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I get up quickly and slip outside, intercepting her before she can leave.
“Hey,” I say, flagging her down. “I just wanted to say sorry. For getting you in trouble with that asshole.”
“Oh.” She looks surprised to see me since the last time we spoke was several hours ago, and she glances around warily like she half expects her pimp to materialize out of the shadows and hit her again for talking to me. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. He’s just… like that.”
“A raging piece of shit?”
She laughs a little, still looking nervous. “Something like that. He’ll be over it by tomorrow. I had a good night.”
“I could tell.”
“Were you watching me?”
“Not in a creepy way. I just wanted to talk, and I didn’t want to get you in trouble again.”
She gives me a cautious look and then smiles, still a little unsure. “Um, yeah, okay. We can talk.”
“I’m River.”
“Avalon. Did you try the pie?” She nods at the diner behind me. “It’s amazing.”
I nod. “Had a slice of the apple. It was good.”
“The blueberry is the best. Buy me a slice and we can talk about whatever you want to.”
As deals go, it’s not a bad one, so I agree, and we go into the diner. She settles in the booth at the window with me, and I order more coffee and a slice of the blueberry pie for Avalon.
Under the fluorescent lights inside the diner, she looks tired, slumping back against the shiny red cushioning of the booth. She kicks her heels off under the table and drums her fingers on the table.
“So is that standard around here?” I ask her. “Dickholes running the show while you do the real work?”
Avalon laughs. “For the most part, yeah. I wish I didn’t have to have a pimp, but around here, that’s the only way to make a living.”
I make a face, and she breathes another quiet laugh, although there’s not really any humor in it.
“It’s not always so bad, I guess,” she says with a shrug. Then her brows pull together. She has delicate, pixie-like features that give away more of her emotions than is probably good for her. “But I’m guessing you didn’t buy me pie just to talk about that.”
As if on cue, the waitress comes over and brings the coffee and pie, setting it on the table and moving away quickly. Maybe she’s used to people having clandestine conversations in the middle of the night at this place. It seems like the kind of establishment where that would happen.
At this hour, there’s no one really around other than working women at the end of their nights, and people working graveyard shifts, grabbing something before they have to head to work.
Avalon picks up a fork and has a bite of the pie, licking the sticky blueberry filling off the back of her utensil.
“I’m trying to figure out if you or any of the girls you know have been picked up by someone,” I tell her, getting down to the real reason I waited all night to chat with her.
She lifts an eyebrow. “We’re not really supposed to talk about it…”
I can hear the ‘but’ in there, so I don’t let her words stop me. “Ivan St. James,” I say. “I’m pretty sure he’s picking up girls from somewhere in Detroit, and I’m just looking for a place to start.”
Up until that point, Avalon has been pretty open. She’s been relaxed, eating her pie like she’s comfortable. As soon as I say Ivan’s name, she goes tense, her eyes getting wide and then shuttering, her expression closing off.
“I-I can’t really talk about it,” she says quickly.
It doesn’t even seem like she really means shewon’ttalk about it. She looks scared. Her face is pale, and her hands tremble when she goes to take another bite of pie.
It makes her look younger than before, and this woman sitting across from me might as well be a different person from the one who was leaning in car windows and flirting with potential customers for the past several hours.
For just a minute, she reminds me so much of Hannah that it hurts. Like a sharp ache in my chest that I can’t ignore.
