There’s an end in sight. There always is, these days, but this one's weird and doesn’t sit right with anyone.

Dean, in a box at the bottom of the ocean, with an archangel.

It even sounds stupid.

Not to mention, the tightest space Dean’s ever been able to stand is Baby’s back seat, and then only with the windows cracked. That Dean would be able to stomach an hour in the box — even on dry land, in the safety of the bunker — is dubious. Now, under the ocean? Supplied with a steady stream of his own worst memories by an angel who, if he can’t destroy the world, will settle for torturing Dean, instead?

With all the gods and witches and possibilities in the world, this is the plan?

Cas marks the page where he stops and slides his translation aside.

This can't be how it ends. Not with Dean walking around like a wrong-ended magnet, repelling all of them, refusing to be approached, or to talk, or to deal, while Cas is this close to the end of seeing him forever.

He finds Dean's door unlocked, and feels an uneasy roll of worry when he turns the knob and realizes it's just going to open.

Either Dean knew he was coming, or Dean knew someone would be coming, or he's panicking: an unlocked door, this time of night, this many beers in...in Dean’s unspoken language, it's almost translatable as a scream, something loud enough to echo.

All the lights are off in Dean's room, except for the TV. It’s a small old set, probably boosted from a shitty motel too cheap to replace it, which means that somewhere in middle America there’s an empty spot on a pressboard bureau. An empty spot in the wall socket. A bill that’ll never be paid, on a credit card that doesn’t exist.

It must remind Dean of home.

Cas doesn’t recognize what he’s watching. There’s a woman, but she’s not naked. A man, not trying to have sex with her, though he does have guns, and seems to be made halfway of metal.

 Wait.

“That man is a politician,” Cas accuses.

Dean shifts on the bed where he’s splayed out, watching the former governor of California shoot people.

“That’s the Terminator,” Dean says.

“The Terminator,” Cas repeats. It’s not that human words confuse him anymore, it’s that he doesn’t get how any human could get from Point A to Point B: elected official, from…terminating. Terminating a lot.

“Cas.”

It’s a three-letter word but Dean slurs it. Fatigue, not alcohol. Alcohol doesn’t touch Dean like it used to (though that doesn’t stop him from drinking). There’s enough going on, that… Well. It’d take a stronger drug.

“Dean, we need to talk,” Cas says.

“Yeah,” Dean sighs. “I know.” On his breath, resignation rolls over cold. Like talking about the box is worse than the box itself will ever be. He stirs again on the bed, shoving himself up against the headboard. “C’mon, then. Let’s get this over with.”

Hurt shines out of Cas’ eyes at that, and Dean seems surprised, and relents. He doesn’t say anything in apology, but he gives Cas a deliberately softer look of exasperation and hopes he’ll settle for it.

The hurt dampens, but remains. Cas pads into Dean’s tiny, bare fortress and stands in the middle of it, unsure of how to be, and Dean folds up, bracing against what hasn’t yet been said: head ducked and arms crossed over his lap.

“Lay it on me, Cas,” he says.

Cas is ready to. But then there’s this moment of long, deep darkness, when everything is the flicker of television and the sounds of a car chase, and Dean’s face is gray in the light and his eyes shine up more than they should, and Cas catches the faint press of Dean’s chin trying to keep his mouth from flexing, and Cas remembers with sudden clarity what’s been too easy to forget (because Dean's made it easy on purpose, and because the threat of loss has Cas cornered inside himself, selfish and jealous):

 Dean doesn’t want to go.

And if Dean were any lesser of a person — even by a hair — he couldn't make himself, even if he did want to.

But Dean is Dean, and Dean’s resolve is unique among men: it makes a stripe across his soul, visible from anywhere.

And Cas, who came filled with things to say, suddenly doesn’t want to.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Dean says.

Cas blinks.

He refocuses, away.

In what way was he looking at Dean?

Was it the same way Dean’s been looking at him?

Sad? Tired? Given up?

Dean sighs, suddenly, a sigh that takes his shoulders down with it, his chin falling to his chest, a dark hiccup in the shadows that could be the open and shut of a mouth. Cas leans forward on his toes, and catches Dean’s words despite their being almost-not-there.

“Look." Dean shakes his head at the ground. "I’ll say it, if you need that.”

Cas’s shiver is an instant reflex that his coat hides well.

The ‘it’ is no mystery, not to either of them, but this is the first time Dean’s ever acknowledged that it exists at all: real, and not just a strange habit Cas has fallen into all on his own. An anxious flurry follows, a thrash against glass that Cas’ lungs makes, and suddenly Cas realizes (and understands, and accepts, all in the same moment) that this is the real reason he’s come here, tonight. That the box is just a timer counting down, applying urgency, and all Cas' other questions, all his other arguments, are just a way to shine light on this thing that’s been chained in the shade for so long.

Dean can’t go away before it gets a first breath, or a last, if that’s the way it has to go.

It would be wrong, otherwise: wrong in a built-in way, like blasphemy, something you can’t explain why but it upsets the order of the world itself.

Cas steps forward while Dean keeps talking.

“I’d just as soon not,” Dean admits. “I don’t feel like giving whoever’s listening-” he rolls a finger toward the heavens “—the ammunition.” His lips press together, maybe between his teeth. “But I owe you, for a lot. Before I go.” Dean’s gaze picks up again, startling Cas at four paces. All the little lines around his eyes, fine as feathers, come out with his defensive squint. “Or, we could just…leave it where it is."

There’s no way Cas takes him up on that, and Dean knows it. He creases a small smile into his face and sits back again, straighter, but exhausted. Cas finally reaches the little chair at the side of Dean’s bed and balances, rather than sits, on its very edge.

“I don’t want to leave it,” he says, roughed-up even by his own standards. “I don’t want you to do this.”

“I know,” Dean says quietly, almost comfortingly. “I know.” He reaches out to tug the corner of Cas’ coat (the one he never takes off, even indoors, and they’ve all just stopped questioning it) and lets his thumb hook in, under the sleeve.

There’s nothing to argue and both of them know it. Only a miracle could change the future, now. And miracles exist, which, just knowing that is more hope than people usually get to cling to, but it’s still so brutally insufficient.

Everything about this is insufficient.

Dean’s attention has slipped to the lock of his hand and Cas’ sleeve, and Cas says his name to bring him back.

“I’ll still be out there, right?” Dean offers, as comfort. “I mean, I won’t be gone, gone.”

“That’s worse,” Cas says. “That’s much worse.”

“Worse than what? What else is there, at this point? You want to take me up to heaven instead? Put me in my own memories forever?” Dean shakes his head. “Just another box, Cas. At least this one keeps the world from ending.”

Cas doesn’t address the grossly unequal comparison. “There are other ways to keep the world from ending. We will find one.”

“When you do,” Dean says, smiling faintly, “you can come haul me up.”

Cas’ whole chest jolts, heart to ribs to spine. Hearing it put so concretely is a misery. Dean will be under the water. Dean will be at the bottom of the ocean. In a box. Completely alone. Cas suddenly slips out of breath and tries to gasp it back, and his whole head gets flustered about it until Dean’s hand comes down on his shoulder.

“In and out, buddy,” he says, leaning in. “Easy. In and out.”

Cas listens. Cas obeys. Dean’s face hovers next to him, Dean’s voice passes instructions through his ears, and slowly breathing gets easier, and eventually existing feels normal again.

“You okay?” Dean asks. He leans in a little more cautiously, inspecting.

Cas just nods. He’s not alright. Only in a relative sense could he even come close. His shoulder is warm and weak under Dean’s grip, and his eyes feel bad and strange, and the TV is hurting his ears. Dean seems to infer this last part, and he digs the remote out of a fold in the bedding and stops the movie.

The sudden silence buzzes.

“I can’t let you do this,” Cas whispers. He whispers it in shame, because Dean can do this, but Cas doesn’t know if he has the strength to allow the world to live on while Dean suffers. He can’t see a future that exists this way, where Dean is screaming and screaming and Cas can hear every cry but do nothing. “You may have to kill me,” he says, very seriously.

Dean assumes histrionics and scoffs. “Cas-”

“You don't understand. I’m- I’m not sure of my ability to allow this to happen,” Cas clarifies, and now Dean stops. The hand on Cas’ shoulder tightens.

“Cas,” Dean says. His hand tightens again, and his face goes upset with it until he makes it relax. “This is why I don’t want to go down this road. It’s not gonna make anything any easier, you know that.”

Cas doesn’t doubt him. But this isn’t about ‘easier.’ There’s no way to make a Mal’ak box easier. There’s no way to send Dean off to not die, ever. It’s the opposite of Cas’ job. Cas brings Dean home.

