“You’re ruining the surprise.”
“I don’t like surprises. Unless a stripper pops out of a cake. You didn’t get me a cake stripper, did you?”
“Dakota mentioned three leads,” Xander said, unable to suppress his grin any longer. He looked like a damn clown with a painted-on smile. “Gladas, who I won’t pursue. I used the information discovered when researching him to locate Annabel Nevis, a young girl who saw a Scylla. That’s a lead, Joey. We’re not dead in the water. At least not yet.”
I turned away from Xander and hobbled toward the office door, ripping it open. My palms were damp and my stomach clenched with anticipation. He had found another lead outside of Gladas. I couldn’t allow Xander to see my excitement, though, and take credit for it.
I glanced back at him and said, “I know you hate my lists, but I don’t give a shit. A) I’m starting to remember why we went five years without talking. B) You better buy me the biggest burrito I’ve ever seen and let me eat it in your car. Wait!” I held up a hand, cutting off his response. “C) I get to have hot sauce.”
9
I stuffed the business end of my burrito—the amazing thing about those little donkeys is that both ends are business ends—into my mouth, smacking loudly to annoy Xander. He turned the radio up to drown out my eating, but I pressed the knob, turning it off. The burrito, being from a taco truck parked in a gas station, wasn’t settling too well in my stomach. I don’t think the strange guilt building within me helped my raging bowels, and I didn’t like it one bit.
Before I realized what was happening, I said, “It’s—” I shut myself up before I could venture any further into the dark territory I wandered through, instead shoving a finger in my mouth and licking the sauce from it. The spice melted the apology right off my tongue. Thank Allah.
I wiped sauce from my chin and stared out the windshield, watching the car devour yellow lines. We headed east, toward El Dorado County, to pay a visit to Annabel Nevis’s last known address from ten years ago. Promising, right?
I finished my lunch a few minutes later. Xander hadn’t turned the radio back on, and I didn’t have any distractions from my thoughts. They’d rolled into a giant snowball of anger and frustration and guilt and grief, and the massive ball had flattened me into an emotional surrender. Before I could stop myself with a burrito or a spicy finger, I said, “I need to tell you something.”
“What’s that?” Xander asked, turning his attention toward me.
“Keep your eyes on the road!” I reached to grab the handle on the ceiling and tensed in dramatic fashion, sparking a wave of agony throughout my torso.
We’d stopped by a pharmacy before my burrito, and Xander had purchased a splint and bandaging. He wrapped up my right hand before checking my bruised torso and ribs, applying fresh bandages and stuffing a handful of pills down my throat. The pain in my hand had vanished with the artificial healing, but when I gripped the grab handle, it returned in flaming glory.
He removed his focus from me and returned it to his driving obligations, probably sensing that I preferred for him to look away while I spoke. “What do you need to tell me?”
Scratching my neck with my left hand, I said, “You’re an asshole for dragging me out here with you.” He remained stoic. My gut tightened and ached, and this strange feeling of remorse clouded my thoughts. I rubbed my eyes and sighed. “But… I’m sorry.”
”What?” he asked, his hands at ten and two, eyes shifting between the road, the side mirrors, and the rearview—unflinching in the fact that I’d just apologized for the first time in my life.
In a much louder voice than a breathy, rapid whisper, I said, “I’m—” I rolled my eyes back, trying desperately to think of a word that rhymed with sorry. Unfortunately, there was nothing that popped into my poetically-dead mind. Do any English words rhyme with sorry? I would have to ask Eminem. He once strung together some nonsense that rhymed with orange—like the lyrical genius that he is. “Sorry.” There, I said it. And I regretted it. It was the worst thing I had ever done… up that point in my life.
And, like the biggest and dirtiest asshole in existence, he had the nerve to ask, “Sorry for what?”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t be a douche-basket.”
Xander smirked. “I’m serious. I don’t think you’ve ever been in the wrong—not for anything. What would you—Joey the Labradoodle—possibly have to apologize for?”
“It’s Labrador,” I mumbled. “Labradoodles aren’t even real dogs. They’re just fluffy teddy bears that are great at snuggling and looking cute and making all your worries disappear.”
“Wait,” Xander said, finding the gumption to take one hand from the steering wheel and raise a point-making finger. “You’re going to apologize for being too good-looking, aren’t you? Or is it for being too funny or witty? Or is it that you’re too good of a friend and make me look like such a bad guy?”
“Har, har. But it’s none of that. Though I should probably apologize for all of that, too.” I loosened the seat belt off of my roiling stomach. That burrito had shot straight through my plumbing, and I needed to use the a bathroom more than two girls on a double date. “It’s just… maybe over the past few days I haven’t been the most… you know.” I scratched my scalp, releasing a snowstorm of dandruff, probably from the high-end shampoo they used after my recent haircut. The finer things in life suck. “I failed at saving… and she is—was—mine and Callie’s… and, well, I don’t know—”
“Hey,” Xander said, peeling his eyes from the road and glancing at me. “I think I’d rather listen to your terrible jokes than hear you stutter your way through an
