Page 9 of If I Stopped Haunting You

Neil tightened his hands on the steering wheel as she glowered at him. When he swiveled to get a good look at her, he could see that a rather large part of her had hoped he wouldn’t show up.Touché, Skinner, touché.

Laszlo hopped out of the car and helped load her bags, and when they were done, she climbed quietly into the back seat, her body carefully angled away from Daniela as Laszlo slid into the passenger seat and slapped a hand on the dash.

Neil jumped. “Is that necessary?”

“I hope you all don’t mind,” Laszlo said, ignoring him and turning to the others, “but we’re going to make a pit stop first.”

“Where?” Neil asked, changing the gear. The grin his question elicited from Laszlo was nothing short of terrifying.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

Without meaning to, Neil caught Skinner’s gaze in the rearview over the top of his sunglasses. Her lips were pursed, fist covering her mouth to keep from laughing. Her eyes were more blue than gray today, and they widened, her lips curling down. Something in Neil’s stomach twisted when she didn’t immediately look away, and he blinked in surprise, focusing on the road as he pulled away from the curb.

Neil suddenly had so many questions for the woman who’druined everything, but his tongue felt heavy, and his stomach was a mess of knots. Was he nervous? He tightened his hold on the steering wheel until his hands were numb. Pressing his lips into a flat line, he ground his teeth, saying nothing for the rest of the drive.

God, thisfucking drive. He would never admit as much aloud, but it was setting his nerves on edge, and he didn’t know how much longer he could mask it, especially in her presence. Something about Penelope Skinner had him leaning forward, wanting to lay his soul bare, and it wasterrifying.

Her attendance only made the treacherous journey that much more difficult, because as much as he wanted to focus on her, he needed to concentrate on the road. These Scottish roads were excruciatingly tight. His stomach dropped as he rounded each bend, fully expecting an oncoming car barreling down the narrow road toward them. He hated being afraid more than anything, and he’d be damned if anyone knew just how terrified the drive was making him. Skinner didn’t need any more fuel to use against him.

When Neil had finally lost feeling in his fingertips, Laszlo motioned for him to pull over. Neil could feel his heart thundering in his chest, the painfulbud-umpworking its way through his fingers as he flexed his hands. He squinted through the windshield until he saw a pullout a ways down. The van slowed to a stop, and he changed gears, putting them into park.

“Here? You want me to pull over here?” Neil blinked against the midmorning light.

“Well,” Laszlo said as he slid out of the car, not quite looking at Neil, “I’m not one hundred percent on this, but I think we might be lost.”

Daniela unbuckled and climbed out after Laszlo.

“Of fucking course we are,” Neil muttered.

He unbuckled before opening his door and hopped out of the van. His neck and lower back popped as he reached up and stretched, his body angry from fifteen years spent hunched overbooks and keyboards. Yawning, he rolled back his shoulders, enjoying the brisk morning breeze that sent a fresh wave of goose bumps across his skin.

Laszlo and Daniela stumbled off to the side of the main road, both of them motioning to an empty field out beyond the trees, visible through a break in the brush.

“Where are we?” Skinner asked, leaning out of her window.

“Are you talking to me?” Neil said, jabbing his thumb into his chest.

She rolled her eyes and pushed open her door, climbing out. She unfolded to an astonishingly short height. Standing side by side, he had the strange urge to rest an arm on her head.

“Laszlo and Daniela are a bit busy,” Skinner said, pointing. “So, yeah, I’m talking to you.”

Indeed, they were leaning over Laszlo’s phone, talking in hushed whispers. Laszlo peered back at them once, turning around just as quickly, shoulders hunched.

“I honestly don’t know where we are. Laszlo was navigating.” Neil shrugged. Much as he liked Laszlo, the man could be a bit oblivious. Neil sighed and ran a hand through his hair, trying to calm himself. “Now that I think about it,” he continued, “the last road trip I took with Laszlo was back in college, and it ended with us stranded at a motel in the middle of the desert with no gas. We probably shouldn’t have let him navigate.”

Skinner made a small sound but said nothing more. When Neil scowled at her, he found her smiling. Annoyed that he’d caught her, she scrunched up her nose and peered past him to the others. He tried not to stare at the way her braid swung down her back, exposing the expanse of her neck. Or the way one side of her sweater slipped down to reveal her shoulder and the light sprinkling of freckles across her pale skin.

Annoying as she might be, he couldn’t deny that she was pretty.

And… white. She looked it, anyway. It was strange, the differences between multiracial and biracial. While her skin was pale, his was a smooth gold that only grew darker in the summer. He knew she got shit for it, for not being Native enough. No one said anything like that about Neil Storm. Despite the curly hair and the green eyes clearly inherited from his mother, he was alwaysenough. He was enrolled. He had proof of his Nativeness, but she didn’t.

There was never any nuance about these sorts of things. Getting enrolled in a tribe included paperwork, Dawes Rolls numbers, birth and death certificates, and an extensive list of living and dead family enrolled in the same tribe along with their enrollment numbers. Neil recalled the paperwork his dad did when he was younger, the dozens of times his dad was rejected before the application was finally accepted, well into Neil’s teens. Neil felt a strange sense of pity for Skinner and all the crap she encountered, all because she couldn’t present some card.

“Stop staring,” she said. “You look like a creep.”

Well, she was certainly more annoying than she was pretty. He’d focus on that.

Neil tried to calm his breathing. His vision was growing fuzzy at the edges, the beginnings of a headache drumming a beat at the back of his skull as Laszlo and Daniela wavered before him. Skinner sighed and crossed to the others, squeezing in between them before taking the phone from a confused Laszlo. She zoomed out with two fingers and glanced down the road, back the way they’d come.