“And it’s not just because of the box,” Dean clarifies. “Even without the box. Even if we just stayed here, business as usual. It’s this life, Cas; there’s just things you can’t have. Everywhere we go, we make an army of enemies who are just waiting for any way in. Any weakness, Cas, any little crack in the wall.” He looks away for a minute. “Any time we have something, it goes bad. Mom and dad. Jessica. Lisa and Ben. Even Sam and me, I mean, how many times…” He drifts off. “That’s the lay of the land, here, all right? If it means something to you, it’s gone.”

“Sam-”

“What about Sam?” Dean is a knife that tilts up in light, glinting.

Cas voice runs away.

“Here’s the truth,” Dean growls. It’s so bitter Cas can taste it. “If I could snap my fingers and never see him again, but I would know, every day, that he’s out there living a life where he gets to be happy — I mean stupid happy — I would’ve done it thirty years ago. I’d do it now. I’d do it yesterday. But he’s here, and he knows how I feel about him, and do you really think that makes it easier to lose him? He’s died more than I’m willing to remember. I promise you- I swear to you, Cas, it’s not easier.”

Resistance straps Cas’ jaw tight to his skull. He wants to fight back, but doesn’t know how: Dean’s telling the truth, his truth, and Cas doesn’t have another. Something burns in his face, painfully.

“Cas- don’t-” Dean says haltingly. Cas hears him move but can’t see how or where, because his eyes are broken, but Dean’s hands on his shoulders move up to his face, and thumbs touch under his eyes, wet and slipping. It’s a jarring touch — surprising from Dean, whom Cas has seen be deft, and quick, and even delicate, but never this. “Hey,” Dean says, almost under his breath. He murmurs lies in a tone that’s also surprising. Cas wonders if anyone else has heard it, in the history of Dean. “It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be fine.”

“Please don’t go,” Cas says, in a voice he can barely command. This awful human feeling is just wrapped, entwined, in every piece of his body, tightening and tightening, and his words come out high and strangled. “Please, please don’t go. I’ll do whatever it takes,” he bargains. “I’ll find something-”

But, “No,” is all Dean repeats, until Cas stops making empty promises. He finally gets Cas’ eyes clear and lets his thumbs rest on his cheekbones, back of Cas’ head braced between his wrists. “Listen to me,” he says, trying to anchor Cas’ focus, moving into his jumpy gaze. “No matter what happens, I need you to be okay, alright? I need you to be here for Sam.”

“No,” he creaks.

Cas will not say yes to this.

It’s cruel for Dean even to ask.

“C’mon, Cas. That’s the way it has to be.” Dean’s head tilts so far to the side it leads Cas with it. They both pause, tipped like little birds. Cas can’t look away. He puts his hands up around Dean’s wrists to keep him there, fingers loosely wrapped, palms warm and feeling, so slightly, the pulse running up Dean’s arms.

“No,” he whispers again, and Dean accepts it this time. No argument. He floats his thumbs over Cas’ skin a few times, from the smooth to the stubble.

“Okay,” he says.

Cas doesn’t like ‘okay’. It feels like he’s being dismissed. Shut out. Like Dean’s giving up on him. And the look on Dean’s face doesn’t help any. He’s focused down and away, like he can see the skin under his hands, the swallow in Cas’ throat.

“Dean-”

“I love you,” Dean says.

Cas chokes on whatever he was about to say. He does his best to stifle it, given their proximity, and succeeds partway. He coughs the last of it out of the wrong pipe and while he does, Dean stays silent, doesn’t say anything more — just lets what he said sit between them, small and quiet and stunning. Cas reaches to envelop it with every sense he has: to cover it and keep it from dissipating. For a second he can see it, gold and holy — is it his grace that perceives this, or is it all in his head?

I love you makes a cavern inside him, and Dean lights it. But then Dean goes in the box and everything goes dark, and the cavern remains but fear floods in, pitch black and rising until it’s filled, suffocated in the space of a moment.

Dean watches Cas’ face as it happens: like he understands.

Like it’s happened to him, too.

The fear seeps up Cas’ throat while he’s clawing to protect this thing that’s drowning, and Dean doesn’t have to say I told you so. If it were impossible to let Dean go before, it’s absolutely unquestionable now.

“I get it,” Dean says. “Believe me, I get it.” He firms his grip and gives Cas’ head a little shake, so small. It’s an instruction: don’t do this. Spare yourself. But it brings Cas' face closer, too, within what, for Dean, is usually best described as headbutting distance, but here is very different. It seems like a map that Dean's laying out, a clear what-happens-next if Cas doesn't let this drop, and what a very strange way this is to try to dissuade him. Dean's breathing is changed, his eyes are dark, he keeps pulling Cas' face just a little bit closer as he's warning Cas not to take his foot off the brakes.

Dean's gaze dips to Cas' mouth. It doesn't stay; it bolts away; it's barely there long enough to be seen. But Cas suddenly realizes he's been fooled, just like with the box, misdirected with every tool in Dean's belt for a very long time.

Dean doesn't want to go.

And Dean does want this.

Cas goes wide-eyed at him, the happiest and worst he’s ever been.

There's a word Cas has been jealous of since humanity took it, warped it, and made it carry water that angels couldn’t drink. He’s used it in its duller form, toward his father, toward his brothers, even toward humanity, though only in a whole, nebulous way. He’s spoken of love, he’s spoken from love. He’s aching to speak in love, even at the cost of having it ripped away.

He puts his hands desperately on the sides of Dean’s head, mirroring the grasp Dean has on him, and Dean's skin wakes under his touch, blushing in the dark.

“There’s nothing medically wrong with you,” the third neurologist said. Neurologists one and two had said roughly the same thing. After his experience with Hannibal's neurologist, Will liked his opinions to come in multiples. In sounders.

The corner of his mouth hooked up.

“Mr. Graham?”

The doctor canted his head, trying to put himself in Will’s line of sight, but Will’s line of sight was not straight: it led elsewhere. Uncomfortable with the lack of response, the doctor stumbled on. “There’s plenty more we can try. We can start small on some sedatives for nighttime, maybe try to slot in an antipsychotic but I really only like to prescribe something like that as a last resort.” He tapped his pen on the screen on his laptop.

Will could see in the mirror: Google, open in a cascade of tabs.

hallucinations sleep paralysis hallucinations night hallucinations no heachache sleep clinic virginia FBI health insurance sexy brunette bored teen sucks cock

“Have you ever been to a sleep clinic?” the doctor asked.

Will forced himself to make eye contact, squinting with the effort as his head slowly turned. “I’ll consider it,” he said.

Will did his own Googling.

lasting effects viral meningitis

It was possible, so it seemed, that he’d been left with a ghost.

Had that been part of Hannibal’s design? Or was the stag an unexpected parting gift?

Hannibal would be…pleased.

Wherever he was.

Hannibal was not in Baltimore.

Baltimore was where he should have been, and where he had gone from.

Jack Crawford had called Will at home after Hannibal’s escape. He’d sounded suspicious, as Will had supposed he had a right to be: but of Hannibal, not him. It was Hannibal who’d come looking; not the other way around.

“I’d like to put people on you,” Jack had said.

Agents. Around Will’s house, his little ship on the water.

That wouldn’t do, Will had thought, in Hannibal’s voice.

“No thanks, Jack.”

He’d looked around the living room, then, across the warm mounds of dog all crowding to be closest to the fire. Something else was there, too, sleeping on the rug just inside the front door. Its feathery, black hackles ruffled in an invisible draft.

Will had wanted to ask Jack if Hannibal had left him anything, but if Hannibal had left him something, Jack would’ve said so. Jack would’ve wanted to see what he’d do.

For a while, Will expected a visit.

He found himself cleaning more. Eating better. Just in case.

But then no visit came, and he snapped back. The house became messy, unkempt, until it begged for order.

Months passed, and they passed slowly.

Will spoke to Jack Crawford less, then much less, then finally not at all. His teaching contracts were quietly not renewed.

Even in Will’s dreams, where his mind could write a more pleasing fiction than his current reality, Hannibal remained firmly himself.

He’d cooked.

They were eating.

And then Hannibal stood over him, pouring wine, and the wine was black. It leaked down the stem of the glass like blood through a vein.

“Are you afraid, Will?” he asked.

Will looked into his eyes, where his eyes should have been. The slits there were empty.

“Yes.”

Hannibal took this as a matter of fact. “Why? Do you think I want to kill you?”

Will tipped his chin up. “Do you?”

