Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"After I refuel," he says, when I open the first aid kit in my lap.
I look at him.
"Five minutes," he says. "Then you can do whatever you want to my face."
I close the kit and sit back and watch him get out of the car, the way he moves even now, even with blood dried on his cheekbone and his shoulder held slightly wrong from where the lamp caught him, still controlled, still deliberate, like his body doesn't know how to be anything other than ready.
The gas station is nearly empty.
One other car at the far pump, engine running, no one visible inside it.
A light above the station door flickering in that specific way that suggests it's been flickering for months and no one has gotten around to replacing the bulb.
The fog has followed us from the cabin, sitting thick and low over everything, swallowing the edges of the road and the dark fields beyond.
I get out to stretch my legs because sitting still after everything that happened tonight is its own particular kind of unbearable.
The air is cold and damp and smells like gas and wet earth.
I lean against the side of the car and wrap my arms around myself and that's when I notice him.
He's standing at the corner of the station building, not at a pump, not going inside, just standing there with a coffee cup in one hand that he hasn't lifted in the entire thirty seconds I've been watching him. He's looking at us.
Not the casual glancing of someone who noticed movement in their peripheral vision. Not the idle curiosity of a bored man waiting for something. This is fixed and deliberate and specific, his eyes moving between me and Enzo and back to me with an attention that makes the back of my neck go cold.
I don't move. I don't look away from him. I just go still the way I've learned to go still when something is wrong and I don't yet know how wrong.
Enzo is beside me before I've registered him moving.
He doesn't look at the man. He doesn't acknowledge him in any visible way. He simply repositions himself, adjusting where he's standing at the pump, and suddenly his body is between me and the corner of the building and the angle the man would need to close the distance to reach me.
His hand brushes my lower back, light and brief.
Back to the car.
I open the passenger door and get in without hurrying, without looking back, and I watch through the windshield as Enzo finishes paying with the particular efficiency of someone who is wrapping up a task and not running from anything, nothing in his posture or his pace that the watching man could point to as fear.
He gets in.
The engine starts immediately.
We pull out of the gas station and onto the road and I watch the man in the wing mirror until the fog swallows him and he disappears into the grey.
Neither of us speaks for a moment.
"He was watching us," I say.
"Yes."
"You saw him before I did."
"Yes."
"Is he O'Rourke's?"
Enzo's jaw is tight and his eyes are on the road and the mirrors in rotation, that systematic checking that never stops.
"I don't know for certain. But a man standing at a gas station in the fog at two in the morning not buying gas, watching us with that kind of focus—" He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to.
"So they know we left the cabin."
"They know we're moving. Whether they know where we're going depends on whether that man has someone to call." He glances in the mirror again. "We need to stop for the night. I can't drive safely with this visibility."
"Okay."
"You're not going to argue?"
"Would it help if I did?"
He looks at me briefly and something moves at the corner of his mouth. "No."
"Then no," I say. "I'm not going to argue."
The fog gets worse.
It comes in thicker as we drive, pressing against the windshield, reducing the headlights to two pale suggestions of light that barely reach the road ahead.
Enzo drives slowly and carefully and I watch the darkness on either side of the road and think about the man at the gas station, about his fixed unmoving attention, about the coffee cup he never lifted to his mouth.
The motel appears out of the fog like something we imagined, a low building with a sign that reads VACANCY in letters that have seen better decades, a small parking lot, three other cars. Roadside and anonymous and exactly what we need.
Enzo checks us in while I wait by the car, watching the road though I can see them still. The woman at the desk barely looks up. Cash changes hands. A key card appears.
The room is at the end of the ground floor, away from the road, which I understand is deliberate. Enzo checks the lock twice and the window once before he sets his bag down and turns the one lamp on low and the room comes into dim existence around us.
Small. One bed. A narrow table by the window. The walls are off-white but probably used to be white.
He sets his gun on the bedside table within reach and then reaches for his jacket to take it off and stops.
"Enzo."
He looks at me.
"Take it off slowly," I say, because I can see by the way he moved that the shoulder is worse than he's letting on.
