.
"No," he said.
One word, and it went in like something thrown.
Then he got in his car.
My hand was still humming where I'd held his wrist. My brain was still flipping through screens and headlines, hunting for the frame that fit his face.
And my chest had gone tight around a feeling I was refusing to label, something standing far too close to disappointment, the particular ache of losing a thing I'd never actually had.
What was wrong with him.
And, the more pressing item, what was wrong with me, that I was standing in a wet parking lot still asking.
He started the engine.
He drove away.
No goodbye. No name. Nothing at all.