“I go in at noon.”
“What time is it now?”
He grabs his watch from the nightstand, checks the time.
“Almost three thirty.”
“Good. So there’s no hurry.”
I pause a beat, watching him.
“But if you need to go, go.”
He sits back down, the bed springs making their usual soft cries of protest. He twists, curling his left leg on the bed, and reaches out to run his finger down my arm. Even in the dark he doesn’t look at me, staring instead at my arm.
“I like you a lot.”
“I like you a lot.”
He keeps running his finger up and down my arm, still not meeting my eyes.
“No, I mean I really like you. I think about you all the time. When you’re not around, I …”
But he trails off, shakes his head.
“Never mind.”
I say, “I know.”
He looks at me for the first in several minutes.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
Neither of us says anything, though, nothing to further the conversation. We keep staring back at each other in the dark until Erik retracts his finger and takes a breath.
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this.”
“I know. So let’s go get a cup of coffee sometime.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
He appraises me, trying to study my face in the dark.
“I realized the other day, despite us doing this every so often, I don’t know anything about you.”
This, I want to tell him, is a good thing. The less he knows about me the better. He doesn’t need to know about my past life. As for my current life, there isn’t much to know. There’s a backstory, but I’ve long since stopped thinking about the cover Atticus gave me. I eventually told myself there was never any reason to use it. I was never going to get close to anybody again.
After several seconds have passed in silence, I nod so Erik knows I heard him.
“I know. I don’t know much about you either.”
“To be honest with you, Jen, I want something more.”
“So do I.”
I’m almost as surprised as he is by the words as they slip out of my mouth.
He says, “You do?”
I reach out and grab his hand, give it a slight squeeze. But for some reason, I can’t say the word. Not yet. Not until I’ve come to terms with the past twenty-four hours. The thrill of holding a gun in my hand again, of squeezing the trigger. I’ve never gotten a thrill from taking lives, though I have to admit there’s sometimes been a satisfaction watching what I’ve thought of as evil people die. I’ve often questioned what kind of person that makes me. And while part of me may have felt alive tonight, another part knows that road leads to a lonely life and probably a lonely death.
Erik keeps watching me, waiting for me to say the word.
I wet my lips, try to speak, can’t. Clear my throat and try again.
“Tell me something nobody else knows.”
The request catches him off guard. A slight frown crosses his face.
“I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.”
“Did you grow up in Alden?”
“No.”
“Then tell me where you grew up. Tell me about your childhood.”
Erik watches me for another moment, still not sure if I’m being serious. Then he takes a deep breath, stares off at the thin line of light streaming in through the curtain, and tells me about his childhood.
About how he never knew his mom. About how his grandmother raised him. About how just before his sixth birthday, his grandmother had a stroke and passed away. About how he then ended up in the foster care system, going from one family to another, never meshing with any of them, and about how as he got older he started acting out, being aggressive with his peers, stealing from the corner stores, the crimes at first petty but quickly escalating until he was thirteen and stole a car to go joyriding, and how then he ended up in a juvenile detention center for a year and when he was released he was sent to a place up north, to a woman named Ruby who took care of kids like him, kids who had no family, and there were other kids at Ruby’s house, a few other boys who also started out with petty crimes and which had snowballed into worse things, and at first Erik was defiant with Ruby, just as he was defiant with every other adult in his life, but Ruby was patient, almost too patient, wearing him down with her patience, and she was kind too, kind but strict, making it known to Erik and the other boys in the home that she had a certain set of rules and those boys were going to abide by those rules, no ifs ands or buts about it. Of course, Erik and the other boys tested those rules, tried to push the boundaries, but Ruby had a three strike policy, and the boys quickly learned she wasn’t playing and that after the third strike they were kicked out of the house, and word would often get back to the other boys still in the home how good they truly had it, how Ruby may be strict but that she actually cared, that she actually gave a damn, and this was something Erik had never experienced, not since his grandmother passed away, somebody who gave a damn, because sure some of the other foster homes were run by good people who cared, but he never got the sense that they truly cared, that they really gave a shit. It was in Ruby’s home that Erik started learning about respect, started doing better in school, started taking care of himself, and right out of graduation Erik joined the Marines because the Marines managed to get his past charges expunged, and he spent several years in the Marines before he met a girl he wanted to marry, but something happened and that girl went away, and Ruby—whom he still kept in
