We stop talking.
Trey pulls the truck into the school parking lot. “Jules, I think you should drive Sawyer home. I’ll take this ball bus home and pick you up from Angotti’s back parking lot on my first delivery. That’ll give you two a little chance to . . . do . . . whatever it is you do when you’re alone.”
Sawyer doesn’t argue, and he and I get out. I wave my thanks to Trey as he takes off again.
We stand face-to-face in the warm, wet air as everything around us melts. I look up into Sawyer’s eyes, and he cringes and looks away. “Dammit.”
“What is it?” I ask.
He doesn’t look at me. “It’s in your eyes,” he says. “The vision. It’s playing in your eyes.”
It makes my stomach hurt. I close my eyes, reach up to touch his face, turn his chin back toward me. “Better?”
I feel his breath on my face a split second before his lips touch mine. A thrill runs through me, from my toes up to my throat and ending in a low moan. Sawyer sucks in a breath and kisses me hard, his hands sliding around my neck, under my hair. I lean back against the car door and he presses against me, setting me on fire.
My fingers explore his chest inside his jacket and he flinches once, just barely, just enough to remind me that his father beat the shit out of him last night. I lighten my touch and slide my good arm around his back, pulling him close, chest against chest, legs clenching legs, wishing I could pull his entire body into mine. Wishing I could fix him.
His lips find my neck and I can’t think straight. I reach up and slide my fingers through his hair, whisper his name in his ear. His hot breath rakes over my collarbone and his fingers tremble at my shoulder, his other hand sliding down my side and finding the hollow of my back, and then our lips are together once more, softer, gentler, and we’re breathing hard.
Sawyer reaches around me for the handle of the door to the backseat, fumbles with it, and then lets it go. “No,” he says like he’s reprimanding himself. And then, after a deep breath, “No,” again. And then he lets the breath go, his cheek against mine and his sigh in my ear. “Jules Demarco,” he says. “You scare the hell out of me.”
I smile against his earlobe. “I know,” I say.
Truth is, he scares the hell out of me, too.
Thirty-One
Saturday dawns clear, sunny, and unseasonably warm and all I can think about is that we’re running out of time, and there’s nothing I can do. I have no job for the first Saturday in years and I don’t know how to occupy my time. I hawk over the weather report, put on my wellies, and sneak out for a walk, studying tree buds and pining for Sawyer, closing my eyes as I slosh through puddles in the elementary school playground nearby, remembering the melty feeling I get when he touches me. But every time my mind goes there, reality slams me in the face and I remember all the shit we’re in.
And I think it’s so ironic that as grounded as I supposedly am right now, I have never felt freer to wander around and not tell anybody where I am. After I test out all the swings, I start walking, trying to figure out what we have to do. What I have to do to solve this mystery, to finish the puzzle. Because it still feels like it’s my fault—or at least my family’s fault for passing down the crazy gene—and I can’t not take responsibility for it.
By the time I’ve walked an hour, I realize I’m not far from the Humane Society. I hesitate at the door and go inside, look around, but I don’t see Sawyer. The employees are busy with adoptions, so I wander into the dog room and look at all of them, some begging for love, others having given up, still others faking it, pretending they don’t need anybody. And I see myself in all of those dogs.
Five weird thoughts I’ve had in my life that I would never admit to having:
Um, that one
That I’m not really me, but I’m sort of just floating above myself watching my body do things
That there’s something really stable and comforting about hoarding
That there’s probably an opposite me somewhere in a parallel universe doing everything right, and my job on earth is to make her look good by messing everything up
That monster spray secretly invites more monsters to hide under the bed rather than repels them
•••
And while I’m standing there thinking weird thoughts and watching this sweet-looking boxer mutt named Boris, and all the dogs are barking as loud as they can at me and the other people walking through, I feel somebody’s gaze boring into my skull. I turn around, and there’s Sawyer watching me through the wire-mesh window to the cat room. He’s got two black kittens crawling up his sweatshirt, and he’s just standing there with this amazingly sweet, kind look on his face. I raise my hand in greeting, and he mouths the words “I love you.”
I smile and blush, and weave my way back through the dog room to the lobby and into the cat room, because when a boy with two kittens says he loves you, you do whatever you can to get to him as quickly as possible.
“Hey,” I say. “You found me,” he says. He pushes a lock of hair out of my eyes and looks away quickly.
My heart sinks. “Still with the vision in my eyes?”
“Yeah. And all the kitties’ eyes too.”
“Dude,” I mutter, because I never had that. It was never that bad. “How did you get here?”
“Took the bus. I—there’s no way I can drive.”
I study his face, and even excluding his black eye, he looks exhausted, and I know he’s been keeping the intensity from me. “Sawyer . . . I just don’t understand. The times when it got really bad for me were when I had things wrong or the crash was imminent. I just don’t know why it’s not letting up on you when we’re making progress and figuring things out.”