Page 43 of Powerless
I scoff and reach across to poke him in the ribs, smiling when he flinches. “How am I supposed to look at my own eyes?”
“Most people use a mirror.”
I poke him again and he snorts.
“Use the mirror, Sunny. What color do you think they are? Tell me that isn’t robin’s-egg blue.”
Pushed toward the center console, I peer into the rearview mirror. They’re blue. But so are the circles under my eyes. The vein that no concealer can ever really cover. So is the way I feel inside right now if I really reach down and dig my fingers into that stone at the bottom of my gut. “They’re just blue, Jas.” I flop back. “And I looktired.”
“They’re not just blue.” He says it like it’s fact and not his opinion.
My stomach flips.
And then I deflect, not wanting to linger in these memories for longer than necessary. Not wanting to face all the shit I’ve opted to run away from. Not yet. I launch back in. “I spy with my little eye . . .”
We play several more rounds.
But we play the baby version, and neither one of us calls the other on it.
12
Jasper
Jasper:Any news?
Harvey:Nothing. If I hear anything, you’ll be my first call.
Jasper:Okay.
“Ithink we should stop for the day.”
We haven’t been on the road for long, but I feel the tug of sleep at the center of my forehead like a weight that wants to push my eyes shut. It’s only gotten worse since the world’s most awkward game of I Spy fizzled out and left us sitting in silence.
All I can hear is the hum of tires against the road. It’s a white noise machine at this point.
Robin’s-egg blue.What was I thinking? It’s just so easy, so reassuring, to fall back into those memories. Sometimes I wish we could go back. It was simple then. I wasn’t recognized everywhere I go. Beau wasn’t missing. She wasn’t running from her life.
But me? I’ve always been running from mine, trying to escape attention.
“Okay.” Sloane looks at me a little too closely, and I raise one hand to bend the brim of my hat, like it might prevent her from seeing me. Because it’s always felt like she looks at me in a way I can’t hide from, like she sees a little too much. “You alright? Want me to find a good place to stop?”
“Yeah. I’m just . . . honestly, Sloane, I’m just really fucking tired. I was all gung ho to leave and now that I have, I’m exhausted.”
“I could drive for a bit?” She says it lightly, but we both know she knows the answer. She’s the only one who knows that whole story, every dirty detail. Everyone else has bits and pieces, but with Sloane, I laid it all out. She was too young to really understand, which I think meant she was too young to judge me.
I sometimes wonder if she judges me now.
I keep my eyes peeled on the rocky rises of the surrounding mountains, so tall and ominous you can see them from the city. We’re well in their midst now, traveling through the rolling yellowed foothills and into the jutting peaks capped with pristine snow. “No. Not with the load we’re hauling. You don’t have any experience with that.”
Her eyes narrow, and I feel it more than see it. “And you do?”
One of my shoulders pops up. “Not recently. But yeah, I’ve hauled plenty of loads of hay in the summer when I was younger. You don’t live at Wishing Well Ranch and not become a full-blown country-boy.”
She doesn’t respond, instead she pulls her phone out, thumbs flying across it. I see a call come in and the screen flashes. Sterling. She quickly declines it and keeps searching.
“You ever gonna talk to him?”
“There is a town called Rose Hill coming up that has a hotel by a lake. Looks pretty.”
