“Never mind.”
“I do mind. Tell me everything.”
“No.”
“What did you do to his water?”
“I swapped it for—” Viktor searched for the word, something he only did when he was knackered or thinking about sex. “—the sparkling one.”
“You put pins and needles in his water bottles?”
“If that is how you say it.”
“And goat juice in his protein shakes?”
“Maybe.”
He definitely fucking did. And he waited until we were an hour from Devon to tell me why.
“Dodger.” I absorbed it, picturing Willow as she’d been while Locke had been gone last winter. That kid, man. She’d known something was up, like she always had her whole fucking childhood, except this time she’d had the comfort of believing her dad wasn’t alone. And in the end, it wasn’t much of a lie, cos Viktor really had been there, and he had the scars to prove it.
“Asher, is supposed to be funny.”
“I’m laughing on the inside.”
My words misted the air. Viktor turned in his seat, eyeing me across the cab that was freezing now the heater had seized, face half hidden by his drawn-up hoodie. “Youmustlaugh. Locke would not enjoy how you are feeling.”
“You don’t know how I’m feeling.”
“If you believe that, then you do not know yourself any better than you know me.”
Nice. The Rattler had some tight turns coming up. I wrenched her through them before I had the headspace to come back to the conversation. “If you want me to laugh about this shit, I’m gonna call you Dodger in bed.”
“You can call me whatever you like. As long as we are together, I do not care.”
“That how you really feel?”
“About what?”
“Our location.” I didn’t count the rest of it. Viktor loved me. He had to. How else would he put up with me? “I wondered if the cold was getting to you.”
“I am Russian.”
“You don’t live in Russia.”
“For reasons that have nothing to do with the weather.”
“I’m not talking about the fucking weather.”
“What are you talking about then?”
Another tight turn took all my attention, the landscape beginning to change from grey motorways to the green countryside that lined the A-road, grass-green, like Vik’s eyes.
Radio Rubi came back online after a few miles of silence. “Not sure you deserve this beaut of a playlist, but you’re getting it anyway. You’re welcome.”
Somehow, he kept the connection open and tinny music filtered through. Trippy soul with a base too low for the archaic radio to pick up. The words, though, they got to me, and maybe they got to Viktor too.
“You are asking, again, how long I can stay, when perhaps it is you that needs to answer that question.”