“Why would I?” Hannibal smiled tightly. Restrained. He lifted the wine bottle and wiped its dripping mouth with a dark cloth. “Do you think I want revenge?”

“No. You don’t need revenge. You-” his mouth tightened, “-forgave me.”

Hannibal nodded. He put the bottle down on the table. Will could hear the glass breathing: soft, familiar whuffling.

Will swallowed.

“Drink,” Hannibal said.

He lifted his glass. “This isn’t wine.”

“No, it’s not.”

Under Hannibal’s expectant gaze, Will sipped at the stag’s blood. He realized he knew the taste.

“Are you afraid that I’ll come?” Hannibal asked, watching. “Or are you afraid that I won’t?

Will closed the house for the winter.

He bought a beaten-up camper-van, piled the dogs into it, and took off.

There was something wrong with the stag.

It wasn’t well.

It moved too slowly, breathed only with great effort, and had lost its strange coat in gaping patches that splashed along its hide. It looked mangy.

Will had never been able to resist mangy.

When he turned out of the driveway for the last time, the stag walked, or ran, or floated, beside the van, and Will let it lead.

The stag liked to watch the news.

It lay between the hotel beds, on the ground while Will took one mattress and the dogs took the other.

It directed Will to read the papers.

Search for Missing Officer Called Off Community Leader Mourned Serial Slayer in Boynton Body Discovered in Fellowes Park

This was its design.

Its coat started to come in again as they crossed through South Dakota, and was full by Idaho.

In Washington, the stag led the camper up toward the mountains then veered sideways, past peach orchards and sorghum fields, up almost into Canada before it stopped. The town it chose was nothing but a series of roads strung out from a rail depot. Will drove them slowly, his constant companion hoofing along outside the window, and finally the camper rolled to a halt all by itself at the end of a long driveway.

Will didn’t know how he knew, at first, but when he turned down, he realized the driveway was lined in clamshells: so out of place, here, and looking so very much like shattered teacups.

“Are you still afraid, Will?” Hannibal asked.

Will looked the room over. It wasn’t big, but it was Hannibal in every way. Ornate in small, intense bursts, and sparse in every other way. “I know I should be,” he said. “I know I am.”

“But?”

“I don’t want to be.”

Hannibal swept a hand absently over the surface of his small desk. “That time — that urge — has passed,” he said. “I would no more derive pleasure from killing you than from killing a songbird.”

“You’ve killed several songbirds that I know of,” Will said. “You drowned some, just to eat them bones and all, before the eyes of God.”

Hannibal considered this. “Yes,” he said. “So I have. But you are not that kind of songbird, Will. Your fruit is not so forbidden.”

Will drew a wan smile. “And what fruit, exactly, do I bear for you?”

“One I cannot cultivate,” Hannibal said. “One that must grow wild.”

The stag snuffed against Will’s neck, hot and humid.

Will had never known nor imagined Hannibal to be tamed, but Hannibal had no drawings, here. He kept no knives. Will peered into the closets and found no suits, only t-shirts.

Anathema.

Across the kitchen table one night, Will looked at Hannibal hard — across a dinner of cans opened crudely — and debated leaving.

“Will,” Hannibal said. He dabbed a spoonful of creamed corn delicately from the can. “Can you be happy here?”

The stag paced just outside the window, edges smoldering.

Will frowned. “Can you?” he accused.

Hannibal smiled, almost. “This is what they’ll give me, when they catch me,” he said. “I choose to live that new life now, so that I need not fear its revelation.”

“I won’t be a part of that life,” Will said, testing.

Hannibal said, only: “Won’t you?”

Even here, the stag kept Will up nights.

Something was still wrong, or at least, not quite all right.

It stared. It paced. It grated its hooves against the rough wood floors until Will rose from the dead and circled the house like a marble in a funnel, knowing where he’d end up, dropped into the dark hole of the bathroom, into the vortex of the medicine cabinet. He’d brought a straight razor with him from home. It was the only blade in the house. Every night he checked to see if it had disappeared.

So far, Hannibal hadn’t touched it, even to shave.

In three months, not much changed. Then, all at once, everything was different.

It was in the hour of no crickets, before the morning birds, that the stag came to kneel on Will’s chest. It ground its knees in urgently until Will gasped awake. In the no-light of the new moon he stumbled to the bathroom, forgetting to flip the switch. He clawed the mirror forward and swept his hand over the shelf where the razor lived, but for the first time it was bare.

In the pitch, Will went still.

Slowly, cautiously, he reached behind for the light, eyes wide for the mirror, for what would illuminate there.

His fingers slipped on the toggle, shaking, but when the light burned on, there was only himself.

The razor in his own hand, unsheathed.

And an acute, ringing disappointment.

The stag’s head pushed out impossibly through the open cabinet, and they stared, eye-to-eye, realizing.

Then Will took a walk down the hall.

“Will,” Hannibal said, when Will woke him. He did his best to sound awake.

“Hannibal,” Will said. He held the razor at the right angle to catch starlight. He felt he could see Hannibal’s pupils dilate, even in the dark.

“Hello, Will,” Hannibal said, in a completely different way.

Will smiled. He’d almost forgotten how to. He put a plate on the bed. A needle. Thread. Bandages. He didn’t know if they’d be used, but that was the question, wasn’t it, that needed to be answered?

He put the blade to his own throat.

Hannibal’s hand threaded out from under his blanket and touched Will’s knee. “I’m here,” he said.

Will sunk the blade.

Hannibal’s lips parted to catch the spray for just a moment, before he tore out of the bed, into action.

“You’re warmer than most,” Hannibal said. “I suspected you would be.”

Hannibal pulled a slippery finger along the shallow canyon that Will had opened in his own thigh.

“Did you?” Will said, serene with opioids. “I always felt I ran cold.”

“Perhaps in some ways. Not this one.”

Hannibal watched the blood pool.

What had always been missing from surgery — and in a certain sense from killing — was this sense of time; the leisure of watching.

The last time they'd done this, Will had offered his left arm, an exploration of the tricep and the gift of a small strip to be sauteed with fiddleheads from the yard.

There would be no sautee, today.

In a deft movement, Hannibal peeled back a thin, almost transparent sheet of dark, burgundy muscle. Not so much that it would be missed. He lifted it to his mouth on the razor’s edge and took it with his tongue without touching the blade.

In the tasting, the pressing to the roof of his mouth to crush the blood from the fiber, his eyes slipped shut, blindly savoring.

“Will,” he said, when it was gone.

Will opened his eyes. Hannibal remained poised over the cut. The needle and thread waited patiently for when he'd had his fill.

“This isn’t how you I intend to keep you with me in that next life,” he said. “The one Jack Crawford will give me, if he’s able.”

“I know,” Will said, and he did know. From Hannibal's reverent stropping of the razor to his steady stitching afterward, the act was far less field dressing and far more transubstantiation. Consumation, not consumption.

But Hannibal was unsatisfied. He made as if to slice again, but paused. “This is more.”

Will’s hand drifted down on his head, crowning the slate hair with his palm.

“I know.”

Hannibal gazed briefly at the ground, deep beyond the cabin floor, then up, as Will turned his head toward the window, toward the big, black, ruffled, horned shape stalking toward the house.

He looked up into the rafters where the lights hung: forty years old by now, like a high school theater, with their blue and red and green gels all burned through from the heat. The cables coiled and ran into the black ceiling like a viper pit — how thematic — and his eyes chose this tangle to lose themselves in. It was all he could see with the angle of his head as it was, with the ruff of his hair filling Betty’s grip, strong enough to punch holes in her own skin and now focused on forcing his chin into the air, neck arched, eyebrows peaking up toward his hairline like that would reduce the pain.

In one deft tug, she forced his head to the side, his cheek hitting the cool floor of the Whyte Wyrm’s stage.

A blush of dust and ancient air plumed around his face, and suddenly, there it was: the last part of the smell.

It was on him. It was him.

Sweat. His, hers, this particular kind: pheremonal, perfumed, part tequila, part worm.

He resisted the temptation to stick his tongue out and lick the boards, and then Betty pulled his head back to center.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he was grinning.

He looked up at her, straddling him, absolutely miraculous and fifty feet tall, stretching up toward the dark ceiling like an angel, blonde hair glowing amidst the electrical snakes, and took a deep breath.

It’s almost ten at night when they ride the elevator up to his penthouse, and they still don’t know that this is their day.

