Page 3 of Devoured

The room she'd rented sight unseen, behind a house in town, was small and clean and smelled of someone else's laundry soap. Lara unpacked the one suitcase. Showered the drive off. Sat on the edge of a bed in a town she had been inside of for less than four hours and listened to a quiet so complete it had a sound.

She picked up her phone. There was a message half-written to her sister from the airport in Boston, hours and a lifetime ago — okay I'm actually doing this, don't say I told you so — that she'd never sent.

She deleted it.

Then she lay back under that impossible sky going dark in the window, and she made herself say the true thing, just once, where no one could hear it and hold it against her.

She had wanted him. For one stupid second on that porch, before he opened his mouth, her body had done the thing it always did and aimed itself straight at the worst man in the room.

But then he'd opened his mouth.

And that was the saving grace of Dean Royston. The others — the fiancé, the two before him — had been charming. Kind right up until they weren't, and the kindness had been the trap. This one had handed her his contempt in the first two minutes. You couldn't fall for a man like that. There was nothing to fall into. Every time her body started up its old stupid song, all she had to do was remember his face deciding she wouldn't last the week, and the wanting would die where it stood.

She'd be fine.

CHAPTER TWO

Lara bought the boots that night.

There was one store in Soluno still open past six, a feed-and-tack place on the main street with a wall of work boots in the back, and she stood in front of it for a while doing the math she always did before she spent money she'd told herself she wasn't going to spend. Then she remembered the way Dean had looked at her shoes — those won't last a week out here — and she stopped doing math and bought the boots.

Not for him. She was very clear with herself about that as the kid at the register rang her up. She was not buying boots so a rude stranger would think better of her, because she did not care what the rude stranger thought, because he was nothing to her but a paycheck and a name she'd be polite to across a desk. She was buying them because he'd been right about the shoes, the bastard, right about the shoes and wrong about what was underneath them, wrong about what she was made of.

She wore them out of the store. They were stiff and strange on her feet, heavier than they looked, and they made her walk differently, and somewhere between the register and the truck the spite drained out of her and left only the boots, and the fact of them, and the uncomfortable sense that she'd just spent money she didn't have on a costume for a part she wasn't at all sure she could play. She'd felt more certain about this job before she bought the boots than she did walking back to the truck in them.

She didn't sleep much. She blamed the bed, which was a stranger's bed in a stranger's garage, and the quiet, which was a different animal than Boston quiet, total and listening. She did not blame Dean Royston, because she had decided, lying in the dark, that he didn’t get to cost her sleep on top of everything else.

By the time the sky started going gray she gave up. She showered, pulled her hair up, put on the boots, and went down the outside stairs from the apartment over the garage to the house in front of it, where the kitchen light was already on.

Elena was at the counter already dressed, scrubs and a travel mug, moving with the brisk economy of a woman whose day had a body in it somewhere. She was around Lara's own age, which had thrown Lara when she first saw her, because the ad had said room to let, Dr. E. Santos and Lara had pictured someone gray and settled, not a woman who looked barely far enough out of training to have hung the diploma straight. The only doctor for sixty miles, and she couldn't have been more than a year or two qualified. Lara had done the math on that the way she did math on everything: a young doctor took a posting this remote because she'd chosen it, or because she was running from somewhere that had more doctors and worse memories. Lara hadn't asked which. She knew better than most that there were reasons a person landed at the end of a map, and that none of them were anyone else's business.

They didn't really know each other. That was the strange part, the thing Lara kept turning over. A week ago she'd taken a job in a town she'd had to look up on a map and answered an ad for a furnished room in the same afternoon, sight unseen, and the woman who'd written back had turned out to be both her landlord and the town doctor. Lara had slept exactly one night over that garage, and here they were sharing a coffeepot at dawn like two people who'd done it for years.

"You're up early," Elena said. She poured a second mug without being asked and pushed it across the counter. "First day."

"Yeah."

Elena studied her for a second. "You're nervous."

"I met him yesterday." Lara wrapped both hands around the mug. "Dean Royston. It didn't go well."

"Ah." Elena didn't look surprised. "What did he do?"

"Looked at my shoes. Decided I wouldn't last the week. Told me so." She heard how small it sounded out loud. "It was the way he said it."

Elena let that sit without poking at it, which Lara was grateful for, because the part that actually bothered her wasn't the part she'd said, and she couldn't have explained the rest without explaining too much.

Elena nodded slowly, like a diagnosis she'd seen before. "He's got a reputation for being hard. People out here will tell you that." She wrapped her own hands around her mug. "What they'll also tell you, if you ask the right ones, is that he's fair. He pays on time, he doesn't lie, and he's never once asked a hand to do a thing he wouldn't do himself in worse weather. And you have never in your life seen a man love two children the way that man loves his." She said it plainly, no softness on it, a fact rather than a kindness. "He's not cruel. He's just not warm. Out here those aren't the same thing, whatever it felt like on that porch."

It was, Lara would think later, the first true thing anyone had told her about Dean Royston, and she hadn't been ready to hear it, so she didn't.

"But you don't have to go," Elena went on, lighter now, the out laid down gently. "You met him once and he was a jackass. That's reason enough to call it. You can phone the house and say you've changed your mind and no one who's met the man would blame you for it."

"It's just first-day nerves," Lara said, and turned the mug in her hands. "Everyone's a mess on a first day. It doesn't mean anything."

Elena didn't argue, which was its own kind of answer.

Lara finished the coffee and went.