Page 75 of Runaways

"Yep, that's the one."

"Breaking into cars doesn't worry me," I tell him. "I'm worried about being on this side of the border. It's not smart—coming here. We've already been here too long."

"We need guns…and money. There's no better place to get those things than here, and you can't argue against that. I mean, we just found three of them in unlocked cars in a Walmart parking lot."

"Again, that isn't what I'm arguing with."

"You know, I thought you'd be happy to see Noah again," Tate says. "Oh, turn here. Take the scenic byway."

Of course, I want to see Noah. There's still a part of me that thinks maybe this is fate, because at the exact time we decided to come back, a video went viral of a girl from a nearby town who looked like a redheaded version of Noah. When Tate firstshowed it to me, I wasn't convinced. It was grainy, she looked too skinny, and none of them quite caught her eyes. That's what I looked for as I scrolled through the videos and still photos—I just needed to see my girl's eyes.

That didn't happen, but I landed in the comment section, where someone who claimed to work with her gave her full name: Lilah Watts.

We named her Delilah. And Watts is my last name.

She gave them my last name as her own. That's how I knew.

Relief washed over me. I spent so many nights lying awake, wondering what happened to Noah. When she was able to stay out of the news, I assumed she was dead. I worried it was brutal…or slow and gruesome, something much worse than whatever Tate had planned.

But he said he knew. He knew she was alive. It was that part that kept him awake at night. I'm not sure what he's going to do about it. He told me he won't kill her—that he just wants to play a game with her, and if I let him, he'll leave her alone. I'm unsure what caused the change of heart, but he's never lied to me before, so I believe him.

Maybe, after seeing her, he was never going to do it. You never know how you're going to react at a visceral level when you see someone you used to love for the first time. After Noah ghosted me, I was hurt. I tried to accept it, but that hurt grew to anger, and with nowhere to go, that anger convinced me I'd be okay with killing her and Tate would be better for it.

Still, as much as I want to see her, I don't think Noah is going to be happy to see either of us, and I don't want to fuck up her life again. I started all of this, and I know that. Maybe Ishould have kept her to myself; we never had any rules for what we'd been doing—not before her. We pretended it was casual, even though it hadn't been for quite some time. But I knew my feelings for her were becoming a problem, and he looked at her, too. I watched him stare at her thighs; I watched the way his eyes dropped to her chest when she spoke to him. I listened to the things he said about her and to her when she was drinking, and it didn't sound like he was joking.

So, one day, I told Tate how I felt about Noah, and then I watched the wheels turning in his head when he smiled and said,I think this could really work out.

And it did—for a while. The three of us really worked out well before Mia found out and Tate fucked it all up. The two of them are—or were, in Mia's case—both rage-fueled nightmares who would rather make someone else sorry than ever fuckingbesorry.

It's easier to be the offended party than it is to admit what you did was wrong. So Tate and Mia were the offended parties, and Noah was punished for it.

We fought about it for months—because I wanted him to tell Mia the truth andbesorry. And he wanted to make Noah sorrier. It drove a rift between Tate and Mia, too, because she never believed him, and he refused to admit the truth. So, in both of their stubbornness, Mia lost more than just her best friend, and she was that much more lonely in the end.

I'd never point that out, though. There's no way he's unaware; he just…needs it to go somewhere else.

His pain manifests itself through fucking and hurting others. And I'm not much better because I'm more than happy to assisthim with both, and I kind of started that, too…because I beat a man to death behind a bar once, and it turned out he was the kind of man no one missed.

No one ever came for us. No one ever knocked on my door. My picture was never on television or in the paper.

Tate loved it. And after a couple of weeks passed, I was able to admit that I loved it, too. It made me feel powerful—like I could do whatever I wanted and no one could stop me.

Like a god…just like Tate said.

It was Christmas of that year when he first suggested we kill Noah. We'd gone to this cabin not far from town that was empty almost year-round. We'd go there from time to time to drink and fuck without limits; we brought Noah there a few times, too. He was drunk and in his feels, and he missed her. I knew he missed her and had missed her the entire time, even if he wouldn't say it aloud.

"I was good to her," he'd say over and over again whenever he got drunk. He'd say it enough that I'm sure he was trying to convince himself, and it wasn't working. "She's heartless. I bet if we sliced her in half and opened up her chest cavity, there'd be nothing there." Then he rolled over, wrapping his hand around my cock, stroking it while he said, "I think we should find out."

I told him no, that I wouldn't hurt Noah. I told him for the thousandth time that if he doesn't want Noah anymore—if he doesn't love her, and he insisted he didn't—then he needs to stop doing this and let her go.

"I can't," he says. "She takes up too much space in my head—in my cellular makeup. Does that make sense? She haunts too manyplaces in my memories and too many spaces in my head. Like this place…don't you feel it? It's dirty here now."

"I feel it. Just not the way you do."

While I'm angry with Noah for leaving me, too, and sometimes, I want to hurt her, I don't want to hurt her like that. I want to tie her to the bed and fuck her into submission and only let her go when she wants me again. I have this fucked up fantasy where she shows up at my door, pregnant and scared, and I'd take care of her, and then she'd never be able to leave me. In this fantasy, Tate is angry at first, but it doesn't take long for him to come around. I know he loves her, even though he lies about it, just like I know she loves him, whether she wants to or not.

I can't blame her for not wanting to—he doesn't always make it easy. But when he does, it's really easy. Like breathing.

"Well, how can you stand it?" he asks. "It feels like someone cut off a part of me—an arm, maybe—and I know where that arm is, and that arm is just fine, living a better, more privileged version of life without a fucking care in the world, and I'm incomplete. I'm dirty and haunted, and I can still feel that fucking arm."

---