Chapter 2 #2
This is important. Not the clean up of someone who is tidy by nature, which I am not particularly, but the clean up of someone who has learned to leave spaces the way she found them.
Doris Harrow’s bathroom should not know I was here for longer than necessary.
The box goes in my bag. The gloves go in my bag.
The hair in the tub goes in the small bin in the corner, covered.
I wipe the mirror.
I wipe the counter.
I look at the bathroom and it looks like a bathroom someone used and treated with care. Good. That’s the aim.
I go back to the bedroom.
My bag is on the floor where I dropped it. I sit on the edge of the bed. I look at my hands, which are clean, the gloves having done their job, no stain, no evidence, just my hands. I flex my fingers.
Different hair. Same hands.
Still me.
Still the person who is going to have to trust her own instincts again eventually, because the alternative is running forever, and I have decided—somewhere between New Mexico and this yellow-walled bathroom—that I am done running forever.
Not done running. Not yet. But done with the forever part.
I’m still running, I think. I’m still a woman with someone else’s story written across her record and a locked box of grief on a high shelf and four hundred dollars in her jacket pocket and no clear path to the next move.
None of that has changed. Except I’m in Sweetwater Valley and the air is different here. I felt something when I drove into this town that I haven’t felt before, something that sits in the back of my sternum without explanation.
I touch my hair. Not mine and also mine, now, for as long as I need it to be. I lie back on the cedar-scented mattress and look at the ceiling. Tonight I’ll be someone slightly different walking through a town I’m passing through on my way to the next position.
I can’t sleep.
This is not a surprise. This is what happens when you’ve been running on adrenaline for seventy-two hours and then stop.
The body doesn’t know what to do with the stillness.
It keeps generating the chemicals, keeps the heart at an elevated pace, keeps the nervous system online and scanning for threats that aren’t currently present.
I lie on the pine-scented mattress and stare at the ceiling. I am absolutely, completely, frustratingly awake.
My mind runs the Amber calculation.
I shut it down.
It runs the evidence calculation.
I shut that down too.
It starts running the my-life-is-over-crisis, and I shut that down hardest of all because that one has the most variables and I don’t have the bandwidth.
I stare at the ceiling. The ceiling is not interesting.
It’s so damned quiet here. Way too quiet. There’s nothing else to focus on.
I try to remember what I saw around this pokey little town. The carnival wasn’t running yet. There were a few Mom and Pop restaurants. A late-night pharmacy. There was also a pub. I heard it when I drove in. It sounded lived-in rather than rowdy. It might be a good distraction?
I calculate the risk. New appearance. Small town. Late enough that the crowd is the core local version rather than the visitor version, which means everyone there knows everyone there, which means a stranger is notable.
Counter-argument: I cannot lie and stare up at this ceiling for another six hours.
Counter-counter-argument: I have a reasonable cover now, at least the first-second version, and I could use a drink that isn’t from a gas station and a conversation that doesn’t happen inside my own head.
I sit up. I put my shoes on.
The pub is called The River and I learn this from the faded wooden sign when I get there, which is a name I appreciate for its directness. It does what it says. It is near the river. No further explanation required.
Inside it is warm. The warmth of a room that has been full of people for a long time and has absorbed the heat of them, the amber of old wood, the low lighting, the smell of beer and something fried, and underneath it something that is just people who know each other, the scent of ease.
The crowd is, as calculated, the late-night local version. Twelve, maybe fifteen people. A bartender who looks up when I come in with the assessment of someone who has seen everything and is filing me quickly.
I take a stool at the far end of the bar. Not the corner, the corner is obvious. The deliberate choosing of the corner reads as someone with reasons to be in the corner. The far end is someone who likes space without being paranoid about it.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asks. He’s cute, probably not much older than I am. Blond hair, a dazzling smile.
“Whatever’s good,” I reply.
He considers this. Pulls something from the mid-shelf without ceremony and pours it. “Whiskey, local distillery. Valley’s been making it for forty years.”
I try it. It’s good. Actually good, the kind of smooth that means the aging was taken seriously and the grain was taken seriously, and I say so.
He looks slightly more interested in me. “You know whiskey?”
“I know some things.”
“Passing through?”
“I’m here for the carnival,” I say. It sounds plausible enough.
He nods, accepting the reason and has no further questions about it. He moves back down the bar.