Chloe holds a bag of very late dinner in her arms, leaning casually in her high-heeled boots and enduring the prickling sensation of her hair slowly drying against her head. She’s excited, not in the happy way, but in the sense that her baseline energy is running high. The storm, maybe. Violent weather affects all animals the same. Her breath is a little fast, and her senses a little finer. She can smell Lucifer next to her: his fancier-than-thou cologne and also the sweat he’s sweating, not because it’s hot but because, he, too, is running high.

Lucifer’s lank frame balances neatly on Italian leather. The shoes are quite ruined by the weather, but he has many more pairs and these aren’t nearly his favorites. He doesn’t carry a thing, and doesn’t think to offer. He’s enjoying the promise of wine, lots of it; and food, lots of it. Chloe’s chosen the menu, and he hasn’t a clue what’s in the dinner bag, except that she was under strict orders to be as exorbitant as possible when ordering. They’re celebrating, after all. Case closed. Another party-crashing, cake-poisoning murder-clown in custody, another runty human child safe from harm. What’s not to celebrate?

The elevator opens to a sound like no other:

Rain, pounding at every floor-to-ceiling window he has.

Lucifer smirks to liken it all to The Flood: like he’s carrying the detective off to his little ark in the sky, flipping one more allegorical bird to dear old dad.

Chloe picks up the smirk and returns it, not quite understanding.

He feels high.

They set up in the kitchen, but move almost immediately to a nook by the windows: two soft chairs and a tiny table. They think the rain will be pleasant to watch, but it’s gray and chilly instead, and they move almost immediately from there to the couch in front of the fireplace. Chloe goes to get a stack of napkins and when she gets back, there’s a fire roaring. Satan pours more wine.

He lounges on the couch while she stands in front of the coffee table and opens the takeout bag, tearing the little staple from the brown paper fold. Lucifer is immeasurably pleased to find that she’s actually followed his instructions: she presents delectable after glorious delectable, revealing each with a flourish that tickles him, heart and stomach.

“Okay,” she says, halfway deep in the bag, excavating a flat-ish box with both hands. “Now this one is kinda weird, but you said-”

“Yes, I certainly did,” he grins, and leans forward in anticipation. She puts the box down on the table and opens it, sneaking glimpses at his reaction all the while. The dish is marvelous, and he can’t tell what it is, at all. Something chocolatey and gold, literally gold, like flecks of metal, and amid it all lies a mysteriously crispy piece of flesh.

“They called it Holy Mole,” she says. “So I kind of had to.”

His jaw drops in a smile that’s mostly surprise and adoration.

“You know,” she goes on, stifling a giggle, “because you’re the devil.”

He can’t close his mouth. The smile wants to stretch, grow, take over, and he doesn’t know whether to let it.

Something changes inside him.

Something's been changing for a while, for years, despite all of his efforts to strap it down, and maybe this is the last thread snapping but he's suddenly cut loose inside himself: thrown into the sky to learn flying by falling.

She notices.

“What?” she says, suddenly hesitant, frozen in her half-crouch in front of the coffee table.

From his seat on the sunken couch, he keeps looking up at her — it’s so rare that he looks up at her — and something goes off the rails. He becomes so painfully aware of her presence that it seems that, before this second, he’d barely recognized she was here at all.

Her eyes.

Her face.

Her little hair with the cheap highlights all matted from the rain.

A drug he hasn’t taken unfurls through him, dilating his pupils and capillaries and everything else. He feels the flush it makes, the crawling heat of embarrassment on his face and neck, but he can’t stop it. He’s not sure he wants to. He’s never felt anything like it.

Chloe’s looking at him oddly.

He must look odd.

Frozen.

Awkward.

And she must see what’s happening to him — she must — but he can’t tell; he really can’t. He can’t tell almost anything about her — that’s half of why he can’t stand to be apart from her. The other half is panic, terror, uncertainty, and everything else his father made to remind the worms why they need his loving caress in their lives.

What will this worm do?

This very special worm?

This worm who is watching him come apart in real time?

For a moment, the answer is 'nothing.'

Then — over the table between them, over the cartons of gold-flecked sauce and roasty poblanos and sweet, crisp pork skin — she reaches for him.

One hand rests at his shoulder, fingers fleecing his collarbone and dipping into the hollow behind. The other meets the bottom of his jaw, grazing the tree line of his stubble and slipping behind his earlobe. The skin there is no stranger to touch, but at this instant it makes him shiver enough to ward her off (though that’s the absolute last thing in the world he wants).

She puts more weight on him, tentative, testing, but he wants it all. He tenses everywhere so she won’t feel even a hint of give beneath her hands.

Braced on his chest, she leans forward.

She’s going to kiss him, he understands, as if he’s trying to warn himself: no, look, she’s going to do it, she’s really going to do it! He’s thought about this moment so often it feels like he’s lived years of his life with his face three inches from hers. He knows what he wants himself to do; he’s invented a million ways to impress her. But suddenly, rudely, nothing he owns is any longer under his control, and the best he can do is hold himself very, very still. He feels his face open like a flower, lifting from a point at the crown of his head: eyebrows rising from their center, exposing shadows to the fire, creating that open, vulnerable triangle over his eyes.

The face he’s making: he’s seen it before, though not on himself. He’s pitied it.

A puppy begging to get kicked.

A dream ripe for the smashing.

 Oh, god.

Chloe stops. Tilts her head to the side. “I thought you hate when people say that,” she whispers. He can hear the nervous wobble in her voice, but she’s still in better shape than he is. He blinks doe-eyed up at her like an idiot.

“It’s…complicated,” he rasps.

She nods faintly, and smiles the most wonderful smile he’s ever seen.

It frees him from his paralyzing rapture: enough to raise up off the couch, reach over the table and take her by the ribs. She’s weightless in his hands, and it costs him nothing to lift her over the table despite the worried look she gives him mid-air. She has the telltale squirm of someone who’s never submitted to trust, and though he intends to whisk her off to bed, that squirm makes him pause. He holds her there with her feet off the ground, pulling her up to his chest without letting her toes touch the table until she submits, understands, that she will not be dropped. That he is more than capable of handling her, with or without her help.

It takes a bit longer than he expects it to, but he’s not exactly counting the seconds.

He can tell when it sinks in because her abs stop biting at his fingertips, and also because she wraps her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck and makes his grip on her almost irrelevant. She puts her face against the hottest part of his neck and he feels quite swept away again.

“Lucifer,” she says, so quiet it’s like his conscience is speaking. “Ask me.”

He doesn’t know what she’s talking about at first, and then-

Oh, no.

He can’t.

“You’re immune,” he deflects.

“Doesn’t mean I can’t answer the question.”

He blushes more than he ever thought possible. “I’m afraid I'd feel a bit…silly about it, at the moment.”

She smiles. “Okay then. Allow me.” She keeps her legs tight around his hips and leans back, head dipped to look up at him through her eyelashes. “Lucifer Morningstar,” she says, in her best and most awful approximation of his voice: “what is it that you truly desire?”

He’s prepared to laugh, or cringe, or whatever.

He’s not prepared for his mind to slip into the palm of her hand. How is it possible?

“What are you-” he whispers.

“Hmm?” she hums, staring deeper into his eyes. “C’mon.”

“I want,” he begins, aghast. “I want-”

She waits. She’s not going to spare him, so he has to save himself. He pulls her back within mouth’s reach with an arm behind her spine and silences himself with her lips.

“Good answer,” she says, breath against breath.

Good. Good all around. Her lips are good. Her skin is good. She weighs good in his arms.

“But,” she says, “wait, hold on.”

He can barely keep blood enough in his brain, but okay. He can wait.

“I’m afraid that if-” she says, and he hears the sentence break up into a bashful smile before she recovers.

The benefit of his long and flexible neck is that, even chest-to-chest with her, he can draw back and look her in the eyes. The openness in his face fades rapidly into a drawn, fierce darkness. If she wants his most rapt attention, she has it. Fear is not one of his laughing matters.

“I don’t want to be just… one of your many…”

He waits. He expects harlots or concubines or consorts.

She says, “lovers,” and the gratitude that wells up in his neck chokes him like a noose.

“I-” he tries, but has to stop to swallow down the knot in his throat. “I don’t want you to be,” he manages, with great effort. His head dips to level a gaze at her. To make sure he has her attention, too. “I don’t think it’s possible.”

He thinks the look she gives him in response resembles a smile, but he isn’t certain. The basics of human communication have escaped him, and he’s left with the body memories of how to stand, how to breathe, how to let his eyes slip closed when hers do, and how to tilt his head to be in the right place, at the right angle, when her mouth alights on his.

