“I studied in the car while I was waiting for you to go to lunch. The chick says it’s easier for you to pee in a cup, but none of these came with cups, and I’m not willing to spare a coffee mug for you to pee in it.”
She took the stick from my fingers and stared at it.
“This is really weird,” she said, putting the stick between her teeth as she started to lower her pants.
I grinned and watched her do it.
“I’ve already seen everything there is to see,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, after you’re done, I’ll pee in front of you.”
She sat down with a huff and pulled the test out from between her teeth.
She peed on the stick, eyes wide and scared, and then recapped it.
I was slightly surprised when she stopped mid pee and held her hand out for another test.
We did it three more times before I said, “You know, it’s really uncomfortable for me to stop mid-stream. I’m kind of really impressed with you right now.”
“This is really weird,” she muttered, staring at me.
I couldn’t care less how weird it was to watch your girl pee.
I wanted to make sure she did it right.
I had a lot of things riding on this… and I found myself fucking excited.
Really fucking excited.
She finished, washed her hands, and then looked down at the screen where there was still no sign.
I wrapped my arms around her just as both of our phones started to go off in time with the others.
“Hello?” I answered Nico’s call.
Ashe did the same, walking out of the bathroom.
“Got a girl missing in your area,” Nico said without preamble. “She was last seen on your road, about half a mile away, about five minutes ago. There was a car that saw her run into the woods… and she’s the same girl that went missing three weeks ago.”
The same girl that we’d had an alert out for since she’d come up missing.
Most of Kilgore had thought that she was just a runaway, but others had insisted that she wasn’t.
“I’ll go out,” I said, hanging up.
When I got back into the bedroom, it was to find Ashe stealing a sweatshirt from my closet.
“Let’s go.”Chapter 16
You can have all my hoodies.
-How to get a girl
Ford
My eyes scanned the area as I felt helplessness start to roll through me.
Ashe, keeping up beside me, but starting to drag behind just a tad, groaned.
“Why does it have to be so freakin’ cold?” she asked.
It was cold.
At least, for us it was.
It was slowly creeping down near thirty-two degrees, and the longer that we walked, the lower the temperature dropped.
It was even suspected that we might get some snow tonight if all the conditions went how they were expected to go.
Which meant that it was bone fucking cold for us, and we hadn’t found a single damn thing in over an hour of searching.
“How long do we look?” Ashe asked worriedly. “What if this was a false call?”
I’d thought that, too.
The false calls had been coming for weeks now.
Oh, I think I just saw her at the Dairy Queen. Oh, that might’ve been her at the grocery store. Oh, this girl that I’m staring at looks just like her.
Each time someone investigated, it was found that it wasn’t the missing girl.
“Maybe we should move and go back to the road. Question the guy that saw her again,” Ashe suggested.
I frowned hard when we came up to a pond.
“Son of a bitch,” I growled, looking at it with anger in my eyes.
The pond was fucking huge, and to get around it, we’d have to walk a really long fucking way in either direction.
“I…”
Ashe grabbed my hand, her fingernails digging into my palm.
“Look.”
I did, finding myself staring at the pond that was an icy sludge at the edges.
“At what?” I asked.
She pointed, her finger pointing out about a hundred feet or so. “By that tree. Look at the pink.”
I looked harder, only just now seeing the shock of pink that was hanging on to the tree that’d fallen out into the middle of the pond.
My heart leaped as I saw the lump shift.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, stripping out of my jacket. “Call them here. Now.”
And just like that, I toed off my boots and waded into the lake.
The shock of the cold hit me immediately, seeping down deep into my bones and giving me a body shuddering chill the likes of which I’d never felt before.
“Be careful, Chevy,” Ashe said from behind me.
I gave her a thumbs up and kept wading in, making my way to the downed log.
By the time I arrived at it, the water was deep, and I could practically feel my body getting more and more sluggish.
My limbs didn’t want to cooperate, and even though I told myself to move, I found that I couldn’t make it.