“Restroom first.”
“Round the back. Key’s on the board.”
She gestures without looking up from her crossword. I take the key and walk out past the snack shelves.
The restroom smells like bleach and wet paper. One toilet, one sink, a cracked mirror screwed into the wall. I lock the door and turn to face myself.
The shirt is darker than it should be from the collar down, a stain blooming across the shoulder and spreading in a line toward my breast. I peel it off. The gauze underneath is saturated. I pull it away, and fresh blood wells up immediately. His fangs went deeper than I’d let myself register.
I clean it with a wad of paper towels and the soap from the dispenser, which smells like industrial lemons and stings when it hits the wound. I hiss through my teeth and keep scrubbing until the pink runs clear. Then I press a fresh pad of paper against it, hold it there until it stops weeping, and tape new gauze over the top with medical tape from my pack.
The clean shirt is at the bottom of the duffel. Black, high collar, buttoned to the throat. It’s eighty degrees outside. I put it on anyway.
In the mirror, the collar sits high enough that you can’t see the bandage if I don’t turn my head.
I go back inside.
The woman has her crossword down now. She watches me cross the store. When I set the key on the counter and ask for a coffee and twenty dollars of regular, her eyes go to my throat. Stay there for a second.
“You okay, honey?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a lot of shirt for weather like this.”
My hand wants to go to my collar. I keep it on the counter. “Thermostat in my truck’s broken. Runs cold.”
“Huh.” She punches in my fuel. Her eyes haven’t moved off my face. “You need anything? We got a first aid kit in the office.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure? You look —”
“I’m fine,” I snap.
Her mouth closes. She rings up the coffee. She doesn’t stop looking at me.
“Twenty-three forty-seven.”
I hand her cash. She counts change slowly, and as she puts it in my palm, she says, quietly, “There’s a women’s shelter in Hope. Forty miles up the interstate. They don’t ask questions.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Honey, they never say it’s like that.”
I take my coffee and leave. The bell over the door chimes. I’m aware of her watching me through the plate glass all the way back to the truck.
“This is fucking ridiculous,” I mutter, tugging my collar up.
I sit in the cab with the engine off. The coffee is terrible. I drink half of it before I put it in the holder and pull out.
The hills rise around the highway past Hot Springs. At seven-forty in the morning, I cross the last bridge before the valley, and my body knows where I am before my eyes catch up. My hands loosen on the wheel. My shoulders drop an inch. The wolf I’ve been riding for ten hours finally shifts her weight.
Not toward the road ahead.
Behind us. To him.
For fuck’s sake.