Page 43 of Handful

Target grinned. “Still got eyes, Handful.”

“Always.”

He went back to his phone. The hangaround turned the corner and was gone.

I stood in the corridor.

The music was muffled through the wall. Someone laughed. A glass clinked.

Legs for days on that one.

I’d said it the way you say hello. No thought. No hesitation. The kind of sentence that assembled itself in the back of my throat and walked out before the front of my brain knew it was coming. Six words. Said to a brother in a hallway. About a woman whose name I didn’t know.

I’d spent months watching my mouth.

I looked down the corridor. Empty. The common room door was closed. Nobody had heard it except Target, and Target thought it was normal, because it was normal. It had always been normal. That was the whole fucking problem.

I went back to the common room. Looked for Austen.

The booths. The bar. The dance floor. The porch through the window.

Not there.

I checked the kitchen. The hallway. The porch.

Not there.

I came back inside. Stood at the edge of the room for a second. The party was still going — music, voices, the bar three deep. Nobody tracking me. Nobody who’d noticed anything was wrong.

Indira was in the booth with Lilac.

“Indira.” I leaned over. “You seen Austen?”

She looked up from something she was saying to Lilac. “She left. About twenty minutes ago.”

I straightened. “She—” I looked back at the room, like she might still be somewhere I hadn’t checked. “She didn’t tell me she was going.”

“No.”

“We were staying tonight.” I was talking half to Indira, half to myself. “That was the plan.”

Indira’s expression didn’t change.

“Did something happen? Is she—”

“She’s fine.”

Twenty minutes. I’d been at the bar with Colt, laughing about frosting, while she’d put her jacket on and walked out the front door.

“Did she say—”

“She said she was tired.” Indira’s face gave me nothing. “What did you do, Handful?”

I stood there. Indira waited. When I didn’t say anything she turned back to Lilac.

Outside it was quiet. The party sounds muffled from here — bass and voices, someone laughing at the top of their lungs somewhere inside. I pulled out my phone and called.

Four rings. Voicemail.