Page 74 of Across His Line

She turns her head and looks at me like I’ve told her to pick a kidney.

“Play something,” I say again. “Connect your phone.”

“You’re going to hate it.”

She looks at me for a second longer, like she’s checking to see if it’s a trick. Then she takes out her phone and taps at it, and the car asks if it can connect, and then something starts playing.

It’s a musical. Not a song from a musical. A whole musical. A cast recording, with an orchestra and a guy singing about something with his entire chest, and then a whole chorus of people joining in, and somebody tap dancing, I think. I’m pretty sure there’s tap dancing.

I look at her.

She’s looking straight ahead through the windshield with her face completely blank. But the corner of her mouth is doing something. Just barely. Like she knows exactly what she’s doing.

I hate musicals. I hate them more than I hate Greeley. My mother dragged me to one in the city every Christmas until I was fifteen, and I spent every single one of them sitting in the dark wanting to die.

I don’t tell her to change it. I don’t turn it down. I don’t say anything. I just put my hand back on the wheel and drive, and the guy keeps singing with his whole chest. Tess keeps looking out the windshield, and the corner of her mouth doesn’t go back to normal for a long time.

The light turns green.

We get on the highway ten minutes later, and the campus is gone behind us, and it’s just road. Gray and long and empty, headlights coming on in the other lanes, the sky over the trees going from blue to black.

She’s looking out the window. Her hands are still on the grocery bag. Her hair is coming out of its knot, and I keep my eyes on the road.

I’ve spent four years trying to get Tessa Canten away from me. I told her to withdraw. I told her I never wanted to see her again. I stood in a stairwell three weeks ago and tried to pay her to leave.

Now she’s sitting in my passenger seat, and I’m driving her home.

I don’t know exactly when this became okay. To be frank, I’m a little furious with myself. Especially with this fucking music playing.

But she’s here with me, and it seems like I’m not the only one who’s changed their mind.

13

Fourteen Minutes Away

Tessa

I know we’re close before the sign tells me.

It’s the gas station first, the one off the exit with the broken S in the sign so it’s been saying HELL in red neon since I was twelve. Then the pharmacy with the faded blue awning. The diner that changed its name three times and never its menu. The bridge, with the green paint peeling off the railings in long curls. The roads get narrower. The houses get closer together. The trees go from tall and spaced out to short and scraggly and full of plastic bags.

I know every inch of this. I could drive it with my eyes closed, if I had a car.

The whole car has been strange. Not bad, just strange. We listened to the whole musical, start to finish, and he never once reached for the volume. Then, he asked if the guy singing was supposed to sound like that, and I said yes, and he said, “Why,” with such complete sincerity that I laughed out loud in his car.

I don’t know for sure, but I think he felt better after he heard my laugh. I noticed like I notice everything. I didn’t know I could do this with him. No blood has been drawn. He’s not being mean to me.

The second we come off the bridge, my body starts closing up. My stomach pulls in. My fingers find the seatbelt strap where it crosses my chest and pull it tighter, which is a thing I haven’t done since I was a kid in the back seat of my mother’s car, because the strap felt like something to hold onto. I don’t know what to do with myself. I haven’t been back since I started at Woodbury, and I didn’t know I’d be this freaked out.

“Which way?” Rafe says at the light, distracting me for a second.

“Left. Then right on Kessler.”

He turns. I watch the houses. I give him the next turn before he asks. And the one after that, short, clipped, in a voice that’s getting smaller every block, and I can feel him notice. He doesn’t look over.

“She knows you’re coming?” he says.

“No.”