His moan is muffled in her mouth, warm and desperate and completely humiliating, which doesn’t make sense and he doesn’t know why. He’s moaned a million moans more wicked or loud or deep than this one. He’s moaned into mouths and skin and other places, and not once with a shred of self-consciousness following him screaming down the hall. But now he feels the shock of hearing himself like a chill on his skin.

 Why now?

 Why with her?

Still carrying her around his chest, he threads his legs through the channel between the couch and table, then makes a toe-cleared path toward his bedroom. It gets harder to navigate as he passes the hall closet, when her intermittent kisses sink into a deep and unbreaking lock, and he can barely stay upright. It’s a blessing when he feels the bedroom door in front of him, even moreso when his knees hit the edge of his bed. He tries to put her down, but she’s strong and stubborn and refuses to be let go, so he twists and falls with her, getting a knee up on the mattress before she digs her feet in and drags him the rest of the way.

The bed is perfectly made, sheets crisp and new, as per his demands. It should feel delicious, as usual: pressed and splendid with the scent of jasmine and myrrh. But the hotel-like sterility, the overblown grandiosity, feels suddenly abhorrent to him in a way it’s never been before. He wants only the smell of her shirt, the feel of her couch with the blankets strewn around, the smell of Hawaiian bread and burned butter and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She’s brought hints of it with her, little drifts that he hunts from her body and chases into the foxholes of her limbs.

He wants to use her like a crayon, grind her into the bed until everything is shaded.

Rain-drumming swells against the walls and windows of his bedroom. Like applause, or a warning, or utterly meaningless, like the rest of the whole mad world outside this room at this moment.

She turns him on his back, which isn’t usually where he starts, but he’ll take it. Her little fingers work to undo his buttons. She’s being careful, he realizes. How many times has he told her how nice his suits are? How many times has he told her how nice she is? How could those two numbers be anywhere near each other?

He grips either side of his collar and yanks until it tears. Let her see just how much he cares about bespoke silk when it stands in her way.

She recoils out of the path of the flying buttons, surprised and then laughing. He mimics the shape of her mouth, happy to have pleased her, and then her face disappears down to kiss the flat of his chest, and he has nothing to mimic. His mask falls flat. He lays there, the weight of them both pressing down on his scars, her touch skipping his heart, and finds he has no idea what to do next.

It’s a cruel and strange twist.

His bag of tricks is empty. He can’t recall a single one.

Chloe’s mouth makes its way up to his neck and his chin twists reflexively up and to the side, extending her path. He wants to break free, turn the tables, make her neck bare under his teeth, but he finds himself capable only of arching further, his whole chest up off the bed, mouth opening silently when she bites him hard at the point of his jaw.

His hands obey her, not him: they slide her shirt up over her ribs when she raises her arms, pluck the sleeves from her fingertips and toss the thing from the face of the earth. When she sits back on his hips and thumbs the straps of her bra off her shoulders, his hands go obediently to unclasp the back. And when all he wants is for the damned things to do something impressive with her sensitive bits, they reach up for her hair and stroke along the highlights, tracing them like beams of light.

She looks down on him beatifically. He tries very hard to look human.

“I’m so happy,” she whispers. She pokes experimentally, not exactly romantically, at the dip at the base of his neck. “Are you?”

Is he?

No.

Predominately, he’s terrified. Boneless. And at a loss for… so much. Happy is so far down the list, he can barely see it from the top. But it is on the list.

So he says, “yes,” without lying, and surrenders to her completely.

Linda’s kind of afraid to ask how it went.

She knows generally what happened.

Basically.

His text hadn’t been ambiguous:

 Deed done. Detective drastically disappointed.

And from the moment he’d walked in, her office had gone cold and lifeless, all the warmth sucked out and replaced with a sense of helpless fury. He’d barely looked at her; just wandered straight to the couch and collapsed into a pile of appendages: the cut branches of a dark tree piled by the side the road.

If not for the look on his face, she’d have thought he was angry. But now, even with his face turned toward the floor, she can see his shame rising like steam.

“Lucifer,” she says, neutrally.

He just shakes his head.

She takes a sympathetic breath and resists reaching out to touch his hand, or his knee, or anything. It’s almost impossible: his mood is like a vortex, like a well that has no bottom, and she’s a moth just like all the other moths that gravitate toward it at any expense. At least she’s aware of her mothiness. It helps her hold herself back, for now, but she’s still his therapist. She has to try to help.

She’s wracking her brain trying to pick the right tack, when Lucifer grinds out:

“He did this.”

He. The way he says it, it sounds capitalized.

“Your father?” she asks.

“Yes, my father,” he echoes, head rocking on a tense neck. It reminds her of her pressure cooker at full steam.

“Why do you think that?”

He looks up at her, then, with the darkest eyes she’s ever seen, even on him.

“I’m so tired of why,” he says, staring into the heart of her. It’s hard for her to parse the way it makes her feel to have his gaze drilling through her head, but it’s not…threatening, or terrible, or any of the other things that make people scream and shit themselves at the sight. It feels more like a plea, a wrist-to-wrist hold, something keeping him from going over a cliff.

She stares right back, as hard as she can.

“I hear you,” she says, and a little sigh deflates his shoulders slightly.

As she watches, this small puncture continues to drain him, until his gaze falters and falls somewhere into the corner of the room.

Minutes tick by.

She has to ask.

She doesn’t even want to know the details anymore, but it’s her job to pose questions. Professionally, it shouldn’t matter if it’ll hurt him, but right this moment she sees someone she just wants to hug back to life. She shoves that impulse in the darkest, deepest closet she’s got.

“Lucifer,” she says. He doesn’t look up. “Do you want to tell me what h-”

“Absolutely not.” His answer comes immediately, scorchingly, despite his shut-off posture.

“Okay,” she says. “You don’t have to.” She pauses. “But maybe we can talk about how you feel? How was it, for you?”

Lucifer frowns, still gazing unfocusedly into the shadows of her potted plants. A long, long minute passes, and his frown deepens, through the passing of cars, the streaming of headlights, the opening and closing of a door in the hall. When he looks up at her again, his face is a mess of lines.

“I-” he says, then bites his lip around the rest. “Shall we say, it wasn’t my finest hour.” He makes air quotes around the last part.

It takes Linda a moment to understand, but then she feels suddenly relieved.

Is that all it is.

No 'I don't love her', no 'she doesn't love me', no 'I felt nothing'...just a little performance anxiety?

She should have known. After all the meaningless slutting, this one must have seemed terrifyingly high-stakes. Stultifyingly, perhaps.

“Lucifer,” she says, feeling on firmer footing now. “As your therapist, it's no longer my place to say, but: if we’re being realistic, I’m sure that even your worst is-”

“You don’t understand,” he says. “The finger quotes are around both ‘finest’ and ‘hour.’” He drops into quiet misery once again. He hates this; that much is crystal clear. Whatever baggage he’s dragged here is filthy to him, repellent. He’s not here for advice. He’s here to confess, to submit to judgment.

“I was,” he says, finally mustering the will, “utterly ordinary.”

Linda is beyond skeptical. But Lucifer stares daggers through his eyes at her face until she remembers he doesn’t lie, and she becomes lost for words, except the one.

 “You?”

“Me!” he says, in complete agreement with her disbelief.

“What…happened?”

“Very, very little,” he says acerbically, and accelerates from there, floodgates creaking open. “I was- humiliated. Cursed. Could barely lift a finger.” He’s turning red. There are things he wants to tell and things he doesn’t, and they’re the same. “I just laid there,” he sputters. “I just laid there. And I didn’t do the thing, or the other thing, or the other thing, and then-” He cringes at the memory alone, gasping.

She has to derail this train. “And what did Chloe say?” she asks.

“What?”

“How did she react? What was her response to all this?”

The question makes him stop to think.

Truthfully, he doesn’t quite remember. Everything after checking the clock is a blur. It’s a reflex: he always checks the clock. He has records to make, records to break. And certainly, even if his performance had been less than spectacular, he’d hoped he’d made up for it in longevity. He’d been positive he’d hit at least an hour…right up until the clock had told him no.

Ten minutes.

Ten fucking minutes.

Not long, but certainly long enough to completely shatter the only expectations he actually cared to meet. If he’d shown his face in front of the Detective after that, it might’ve burned off — again — so he’d run to the bathroom. Then he’d run a little bit further, and a bit further than that, until he’d texted Linda from the atrium of a hotel, trying to keep himself out of the bar.

Linda has to hold him hostage in absolute, unforgiving silence to make him admit he'd run away, after which she leans over her crossed legs, wanting to hit him or hug him or something. Still, she tries to stay a therapist. She’s just kind of pissed off on everybody’s behalf.

“Why do you do this?” she asks.

