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The sun streamed into the room around the edges of the curtains. Shannon untied the nylon around my wrists and rubbed them until the pins and needles sensation faded. It was the first time I’d gotten a really good look at him.
The castle had been dark except for the fireplace the previous night, and it had of course been dark outside. It wasn’t as if he’d been a total visual mystery to me. But there were details you could only fully catch in the light of day—like the fact that he had the longest, most beautiful dark eyelashes I’d ever seen on a man. But somehow they didn’t make him seem less scary or any less masculine.
“What?” he said.
“N-nothing.”
He got up and left the nylon belt or rope or whatever the hell it was meant to be used for—it was fucking versatile—lying on the bed beside me.
“If you want a shower, now is the time.”
God, yes, I wanted a shower. I hadn’t had a real shower in months, and even worse was the fact that I couldn’t remember it when I actually had.
I was in there a lot longer than he preferred. Probably fifteen or twenty minutes. Until the water ran cold. It was just such a lovely novelty having hot water pouring over me.
Shannon banged on the bathroom door. “Let’s go.”
He probably thought I’d climbed out the bathroom window. There was no bathroom window, but I’m sure it didn’t prevent him from imagining some way I could still do it. Or maybe he thought I was fashioning a weapon out of the sink pipe.
I was just turning off the water and pulling back the shower curtain to get out when he kicked the door in. I jerked the curtain around me.
“We need to get on the road,” he said as if he hadn’t kicked the door down. Just a normal day with Shannon. I wondered what his friends thought of him or if they were just as bad. Maybe they were all just like him: highly paranoid and shady.
Shannon retreated back into the bedroom, and I got out, dried off, and put the clothes he’d given me at the castle back on. He didn’t say another word about either my long shower or busting in on me like that. Every time he had an opportunity and I thought he was going to pounce on me and just... take... nothing happened. I was becoming increasingly convinced that I was right about Shannon not prioritizing sex.
In a way, that scared me more. I felt sure it was some deeper sign of sociopathy or something. Like he got all his thrills from the big death instead of the little one.
We got back in the SUV, Shannon turned in the key, and we were on the road again. I wondered what he’d used for ID when he’d gotten the room? Had he used his real information, or did he have fake IDs? Or had he talked his way out of it, using the kid’s desire to leave work against him?
Shannon stopped a couple of times for gas, a couple of times for food, and gave me a few more bathroom breaks. He watched me like a hawk at each location.
I was about to go crazy without the radio or human speech. You’d think I would have gotten used to it with all the time with only Trevor, but there were the chickens. And birds. And sometimes deer would wander into the park. A few times I sat so statue-still that they’d come up to me. But it had taken weeks. It had been a game to see how close one would come. I think six feet from me was my record. And then a stupid crow had sent it running.
And there had been music in the castle. Ren Fair music, but still. And at least Trevor spoke to me.
I could probably manage to fit most of my conversation with Shannon since leaving the castle onto the back of a napkin.
He’d had to make a detour to the airport where his car was parked and drop off the rental SUV. He carefully kept me out of view of cameras without making it look too odd, then we got into his car and continued.
His real car was a shiny black four-door Cadillac that looked like something you’d drive the president around in. The license plate said, Georgia. I half expected to ride in the back with a glass divider between us, but he put me in the front with him. There was no glass divider.
I could have screamed for help in the airport rental place, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to stop me. But there was that luggage with Trevor in it that we were dragging around. What if I got help but then they decided I’d been an accomplice? There was also an insane part of me that trusted Shannon, despite all reasonable evidence that I shouldn’t. There was still a part of me that wanted to crawl inside his cold dead silence to escape the scrutiny of the world.
Shannon was a man of utility. He packed the most practical, versatile things. He drove the most unobtrusive car. He spoke the fewest words necessary to get his point across. When we got to his house, I knew it was his because the inside matched everything else I knew about him.
A little cold. Very minimalist. Clean. Regimented. It was a big, nice house in an equally nice neighborhood. It wasn’t flagrantly lavish, but it screamed either upper middle class or,I’ve got a fuckton of money, but I don’t need you to know about it.Considering all the illicit jobs I’d imagined him holding during our endless trip, I was leaning toward the latter.
As soon as we crossed the threshold, the security system blared at us. Shannon turned it off, locked the doors, then turned it right back on again. Message sent. Nobody went in or out of this house without him knowing about it, and it was going to be locked up tighter than Fort Knox at all times.
Inside, everything was gray and black and white. The only splash of color was some red here and there. The color of blood. I wondered if he realized how much of his internal state he broadcast just with his decorating choices?
“Stay. I’m going to put my stuff up.”
Anybody else would have tossed his bags beside the door and handled it later. We’d been driving all day, and he was obviously tired. But in Shannon’s world, it seemed everything had a place, and nothing ever deviated from where it was supposed to be.
He took his bag upstairs while I stood in the living area glancing around awkwardly. A bright red photo album caught my eye from the coffee table. To give myself something to do, I sat on the sofa and flipped through the album. It was filled with pictures of abandoned amusement parks. Decapitated mermaid heads and fins and creepy peeling clowns abounded. There were broken down wooden roller coasters that looked to be rotting and seemed held up only by vines. One rather sad image showed a couple of paddle boats abandoned in the middle of a lake.
What was it about these places that drew Shannon? They were so empty. Maybe it felt familiar. He wasn’t in any of the photos, making it clear he’d been the photographer. But there were almost never other people in any of the photos either. Occasionally there was a stray leg or arm, even the side of a face and body as someone walked through the frame—no doubt his fellow urban explorers. But people in the photos were clearly accidental, never intentional. People weren’t what Shannon was interested in.
