His eyes found my car, the silver Civic, third spot from the stairwell, a car of perfectly reasonable proportions for exactly one of us.
Scorch stopped at the passenger door.
“This is a very small car,” he said.
“It fits me perfectly.”
His gaze came off the car and settled on me, brief and warm. “Yeah. I can see that.” he said.
My pulse jumped once and I got in before I had to answer that.
He folded himself into the passenger seat with the focused determination of a man completing a difficult objective. The seat went to the last notch and then past it. His knees were near the dashboard. His shoulder was solidly in my space.
He found a position and owned it.
“Comfortable over there?” I said.
“Completely comfortable.”
His knee was three inches from the gearshift.
“You are not comfortable.”
“Any time now,” he said, with considerable dignity.
I pulled out of the garage.
WE MADE IT TO I-10before he spoke.
“Just one night,” he said.
“That’s the arrangement.”
“And in the morning I do what I want.”
“In the morning you call Cricket and work out your own ride,” I said. “Tonight you sleep somewhere that isn’t a hospital.”
He watched the city thin out past the loop. After a while: “Your place. What should I know?”
“My cat hates strangers,” I said. “Don’t take it personally. Give her an hour.”
“I’ll win her over in thirty minutes.”
“You are going to lose that bet.”
His voice went warm. “We’ll see, sweetheart.”
I kept my eyes on I-10.
THE BUNGALOW WAS TWENTYminutes from the hospital, west of the loop: a narrow lot, a live oak that had been there longer than the house, a front porch with two boards that still needed replacing. I’d bought the place with three years of trauma-nurse income and painted the door yellow the same week, because the previous owner couldn’t tell me not to anymore.
Scorch filled the doorway from the inside. When I pushed the front door and waved him through, he had to angle his shoulder to clear the frame. The living room reorganized itself around him: the couch, the bookshelf, the lamp doing its best from the corner.
That was when Loretta opened her eyes.
She’d been asleep on the back of the couch at approximately shoulder height and opened them to find a large dark presence three feet from her face. She sat up. She assessed.
She hissed.
