He is still looking at the drawing, his expression almost reverent.
"You sell these?"
"Yeah."
"To who?"
"People who see the beauty in endings. The dirty truth of life."
He laughs, a husky sound that sends shivers down my spine.
“The truth. Yeah, most people can't handle the truth."
"No, they can't."
We stay like this for a moment, crouched on the side of the road, the dead fox between us, the sun setting behind the red rocks. Two strangers who aren't really strangers at all. Two people who recognize something in each other that the rest of the world can't see.
Dom stands up, brushing the dust off his jeans. "You heading somewhere?"
"Nowhere specific."
"Good," he said. "Neither am I."
With those parting words, he walks back to his car and slams the door as he gets inside. The engine roars to life, loud andaggressive. He looks over at me, and even from this distance I can see those dark eyes holding mine.
"See you around, Roxy," he says as he drives by with his window down. And then he was gone, disappearing down the highway in a cloud of dust and exhaust.
I sit here for a long time after he leaves, staring at the empty road, my heart beating faster than it should. Something important had taken place in that brief meeting. I didn't know what yet, but I could feel that shift in the air, that sense that everything was about to change. Let’s call it a gut feeling, intuition. Huh.
I look down at my drawing of the dead fox, then at the real thing lying on the asphalt. It feels like a sign, telling me my twin had just introduced themself. For most of my life I have hated being around others, tolerating people because society tells me to, but this is huge. This is the first person who has ever made me want to know more about them. To have an actual interest in another human, all because we clicked over something others would judge.
I shake my head, trying to clear my thoughts as I pack up my supplies, climb into my van, and start the engine. The cassette player kicks back on, filling the space with music. I pull onto the highway, heading north toward nowhere, and try to ignore the way my hands are shaking.
I also ignore the way I’m already hoping I'll see him again.
CHAPTER TWO
DOM
I saw her before I saw the fox.
The thing people don't understand about me is that I notice everything. Every detail, every movement, every fucking thing that's out of place. It's a survival instinct I picked up young, back when noticing things meant the difference between getting jumped and making it home in one piece. You learn how to read a room, read a street, assess a person in the span of a heartbeat. And once you learn that skill, you can't unlearn it.
So yeah, I saw her.
A flash of pink on the side of Route 89, bright against the desert rock background and the fading light. A girl crouched on the shoulder like she was praying to something. I almost didn't stop and kept driving, because what the fuck did I care about some random girl on the side of the road? But then I saw what she was looking at.
The fox. Dead. Flies swarming, a matted carcass along with that particular stillness that only comes when something's stopped being alive and started being meat.
And she wasdrawingit. Weird to some, intriguing to me.
I pulled over about fifty yards back, and just watched. She didn't notice me as she was too focused on her work, her pencilmoving across the paper in quick, confident strokes. She wasn't sketching it like some nature artist trying to capture beauty. She was lovingly capturing its essence with every detail of the decomposing animal and the purpose of what that fox had become.
I got out of my car, leaned against the door and lit a cigarette, fascinated by the woman and the way in which she worked.
She was small, petite, I would guess maybe five foot two by the length of her legs, which is pretty small compared to my six foot. She had long black hair that fell past her shoulders, catching the hue of the light of the sunset. I also noticed that she was sucking on a lollipop, which again, was interesting to see, considering what she was doing. She was wearing a bright pink hoodie, which shocked me in this heat, but didn’t seem to affect her, and cut-off shorts that showed off tanned legs that went on forever despite her height. From this distance, she looked like sunshine. Like one of those girls who smiled too much and laughed at everything and pretended the world was a good place.
But I knew better. Girls like that didn't crouch on the side of the road drawing roadkill. Girls like that didn't have that particular intensity in their posture, a focus that said she wasn't just passing time, but was doing something thatmatteredto her.