Lucifer looks at her, self-hating right down to his bones, and has no real answer except that it’s Chloe. It’s Chloe, and this sensation of wanting to run and hide hadn’t ever, ever happened upon him before he met her.

“Lucifer,” Linda says. “Go home.”

He hangs his head.

“No, wait-” she corrects herself. “Wherever Chloe is, which by this point could be a convent: go there.”

His jaw clenches so hard she can see the muscles flex around the top of his head.

“Go there, all right? — and when you get there, if she lets you through the door, take out your ego, throw it on the floor in front of her, and stab it to death.” She hasn’t ever really spoken to a patient like this, but it seems warranted. She stands, drawing herself up in anger, and Lucifer stands too, out of reflex, maybe confusion. He hasn’t really seen this from a therapist before, or anyone, actually, that isn’t celestially-oriented.

“Then, get a bat,” she continues, eyebrows reaching up over the rims of her glasses. She starts advancing on him, which makes him back away, along the couch and toward the door. “Actually, get two bats, one for you and one for her, and beat the corpse together; I mean, really beat the shit out of it. Until there’s just no way it could ever come back. And when it’s dead, stuff it in a barrel, fill the barrel with cement, roll it off the pier and forget it ever existed.”

She’s caged him with his back almost to the door. His hand reaches behind for the handle.

For a teensy tiny little second she puts a smile on her face, but it is savage in every way.

“Are you picking up what I’m laying down?” she intones.

He nods.

The door handle clicks behind his back.

And then he’s gone.

Linda was right: Chloe’s not home. It’s the first place he goes, and when she doesn’t answer the door he walks in anyway.

Nobody’s there, not even Maze. Trixie’s absence barely registers on his radar, and only as a general emptiness. A coldness.

He tries the precinct next, but she’s not there, either. The night sergeant sees him coming and just shakes his head.

When he gets back out on the street, it’s stopped raining. Everything’s still wet and gray but the waterworks are off.

He’s been gone from her side for almost eight hours, and he’s afraid for every minute more that passes.

Where is she?

Her voicemail is full. He’s filled it. He’s sent well beyond a reasonable number of texts, most of them coherent, but his phone remains silent and dead. There’s nothing more he can do, save trawling every coffee shop in Los Angeles, so he goes home. And that, as it would be, is where he finds her.

She’s in his bed, right where he’d left her, sipping off a cup from the Coffee Bean. The whole room smells like coffee. There’s another cup on the bedside table and he doesn’t even need to ask. It’s for him, he knows, because he recognizes his favorite barista’s loopy hearts decorating the cup, the biggest one drawn with devil horns and a little forked tail. Ashlee; wonderful girl.

So the Detective had been out of bed, if only long enough to pop downstairs for caffeine.

And she’d come back.

His confusion keeps Lucifer on the verge of his own bedroom, arms spanning the doorway, forearm braced on the jamb like someone might try to drag him inside. He searches the scene in front of him for clues, but Chloe sips her coffee intractably and takes a full five seconds to look up at him. When she does, his throat clenches a little. Should he speak first? Should he wait for her cue? Linda’s instructions had been unhelpfully metaphorical, he realizes. He should have asked for something far more specific.

“You’re back,” Chloe says. She seems casual, normal. Maybe even chipper. But he can hear that undertone.

“Yes,” he says, not moving.

“Something you had to do?” she asks.

He blinks. “Yes?” he says.

“Finished?”

He tilts his head. Where is this going? Is there a trap at the end? “Yes,” he affirms.

She purses her lips and licks a little soy foam from the top of the cup. “Okay,” she says.

 Okay.

He feels the beginnings of confidence returning to him, but it’s not a secure thing. He knows he’s run off for what should have been — might still have been — one time too many, especially given the activity of the evening, and she is far too calm for the firebreather he knows she is.

He lets his arm fall from the door jamb as a test. She doesn’t react.

He takes a step into the room.

Then another.

She sips coffee and looks out the window, and lets him get right up next to the bed before turning a glare on him that could turn mortals into stone. Devils too, apparently.

“You think you’re getting into this bed,” she says. Her voice doesn’t match her face. It’s still nonchalant, upbeat. That’s how he knows that whatever she’s got in mind, it’s going to be excruciating.

Good.

Good.

If she can find the penance to absolve him of this — this and everything else, all his other shortcomings and runnings-away — he’ll welcome it with open arms.  

“It’s my bed,” he says, and immediately wants to slap himself. Can he not push back, for once? Can he not test it?  

But his test doesn’t test her.

“Not anymore,” she says.

He knows she means this as a threat or some other sort of disparagement. He knows this, and yet hearing it, his heart glows furiously through his fear. His confidence breaks up out of its coffin, through the dirt. Not anymore. His whole existence he’s shared this bed with a parade of God’s creatures, all shapes and sizes and bits and pieces, and it’s never occurred to him that sharing isn’t what he wants. He starts to shiver.

“Yes,” he says. Yes to all of it, even what she hasn’t said yet.

“We’ve got some things to talk about,” she said.

“Yes,” he agrees. Fervently. The shivering intensifies.

“And you’re going to stand there and talk about it.”

He nods. He stands up a little straighter, even the little stumps of muscles between his shoulder blades righting themselves. If they were still attached, his wings would be held at attention, quivering and half-folded as if ready to dive.

“Let’s start with what scares the devil himself,” she says. She picks up his coffee and extends it to him. He takes it with a shaky hand but stays where she put him, at the foot of the bed. He’ll earn his way back. She’ll make him.

He feels such gratitude that he gives her exactly what she asks for.

It’s dawn by the time he makes it between the sheets again.

She pulls them back and he slides in, stripping off his clothes in a clumsy rush and vacuum sealing all six-foot-three of himself around her. He’s getting the hang of nonsexual physical affection, slowly but surely. This still counts, he tells himself, even if they’re both half naked and his face is firmly interjected between her shoulder and cheek. And forget what El Diablito is doing pressed up against her ass; there’s nothing he can do about that, and they’ll both just have to live with it.

Or, you know, enjoy it.

“I guess I should take it as a compliment,” Chloe muses, having dropped her cool detachment altogether. “After — how many did you say?”

“Millions.”

“Right. Billions.” He can hear her eyes rolling. “After trillions of human sexcapades, I’m the only one who ever threw off your game.”

“Yes,” he murmurs happily.

“Because you just love me so much,” she teases.

His smile drops.

Well.

He’d never said that.  

But.

“Yes,” he says. Then again, grinning until his ears hurt. “Yes.” She wiggles a bit into him, asking to be held firmer, and he snugs her up with his free arm. The other is under her head and can’t do much but reach back and touch her hair.

Everything still smells a little bit like coffee, though the cups are long empty.

Out the window, the sun is coming out; no rain today.

The flood is past them.

By the time Hop drops little Pam off at home (really not the purview of the police department, as he’s told Big Pam never, not once, and he’s never going to) and hits the IGA for beer and defrostables, it’s almost seven. He’s got the energy to operate anything that requires three fingers or fewer: a microwave. A bottle opener. A VCR.

He takes the truck quicker than he should down the driveway. It pitches like a ship through the washouts and ruts, waggling his spine like a rope, gravel patches vibrating up through his thighs and out through his ears. It shakes the stress out of him, leaving him with pure, distilled mental fatigue and the bodily constitution of wilted celery. El never seems to notice his composure: as soon as his keys turn in the door, she comes at him with such-and-such permission slips he has to sign and look-at-this-test-I-got-a-hundred-on and somebody’s birthday party is tomorrow and we need a present right now and it has to be cool.

His hand feels like a gigantic paw on her little head, sinking into the kelp forest of her curls, slightly green from her recent attempt to go blonde. He keeps her at elbow’s length so he can get around her into the kitchen — beer to the fridge, first things first — then pulls out a chair at the table. There’s a pen already there.

“This one is to go to the mayor’s office,” she says, kneeing up onto the opposing chair and splaying across the table to fingerpoint to the empty line.

“Mayor’s office?” he mutters. “That’s a field trip, now?”

El rolls her eyes.

“You know I can take you to the mayor’s office whenever you want.” He signs: a wiggly line with nothing particularly Hoppery about it. He’s gotta change that before she starts forging things just because she thinks she can get away with it.

“Um, no thanks,” she says. She slips the sheet away and slaps another one down. “This is because Amy Waltrine has strep.”

He adjusts the paper to get a better position to try a new signature.

“But she doesn’t really have strep,” El says, as he thinks about what to change. “She has the clap. So, don’t worry about it.”

