Citizens were in a law-abiding mood tonight. The radio stayed quiet. His thoughts sure weren’t. His stomach seemed to have tied itself into a cat’s paw knot, one of the more complicated knots he and Jonah had learned in Boy Scouts. Jonah could get out of those. There was no getting out of handcuffs or a jail cell, though.
He sighed.
Fuck.
Eli looked out over the inky dark of the hills. The Plugged Nickel was roughly situated between Whiskey Creek and Coyote Creek. One was for pissing in, the other for swimming in, his dad had once said. Though he and Jonah had done both in both, grossing Glory out thoroughly.
It was so dark you’d have to stare for a long time to even make out the shapes of individual trees, though the hillside was carpeted with them. Imagining a life without Glory in it was a bit like that. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make out its outlines.
He breathed in again and swiped his hands down his face.
He’d decided to start his cruiser and back out, drive up Main Street, check on the storefronts, the usual.
Which was why he was faintly surprised to find himself flinging the door open and crunching off over the dirt and gravel into the dark, toward the back of the Plugged Nickel, compelled by instinct and by a natural law that superseded all his logic and will and training. It was the same compulsion, he guessed, that had driven him to carve a set of initials on the Eternity Oak the day after his seventeenth birthday.
He wasn’t much for superstition, but that was another moment where the need to do something had outweighed sense. And what he’d done then, if you believed local legend, was seal his fate.
Chapter2
Glory stormed the length of the Plugged Nickel’s dank rear hall until she got to the back door, which she shoved open as if it existed merely to spite her. She stepped out into the bracing slap of the night and let the door swing shut hard behind her.
That little bite in the air hadn’t been there a week ago; summer was beginning to surrender to fall.
Thenerveof time for moving forward when she was stuck here in Hellcat Canyon.
She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes and sighed and banged her head lightly against the wall. Once, twice. Her heart was going like a kick drum. Damndamn. Damndamn. Damndamn. Like that.
Just standing near Eli made her feel like a wire ran from her head to her toes and lit her up until she buzzed and crackled like the old neon sign out in front of the Plugged Nickel. The one that was bound to one day set the whole countryside on fire unless cheap-ass Carl sprang for a new one.
The ironies were many, and they were all a little hard to take.
For instance, wasn’t it funny how a kiss a lifetime in the making could ruin her in moments?
And how every kiss from now on would be a footnote to that one?
Not to mention every man?
It was just her shitty luck that she hated him now.
Growing up, Eli had been... like the weather. Part of the texture of all of her days, one of the essential little currents that fed every part of her life, the way Coyote Creek nourished all the flora and fauna around here. But there was the Eli she’d grown up with, who would never do a thing to hurt her.
And then there was the Eli whose face was the deadly intent blank of a stranger’s as he moved toward Jonah that day in the Plugged Nickel and...
She sucked in a sharp breath. Thinking about that day was like driving that narrow mountain road on I-5 up into Oregon at night in the pouring rain. You looked straight ahead, not down, not off into that infinite blackness, because you didn’t know what it contained and you were better off not knowing.
So she didn’t think about that day.
Or about Jonah.
And she hadn’t talked to Eli since. She’d cut him right out.
Life as she’d known it had shattered so hard she could see its innards, see all the little pieces that could never be put together in the same way again. And that meant all of her best laid plans had been kind of blown to bits, too.
She’d suddenly needed a job again, stat. But she’d had to wheedle Carl into giving her this one, crappy as it was, given that she’d inadvertently singed a few bridges on what she’d thought would be her triumphant exit from town.
Here she was again, employee of the year, outside marinating in angst. She really wasn’t proud of that. Pride itself was kind of a luxury, given her current circumstances, but she had a lot more of that than she did money, and it was the reason she wouldn’t tell Eli why she was working here.
She wouldn’t have been able to bear his pity.