“I think there are Funyuns in the container with the green lid.”
His sigh makes her skin tug. “Do I want to know what a Funyun is?”
“I’m not telling until after you eat one.”
“So that’s a no.”
A few hundred yards ahead, at the crest of a hill, taillights flash red through the darkened day. Ripley backs off the gas. “Shit. I should’ve checked the highway construction reports before we—”
The driver in front of them brakes hard, skids a little, then hydroplanes in a slow, sickening turn.
“Hold on” is all she has time to say.
18
Time slows down, becoming loose and elastic inside Ripley’s head.
Gas, brakes, or steering, Pip,her dad’s voice murmurs. She’s desperately glad he’s here. The Charger was born to grip the road and never let go, and her dad made sure she knew how to drive it in the worst weather Montana could spit at her.
Steering.
“Now or fucking never, Adams,” she mutters, cranking the wheel.
She swerves into the left lane, her right front bumper almost grazing the spinning sedan. The driver in the truck behind them lays on the horn. Fuck, he’s heading for the left lane too—big, heavy, and coming right at her.
Gas.They flash past the sedan. She downshifts, pulls into the right lane. She has maybe two hundred yards from here to the traffic crawling toward the construction zone.
Brakes.
She touches the pedal with every bit of finesse she can muster, adding pressure until the seatbelts lock. A hundred yards. Seventy. Fifty. Forty.
“Come on, baby,” she murmurs. “Come on. Come on, come on, come on—”
Inches from a red minivan, they come to a hard stop. Their bodies fall back into the bucket seats like they’ve been shoved.
Rain pummels the roof. Two people breathe hard and fast. In front of them, a flap of worn rubber dangles from the minivan’s rear wiper, bobbing with every swipe. There’s a black bumper sticker with a crease running through the tiny white letters where someone applied it not quite straight.
“ ‘If you can read this, you’re too close,’ ” Smithson recites in a blank, shocked voice.
With shaking hands, Ripley pulls off the road, tucks the Charger against the guardrail, and kills the engine.
“Well,thattook a year off my fucking life. You okay?”
Before she can blink, he’s got his seatbelt off and is practically halfway across the center console, his eyes darting frantically up and down her body. His hands search her shoulders, flutter over her face, dig underneath her braid.
“Are you hurt? Don’t try to move. Can you speak? Christ, Ripley.” His mouth is pulled down into a rictus of panic. His eyes are blank, unfocused.
He’s not here,Ripley realizes. Part of him has gone back to some other time and place. Probably the one that made him need to carry a tin of Xanax when he travels. Which, fuck.
“Professor.Hey.” She tries to catch his wrists, but he’s fucking strong from all that rowing and cycling and horseback riding. She gives up trying to hold him back, instead applying her hands to his cheeks. “James. James!”
His gaze pulls back from the abyss a fraction.
“I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re okay,” she says.
“I was distracting you. Talking too much. It was my fault.” He strokes an almost imperceptible distance up the sides of her jaw, then back down, his fingers trembling.
“Uh, no, it wasn’t,” she says bluntly, mostly because it’s true, but also because his eyes have reached into her and locked onto something that’s erased most of her vocabulary.