Hop’s pen hovers in the air. So many things wrong with the words that just flew nonchalantly out of his daughter’s mouth. “She has the what?” he says, squinting incredulously. El senses, just now, that this is one of those things she didn’t quite put in the right box.

“The…clap?”

“Who told you that?”

“Amy Waltrine?”

“She just — you kids talk about that stuff?”

El shrugs.

Hop shakes his head. He doesn’t understand the world anymore. Since when was gonorrhea some perverted badge of honor? Back in the day you felt some healthy shame and kept your mouth shut about it and never went into the backseat with Mary Kelly again.

Kids.

“Well, look,” he said, finally touching pen to page again. “You remember that conversation we had? About boy-girl stuff?” He glances up to make sure El’s blushing bright red. Yeah, she remembers.

“Daaaaad,” she says. “I’m not…doing it.”

“That’s right you’re not,” he says. He scrawls his name, tosses the pen down and lets her take the sheet. Dammit— he forgot to try the new signature. “And if you are…”

“They’re in the kitchen drawer.”

He stares her down across the table. If she can’t say the word to him, no way is it going to roll off her tongue with little Jimmy Johnson. “What are in the kitchen drawer?”

“Ugh,” she protests, but she levels the stare back at him. “Condoms.”

Hop sighs again, deep and huffy, like he can wipe his brain clean. “Go put that stuff away. You’ve got a movie to pick.”

Clutching her forms, El slides back into her seat and looks at him apprehensively.

“What?” he asks. He leans back in his chair until the vertebrae crack. El makes a face: gross. Hop grins behind his scruffy beard. “What?” he repeats.

She looks hesitantly toward the door, just as he realizes she’s not in her traditional movie night attire. No boy band t-shirt. No little cartoon pajama pants. No floofy slippers.

“You got plans?” he asks.

She looks at him with loosely feigned remorse, but she’s hovering on the edge of the kitchen chair with anticipation, glancing again toward the door.

“On movie night?” Hop presses. Does he sound pathetic? He wants to sound funny, but she’s never missed a movie night. It’s their night: he suffers through some unbearable kid flick and they plow through bags of microwave popcorn and he gets to sit next to her on the couch and pretend she’s still his little girl. Movie night.

But suddenly, El looks genuinely apologetic, and Hop snaps himself out of it.

“Alright, then,” he says. He puts his hands on the table top, letting the smooth formica slip under his fingers. “Whose door’ll I have to break down if you’re late?”

El’s face breaks into sunrise. She leaps from the chair, quick as a bird, and pecks him on the cheek. The things he trades. “Movies. Max and everybody.”

'Everybody' includes Mike, he's sure, but he doesn’t have to press it. “Remember,” he prompts, and she knows the drill.

“Home by nine, or call. Say please and thank you. Don’t break the law, unless I can get away with it.”

“That last part was a joke,” he says, but he likes it, and he likes that she’s kept it. There’re too many rules in the world to begin with; let her bend a few.

El disappears down the hall in a flurry of dry-leaf footsteps, and Hopper is left alone in a suddenly-silent kitchen. He’s got three videos on top of the TV, all tailored toward the mercurial preferences of a teenager, and an extra TV dinner to kill.

Salisbury steak and Sixteen Candles.

What a night

*

Twenty-five minutes of Long Duk Dong and mushy peas are about all Hop can take.

He shoves the unfinished plastic tray to the other side of the couch and pauses the video. For a long moment, he stares into the tape squiggles, trying to figure out why he feels like a potato about to explode in the microwave.

One missed movie night is…nothing. There’s plenty worse going on around town: the little assholes that huff paint behind the Ace, or the punks he has to run off the record store every other night with their weird hair and racoony eye junk. It’s not like she’s shoplifting girl crap from the drugstore, or getting busted out on Boner Boulevard in some kid’s beater.

But it’s not just a missed movie night.

It’s all these little things that’ve started creeping up on him, one at a time until he can’t shut the door on them anymore.

She doesn’t sit next to him on the couch anymore, for one. Sometime over the summer she’d claimed the opposite armrest, and the first few times she’d had a reason (a hot mug of something to balance, a school notebook with homework to finish) but now she never does.

And she doesn’t do bedtime anymore, either. Used to be he’d come in and sit down and she’d roll toward him, pretending to be sucked into the giant vortex his two-hundred-fifty pounds made in her mattress. They’d shoot the shit about this shitty kid and that cool kid and some field trip coming up and what did she want for Christmas and should they get a puppy, and then he’d kiss the top of her head and make a mess of her hair and close the door behind him when he left. But lately he goes to check on her and the door’s already shut, some weird music going on, and she yells, ‘night, dad’ and he stands there like an idiot in the dark, wondering what the hell changed.

He’s too old for this shit.

Heaving himself up off the couch, he marches to the kitchen, grabs the phone off the wall and punches a number.

“Code red, Joyce,” he says, when she picks up. “Code red.”

*

The first thing that Joyce says is—

—no, the first thing Joyce says, after ‘light me, Hop,’ is:

“Is this about Amy Waltrine?”

Hop is knee-deep in a drag on his Camel and he almost chokes it out. “The clap kid?” he says, finally, on the exhale.

Joyce makes a face. "Hop."

“No, it’s not about the clap kid.” He shakes his head in his own cloud. He manages to contain himself for a few seconds before the indignation bristles through. “I don’t get it; I really don’t. How’re they even doing that at this age? We were, like, sixteen!”

“Seventeen,” Joyce says.

“Sixteen; seventeen…this kid’s, what, thirteen?”

“Fifteen, almost sixteen” Joyce says. “Two years older than Will.”

Hopper sulks and passes the cigarette. “Still. She got it in her throat.”

“Hop.” Joyce slaps him on the shoulder. She sips when she smokes, making choo-choo puffs that sail past Hopper’s face in the dark. When she’s done, she dances the cigarette back in front of his face, and he tries to take it but she doesn’t let him. He can’t miss the look she gives him. “There but for the grace of prophylactics went I,” she reminds him. “And you.”

He sighs and rolls his whole head. She lets go.

“Just don’t say anything to Shelly, okay,” she says. “She’s mortified.”

Hopper nods in agreement — though why he would ever mention that to Shelly in the first place is beyond him — and takes a slower, gentler puff. He’s starting to calm down. Actually, he’d calmed down a bunch on the way over: Lynyrd Skynyrd on a dark road really wrings the shittiness out of him. Lynyrd Skynyrd, and being ten minutes and a football field away from sharing a Camel with Joyce Byers and bitching about their kids.

Solidarity, man.

“So who was the other kid?” Hop asks. He tries to do it surreptitiously but Joyce knows him way too well.

“What are you going to do, lock him up?”

“Maybe.”

“El’s smart,” Joyce says, smiling out over the field. The whole thing’s dark except for the red playclock, which somehow never shuts off. The white lines are fresh, glowing in the moon.

“Yeah, she is.” Hop’s attention, too, settles on the red clock. Eight thirty-two. He’s too fucking tired for eight thirty-two.

They both go quiet.

“Thanks for coming out,” he says after a while. Even after just the one smoke, his voice is back in the gravelly gutter where it used to sit when he was sucking down two packs a day. “I’m still quitting,” he says. “Sometimes you just need a goddamn cigarette.”

Joyce agrees in silence.

“What happens to these kids, huh?” he asks. The words are as soft and faint as his breath. He turns his head to her, beard rustling over the fleecy ruff of his coat. Her face is neutral, receptive. It encourages him. “It’s all, movie night and chasin’ ‘em down the hall and ‘daddy, do my hair’ and then, boom, she’s going out at night and some kid’s got the clap.”

Joyce gives his arm a little wiggle. “It’s not that bad,” she says.

“Hey, I’m not saying a kid can’t have freedom,” he says. “Just-”

“Just what?”

He holds his breath like it helps him think. “Well, you kept yours right,” he says. “How’d you do it?”

Her mouth quirks. “What do you mean by that?”

“You know,” he says. “You’ve got two…” He doesn’t want to say it, but there’s no other way to put it. At least, not that he’s clever enough to come up with. “Two fine, upstanding momma’s boys.” He puts his hands out between them to forestall her open-mouthed offense. “Look, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing; that’s what I want. I mean, those kids miss you when you go to take a piss.”

“That’s disgusting.”

He shrugs, shoulders and eyebrows hitching up together. “You like it.”

“I like my boys,” she says.

“And they like you.”

Joyce presses her lips together and leans deeper into Hop’s shoulder, close to feeling his arm through the eight layers of coat and flannel. “El loves you, Hop. She’s not going anywhere. But she’s gotta have something else going on.”

