Page 27 of The Luminaries
“We do.”
“Are you going to waithere?”
“Oh.” There’s the flush again. He rubs at his hair, and for some reason Winnie feels embarrassed that he’s embarrassed. “It just seemed easier to wait together. But sure.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I’ll call you when the rain eases up.”
“Or just come in,” Winnie says with a sigh, and she shuffles past him toward the front door.
Before he can inevitably protest, she snags a finger in his button-up and tugs him along. Her skin touches his undershirt. It’s warm like his hands were, and he doesn’t pull away. In fact, he lets her drag him all the way to the porch steps.
“You sure?” he asks as he follows her up the creaking wood.
“Obviously,” she replies. The rain stops misting her as the porch ceiling stretches over them. The cold vanishes too when she steps inside the house.
“I see you still don’t lock the front door.” Jay slumps in behind Winnie.
“And I see you still have a problem with that.” Winnie dumps her anorak on the front-stairs banister and cuts into the kitchen. “Want something to drink? We have water and we have water. Or I guess I can make you tea.” There is also ginger ale, but he is not special enough for one of those.
“I’m good.” He joins her in the kitchen, and as Winnie sets about making her own pot of Earl Grey, he hovers awkwardly in the tiny space. It is even weirder seeing him in her house than it was to see him drive. Last time he’d stood in that exact spot, he’d been a whole head shorter. Probably a whole head thinner too, since his shoulders have expanded from growing boy into best hunter in Hemlock Falls.
He also stands differently. It used to be that nothing could keep him still. He was always bouncing or tapping or fidgeting or shifting. Like a runner about to start a race, he had this potential energy always ready to go kinetic. Winnie could never sketch him quite right—though shetried hundreds… maybe even thousands of times. Her skill just wasn’t there.
Or maybe he was just too alive.
Now, though, she thinks she can capture him. He stands, hands in his pockets, shoulders bunched toward his ears, and his gray eyes not vacant… but not quite alive either. Like the forest winter refusing to let go.
From her side-eying vantage at the kettle, Winnie can’t even see his chest move. He is as still as a vampira waiting for its prey.
The act of making tea saves Winnie from conversation, but once the kettle has whistled its readiness and the Earl Grey is steeping in her unicorn mug, she has no choice but to face him head-on.
Except that he is the first to speak. “Why me?” he asks.
“Huh?” Her glasses slide down her nose.
“Why me? For tutoring you, I mean. There are other people you could have asked.” He dips his head in the vague direction of Gunther’s. “In fact, it seems to me there are a lot of people who want to help you.”
Winnie wets her lips, frowning at her tea bag as she dips it in and out of the mug. She can’t tell Jay the full truth. She also can’t lie, because he will see through that in an instant. But the argument she’d mapped out earlier while riding her bike to Gunther’s (You don’t want me to die, do you?) now seems unhelpful. He has agreed to help her; he just wants an explanation.
Auburn tea swirls outward, thicker with each of Winnie’s strains. Her dad used to joke that his hair was Earl Grey because it was a mixture of black tea shot through with silver. He also used to leave her coded messages on the tea-bag tags. Goofy things likeSteep me!orAddress me as “my lord,”and the cipher would hide somewhere in plain sight in the kitchen. Usually a circled barcode on the spaghetti package or a starred phone number on the fridge.
Winnie drops the steeped bag and sighs. “Last night didn’t go as well as everyone thinks, Jay, and you’re the only person I can trust to help me.”
It isn’t a lie, and Jay’s eyebrows rocket skyward. His posture straightens. For a split second, he looks like the old, animated Jay she used to know. “You trust me.”
She pushes at her glasses. “You’re the best hunter in your year.” Also not a lie. “And you’ve known me a million years.” An exaggeration, but not a lie. “And I trust you not to tell anyone that you’re helping me.” Very, very true.
“Because I’m a Friday.”
“Because you’re a Friday. Honesty to the end, right?” She yanks out the tea bag and drops it into the trash. Then she fastens her gaze on Jay and waits for him to press her for more answers.
Instead he says, “You’re supposed to put that in the compost.” His tone is light, and there’s something that could almost be called a smile towing at his lips.
But Winnie can’t smile back. “We haven’t composted in four years.” She strides past him toward the stairs. “I’m going to change,” she calls. “The remote is broken. You’ve got to turn on the TV by hand.”
By the time Winnie has changed into dry clothes and grabbed her Kevlar gear from the night before—the banshee needles still poking out of it—she finds Jay sitting on her couch. He has fallen asleep, his boots propped up on the old trunk turned coffee table, arms folded over his chest, and chin slouched against his clavicle. His watch winks out from under a flannel sleeve. It’s old and requires daily winding, but it used to belong to his dad—a man Jay never actually knew.
Somehow Jay looks as young as he did when he and Winnie used to be friends, the angles of his face eroded away. Gone is the sense that he is hunted; gone is the sense that he is hunting.
He is just Jay Friday, tired and familiar.
