She heard Jordan ’s cry of alarm, felt the weight of the car shift, saw a cement wall hurtling toward them.
This part of dream was always the same. The slow motion. The crunch of metal. The shattering of glass. Then her screams.
Don’t look. Don’t get out of the car.
But she did. She always did.
Nobody knew how she got out of the real accident. Speculation was that she’d crawled through the broken front window, because glass shards were found embedded in her knees. But in the dream, she was always just out. Just standing beside the car looking in. But the car was empty.
She turned around, the way she always turned around.
And bumped into herself, into her wild-eyed self. “You’re a bad person,” the Cleo in white said. “Come and see what you’ve done.”
“No.”
Cleo in white grabbed her arm. And Cleo was amazed, because she could feel the deathly chill of the other Cleo’s skin, the pressure of her fingers. “Come and see what you’ve done.”
“I didn’t do it, you did it.” Cleo hung back, planting her feet on ground that kept slipping away. “You killed Jordan. You did it. I can’t look,” Cleo sobbed. “Don’t make me look.”
Suddenly she was in the middle of the road, staring at the broken, smashed pumpkin.
Why, she thought, the way she always thought with such a degree of false confidence, it’s only a broken pumpkin. But then the pumpkin moved. And the pumpkin cried for help.
Jordan.
Jordan ’s voice. Full of pain. Full of beseeching, imploring pain.
Cleo came awake with a start, trying to get her bearings.
At first she thought she was back in the room at The Palms.
No. Not The Palms. A hotel, but not The Palms. She’d tried to get away from The Palms, but Daniel Sinclair had caught her. Sinclair. She was in a hotel with Sinclair.
Had she cried out?
She lay there, listening. Silence, except for a steady, even breathing coming from the vicinity of the hotel room door. No, she hadn’t made any noise.
From beyond the window, transports roared down the interstate. Reassuring artificial light cut in around the curtains, casting the room in layers of shadow. The pillow under her head, and the mattress beneath her, were damp with sweat. Fear covered her body like dew.
Trembling, legs weak, she got to her feet and made her way through the darkness to the bathroom. Once inside, she turned on the heat lamp, then the shower, and stepped inside.
At first Daniel couldn’t place the sound. Rain?
Yeah, rain. He liked the sound of rain. There was something comforting about it. But little by little, reality filtered in until he realized it wasn’t rain at all, but the sound of a shower.
Shower?
Cleo had already taken a shower.
He went from half asleep to wide awake in a fraction of a second. He jumped from his makeshift bed. She’d gotten away. Somehow she’d gotten past him. Somehow she’d stepped over him without waking him, leaving the shower running to throw him off.
Adrenaline pulsed through him. He shoved the bathroom door open so hard it banged against the wall. He ripped aside the shower curtain.
And froze.
Cleo sat in the tub, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, shaking and rocking.
Daniel reached in and shut off the water. “Cleo?”
Where earlier she’d boldly exposed herself to him, this time she grabbed the edge of the shower curtain and pulled it to her, wrapping it around herself as best she could. She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “C-Can’t a p-person get a l-little p-privacy around here?”
He straightened. “I just thought-” What he’d thought was that she’d gotten away. This hardly seemed the time to explain the reasoning behind his intrusion. Withdrawal, he suddenly realized. She’s going through withdrawal.
He pulled a fluffy white towel from the rack on the wall and handed it to her.
“What are you addicted to?”
“W-what?”
“Crack? Heroin? I can hook you up with some people who can help you.”
Wrong thing to say.
Slowly her head came up. And when her eyes connected with his, they were glittering with anger. “You son of a bitch.”
She stood, towel forgotten, shower curtain forgotten. She stepped from the tub and lifted her hand, poised to smack him. He grabbed her wrists and pinned her to the wall, her hands locked above her head, the soft globes of her breasts smashed against his chest. Above his head, he could feel the heat from the overhead lamp burning into his back. Near his right ear, he heard the timer ticking away.
Next thing he knew, he was kissing her.
She stiffened. And then she began kissing him back.
He moved his mouth over hers, sucking at her lips, pulling away, turning his head, finding her again. He plunged his tongue deep inside her mouth, and she met him, thrust for thrust.
He released her hands and she wrapped her arms around him. Her leg curled around his thigh. With her back braced against the wall, he grasped her leg and lifted it higher, a layer of denim the only thing keeping him from sliding inside her.
She let out a cry of frustration, unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans, freeing him into the heat of her hands.
“You’re beautiful,” she whispered against his mouth. “I want you.” She guided him to her.
“Wait,” he said in a breathless voice. “We need a rubber. You got a rubber?”
“We don’t need one.”
“Yes, we do.”
“Are you afraid of me?”
“I’m looking out for both of us.”
“But if either of us were tainted, it would be me, wouldn’t it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
The heat lamp clicked, engulfing them in darkness. He reached behind him, searching for the wall switch.
“Leave the light off,” she whispered.
“I want to see you.”
“I want to pretend you’re somebody else.”
“You’re making me mad.”
“I’m just being honest.”
“Honest?” he said. “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“What about you? You said you were tired and hungry, but this is what you really wanted, isn’t it?”
“And you don’t?” He cranked up the heat lamp. The red filaments came on, giving the space around them a weird, darkroom kind of glow. He bent his head to kiss her. She turned her face away. She was still cradling him in her hands. She let go and pressed both palms to the wall.
He still had a hand to her thigh, her leg wrapped around him. “Look at me,” he said, his voice smooth and low.
She kept her face turned away.
He slid a finger inside her. “Look at me.” She was hot and wet.
He began to stroke her slowly. “Look at me.”
Her face came around. Her eyes were half closed, her lips parted, her breasts rapidly rising and falling.
His strokes became faster and faster, until her entire body tensed, until she threw back her head and cried out, until she went limp and they both slid to the floor.
“It’s too bad you don’t have a rubber,” she said, her voice thick and slurred, still lost in a euphoria he couldn’t achieve. He rested his forehead against hers. “No shit,” he said, his voice tight and strained.
Another minute passed with just the sound of breathing. “You could get one,” she suggested. He sensed that she was holding her breath, waiting for his response.