Logan faced Ashley, but she stared past her at the motel wall. For a second, Ashley thought she might cry.
“That’s so sad,” Ashley said, and the words felt immature and wrong. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Logan said, voice quiet like a sigh. “I don’t know if he hates me or whatever. Until then, I really was trying to make it work. But I’ve got other plans now. When I turn eighteen, I’m gonna pack up and hit the road. I’m gonna find a place that actually feels like home.”
Logan looked at her. Her black hair fell at her neck, glowing with a warm sheen from the string lights. Ashley listened to the thrumming rhythm of her own heartbeat. She clutched the comforter between her fingers and inhaled the scent of air conditioner and musk. She was a different Ashley tonight.
What was wrong with her?
“You could stay in Snakebite,” Ashley said.
Logan’s brow furrowed. “I really can’t.”
“People will get better after we figure all this stuff out. You’d just be one of us.” The wall behind Logan was a blur of green and brown. Ashley stared at it instead of looking Logan in her eyes. “You wouldn’t have to keep moving around. You could stay here.”
Logan smiled, but it was bitter and cool. “Cute idea, but I wanna go somewhere that people don’t default hate me. In fact, I’d love to live somewhere they actually like me.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet.” Logan shrugged. “There’s lots of places. I’ll find one.”
Ashley looked down. As much as she wanted to believe there was a place like that—a place where people didn’t feel so alone all the time—it was starting to feel like it wasn’t about the town itself. Before Tristan’s disappearance, Ashley had loved everything about Snakebite. This had been home. She’d never felt alone here.
“Here’s a thought,” Logan said. She pointedly avoided eye contact. “You could come with me.”
Ashley’s throat was tight. “You mean leave Snakebite?”
“Sorry, that’s stupid.” Logan cleared her throat and tilted her head to face the ceiling. “Obviously you’d wanna stay here. You’ve got the farm and all that.”
Ashley’s grip on the comforter tightened. There was something strange about Logan’s suggestion, like she’d pulled open the curtains and revealed a horizon Ashley had never seen. In all her years in Snakebite, no one had ever asked if she wanted to leave. It had never occurred to her that she could just … go. But Logan said it like it was easy. The thought almost made Ashley laugh.
“It’s not stupid,” Ashley said. “I just don’t think I could—”
“No worries. I take it back.” Logan ran a hand through her hair. “I always say stuff that makes no sense when I’m tired. That’s all. When I leave Snakebite, I wanna leave by myself.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, you meet tons of stray cats on the road, but that doesn’t mean you take them all with you.”
“I’m the stray cat?”
“Obviously.”
“I feel like you’d be the stray cat,” Ashley said. “You’re, like, two steps from being a cat lady now.”
“What’re you trying to say about me?” Logan scoffed.
Ashley arched a brow at her and they both burst into laughter. The sound echoed off the motel walls and that heavy feeling in her chest—that dread—quietly dissolved until Ashley could breathe again.
Logan’s smile was easy. She was only inches from Ashley now, cheek pressed into the mattress, eyes half lidded with sleepiness. It was the first time Ashley had seen laughter make it all the way to her eyes. They danced in the half-light, black and endless as the night outside. Ashley couldn’t remember Logan inching this close to her. Maybe Ashley was the one who’d moved. There was something restless in Logan, magnetic and dark and impossible to ignore. She’d lain across from Tristan like this a hundred times, but she’d never felt this pull.