Instead he drew a map.
“Single-story, white—or used to be white—wood frame, I don’t remember the address, but it’s right on Highway 68. Next to a service station. Has one of those old metal signs hanging out front, Havoline Oil or something like that.”
He tore off the sheet and pressed it into my hand.
“And why is this the last place they’d look for us?” I was falling for the deflecting technique again, not that Havoline Oil had anything cloyingly poetical about it. “And why are you drawing me a map when you’re coming with us?”
“In case something happens.”
“To you. What if something happens to both of us?”
“You’re right. I’ll make five more.”
He started on the next one. I watched for two seconds, then grabbed the pad out of his hand and threw it at his head.
“You son of a bitch. I know what you’re doing.”
“I was drawing a map, Cassie.”
“Rigging a detonator from a soda fountain Mission: Impossible style, really? While we all run like hell for the Havoline sign with you in the lead on your broken ankle and stabbed leg, sporting a hundred-and-six-degree temperature . . .”
“If I had a hundred-and-six-degree temperature, I’d be dead,” he pointed out.
“No, and you want to know why? Because dead people have no temperature!”
He was nodding thoughtfully. “God, I’ve missed you.”
“There! There it is, right there! Just like the Walker homestead, just like Camp Ashpit, just like Vosch’s death camp. Whenever I’ve got you cornered . . .”
“You had me cornered the minute I laid—”
“Stop it.”
He stopped. I sat on the bed next to him. Maybe I was going about this all wrong. You catch more flies with honey, my grandmother always said. The problem was that womanly wiles weren’t something I carried in my wheelhouse. I took his hand. I looked deeply into his eyes. I considered unbuttoning my shirt a bit, but decided he might see through that little ploy. Not that my ploys were that little.
“I’m not letting you pull another Camp Haven on me,” I said, adding what I hoped to be an alluring purr to the timbre. “That isn’t going to happen. You’re coming with us. Poundcake and Dumbo can carry you.”
He reached up with his other hand and touched my cheek. I knew that touch. I’d missed it. “I know,” he said. The expression in his chocolatey (gah) eyes was infinitely sad. I knew that look, too. I’d seen it before, in the woods when he confessed who he really was. “But you don’t know everything. You don’t know about Grace.”
“Grace,” I echoed, pushing his hand from my cheek, forgetting all about the honey. I liked his touch too much, I decided. I needed to work on not liking it so much. And also
work on not liking the way he looked at me as if I were the last person on Earth, which I actually thought I was before he found me. That’s a terrible thing, an awful burden to put on someone. You make your whole existence dependent on another human being and you’re asking for a world of trouble. Think of every tragic love story ever written. And I didn’t want to play Juliet to anybody’s Romeo, not if I could help it. Even if the only candidate available was willing to die for me and sitting right beside me holding my hand and looking deeply into my eyes with the not-so-gah-now eyes the color of melted chocolate. Plus being practically naked under those covers and possessing the body of a Hollister dude . . . but I’m not getting into all that.
“Grace again. You kept mentioning grace after I shot you,” I told him.
“You don’t know Grace.”
Well, that stung. I never knew he was so religious—or judgmental. The two usually go hand in hand, still . . .
“Cassie, I have to tell you something.”
“You’re a Baptist?”
“That day on the highway after I—let you get away, I was very afraid. I didn’t understand what happened, why I couldn’t . . . do what I came to do. Do what I was born to do. It didn’t make sense to me. And in a lot of ways, it still doesn’t make sense. You think you know yourself. You think you know the person you see in the mirror. I found you, but in finding you, I lost myself. Nothing was clear anymore. Nothing was simple.”
I nodded. “I remember that. I remember simple.”
“In the beginning, after I brought you back, I really didn’t know if you were going to make it. And I would sit there with you and I’d think, Maybe she shouldn’t.”