He takes the jacket off slowly, and when the fabric clears his shoulder I see it, a cut across his chest from the fight, longer than I'd like, deep enough that the fabric of his shirt has stuck to it in places and dried there.
I have the first aid kit open before he can tell me it's fine.
"Sit down," I say.
He sits on the edge of the bed.
I sit beside him and open the kit in my lap and I don't look at his face because if I look at his face I'll lose my concentration, and right now I need to concentrate.
"This is going to sting," I say.
"I know."
I clean the cut carefully, working from one end to the other, and he doesn't make a sound, doesn't flinch, just sits there with his hands loose on his thighs and his breathing even and lets me work.
The lamp casts everything in amber and the motel is quiet around us.
Outside the fog presses against the window and makes the room feel like the only place in the world.
"You should have told me this was this bad," I say quietly.
"It's manageable."
"That's not what manageable looks like."
He says nothing.
I press a clean pad to the cut and hold it and look up at him for the first time since I started and immediately wish I'd waited a little longer because he's staring at me, close and quiet and completely still in the way he gets when he's decided something.
"It was a long night," I say, because I need to say something.
Something shifts in his expression, something warm underneath the control. "It was."
I look back down at what I'm doing. I apply the closure strips carefully, pressing each one down, smoothing the edges, and his skin is warm under my fingers and the room is very quiet and I am extremely aware of every inch of distance between us, which are not many.
"Done," I say.
I should move back. I should close the first aid kit and put a reasonable amount of space between us because this room is small and it's late and we've already established tonight that neither of us is very good at stopping once we start.
I don't move back.
Neither does he.
He reaches up and his fingers brush the side of my face, light and careful, his thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone the way he did once in a dark hallway and once in a jacuzzi and apparently the feeling it produces in me doesn't diminish with repetition, it just gets more specific, more concentrated, like my body has been cataloging exactly what his touch feels like and keeps updating the record.
"Isabella," he says quietly.
"I know," I say, because I do know, I know all the reasons, I've known them all along.
His hand curves around my jaw and he tilts my face up and he kisses me.
It's nothing like the jacuzzi.
That was heat and frustration and four years of everything finally breaking the surface all at once.
This is slow. His mouth is soft against mine and he takes his time with it, learning the shape of my lips with a patience that makes my chest ache, his thumb moving gently against my jaw, his other hand finding my waist and settling there without pulling me closer, just resting, just anchoring.
I kiss him back slowly, matching the pace he's set, and it feels like something I've been waiting for without knowing I was waiting, the specific quality of this, the gentleness of it, which should not be as devastating as it is.
He pulls back just slightly.
Close enough that I can feel him breathing.
A low moan of protest leaves my lips as he rests his forehead against mine and we stay there, eyes closed, breathing the same air in the amber lamplight of this small anonymous room.
I shiver and it’s not from cold. Not from anything except the way his mouth felt and the way he's looking at me now and the particular tenderness of his hand still curved against my jaw.
He pulls back immediately, his hand moving to my arm. "Are you cold?"
I open my eyes. He's looking at me with concern, reading it wrong, already reaching for the blanket at the foot of the bed.
"I'm not cold," I say.
He looks at me.
"I'm not cold, Enzo."
Understanding moves across his face slowly, and with it something else, something that makes his jaw tighten and his hand still on my arm and his eyes drop briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes.
He exhales slowly. His hand moves from my arm to my hand and he holds it, loose and warm, and we sit on the edge of the bed in the lamplight and don't say anything else for a long moment.
"You should sleep," he says finally.
"You should too."
"I'll rest.
I know he won't sleep. He means he'll sit in that chair by the window with his gun and watch the door all night.
"Enzo."
"I'll rest," he says again, firmly but not unkindly. "Sleep, Isabella."
I lie back and pull the blanket up and watch him cross to the chair by the window and settle into it, his gun resting on his knee, his eyes on the door.
The lamp stays on low.
I watch him for longer than I should and I'm aware of him there, solid and present in the amber light, and the room feels safe.
Outside, the fog sits thick against the window.
Neither of us speaks but neither of us sleeps either, and we both know the other is awake, but somehow that's enough.