As she stared at his blank white face she could almost see the thought balloon over his head filled with his own unfortunate realizations: yep, that really is my girlfriend of five years standing in the doorway.
“I’d give that dismount a six,” she said, brightly.
“Christ... Avalon... I...” His words were frightened gasps. He stopped.
“Wasn’t done yet?” she suggested.
She didn’t recognize her own voice.
For some reason Corbin glanced uneasily at her hands then. She remembered the little vase. She gently, gingerly put it down on the dresser, like it was a bomb and she’d just set the timer on it.
In her peripheral vision Grace shifted very slightly.
“Freeze, Grace,” Ava commanded, like she was Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson onThe Closer. She had no idea why she wanted Grace to freeze. It was just that giving interns orders had become a reflex.
Grace obeyed like it was Simon Says.
Corbin—glib, motormouth, brilliant witty blah blah blah Corbin—remained silent.
And that was somehow the eeriest thing of all. It was like the deep silence of a power outage. A silence caused by a grave malfunction, like an earthquake or a nuclear attack.
She wasn’t the sort to shove a stiletto into his sternum, even if they’d owned a stiletto. And if they had, it would have been an artisan hand-forged one-of-a-kind stiletto, because he would have insisted.
But shedidknow how to cut him in the worst possible way.
“I always knew you were a cliché, Corbin.” She’d never sounded so bored.
She didn’t quite remember leaving the apartment and finding her car and getting in it. She only knew her inner GPS was taking her home to Hellcat Canyon as if she were a creature fleeing for its burrow. She hadn’t been there since last Christmas. Almost a year.
Who would have guessed the smooth green Teletubbies meadow of her relationship had a tiger pit in it? FOOSH! Down she’d gone.
Shouldn’t there have been some sort of trajectory of transgressions before she found him banging their intern? Some clue other than the sort of selfishness common to guys like Corbin—hypereducated Ivy League nerdy-cute guys who were charming and witty and casually brilliant and benignly certain that everyone would happily just enjoy the gift that was their mere presence, because that’s generally what people did?
Her speedometer quivered up, up, up to sixty.
She was just about to really gun it through the next set of delicious S turns, when from out of nowhere red lights flashed in her rearview mirror.
“Fuck.” Her voice startled her: it was a dry caw, thanks to three hours of silence. She heaved a sigh so gusty it ought to have blown her doors open, slowed it on down, and pulled over to the next verge.
She draped her arms across her steering wheel and tipped her forehead onto them. She drew in a long, hot, shuddery breath and sighed it out. This was going to be one monster of a ticket.
She lifted her head, which felt so heavy it was like trying to jack up a car, and watched in her rearview mirror as a big, big sheriff’s deputy loomed and trudged over the verge toward her.
The guy ducked down, pushed the sunglasses up off his face. “License and registra...Avalon? Avalon Harwood? What the hell? Why the hell you speeding?”
Ah, small towns. Sheriff’s Deputy Eli Barlow had just gone from Cop Voice to Friend Voice in three seconds flat. He sounded worried and pleased and affronted all at once.
“Oh,hey, Eli. So how are things?” She tried an apologetic, ironic little smile. Eli was an old high school friend of her older brother Jude’s. He was always such a nice person, big and quiet. He knew all about her toe up the faucet and jumping Whiskey Creek and probably nearly everything else she’d ever done, because, well, small towns.
Eli snorted. “Why the hell are you speeding onthisroad? BMW or no BMW, you know better. Everything okay?”
“Suchlanguage, Deputy. I’m so sorry. I really am. I just... I got... I’m not... everything’s fine.”
She wasn’t precisely aglibliar but she could usually do better than that.
As it was, he was studying her with cop eyes: sympathetic laser beams. “I call bullshit on the ‘everything’s fine,’” he concluded.
She twisted her mouth wryly. “Are those X-ray shades on your head, Eli? Because, you know, that’s what Google ought to be working on. Not Google Glass. They could issue them to cops. Shades that see right into the souls of transgressors.”