Headlights(99)

But Hannah …

Daphne, at Linger. What did she say? When you find her … don’t fucking let go.

Hannah and me. Having seen so much of each other, to have lived it, ourselves, in breaths and moments and memories. Having shared all the worst and best moments of a life, lived each other’s memories. I don’t know that you ever come back from that. I don’t know how I could ever want to.

My whole life carrying all of this alone. Up to now.

And she’s in danger. Because of me. Because of this Witchwalker.

“We didn’t talk to it,” I say. “Last night. I couldn’t … I don’t feel any closer to knowing.” What’s happening, how I’m involved in all this. How I am supposed to solve this case.

She studies my face, but I can feel she’s elsewhere too, piecing things together, searching for any clue. “Maybe it did … speak to us. In the way it could.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I got this sense that it sort of … wanted us thinking of our pasts, those memories. Maybe it’s not just because the dark feelings and memories call to it … maybe it wants us to find something there. Maybe not for me, that I understand. But for you. It’s your hair around the killers’ tongues, and it’s your childhood motel room it brought me to.”

She trails her fingers down my wrist, thinking.

She says, “It seemed like there are gaps, though. Somehow. In your memory. Is that right? That memory of your mom in the park. That was in Aspen. But it’s incomplete. There are more of those. Did you … Could it be something about that room, specifically, or that park, or your life, that it’s been trying to get at? Trying to remind you of?”

Flashes. Rose. Other moments.

“Maybe,” I say, but I’m caught on what she said. “And for you…?”

“I think for me it’s simple,” she says, quiet. Her hand on my forearm. Her shin against mine beneath the sheets. “I think I stumbled into something that was always about you. But the Witchwalker, I think it liked me being there. I think it liked being in symbiosis with me. I felt … sometimes, when I was eating…” She takes a breath, her chest rising. I slide my hand over hers and squeeze. She says, “It felt like it was happy, somehow, that it could feed something. With what it was doing. Like it was satisfied, watching me.”

I take this in, try to understand. “But symbiosis, like the bird you told me about. The bird provides a service to the crocodile too.”

She bites the inside of her cheek and nods. “Roles in ecosystems change, evolve. We still have wolves, even though … well, we’ll see if we still do for long. But some wolves found it advantageous to adapt to live with humans. And some humans found that advantageous also. And now we have dogs. The purpose they serve now for us is largely just … fulfillment. Some have other jobs, but … we care for them, feed them, make sure their needs are met. I think … when I’m there, the Witchwalker, it’s not alone. And it likes that. I think it recognizes something in me, and maybe something in you.”

“You think it wants you to be its pet?”

“I think that it has one main want, and that is whatever it is that has to do with you. And everything else … might just be accidents, or … maybe it’s just stumbling around in the dark like all of us. Existing, trying to understand what the point of any of this is. I don’t know, I only feel it sometimes. It’s not like you and me in the other-place. I think it thinks differently than us. Like … we can and can’t speak to dogs. We can and can’t understand other species, you know? So I could be wrong about all of it. Also, um.” She draws her finger slowly, tentatively, down my chest. “Last night, I … did, maybe, get distracted.”

I run my eyes over her face. Hannah Lawrence. Here, right beside me. Emotion floods me, one I don’t quite know. Overwhelming. Too big.

I lean down and kiss her.

I want—need—to feel her. To slow down this time, to take in every inch of her and make her make those sounds she did last night. This time, without her reliving the pain, without everything else. And the way she reacts to the kiss, the way she presses into me, wearing just her sweater and underwear—I can feel her in both worlds, this one and the other. Wanting.

Wanting something I can easily give. At least in this moment. At least one more time.

I roll on top of her. Slip my good hand behind her head, tangle my fingers in her hair as I kiss her harder. She slides her tongue into my mouth, and I press my hips to hers, her back instantly arching to meet me. I can feel how she wants to move, what she wants to give me. I can see it in her mind as she thinks it. Break the kiss, put me on my back, touch and taste every part of me on the way down. But as she tries to lift her arm to touch me, I pin it gently down against the bed. “This time, today,” I say, into her mouth, between breaths. “Let me. Let me do this.”

“Well,” she says, after a moment, a faint smile on her lips. Her lips I kiss again, hovering my body over hers. “If I have to.”

I trail my mouth down her throat again, biting, just a little, at her skin there. She sucks in a breath and exhales a small laugh. “There’s got to be a cannibalism joke in here somewhere,” she says.

I smile, lick her down to her collarbone. Then I feel, in that other-space, just a little, but …