Page 51 of Ladybirds

“That is not what I said.”

“You’re the only one who can see me.”

“Why do you keep ‘popping in’ on them, then? There are literally thousands of other places you could go to do some people watching.”

He hesitates. When she chances a glance, his expression is pinched in a way that makes her nervous. It’s the same look he gets when he wants to twist the truth, but doesn’t know how. “Seth?”

He grunts, looking out the window. “Just to make sure everyone’s well.”

“Yeah, I’m not letting this one go. I command you to tell me.”

“You can’t command me to do anything,” he retorts. “You may have me on a leash, but I’m not your dog.”

At the intersection, she stops at the red light and faces him fully. “You can either give me an actual answer or I can needle you with questions the rest of the ride. Why do you keep checking on them?”

Seth grits his teeth, jaw straining. “They’re your people.” The words rush out of him, a hiss of breath. “If something happened to either of them, it would crush you.” He shakes his head, eyes meeting hers. The depth of sincerity she sees there makes her hands sweat. “You’ve lost enough.”

Sara swallows, breath shallow and eyes blown wide. Behind her, a car honks. At some point, the light turned green.

Taking her foot off the brake, she drives through the intersection; grasping the steering wheel with a white-knuckled grip to mask the trembling of her hands. It’s only after she turns onto the highway that she finds her voice. “Why?”

The word is shaky, vague enough that he could easily answer around it, but it’s all she can manage. Her heart is hammering in her chest, an echoed beat of a fist against solid wood. In front of her is miles of open road dotted with a spattering of cars, but all she can see is the panic in Seth’s eyes when he begged her not to answer the door.

“I don’t know what he is capable of.” His answer is soft, strained at the edges. “And the firm he’s interning at is out of my reach.”

Licking her lips, she tries to keep her voice steady. She doesn’t need to ask who ‘he’ is. “Reach?”

“There are… limitations to how far I can travel.”

He doesn’t elaborate. Sara doesn’t ask him to. A silence falls between them, thick and brimming with tension. Her thoughts a whirlwind of disbelief—David would never hurt anyone, let alone her friends—but through it all she can still hear the drumming of his fist against her door, the slurred curses and violent rattle of the handle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

They don’t talk about it.

Sara doesn’t ask, Seth doesn’t offer, and so the conversation dies before it even begins. She does think about it, though. It’s in the back of her mind when she drives to class, when she does her grocery shopping, when she faithfully locks her deadbolt the moment she’s through the front door.

A week later, Jen invites her out for dinner and drinks, and Sara jumps at the chance to be out of her apartment and out of her own head for an evening. Part of her expects Seth to argue when she asks him to leave her be for the night, but he only shrugs. Then she’s stumbling out of the restaurant with Jen, their arms linked and laughter slurred, and she spots him across the street. She’s so drunk, she shouldn’t have even noticed him—he’s a charcoal shadow blending into the building behind him—but, somehow, her eyes find him as easily as if he were the only spot of color in a sea of gray. He stays, stone still and ever watchful, until the very moment Miles pulls up and helps them safely into the car. When she arrives home, he’s curled up in his chair with Ansel on his lap watching reruns of Amor Prohibito.

“Was it a worthwhile evening?” he asks.

He makes no indication that he ever left the apartment, so Sara doesn’t either. “It was fun.”

Seth nods. “Good.” His eyes flit from her bare feet to the heels in her hands and chuckles. “Get to bed, Princess. The morning will come all too soon.”

It’s a good suggestion. A great one, in fact. She barely manages to change into an oversized t-shirt before her body hits the bed.

When she wakes up, Sara fully expects her hangover to be the worst of her problems. Her head throbs with her pulse, cotton lining her tongue and her stomach lurching when she stands. It’s only after forcing down some pills and half a slice of dry toast that her stomach feels calm enough to trust. Seth watches her, wearing that infuriatingly smug grin the whole time, but he’s at least smart enough not to comment.

Then she gets in her car, turns the key, and listens to the engine sputter and whine.

Sara frowns, tries it again. The engine turns over, and she breathes a sigh of relief and chalks it up to the freezing temperatures.

Until she gets about a mile down the street.

“No, no, no!” she mutters, panic rising faster than the smoke from beneath her hood. “Please, please don’t do this to me. Not today. Please, not today.”

The engine responds with a final, sputtering breath before going silent. Sara swears using just about every curse she knows as she drifts to the side of the road, clumsily searching for the hazard lights. Dark smoke leaks out from under the hood, mixing with the steam.

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