Don't Fail Me Now(65)

“If you’re looking for your boyfriend, he’s looking for you, too,” the Mastino lookalike at the desk says with a knowing smile.

“Oh, he’s not—” I start to say but then let it go. Explaining would only make things weird.

“He got in the elevator a few minutes ago,” she says. “I’d check the lobby.”

“Thanks.” I stand there, the phone still warm in my hand, sinuses screaming from all of the flooding they’ve suffered through today. I want to go back and hide in the bathroom till morning, not talk to anyone until I stop feeling so emotional. But maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I inherited a little more from Buck than just his eye color and love of action movies. If I run from everything I’m scared of, I’m no better than him. And if I keep pushing Tim away just because the feelings I get when I’m around him make me uncomfortable, I’ll never know what it’s like to really let someone in—a someone I’m not related to, anyway. Before I can change my mind, I spin around and head back to the stairs, taking them two at a time.

I find him sitting on a bench outside the automatic front doors, under a streetlamp. I thought the Southwest was supposed to be all dry heat and cacti, but it’s freezing out, and he’s in a flimsy Hanes undershirt. As I get close I can see goose bumps running up and down his arms, which are so tense that muscles I never noticed were there are thrown into relief. Not that I care about that kind of thing.

“Come inside,” I say from behind him. “You’ll get sick.”

He doesn’t turn around, but his shoulders visibly relax. “I thought you left,” he says.

“Where would I go?” Clutching my arms for warmth, I sit down next to him, and we share a few seconds of awkward silence. For the first time all week, he’s starting to show the wear and tear of life off the grid—his hair’s sticking up like permanent bedhead, and there are dark circles under his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just got worried. It’s a strange city, the middle of the night . . .”

“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll be okay.”

He gives me a look. “Really?”

I let my chin drop to my chest, the weight of everything centering at the top of my spinal cord, curling me in like a snail. “No.”

“Well, I have some good news,” he says. “My dad talked to the cops, and the search is officially off.”

“So you called him.”

“Yeah.” He looks at me with an expression of heartbreaking guilt. “I know you asked me not to, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Did you tell him where we are?” I ask.

“No, not exactly,” Tim says. “But I did tell him we were with you and that Cass was in the hospital. I asked him to call off the AMBER alert so that we could focus on getting her better without looking over our shoulders for sirens.”

“And?”

“He said yes, on two conditions.”

“Which are?”

“That he can wire me some money for food and that he and Karen can come meet us in LA,” Tim says. “To take us home on a plane.”

I let out a long, shaky breath. Mr. Harper doesn’t sound like such a bad guy after all. Just a worried-sick father. A foreign species I have never observed up close. “That sounds fair,” I say. “You guys have roughed it long enough.”

“No, all of us,” he says. “That means you, too. And Cass. And Denny.”

“But why would they—they don’t even know me. If they did, they would know I’m nobody’s charity case. They probably hate me anyway.”

“They don’t hate you,” Tim says. “And it’s not charity; you’re Leah’s family. Plus, they know how much you mean to me.” He reddens. “I mean, I told them about you.”

I pull my legs up to my chest and hug them, pressing my face into the soft denim at the knees, rubbed so thin from months of squatting for condiment packets below the counter at work that they feel ready to split at any second.

“Tim—” I start.

“No, I should say it,” he says softly. “The thing is, I care about you. A lot, actually. More than I probably should after just a few days. When this all started, I just wanted Leah to feel better. I had no idea how big it was.”

“What?”

“Everything,” he says. “The three of you coming together, going to see him. I can actually see Leah changing. And I’m changing. I mean, you’re changing me.” He blushes again. “Not that it’s about me, I know I wasn’t even invited.”

“I need to stop saying that,” I say.

“It’s true, though.” His eyes are full of determination. “Denny and I could stay here in Arizona, for all it matters. If I’m good for anything, it’s just to help you and Leah and Cass make it the rest of the way. And I know it wasn’t fair for me to try to start something between us when you have so much going on. I won’t do it again, and it’s okay if you never want to see me again after this, but I just need you to know that—”

“It didn’t mean nothing,” I say quickly.

“What?”

“On the rock. At the canyon. It didn’t mean nothing.”