Page 33 of Joker

The radio is fine where it is.

Each answer gives me another small piece of a picture I have no business putting together, and still I keep doing it.

Not because I need to know. Because I want to. That’s a bigger problem than the hair.

Eventually the conversation fades again, but this time it feels like a shared thing instead of a wall. Raven leans back a little deeper into the seat. Not fully relaxed, still not that, but the tension in her neck has eased a fraction. One of her hands rests near the tote with the wig tucked away inside, the other curled in the sleeve of my sweatshirt.

Mine.

The word drops into my head ugly and possessive and wrong. I shove it aside hard enough to make my jaw tighten.

Not mine. Not anything close to mine.

She’s a woman I’m transporting for another chapter because Logan called in a debt and trusted me to do the job. That’s it. End of story.

Doesn’t matter that she looks like that with her real hair down. Doesn’t matter that she laughed at my dry bullshit twice now. Doesn’t matter that every instinct I’ve got has started filing her and that little girl in the backseat under some private heading labeled protect.

None of that changes what this is.

I know that. The problem is, my body doesn’t seem particularly interested in listening.

I catch myself looking over again when she tucks one side of her hair behind her ear. The move bares the clean line of her throat for a second before the dark strands slide forward again.

I look back at the road so fast it’s almost violent.

Internally, there’s no recovering from it. Because the truth is simple and extremely fucking inconvenient.

One look at her real face, with that bad disguise gone and all that dark hair loose over my sweatshirt, and something in me tips past curiosity into a territory I have no business entering.

I’m not sentimental enough to call it anything pretty. I’m not stupid enough to pretend it’s harmless.

So when I glance at her one more time and catch the reflection of those amber eyes in the windshield before dragging my attention back where it belongs, I know exactly one thing for sure.

I am absolutely, thoroughly fucked.

I notice the shift in him immediately.

Not because he does anything obvious. That would be easier to understand.

He doesn’t flirt. He doesn’t stare in a way that feels invasive. He doesn’t make some ridiculous comment about my hair or act like the fact that I took off a terrible disguise suddenly changes the dynamic between us.

If anything, he reins himself in.

It’s subtle, almost impossible to catch if you aren’t paying attention, but I am always paying attention. I have learned how to read the smallest changes in a man’s posture, his breathing, the way his hands move when something in his head shifts.

Joker doesn’t look at me any longer than he did before.

He doesn’t lean closer. He doesn’t try to fill the space with anything unnecessary. But something tightens in him.

Something deliberate. Like he noticed something and decided, very quickly, that it would not matter. That should make me feel safer.

It does.

It also makes me more aware of him than I want to be. Because men who react loudly are predictable. Men who react quietly are not.

I shift slightly in the seat, tucking my legs closer beneath me, my fingers still buried in the sleeves of his sweatshirt. My hair falls forward over my shoulder again, and I resist the urge to fix it because I don’t want to draw attention to it now that it’s down.

Even though he hasn’t said anything. Even though he hasn’t made it a thing. That somehow makes it worse.