We Were Never Here(86)

    “No, it’s true, Emily. You say jump and I say how high.”

“I never told you to come!”

“That’s bullshit.” Her voice rang out and the din of the lobby disappeared. I noticed fish-eyed stares from the woman behind reception, a mom with a straggling toddler, a sunburned couple on their way to breakfast.

Kristen glanced around. “Maybe we should discuss this in private.”

“Should we go back to our room?” Aaron held up his key.

No way was I locking us in a room with this woman. They both gazed at me, their eyes pleading. But for such different reasons.

And then it was very clear what I needed to do: protect Aaron at any cost. Her desperate call to him last night hadn’t had the effect she’d hoped; it hadn’t made me hers. What would she do to get him out of the picture now? Who knew what she was capable of?

I did. I was maybe the only person who did. “Aaron, why don’t you head back upstairs?” I gestured into the lobby. “Kristen and I will have a chat.”

“You sure?” he asked, and I nodded. He pressed his palm onto my waist as he passed. I watched the elevator swallow him up, and panic fanned out in my chest.

“Should we go outside or something?” Kristen glanced around. “I really don’t want to talk about this here.”

“No. No one’s listening. We’re talking now.” I strode to a sofa and she shuffled after me. I waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, curiosity got the better of me: “Where’s your bag? Where are you even staying?”

“Here. They’ve got my suitcase, but the room won’t be ready for a few hours.”

“Oh.” An awkward beat. “You…you really shouldn’t have come.”

“This is ridiculous. You send me that goddamn cryptic email telling me to check the news, and so I see the article about a witness coming forward and I have a heart attack, obviously, and I run to you because all you’ve been saying for weeks is that you need someone to talk to and you’re freaking out.”

    I frowned. “So you came because you thought I was going to tell Aaron?”

“No, I came because you’re my best friend.” She opened her hands, exasperated.

We stared at each other, our gazes forming a single laser beam. She gave her head a disgusted shake and muttered, “You say jump…”

Well, how’s that for irony: We both thought the other had us at her beck and call.

Kristen leaned forward and murmured, “Don’t look, but the woman at the front desk is staring.”

“Probably because you’re making a scene.”

She stood. “C’mon. I need to stretch my legs.”

I watched her go, my pulse pounding in my ears. She got to the door and turned to stare at me, an expectant dog impatient to be let out. “You…you don’t want to be alone?” I asked.

“I didn’t fly two thousand miles to be alone, Emily.”

I slid my hand into my backpack and realized, with a crashing sensation, that I didn’t have my phone—it was still plugged in upstairs.

As if she could read my mind, she held up her own cell. “You want me to turn this on and send that stupid photo?”

This time nobody turned, no one gawped at the break in decorum. Because Kristen was so good at this: making the malicious sound innocent, incidental. For all anyone knew, she was just teasing me about a drunken snapshot from our younger days.

Which was the truth, in a way.

Hopelessness swelled, an urge to wail and keen and beat my fists on the homely hotel rug. Instead I followed her to the entrance. The automatic doors slid open, a gasp of hot desert air. Kristen took a few steps and then looked back, her hazel eyes feline and inescapable. I saw her as a mountain lion—face calm, ears pricked, gazing over her shoulder at me with the soft knowledge that I had no choice but to follow.

    The hotel dumped us directly out on a busy six-lane road. Kristen turned right and stepped onto the cracked sidewalk. At least we were still out in the open here; a short way down was a strip mall with a nail salon and barre studio and Chinese restaurant. Funny how now I wanted us to be exposed, for people to see us.

“We need to just come right out and say it,” she announced. “This needs to stop.”

“I agree.” Sunlight pressed hard on my scalp; a bead of sweat skidded down my spine. “Well, wait. What are you referring to?”

“This fighting, this tension—everything I say or do, you interpret in the worst possible way. It’s suffocating.” She walked with purpose, and I realized we were nearing the trailhead Aaron and I had picked out over breakfast.

“Well, maybe if you didn’t keep dangling that photo from Cambodia over me, we could both relax. And now the, the glob of Paolo’s melted IDs and stuff? It’s messed up.”

She stopped marching and turned to me. “Well, maybe if you didn’t always seem one step away from losing your damn mind and blowing up our lives, I could get rid of them and still sleep at night. With the knowledge that my best friend wasn’t about to betray me.”

“Kristen, listen to what you’re saying. You’re the one threatening to betray me.”

She scoffed and took off again. The trail marker emerged on the road, a weather-beaten sign with a map covered in squiggly trails and warnings of every kind: pack water, don’t litter, watch out for pumas. If you see one, make yourself big and tall and loud.