7. Harper
HARPER
Iwoke up in a stranger's hoodie that smelled like cedar and gun oil, and my first thought was it smells like him, and my second was like who?
For a long minute I didn't move. I lay there with the gray fabric bunched under my cheek and let my brain reboot the way an old machine does, fans first, then memory loading in the wrong order.
Socks. A bullet hole where my shoes used to be.
A cut on my arm under a square of gauze somebody had taped down like it mattered.
A man who wouldn't give me his name, and a phone I'd killed myself, lying face down on the floor where it had slid out of my hand in the night.
The hoodie was not mine. Charcoal gray, three sizes too big, sleeves that swallowed my hands.
I had not put it on, which meant he had, sometime between me falling asleep mid-insult and the light coming up gray at the window seams. He had pulled it over a woman he'd known nine hours, tugged the hem down, and stepped away.
The thought of those careful hands doing a quiet thing in the dark with no one watching made my whole chest go hot and strange.
I sat up too fast. The room tilted, then settled.
He was in the kitchenette. Of course he was.
Back to me in a black T-shirt that did nothing to hide what the night before had told me, that he was built like a door, working a French press with the focused stillness of a man defusing ordnance.
A thin pewter light bled through the film on the windows, enough to see by, not enough to believe in an outside.
"You dressed me," I said. My voice came out a rasp.
He didn't turn around. "You were cold."
"That's a sentence with a lot of hands in it."
"You can have it back whenever you'd like." He set one mug down and slid it an inch toward the empty stool, an offering made at arm's length. "You looked like you'd stop shivering in it. So."
So. The man had a one-word vocabulary for anything that touched a feeling, I was learning. I pulled the cuffs down over my fists and did not give the hoodie back, and we both noted that I didn't, and neither of us said anything about it, which was somehow louder than if we had.
"Is that coffee?"
"It's an attempt."
"I'll take an attempt. I'll take a rumor of coffee.
I'll take a man describing coffee to me from across a field.
" I got up, wobbled, and crossed toward the smell, which is the only thing that has ever reliably moved me before noon.
The floor was cold through my socks, as advertised.
I wrapped both swallowed hands around the mug and felt, for one whole second, almost like a person.
Then I remembered I was a hostage. A guest. A loose end being kept somewhere safe by a man who shot people and made a passable French press. The categories were getting slippery.
"Okay," I said, turning to lean against the counter so I could watch him, because watching him felt safer than the alternative.
"Daylight. New plan. We talk like people.
You start by telling me one true thing about yourself, and I promise not to use it against you, which is a promise I'm definitely going to break. "
"I made coffee." He picked up his own mug. "That's true. That's the thing."
"That's not a fact about you, that's an event that happened near you."
"It's what you're getting."
"You are the single most withholding person I have ever met, and I once dated a guy who refused to tell me his last name until month two because he said it gave me, quote, too much power.
" I sipped. It was good. I resented how good it was.
"You'd have liked him. He also owned a gun he wouldn't discuss. "
Something moved at the corner of his mouth and got shut down before it could become anything. He had a whole security system for that mouth. I was starting to want, very badly, to get past it, a problem I made a note to examine never.
Here is the thing about two people who hate talking trapped in a closet of a room: it is not quiet.
It is two engines running hot with the brakes on.
He'd do something small and competent, wipe the counter, square a towel, and I'd narrate half of it, and his silence only made me narrate more, because silence to me is a vacuum I cannot help rushing to fill.
We circled. We did not touch. We were the same animal, I realized with a kind of horror, stapled into one small room to see what happened.
"You don't have a TV," I said. "You don't have books. You don't have a single object in here that suggests a hobby or an inner life. What do you do in this room?"
"Wait."
"For what?"
"Whatever's coming." He said it the way other people say they sort the mail.
"That's the bleakest thing I've ever heard, and I've read the comments under a local news post."
So I did what I do, which is poke the dangerous thing, because some wire in me is crossed and always has been.
Fear and curiosity run on the same line for me, and curiosity is heavier, it always wins, it has gotten me into every room I should never have entered, including the one that started all of this.
I set the mug down and started, casually, to case the place.
The steel door first. He'd hung it himself, flush in a frame shimmed to a hair. Two locks I could see and one I couldn't, a keypad with the shine worn into four digits in a pattern I clocked without deciding to. I leaned on it like I was stretching, and it didn't even acknowledge me.
"It's locked," he said, not looking up from the window seam.
"I'm aware. I'm appreciating the craftsmanship."
"The vent's too small for a cat," he said, finally looking at me, with nothing smug in it, which was the maddening part. "Check it all if it helps. You'll feel better."
"I hate that you said that, because now if I check them it looks like I'm doing what you told me, and if I don't check them it looks like I believe you, and both of those are unacceptable."
"Then we're at an impasse."
"We're at an impasse," I agreed, and checked everything anyway, because of course I did, and he was right about all of it, and I came back to the counter feeling like I'd lost a chess match to a man who hadn't bothered to sit down at the board.
So I went for the real thing. I needed a screen and a connection and ten unobserved minutes, and then I'd know who he was and what was happening and who exactly wanted to put me in a freezer, because information is the only blanket that has ever actually kept me warm.
My phone was dead on the floor and staying that way. But there's always a router. I drifted toward the faint warmth of electronics behind the kitchen wall, casual as I could fake it, eyes doing the work my hands weren't allowed to.
"There's no wireless," he said, before I'd touched anything.
"Nothing that broadcasts. The line that comes in is hard only, and it terminates somewhere you won't find, and even if you found it, it's not a network, it's a tunnel, and the far end of it is a wall.
" He sipped. "I built it to keep people out. It works the other direction too."
I stared at him. "How did you know I was going to do that?"
"Because it's what I'd do."
And there it was, the reason my pulse wouldn't settle.
He had thought of me before I thought of me.
Every door I reached for was already closed, not slammed, just closed, ahead of time, by someone who knew which way I'd run because it was the way he'd run.
It made me furious. It also made me want to know what lived inside a head that worked like that, because I had never met a mind that kept up with mine, let alone got there first and turned on the light.
"You're enjoying this," I accused.
"No."
"You are. There's a one percent muscle activation in your face that, for you, is basically a parade."
"I'm not enjoying any of this," he said, and the floor that dropped out of his voice on the last word made me believe him, and made me feel, weirdly, worse.
He set his mug down, crossed to a duffel in the corner, and came up with something I'd buried so deep in the wreckage of the night I'd forgotten to grieve it.
My laptop. Battered, sticker-peeling, held together with spite, the one thing besides the phone that was mine.
The last time I'd seen it, going out my door in the dark, the screen had been a spiderweb of cracks with a dead black bloom where it caught the floor.
It wasn't cracked anymore.
"You," I said, and stopped, because my voice had done something embarrassing.
"The panel was the only thing damaged. The board was fine.
" He set it on the counter in front of me, screen up, and stepped back, hands going behind him, a man delivering something and getting clear of it.
"I had a spare display close enough. The bezel doesn't sit flush, bottom left corner.
You'll see a seam. I didn't have the right adhesive, so I used the wrong one, which means if you ever pry it you'll fight me for it. But it's not cracked."
I opened it. It woke. The screen was whole and clean and mine, every sticker, every scratch, the dent where I'd dropped a screwdriver on it at sixteen.
He'd done it in the dark, in between dressing a sleeping girl and making a French press, without being asked, without mentioning it, and handed it back like it was nothing, like he hadn't just returned the only thing I owned that remembered who I was.