Page 109 of Run Away With Me

18

Nevermind– Nirvana

While Brooke was in the shower, I forced myself to do what had become normal – packing up our stuff, moving some cash into our wallets for the day and hiding the rest of it among our bags, checking on what snacks we had left.

I wanted to still be riding the high of the open mic night and being here in Nashville, but the news story had stolen my excitement and filled that space with uneasy foreboding.

‘All good?’ Brooke asked when she came out of the bathroom. She walked over to me and tucked my hair behind my ear.

I was almost certain that she believed I hadn’t killed the Creep, but I also couldn’t blame her if she still had some lingering doubts.

‘As long as I have you,’ I replied.

She smiled and leaned in to kiss my cheek. ‘Well, you do have me.’

That felt impossible, and huge, and incredibly precious.

‘I really like you, you know,’ I blurted, and I felt Brooke’s lips stretch into a smile against my skin.

‘I like you too,’ she said softly.

I opened my eyes and looked at her and my whole body went hot. Brooke was wrapped in just a towel. It wouldn’t take much, not much at all, for us to stumble back into bed.

She caught the look in my eyes and hers went dark too.

Then she laughed, a little embarrassed, and stepped back. ‘I’ll go get dressed,’ she murmured.

‘Okay,’ I croaked.

So she wasn’t ready for that. Whateverthatwas. It wasn’t out of the question, though. That much was clear.

I was fine with giving her time. To be honest, I needed some myself. I wasn’t sure I was ready to take this any farther. Not yet, anyway. But maybe soon.

To distract myself, I reached for the TV remote and flicked it on out of habit, not thinking about what could be waiting for me.

It hit me, like a punch to the solar plexus, when a picture of me stared out from the screen. It wasn’t particularly recent – two, maybe three years old, when I’d had bangs and my long hair had covered my face. I looked young. The picture was one my mom had taken the summer before ninth grade, one Saturday when we’d taken a rare trip to the beach.

I wasn’t that girl anymore. That was Mouse.

The two hosts were talking about her, not me. I started breathing a little faster, right on the precipice of panic.

‘Police have come under fire for not issuing an AMBER Alert for Jessie Swift.’

The screen was still showing my picture, disembodied voices speaking over the top.

‘There are a few reasons why that wasn’t appropriate in this case. Jessie is seventeen, and there was nothing to suggest she’d been forced to leave the city. The AMBER Alert system is an incredibly valuable tool to inform the public about missing children, but there are specific circumstances for its use.’

The image changed, to one of me and my mom. She had her arm around my shoulder and was beaming at the camera. She looked beautiful, as always, and I looked up at her with a slightly awestruck expression.

That photo had been taken the summer before the Creep, when, despite our rocky relationship, I’d still thought my mom would protect me from anything.

‘Why has the information about Jessie been so slow to be released?’

‘As her mother’s boyfriend was murdered, the initial investigation concentrated on whether Jessie was in any danger, either to herself or someone else, and establishing how she left Seattle.’

‘I can’t listen to this,’ I whispered, turning the TV off again as Brooke walked back into the room. ‘Please can we get out of here?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Of course we can. Just give me ten minutes.’

---