Page 16 of Quiver

She held up a hand to cut her off. “Don’t. I … just not today.”

“Okay.”

“Merry Christmas, everyone.”

They all echoed the sentiment, but she gritted her teeth and shook her head before pulling her coat back on and flipping up the collar. Clearly, a happy holiday was not in the cards for her.

Kylie didn’t tell her parents she was leaving. She’d merely told the grandmother of the group she needed to retrieve her coat, then slipped out into the chilly Vermont air. It wasn’t even five o’clock yet, but darkness came early this far north, and she found it fitting that she hadn’t seen the sunset.

She picked her way carefully along the snowbank on the edge of the road picturing the headline, “B-list has-been found frozen after stumbling in the dark and cold of her self-imposed isolation.”

She laughed aloud, which only enhanced the manic edge of her evening. Why had she thought she could go out in this town without running into ghosts? She may have argued the odds of ending up at Fletcher’s ex-girlfriend’s parents’ house were pretty slim, but in a town this small, they probably weren’t. The anonymity of city life had clouded her judgment, or maybe she really was a glutton for punishment. Plenty of people accused her of as much over the years, and while it wasn’t something she’d ever consciously aspired to, the last few days suggested she was either stupid or willfully engaging in emotional risk-taking.

She stopped and stared up at the stars shining overhead. What was wrong with her? At thirty-four years old, she was still too young for a midlife crisis, no matter what Hollywood might suggest about her shelf life, but she still felt a little unhinged. As much as she wanted to blame the audition and Sophia LeBlanc for her mental instability, she suspected it had been building for some time. She’d been filled with a vague sense of lacking for longer than she cared to admit, but it wasn’t until she’d read Talia’s script that she’d let herself want something to fill the void.

Wanting was dangerous, like hunger or desire or hope. The cravings could consume you. She’d seen too many lives and careers careen out of control when they surrendered too deeply to their own drive, and yet without a little bit of insanity, few of them could ever commit to the vulnerability required to transcend the masses. She’d always secretly thought herself superior at walking that tightrope, but now she felt her balance slipping.

And she’d turned to Fletcher to break her fall.

She rolled her eyes at the very idea now, as a set of headlights filled the street behind her. She had a brief second where she worried it might hit her, and while the idea didn’t appeal to her, she also didn’t think it would hurt as badly as some of the dumb decisions she kept making.

The truck rolled by her without incident, and she suffered a sharp pang she didn’t have the chance to make sense of before brake lights flashed brightly, followed by the white to signal a reverse, and she knew then who was driving. Her brain always burned red to white when Fletcher got this close. Still, she’d never seen the woman reverse course, so she froze and braced for a collision of another kind.

Fletcher stopped the muddy Toyota Tacoma next to her and lowered the passenger-side window. “What the fuck, Kylie?”

“You could’ve left it at ‘Merry Christmas.’”

“You could’ve left it at any point before you accused me of having an amorphous relationship with desire.”

She snorted softly.

“Seriously? Who says shit like that at a holiday open house? Or, you know, anywhere?”

She sighed with something approaching regret. She didn’t love the way she’d reacted to seeing Ava, but she couldn’t explain that to either of them without breaking open completely. “Neither one of us has ever been good at knowing when to let things go where the other is concerned.”

“I don’t know,” Fletcher said. “You’ve proven yourself pretty adept at letting go over the years.”

“And you’ve been good at moving on. Why not keep driving?”

The comment seemed to give Fletcher pause. “I’m not sure.”

It was the first genuine response, but instead of easing the tension, it only made Kye more wary. She wasn’t sure she trusted herself with any sliver of vulnerability right now, not her own or anyone else’s. “I hope you figure it out, but I have my own stuff to work on, and after what happened back there, there’s more baggage than I previously realized. How about I’ll unpack mine and let you tend to your own, ’cause that’s how you roll. Not that it’s any of my—”

“Shut up.”

“What?”

Fletcher grumbled. “Shut up and get in the truck.”

“You used to be a lot better at talking to women.”

“And you didn’t used to be icy enough to fog up my windshield glass.”

“Ah, well, you’d know plenty about cold shoulders.”

Fletcher rolled her eyes in the dim light of the truck cab. “I’m trying to give you a ride back to your parents’.”

“Will you be this grumpy the whole way?”