The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(45)

“I’m sorry,” I croaked.

“I don’t care.” He said it again, sounding astonished. “I don’t care. What the hell were you—what am I supposed to think now? How are you gonna convince me you won’t try to kill us again?”

I clenched my fists around the wheel. “I won’t. I wasn’t. I get … I’m bad with people. It’s stupid. I was being stupid, talking to the cop like that. It’s just, disrespect makes me mad.”

“It makes me mad, too. But sometimes you have to swallow it the fuck down.”

“Stop,” I said, lifting a hand. “I’m serious. I know that was horrible. But I can’t tell you I won’t drive us off the road again if you don’t stop talking about it, so maybe you should take the wheel.”

He settled back against the window, arms folded tightly over his chest, and said nothing. So I drove. All the way to the gravel lot of the first motel I saw: the Starlite Inn, pushed right back up against the trees. Finch glanced at them, but said nothing.

We were checked in by a man who looked exactly how the guy checking you in at a cheap motel in the middle of the woods is supposed to. I’d assumed there’d be a guest book, where I could sign funny names and maybe get Finch to look at me again, but they must only have those in old movies.

He paid for just one room, and I was grateful. At this point I didn’t trust he wouldn’t disappear. Go back to New York, or try to, and take a wrong turn and end up in the Hinterland.

Clingy didn’t become me. I prided myself on not needing friends—I thought it meant I didn’t need anybody. Turned out it just meant I needed Ella terribly, too much. She was literally all I had.

Our room was the in-between color of despair, with a landscape painting behind each bed that was a Rorschach test for depression: if you saw a faded-out cornfield in a dusty blue frame, you were fine. But if all you could envision was whatever god-awful sweatshop must’ve produced it, the prognosis was not good.

“Stop staring at the ugly painting,” Finch said. “You’re weirding me out.” He flopped down face-first on one of the beds, then immediately rolled over. “This pillow smells like the time my bunkmate peed his bed at camp. And I’m too tired to care.”

I sat on the edge of the other bed. “I really am sorry.”

He winced. “Don’t say that.”

“What? Why not?”

He threw an arm over his eyes. “Just forget it. Look, what did you see on the road, behind the cop? Not an accident, right?”

With his eyes covered, he was easier to talk to. I lay back on my own pillow. “Not an accident. I don’t know why, but it felt kinda, you know. Hinterland-y. You saw the car with all its doors open?”

“I didn’t see anything. There was a cop in my face, I was too busy trying to look innocent.”

“You? Could you look anything but innocent?”

“Oh, yeah. I can be a real asshole.” His voice was drifting.

“I don’t buy it,” I said softly. “You seem like one of the good ones.”

“Shows what you know.”

There was something in his voice that made me wary, and I took too long to think of a response. His breathing turned steady and slow, a contagious sound that climbed into my limbs and made them heavy as sand. I could barely lift my arm to turn off the light.

After I did, I blinked up at the ceiling and smiled: it was covered in phosphorescent stars. I let my eyes close. The sound of Ellery Finch sleeping was almost as good as having someone to reach out for in the dark.





18


Finch was having a nightmare.

I heard him in the next bed, making small, sorry sounds. The light that came in around the curtains was the dusty yellow of streetlamps. I couldn’t tell what time it was, and my phone was plugged into Finch’s charger across the room.

“Finch. Ellery.”

He didn’t answer. When I switched on the bedside light he flinched but didn’t wake. Silently I sat up and swung my feet to the floor. I stopped there, waiting for his eyes to open.

They didn’t. My body felt gritty from the motel bed, like I was swimming in the dirt of other people’s bodies and just couldn’t see it. I rolled my neck and watched him.

His head was thrown back and his eyes were moving beneath their lids. Usually when I looked at people too long I started seeing them as component parts: Bony noses. Eyeballs in sockets. Odd cartilage curve of ears and fingers so strange and overevolved and makeup floating just over the skin and what the hell was with pants, and knees, and how did we walk around like all of this was normal?

But Finch stayed staunchly, solidly unified. He was a boy in a bed with his neck stretched long. His mouth shaped itself around words I couldn’t hear, then he moaned with such aching regret I was next to him with my hand on his shoulder before I could think.

“Hey. You’re having a bad dream.”

He sucked in hard through his nose. His eyes shuttered open and hooked on the ceiling, then my face. I watched the dream leave them and sense roll back in.

“Oh!” he said. In his voice were unshed tears, and I thought he might want me to look away. But he grabbed my hand and brought it to his chest and held it.

I let him. The steady pump of his heart through his shirt made me remember the heart was a muscle. Our most important one. “You were having a nightmare.”