He sighed, looking away. “Could you—I mean, someday, when things are not so messed up—could you maybe ask me that again?”
He expected her to laugh at him, or shout, or get out of the car and slam the door on him in a hail of curses, but she did nothing. Just kept staring out the window at the dark.
And then her fingers slid right through his ribs and took everything they found in there. “Okay,” she said.
He stared at her.
Her voice was light. Not angry. Not judging. Not jealous. Just Okay.
And then at last she turned to look at him, blue eyes big and round, red lips curving in a Mona Lisa, knocking his lungs out.
“Good night, Ré,” she said. “I hope you get some sleep.”
She opened the door of the Buick and got out, careful not to slam it behind her. She didn’t glance back as she crossed the road and went in her front door, but Ré watched her the entire way in case she did.
E
Evie leaned against the front door as soon as she was on the other side, and she breathed for what felt like the first time in her life. She closed her eyes and felt Ré’s fingers on the back of her knee, soft and light, though they were so often clenched into fists. This could not be happening. Him, outside her house, in the middle of the night. Not throwing stones to be let in, not twisting her arm into staying out.
Not asking for anything at all.
Just trying to get some sleep.
She opened her eyes and smiled.
It was the very last thing she should do, but she couldn’t stop it. A strange, bright, bursting feeling exploded inside her. A million colored lights at once. And she couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t not feel it if she tried.
No, this could not be happening.
She pushed off the door and climbed upstairs to the attic, kicking her filthy shoes aside. Everything had changed, somehow, the moment that Buick had come into view. Her step had slowed when she saw that car, but her heart—it had stopped.
Ré. Parked outside her door. Asleep.
All the things she’d just confessed to Sunny. The gross truth about Shaun. Everything she’d tried so hard not to feel, smashed lips and small bruises, they were all gone. She was free.
I don’t think you know him as well as you think you do, Sunny had said. She was right. He was so much more than the toughest boy Evie knew.
She crossed the bedroom to the gable window, pulling the curtain aside.
The Buick was still there, dark and rusty blue in dull moonlight, the driver’s side window half down. Ré had put the seat flat again. She could just see his bare arm, the sleeve of the black T-shirt he wore, the dark shape of his tilted head. He was still. Maybe already asleep. She smiled again, lifting her fingers to the glass, touching from a distance.
An anchor in the water.
Not going anywhere.
R
Ré dreams. Wet cake pressed against the roof of his mouth, juice slipping from the seam of his lips, tart and sweet and boozy. Like cherry liqueur. Like the stuff his aunties drink at Christmas. It makes a warm spot at the bottom of his belly, makes his lips and fingers tingle.
The cake is rich and heavy, so good it can’t be real. It’s devil’s food. It makes him so happy, he feels like a little kid again, stealing his mamie’s tarte au sucre and stuffing his face behind the kitchen door till he’s sugar-sick.
He chews and chews, but the cake doesn’t get any smaller. He can feel pebbles of cooked flour and egg sticking between his cheeks and gums, under his tongue. It begins to fill his whole mouth. Each time he bites down, there’s a little more.
He opens his eyes, confused, and sees the woods around him, the snow that buries his feet. He is naked but for his jeans, and shivering.
And then he knows.
The bridge of his nose begins to sting, his eyes to burn. Salt water blurs his vision. He starts to cry, because he can’t stand it anymore. Because he knows from one instant to the next that this dream is the same as all the others, even though it’s sweet: he is choking.
When he opens his mouth to spit the cake, it’s blood. It spills salty and hot across his chin, across his collar. It pools in his shoulder bones, pours down his arms, bare chest, his jeans and bare feet. Snakes of blood, squeezing tight. His lungs scream for air.
He reaches into his mouth, scraping cake and blood from his airway. He falls to his knees, one hand clawing his mouth, the other disappearing to the elbow in red snow.
And he sees the deer at the edge of the woods, watching. Their antlers rattle and knock, soft sounds as though they’re speaking. His eyes are wild, pleading, but the animals don’t come any closer and they don’t help him.
And he thinks, Goddammit. If this demon is coming, let it come now. I’ve had enough. Let it come. I won’t fight it anymore.
At the back of his throat, his fingers catch in a mess of fibers. He pulls, and it comes up from his gut with a sliding-backwards feeling, like he is pulling his own insides out, flipping himself like a sock. He pulls and pulls, and more of it comes. It is black and sticky, wound in a bundle. It tangles in his fingers, and he pulls.
When it finally slides free of his throat, when he can at last suck the breath his lungs scream for, he opens
