Page 41 of Tourist Season
“Why not?”
“Because you just said you wanted to rip Sam’s face off with your bare hands.”
“I said that out loud?”
Harper’s eyes dart to me. I think I see a blush in the pink light that rises in her cheeks. She doesn’t answer me as she slows the vehicle and navigates the turn that leads to Lancaster Manor.
It might take us six years to reach our destination, or maybe only moments. Time makes no sense to me anymore. The one thing I’m sure of? Harper Starling is my lifeline to the planet. If I’m not with her, I might end up stuck in this other dimension. I need to touch her. I couldn’t help myself at the river. I can’t help myself now either. So I reach out, laying my hand on her arm, moving with her as she startles.
“We’re here,” she says, turning off the car. She pulls away frommy grasp. Why do I feel the loss of her heat in my hand? Why am I trying to touch her in the first place? She’s clearly sticking to the plan. Enemies until death or destruction. Why can’t I do the same?
I trail after her as she leads the way from the street to the gate of her cottage, holding it open for me. When she gets to the front door, she unlocks it and doesn’t look back to see if I follow. I’ve seen her house through the windows, of course, but this is the first time I’ve been inside. It’s exactly how I’d expect Harper’s place to be, aside from the way I’m pretty sure the shifting geometric pattern on the stone floor has enveloped my feet, anyway. It’s simple. Practical. The decorations are sparse, but I’m sure that each one is meaningful. A chessboard whose pieces I’m sure are moving on their own. A carved wooden orca. A brightly colored macramé of a southwest desert landscape. A photo of a man and a woman with a blond girl, maybe four or five years old. I pick it up and stare at their faces. It must be Harper and her parents. There’s an ease in her smile, a lightness to it that just doesn’t exist in the version of her that stands in the kitchen. The woman I know is forged by destruction. Maybe that’s the only way to survive this world. To become the destroyer.
I look over at Harper, tracers of light following every motion as she strips off her coat. She glances my way over her shoulder as though she can feel me watching. “I’ll get you a robe and we can wash your clothes,” she says, unbuttoning her plaid shirt. I’d give anything in this moment for her to turn and face me. To see if the bioluminescent glow covers her whole body. To see the curve of her breasts as they rise and fall with unsteady breaths. To see the light on her skin. The flare of her hips. The softness of her flesh. To see if her pussy glistens with arousal for me.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“Okay,” I say as I drag both hands down my face, my cock aching with sudden need.
Harper gives me a perplexed look, one that seems to linger. The light within her deepens to shades of red and orange. For a moment, I think she might turn toward me. But she doesn’t, heading up the stairs instead. I’m still standing there with my hands on my face, trying to will my erection away when she comes back down in a robe, another one draped over her arm, her wet clothes clutched in her bandaged hand.
“Here,” she says as she comes close enough to offer the garment to me. I take it with a tentative hand. “Follow me.” She leads me to a short hallway off the kitchen, pointing to a bathroom as she throws her wet clothes into a washing machine in the closet on the opposite side. “You can put your clothes in when you’re done getting changed. Just close the lid and it’ll start.”
I nod, doing as she says, though the simple task takes a lot longer than it should to execute when I end up staring at my reflection, trying to make sense of the person staring back. I’ve come all this way and waited all this time to avenge my brother. And now I’m standing in his killer’s house with a hard-on for the woman who took his life?
It’s just the mushrooms, I tell myself.They’re just clouding your thinking.
The problem is, every time I tell myself that, it feels more and more like a lie. What if they’re not clouding anything? What if they’re peeling back the fog?
By the time I come out of the bathroom and start the washing machine, Harper is cracking open a beer, an empty one already resting next to where she leans against the kitchen counter. She’sgot a bottle of tequila out too, and chases a sip of lager with a shot. “You’re going to have to stay the night here, because I’m not driving you anywhere,” she declares as I approach. “So I guess I’ll be looking after you. Joy of joys.”
I chuckle. At least one of us can stay focused on our situation. I need to do the same. “Seems fitting,” I say as I pull the tequila from the counter and take a sip straight from the bottle. The smoky burn slides down my throat and I hold on to that feeling. I need to scorch her right out of my veins. “You kill Billy. I come to kill you. You steal my book and drug me. Then you look after me. Seems full circle, doesn’t it,” I say as I raise my arm to show her the ouroboros tattooed there. I know she’s looked through my scrapbook. She’s already worked out who gave me this tattoo and what I did to him when it was finished.
I take another sip from the bottle and she watches every motion with haunted eyes, the luminescence in her skin cooling to a blue light. Her voice is firm, but I detect a melancholy edge beneath it, the tremor of something deeper and hidden when she says, “I don’t want to argue with you right now, if that’s what this is.”
“What argument could you possibly make? You did what you did.”
“Oh, I could makeplentyof arguments.” She rolls her eyes before taking a long pull of her beer. “Problem is, you’re the kind of person who would argue with me if I told you the sky was blue. If you want to believe it’s green, you’re going to be fully committed to your bit. It wouldn’t matter if you’redead fucking wrong. You’re going to believe what you want to believe, and no one is going to change your mind.”
“Since when have I given you the impression that I’mthatunreasonable?”
“I don’t know,” she snarls, the volume of her voice rising with every word, “how about the time you left a severed head in my fucking bird feeder? Does that seem like something a reasonable person would do?”
“And you’re some bastion of morality? You called the old man killer up on the hill to ask if it was his doing, then promptly yanked that head out of the feeder to sniff test it and give it a little cuddle. Quite possibly, that’s something that a hit-and-run murderer might do, don’t you think?”
She rips the bottle from my grasp and takes a long drink before slamming it down on the counter. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Right.” I step closer to Harper, hemming her in against the counter. She doesn’t balk, doesn’t back down. Not even as I lean in until I can smell the tequila on her every exhalation. Her eyes drop to my lips, and when they rise to meet mine once more, I swear I see more than just fury in their mercury depths. “You run away from everything, don’t you? You run away from me.”
“Do I? Because you’ve threatened me, you’ve intimidated me, you’ve spied on me, and yet I’m standingright fucking here.”
She’s right, but she’s also wrong. And I don’t just mean the accident. I meannow, in Cape Carnage. In Maya’s shop. Every night that we dig and she insists on walking home. In the car, when she pulled away from my touch. Just moments ago. I know she saw the way I was looking at her. She let her gaze rest on me until I felt the undeniable tug, an invisible cord that seems to pull taut every time she’s near. Even now, she’s staring up at me with her fucking intoxicating defiance, but on the inside, I know she’s retreating, folding in on herself. Running away.
And if she thinks I can’t find her there, she’s wrong. Because I’m in her thoughts, just like she’s always in mine. I can see it inthe shifting flecks of silver in her eyes. It’s in the rosy hue that illuminates her cheeks. It’s in the pulse that strobes currents of light in her throat, and the unsteady breaths that tremor in her chest. It’s in the desire that haunts her features when her focus drops to my lips and lingers.
There’s a single beat of time where I just stare at Harper Starling. It’s a moment that might stretch to infinity, balanced on the cutting edge of a blade. It’s an ouroboros, consuming itself, violence and desire intertwined.
And in the next moment, we’re crashing into a brutal kiss.
