Chapter 27 #2
Veer saw me in all my grotesque animal fury and still came after me.
Maybe she’ll learn to resent me, or I’ll learn to hate her, but isn’t that what I wanted?
I mean, the chance to try something new and the freedom to turn away from it when I want, on my terms. And I won’t have to lie or steal or carve pieces of myself off as offerings to the gods of loneliness to survive. At least for a little while.
I want to say Why? and What’s wrong with you?
and maybe, just a little, What’s wrong with me?
There’s a roughness in my throat, and it takes a second to realize I’m on the verge of tears.
Because I’m scared, fuck, I’m scared that the future might be good, and it feels like betraying my mom to look forward to it.
“That could get old quick,” I say, and Veer shrugs and I’m gripped with the urge to say more, to say everything, to get on my knees and swear to her that I’ll never hurt her, that my curse will never touch her, but that’s not true and I think she’d know I was lying.
I shuffle forward and reach across the gap between us until I can tap the back of her hand with one finger. “Can we go for a drive?”
So we drive. Veer winds through the neighborhoods, going nowhere in particular. Just going. Maybe she’ll drive in circles till the sun goes down, till time stops. Her knuckles are striped pink and white against the black foam of the steering wheel.
“Are you going to tell anyone?” I whisper.
Without warning, Veer pulls over. She shoves her hand into her pocket and then there’s her open palm and the snick of a blade, and before I can react, her hand is on my mouth and my sinuses are full of the scent of calamity and collapse.
I lick the line she’s opened, a sort of second heart line, and my body crackles with the electric energy of sacrifice and satiation.
No more blood that smells of preservation and penitence. She tastes like coming home.
“What do you think?” she says, her eyes on the horizon, her sweat on my lips.
I press my tongue flat against the cut, willing it to close, and pull away.
“Your palm’s a stupid place to cut. It’ll keep reopening.”
Veer retracts her hand, her eyes dark. “I’m counting on it.”
I want to kiss her. I want so many things, but there’s a dusty, dented pickup truck a few houses down with a red-and-black For Sale placard in the window and that feels like a sign.
I nod at the truck. “I’m going to go take a look at it.”
Veer tenses. The air goes stale, and I’m flooded with the familiar feeling of failure. I’ve ruined everything again, somehow.
“Okay,” she mutters as I climb out. I want her to stop me. I want her to put into words what she wants from me and what she wants to give me. I don’t know how to do this.
Veer looks miserable, and I’m struck by the thought that maybe she doesn’t either. I remember the way she lashed out, the cold snap of her Can I help you? She watched me so many times, she waited for the right moment, and when it came, she couldn’t stop herself from pushing me away.
What if I tried, one more time, to get it right?
I slip back into the passenger seat. Veer’s hand flinches back from the gear shifter, her eyes flashing amber with hope.
“Hey,” I say. Wrong. Bad start. Stupid. Get out of the car, Ellis. Run away. Disappear. I breathe through my nose, let myself get lost in the cocoon of brake dust and sticky candy wrappers and a heart-line cut still refusing to close.
“I used to wish for someone like you,” I tell the blue expanse outside the windshield, and my voice wavers. “Someone who’d see everything, and not be scared, or maybe even be scared, but not turn away. Someone who’d take care of me without making it a debt.”
In the driver’s seat, Veer makes a choked noise. I turn and her eyes are glittering. She folds her hand over mine, envelops me in the smell of possibility and promise.
“I think I wished for someone like you too,” she whispers.
She sniffs, hides it with a cough. “You don’t owe me shit, okay?
When you were”—her hands flit uncertainly between her mouth and her torso, and I realize she’s still finding words for what I am—“that was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, no question, but I’ve seen a lot of scary shit.
I can take it. Just, you know, I want someone who’ll take from me honestly. Not fuck me up and call it love.”
She trails off, and I hear all her secrets in the silence after. She, too, is afraid of being in debt. She, too, doesn’t know how to love without sacrificing pieces of herself. But life is long and the desert is wide and maybe there’s still time to try.
I look back to the sign on the truck. 89K miles.
Good condition. The desert and its endless hunger, that’s home—the long straight stretch of highway, the mirage glimmer as it cuts a fork in the lapping tongue of the mountains.
Maybe some of these strangers in my inbox are too much like my mom, or like Brian, but maybe some of them aren’t.
“I have to go,” I say, and her fingers grip hard into mine. “But trucks have passenger seats.”
Her hand’s on my chin, now, forcing me to look at her. “Don’t fuck with me, now.”
She looks dangerous. Relief grows, expands out of me. “I won’t.”
She pushes into me, lips scraping mine, but the kiss itself is gentle and tender and scared and hopeful. Maybe there is something warmer than loneliness. Easier than fear. Maybe I can have it. Maybe I can’t, but fuck it, it’s at least worth a try.
Veer settles back in the driver’s seat, and I dial the number.