I drink the whiskey and I roll my shoulders to relax them. I look around the room to get a read on who else is here. What they’re doing. The social geography of a space where everyone’s having a good time.
Two older men sit at a corner table playing something that involves cards and a quiet argument.
A group of four in the middle, mixed ages, easy body language so they must all be good friends.
A woman sits at the far table reading, which is odd.
Reading in a pub at eleven-thirty on a weeknight is a bold choice and I respect it.
And at the other end of the bar…
I don’t know how I missed him when I came in.
He’s looking at me now, which is why I’m not overlooking him again.
He has quick eyes and a face that looks like it’s perpetually about to find something amusing.
He’s been at this bar long enough to have the relaxed posture of someone in a familiar space.
He raises his glass.
I raise mine.
He grins.
“Bad day?” he asks.
He hasn’t moved. He’s still at his end of the bar, still easy, still with the grin. His dark hair is cut just a little longer than it should be. His brown eyes sparkle even under the dull lighting. I bet that smile makes all the local girls swoon.
“Excuse me?” I reply.
“Whiskey.” He tilts his head. “Not everyone’s first choice.”
I hold very still.
“I’m not—” he continues, raising a hand. “I’m just observant. Occupational hazard.” He pauses. “And mildly nosy.”
“Mildly,” I say.
“Sometimes I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut.
It’s a character flaw.” He picks up his drink and moves down the bar like he’s decided something and is acting on it without overthinking it.
He stops two stools away. Not one, not right beside me, two, leaving a buffer that says I’m making conversation, not a move.
This close, I can sense that he’s an Alpha.
If he starts lecturing me about being an unbonded Omega in a shady pub at midnight, I’m going to hit him. With my whiskey.
“Jack,” he says.
“Lola,” I reply.
“Lo-la.” He says it like he’s testing the weight of it. “You drove in tonight. Dark blue hatchback, rear left tire running a bit soft.”
I glare at him. I’m not sure this is safe ground.
“I was at the carnival ground,” he says. “I notice cars.”
“You notice a lot of things.”
“It’s a gift and a curse.” He drinks. “What brings you to Sweetwater Valley, Lola?”
“The carnival,” I say. Thank goodness for the carnival being in town so I have an excuse to hang my lies on.
“That’s what everyone says.”
“Maybe everyone means it.”
“Maybe.” His eyes are sharp and bright and they’re doing the thing where they look like they’re not paying close attention when they’re paying very close attention. I recognize this because I do it too. “You don’t look like someone who came for the carnival.”
“What do I look like I came here for?”
He considers this seriously, like he has been asked a big question and he is going to give it a real answer. “Someone who needed to stop moving,” he finally says. “And picked somewhere that looked safe enough.”
The whiskey glass is cool in my hand. “That’s a lot to get from a hatchback and a drink.”
“I also got it from the way you sat down,” he says. “Back to the wall, sightline to the door, far enough from the group to have deniability about being part of it.” He pauses. “You’re very good at looking like you’re not doing what you’re doing.”
“And what am I doing?”
“Right now?” He smiles mischievously. “Deciding whether I’m a problem.”
It’s difficult to keep the smile from my lips. There’s something about this guy that is not setting off my alarm bells. Which should be a red flag immediately. Yet stupid me still sits here talking to him.
He keeps his gaze on me and what’s in his expression is not threat. Not a calculation. The casually nice face that has turned my way like a plant turns toward light, not demanding anything from the direction but genuinely, simply interested in it.
“Are you?” I ask. “A problem?”
“Frequently. But not the kind you’re thinking about.”
“What kind am I thinking about?”
“The kind that makes trouble,” he says. “I’m not that kind.” He finishes his drink. Signals the bartender without looking, the simplicity of a long habit. “I’m the kind that buys the next round and asks too many questions and overstays his welcome.”
“That’s a very specific self-assessment.”
“I’ve had time to develop it.” His fresh drink arrives. He nudges my empty glass toward the bartender without asking. “What do you do, Lola?”
“Lots of things.”
“Name one.”
“Currently? Whiskey.”
He grins. A real, full, troublesome grin. It does something to the room, the energy of someone whose enjoyment is genuine rather than faked. I feel the corner of my mouth respond before I decide to let it.
We talk for an hour.