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“Ice machine,” I repeated when we stepped back out into the biting cold. “Is she fucking with us?”
The room was as sad as I expected, based on the outside. Two queen beds separated by a chipped nightstand. The ancient television sat on the bureau, the remote tethered to the wall behind it. Both the bedspread and the carpet were a hideous pattern of swirling yellows, golds, and reds, with dashes of blue and green. I pointed out to Willow that it was the kind of pattern that was useful when you needed blood and vomit stains to blend in.
“Tell me you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth without telling me,” she called from the bathroom.
“What? Because I don’t like sleeping in former and future crime scenes?”
“Because you think that bad things only happen in places like this and not in five-star hotels.”
I frowned, wondering if I was imagining the bite in her voice. “That’s not what I think.”
Willow came out of the bathroom. “Then you agree that we’re perfectly safe here,” she said, and kissed me. Her lips were warm, her voice was light, but there had been a shadow in her eyes.
The familiar prickle at the base of my neck.
She’s not what she seems.
But I pushed it away.I don’t care, I told the voice.I want what she is.
19
WILLOW
Itried to convince Julian to let me stay behind while he had his meeting with Callum, but he wasn’t having it. He swore it was because he needed me in the meeting with him, but I had a feeling it had more to do with how much he hated the motel. He hadn’t said anything else about it, but I caught the disdainful curl of his mouth when he saw the bathroom for the first time. The way he’d rubbed the thin, scratchy material of the comforter between his thumb and forefinger and then wiped his hand on his jeans.
While Julian drove with surprising skill through the snow, I read up on Callum O’Conner. I saw pictures of him as a stringy twentysomething wunderkind, posing with a copy of his first published book, a rictus smile on his angular face. Over the years, he’d filled out. His smile had come more naturally, and then faded off his face altogether. He’d published a book every two years for the last twenty, and all ten had gone on to sweep the book awards circuit. He’d said from the very beginning he only had ten in him, which meant his latest,All the Dying Light, would be the last.
“Do you think he means it?” I asked Julian.
Julian nodded. “Yeah, I do. He takes his word very seriously. I think even if he wrote another book, he wouldn’t publish it. Might even write it just to write it, and then burn it.” His tone was half disgust, half admiration.
“You don’t meet many people like that,” I said, unsure of how I felt about it myself. I admired people who meant what they said and only said what they meant, but what Julian was describing went beyond that. It was too rigid, too inflexible. It didn’t allow for the idea of growth or change in yourself. It showed no curiosity in the future but rather tried to control it.
“Luckily,” Julian muttered. We hit a slick spot, and he eased up on the gas, letting the car find its traction again. I’d have slammed on the brakes, or at least shrieked, but Julian looked cool and unaffected.
“Where did you learn to drive in snow?” I asked when my heart dropped back out of my throat.
“Aspen.”
My laugh was choked, but it helped drive out the last of the nerves. “Of course you did.”
Julian slanted me a sideways look. “I can’t help the family I was born into, Laurier.”
“I know.” I turned to stare out the window at the unbroken, unrelieved white of the fields that stretched out to meet the gray-white sky.
“And I’m not going to apologize for it.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
The silence stretched out, long and painfully obvious. I suddenly wished for LA traffic, the sound of horns blaring and people swearing and music pumping. Anything to fill the empty space. Anything to keep me from asking myself–was I asking him to? It wasn’t that I blamed him for being born into a wealthy family. It was more complicated than that. My father was rich, too, but I hadn’t grown up like Julian had. No birthright in the family business, no million-dollar houses, no trips to Aspen. I’d been bornadjacentto it, and that made it worse somehow. But I didn’t want Fletcher’s money. I completely understood why my mom took the pittance he offered–she hadn’t slept with him for money. She hadn’t gotten pregnant for a payout. Her pride wouldn’t let her go after what the courts would have awarded her. I was proud of her. Happy with the way I grew up.
And yet.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “It’s just…strange for me, I guess.”
“Why?”
“Because you learned how to drive in the snow in Aspen,” I shrugged helplessly and laughed a little at how dumb it sounded. “And I didn’t.”
