Headlights(100)

Shame. Guilt. Doubt.

Is that from her?

I pull back and look her in the eye, place my hands on her thighs.

It is. She’s … worried. About my finger, about …

She’s worried about me.

She feels shame.

“To be clear,” I say. “I offered that to you. You did nothing wrong. I regret nothing, and I would let you consume every part of me if it’s what you wanted.”

Doubt, in her eyes. That feeling still there. She doesn’t believe me.

“Hannah. Last night was the best of my life.”

Her eyes fill looking up at me. Battling that shame, still. How do I tell her? How do I make her understand?

“I took your fox drawing,” I say, my hands on this perfect woman, my eyes on her face, “because I thought it was beautiful. And I’ve touched it and held it and carried it ever since. Since the moment I knew you existed on this planet, I haven’t stopped thinking about you. Haven’t stopped wanting to see you, wanting you, needing to know anything and everything I could about you. And I didn’t want to want you, or think about you. I fought it. Until I couldn’t. You, Hannah Lawrence, have consumed my every waking thought since the moment I first saw your face. Since I heard your name. I wanted last night more than I have wanted anything ever. And I loved every fucking second of it.”

Her brow furrows again and tears fall, a flood of emotion hitting me from the other side. So much, too huge, for us now. Too big to understand. Painful, and also …

Hannah pushes herself up on her elbows and takes my face in her hands, kisses me harder, with more urgency, scrambles to pull her sweater over her head, breaking contact with me just for the moment it comes off.

“Wait,” I say, pulling back. I swallow. “Did I do anything you didn’t want? Last night?”

She stares at me for another minute, and the corner of her mouth cocks in a slight smile. It hits me like a punch to the chest. I’m hard, again, seeing it. Was already, probably. But … damn.

She pulls me in again, kisses me harder.

Then I slow the kiss down because whatever’s coming next, whatever lies ahead for us, I want—need—her to know what this, what she, means to me.

I push Hannah back down to the bed and pin her arms with my hands as I trail my mouth down the most beautiful perfect body I’ve ever seen.

“What do you call a cannibal who only eats pussy?” I say, between kisses.

“What?” she says on a breath, and I can hear that smile there.

I lick, kiss, bite down her tits, her stomach, her hip bone, across the plane of her abdomen. Her skin, her perfect smooth warm skin. I lift my head just long enough to say,

“A Cativore.”

She laughs. It’s the first time I’ve heard her really laugh. It’s musical and a little stilted, unused. I want to hear it forever, want to drown in it. “That’s not—” she says. “That’s the worst—”

And then as I flick my tongue somewhere it hasn’t explored yet—somewhere, if I’m being honest, I may have imagined tasting so long before now—she falls back, sucking in a breath.

And in every way I am capable of, with everything I have, in room 217 at the Stanley Hotel with a missing pinky and a feeling of something so right in the middle of all the wrong,

I do everything I can to make Hannah Lawrence feel something other than pain.





5



What happened to John Denver?” Hannah asks. Her head on my chest, my arm around her. We have to go soon. We both know it. I would stay here forever, just like this. “In the end?”

Her hair falls over her face. With my free hand, I tuck it back behind her ear again. I have to focus to hear the words she just spoke. To understand the question.

“He had a kid with a singer in Australia,” I say. “He and Annie reconciled … kind of. In the movie, he has this camping trip with his kids and they all get on better terms. He hires his dad to pilot his private plane, and his dad seemingly finally accepts his music before he dies. John learns to pilot on his own, and he gets a little restless. The music business landscape changes, and he’s no longer the sensation he was before. But he writes songs and he plays and he flies.”

“And he dies, flying?”

“I think … My feeling is that he wanted to go. That’s what it always seemed like to me, in the movie anyway. His dad died. The record deals weren’t the same. He’d done all this charity work. Annie and their kids kind of moved on. He started toying around with his prop plane, making adjustments himself, then flying it. He had a malfunction flying near Monterey in California. He crashed into the ocean. But it’s just a movie, and just my memory of it. I have no idea what state he was in, in the end.”

She stares up at me for a long time, my injured hand in hers, over my chest. She kisses my palm, looks down at it. When she looks back up, she says,

“I don’t want to say what I think,” she says.

“You can say anything.”

“I think … I think I know where we have to go. What the Witchwalker was telling us. I think it knew I would understand. I think it knew I could explain some of this to you, or that we’d get there together.”

And because of that thing, linking us in the other-world, because I can almost feel her thought as she’s about to say it …