cVV #2
Joker notices immediately. I don’t know how. Maybe because he notices everything. Maybe because I’m sitting close enough that the movement isn’t subtle in the passenger seat. Whatever the reason, he glances over once, then reaches behind his own seat without making a big deal out of it.
“Here.” He pulls a dark gray sweatshirt from the back and holds it toward me one-handed while keeping the truck steady with the other.
I stare at it for a second too long.
His sweatshirt.
The thing is absurdly large and clearly worn, the sleeves pushed up where it’s been folded or tossed around in the back. It shouldn’t matter. It definitely shouldn’t make my pulse do that weird little stutter.
“I’m fine,” I say automatically.
He keeps it there. “You’re shivering.”
“I’m not cold.”
His brow lifts the slightest bit. “You’re visibly shaking.”
The fact that he says it without judgment somehow makes it worse.
I hesitate another second, then take the sweatshirt because refusing would be ridiculous and because I am, apparently, too tired to keep pretending I’m less affected than I am.
The cotton is soft and heavier than I expected.
It’s still faintly warm from being in the cab, and when I pull it over my head, it smells like him.
Not in a way that should matter. Not in a way I can even properly explain.
Just clean detergent, skin, leather, something darker and masculine beneath it that doesn’t smell expensive or polished.
It smells real. Grounded. Like the truck and the road and a body that exists firmly in the world without asking permission.
The comfort of it hits me so unexpectedly I almost go still.
That makes no sense.
It’s just a sweatshirt. A borrowed layer from a man I’ve known for less than an hour. There is absolutely no reason the weight of it settling over my shoulders should feel like relief.
And yet.
I tug the sleeves down over my hands and stare out the windshield, trying very hard not to think about it. “Thanks,” I say quietly.
He shrugs one shoulder. “Didn’t need you freezing to death before the state line.”
The dry edge of it makes me smile before I can stop myself. Small. Barely there. But real.
I’m almost certain he notices.
He doesn’t say anything about it.
The miles keep slipping beneath us. The road changes slowly, almost imperceptibly, from one stretch of dark highway to another.
Every now and then Joker takes an exit I wouldn’t have expected, then loops back onto a different road ten or fifteen minutes later.
At first I assume he’s just following directions I don’t know about.
Then I notice he keeps checking the mirrors.
Not casually. Not the absent kind of scanning most drivers do. Purposefully. Constantly. Rearview. Side mirror. Road. Tree line. Rearview again.
He does it with the same calm rhythm he does everything else, like it’s second nature and not worth mentioning, but once I notice it, I can’t stop noticing.
He’s also not taking the most direct route.
I know enough about driving north from here to recognize that. We should’ve stayed on one of the bigger highways longer than we did. Instead, he peeled off twice, cut through darker stretches, circled back around onto roads that make less sense if your only goal is speed.
That should scare me. It should make me feel more hunted, not less. But the opposite happens. Because for the first time in weeks, I’m not the only one paying attention.
I’m not the only one calculating where a car behind us has been for too long. I’m not the only one trying to remember what color the headlights were two exits ago. I’m not the only one carrying the mental weight of every possible thing that could go wrong.
Joker is doing it too. Not nervously. Not in a way that makes me think he’s panicking. In a way that says this is what he does when he wants something protected.
And God help me, I feel myself easing because of it. Not fully. Not enough to be stupid.
But enough that my grip loosens on the sweatshirt sleeves by degrees until my hand is just resting there instead of clamped around it like a lifeline.
Enough that I stop checking the side mirror every thirty seconds because I know he already has.
Enough that my breathing starts evening out without me having to force it.
That realization is so foreign I almost don’t trust it.
I watch his profile in the low light for a second before I can stop myself.
He’s exactly what I thought when I first saw him. Big. Hard. Dangerous in a way that doesn’t require theatrics. He doesn’t look like a safe man.
He looks like the kind of man you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw him in daylight with that expressionless face and those tattooed hands and that rough-cut presence that feels too sharp for ordinary life.
And yet sitting here beside him, wrapped in his sweatshirt with my daughter asleep in the backseat and the night stretched wide around us, I feel safer than I have in longer than I want to think about. That contradiction should probably bother me more than it does.
Instead, it makes something in my chest ache.
I turn my face back toward the window before he can catch me looking.
A few more quiet miles pass before he speaks again. “You can sleep if you want.”
The offer surprises me enough that I glance at him. “I’m okay.”
“You don’t look okay.”
There’s no cruelty in it. No challenge. Just observation.
I should probably be offended. Instead, I let out a tired breath and say, “That’s because I haven’t been okay in a while.”
The words slip out before I can stop them. For half a second, I wish I could pull them back. Not because they’re untrue. Because I don’t know what to do with the fact that I said them aloud to a man I barely know.
Joker doesn’t pounce on it. Doesn’t ask what happened or why or how bad it got. He just nods once like he heard me and leaves it there.
That should not feel as kind as it does.
I shift deeper into the seat, the sweatshirt swallowing me whole, and glance back at Lexi.
She’s still asleep, her face turned toward the window, Bunny trapped tight in her arms. Her little mouth is slightly open, her lashes dark against her cheeks, and one of her shoes has come half untied from where she must’ve been kicking her feet before she passed out.
I stare at her for a long second. Then I look forward again and realize something slowly, carefully, like my body is afraid to believe it too fast.
For the first time in weeks, I’m not carrying all of it alone.
Not the route. Not the vigilance. Not the constant, grinding expectation of danger pressing against the back of my skull.
Some of it is sitting in the driver’s seat beside me, broad shoulders filling the dark cab of the truck, eyes moving between the road and the mirrors like he’s already decided that whatever is chasing us will have to go through him first.
I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do with him.
But somewhere between Louisiana and whatever comes next, with my daughter asleep in the backseat and a stranger’s sweatshirt wrapped around my body like borrowed armor, I feel something I haven’t felt in so long it almost doesn’t register at first.
Not safety.
Not yet.
But maybe the first edge of it.
And for right now, in the middle of this dark road with nowhere to go but forward, that is enough.