Hop snorts. Joyce sees it from below — the billow of air over his shiny, iced beard — and it reminds her of a billy goat. Put some horns on him; he’s got the whole stubborn rest of it covered.

“A girl can’t live on Schlitz and Bob Seeger alone,” she says. He head butts her. Just gently…but the goat thing stands.

“Worked pretty well for you,” he mutters gruffly. He stubs the cigarette out on the silver slat and drops it through the gap, condemned to the no-man’s-land under the bleachers.

“I was a little weird,” she says.

“A little,” he corroborates.

She leans in to shoulder-check him but he sees her coming. His big arm catches her at her zenith and mashes her deep into all that coat fluff. Some of it, she can tell from the warmth, is Hopper fluff. Both are very cozy to be smashed against, but Hop still, after twenty years, doesn’t know his own strength. Joyce’s peeping sound is how she communicates that he’s got her ribcage in a vice.

“Sorry,” he says, but he only loosens up a little.

They breathe together (Joyce, shallowly).

Look at the stars.

They stay motionless enough that their warmth hangs around them, and the punishment of fresh cold discourages even the slightest shift. Joyce lights another cigarette and smokes it like a statue, hand stuck up by her mouth. When it’s mostly done she tosses it down with all the other illegal, irresponsible, little-forest-animal-poisoning litter.

She feels Hopper’s chin double up against the top of her head when he looks down at her, and she looks up expecting a sarcastic scolding but gets a totally different Hopper.

A little more open around the eyes.

A little more pink in the cheeks.

A little less symmetrical in the smile.

She knew that look twenty years ago, and it hasn’t changed at all.

He’s gonna ask.

“Joyce,” he says, staring not at her, but at the stars.

“Yeah, Hop.”

They’ve been circling this, not like a drain but like a hunt. Every night drive, every smoke-out behind the high school, every midnight fried egg at the diner, they’ve come closer and closer to some center, like the North Pole, and Hop’s got this flag to plant. At this point, he’s so used to carrying it he doesn’t realize how heavy it’s become. His shoulders bend under it: all the time, but especially here, and now.

Joyce’s body is pulled suddenly, gracelessly, by an unscripted jerk of his arm.

“Sorry to get you out here on a school night,” he says. “I know you’ve got…stuff.”

He gets up, bleacher creaking, and offers her a hand.

The flag stays where it is, tied to his back.

His loss makes her cold, but his hand is still warm to the touch.

“We’ve all got stuff,” she says. “You know I’m here for ya.” She says ‘ya’ instead of ‘you’ so he won’t get scared. For a terrifying bearlike human being, it’s surprisingly easy to get his tail between his legs: sometimes just the barest hint of sincerity’ll do it. Then, of course, there are times he surprises her.

Though he doesn’t often do it this way:

“I love you, Joyce.”

Lightning.

It’s like she’s opened her coat, and shirt, and everything — all the way down — and let winter pour in. Just, ice, through every inch of her body.

Hop just sighs, eyebrows furrowing so deep they hide his eyes. “No, no,” he says, and Joyce realizes her face must be stuck in some terrible expression: it gets away from her sometimes. Hopper grips her shoulders, facing him, corralling her. “Here, it’s—” he sighs again “—it’s this whole thing with El. And with-”

His head dips. Hands loosen. Joyce puts hers up around his wrists and squeezes.

“With Sara, we always said we weren’t going to let it happen, you know?” He keeps looking at the ground. “We weren’t going to let her get too cool for us.” He laughs, but not really. “The world wasn’t gonna get her. She was going to stay our little girl.”

Joyce squeezes harder. Hop squeezes back.

“Growing up shouldn’t mean you can’t hug your dad or smile or actually like anything. But these kids hit high school and ‘love’ means ‘fuck’ and I think that — I think it’s fucked up. I think it fucks kids up. And I’m not letting some bozos convince my daughter that you have to turn into one of those record store punks on your thirteenth birthday.”

He stops talking. Out of breath, maybe.

Joyce is still frozen in place. She dares lift her eyes, and he’s looking right back at her. His gaze sticks like glue.

A few moments into his silence, she says: “What does that have to do with-”

“Everything,” he says. “I’m getting the word out. I’m gonna use it.”

She blinks.

“So, I love you,” he says. “And you love me. And we should fucking say it.”

She blinks again.

“Look: it means something that I call you,” he says. “And it means something that you come. It doesn’t have to mean more than that, but let’s call it what it is.”

She’s voiceless.

He’s impatient.

“You don’t have to get all weird about it. The whole idea is that you don’t get all weird about it.”

She nods. “I get it,” she says, a little raspy, and forces a smile.

“Come on,” he says, half joking. “Don’t tell me the cool kids got to you, too.”

Joyce doesn’t know how to explain to him what’s happening to her at this second, as he looks at her and she’s appearing to stay exactly the same. A fuse has been replaced somewhere, something she’d burned out so long ago and gone without for so long she’d forgotten it was ever there. Circuit completed. And what she feels, is a bewildering combination of fear and fearlessness.

The fear feels familiar. She’s no stranger to fear: everything she’s ever gotten for herself has made her afraid in return. Her beautiful, fragile kids; Her beautiful, shameless husband; Her weird, shattered reputation. It’s all mixed up into a wet, cold, ash that’s frozen like cement around her life. But she hasn’t felt fearless in a long, long time, and she doesn’t know why now, except that it’s in some way because Hopper loves her and Hopper is good.

Good in a way that’s beyond morality. Beyond reason. The kind of good he is, is elemental. She can smell it in the back of her head.

She’s been waiting for years, maybe since high school, for this declaration of love to come floating up out of him, like a body from a swamp. She realizes now that she’s been dreading it. More fear. Fear that love would mean fuck, maybe: like he’d said. And that the last little pure thing she’d been able to keep from the cement would be buried and gone.

But this is not a burial.

This is a force of nature, six-foot-four and heavy, unstoppable, coming out of the woods to stand in front of her and kneel.

It feels like the opposite of fear; it feels powerful, and she feels taller, and stronger, and when she looks up at him she takes his gaze straight. The way he looks back at her says she can get whatever she asks for.

He licks his lips.

He jolts awake in the dark but stays in bed, diligently laying on his back with his eyes closed for at least half an hour, until he realizes his heart is beating so fast that he won’t get within firing distance of sleep again.

He gives up and pulls on a sweater as he shuffles out to the kitchen table. He leaves the lights off (because if anything does come, he’s not going to miss it), lays his sidearm out on the table, and starts disassembling.

The oiling and buffing is meditative; he can do it by heart, even in the dark. It smells familiar, feels familiar in his hand. He can make it silent, which he needs to do because his house isn’t big, and the walls -- while more robust than the cabin -- aren’t exactly soundproof.

If there’s anything El needs, it’s a lifetime of good sleep.

What he needs is different: he can’t yet put it into words, but he’s got the feeling it’ll eat him alive before too much longer.

It doesn’t take as long to clean the gun as he wants it to, but the piece still looks pristine when he’s done. He admires the shine in the moonlight and then gets up to stand pointlessly in the living room, waiting to see if the sun’ll come up early.

It doesn’t.

Hop looks back into the depths of his room, where his bed is freezing and bleak and reeking with nine-ish years of night sweats. Next to that hellmouth, El’s closed door is relatively comforting: it’s covered in Mike’s taped-up drawings and little nameplates that used to say, “Helen” before he took a pocketknife to them. A few new ones say, “Jane.” He wonders which ones they’ll settle on. Maybe both?

He moves toward the door one aimless step at a time, listening to the fridge noises and the clock noises and the ticks and tangs of the radiators until he’s close enough to lay a hand on the wood.

Tempted as he is to push it open, peek in, make sure she’s still there, he doesn’t. Instead, he puts his back to the wall and slides down into a knees-up sit against the wallpaper and drywall and fewer two-by-fours than city code strictly requires.

The thing around Hopper’s throat likes this. It wants him hugging the wall, pressed as close as he can get.

An hour later, Hop wakes up warm on one side and freezing on the other.

The warm side is covered in a pink blanket, and under it is Eleven, who is asleep — or not asleep. Just waiting. She opens her eyes the moment she senses he’s opened his.

“Hey,” he says. It sounds like a hairball; he hasn’t spoken since he got up. “What’re you doing out here?”

“What’re you doing out here?” she echoes.

He shakes his head. “Trying to get some shuteye. At least, I was,” he accuses lightly, but puts an arm around her. She huddles into the hollow beneath.

“Here?” she persists.

“Yep,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because,” he starts, and doesn’t want to plant any worries so he omits the gun cleaning and racing heart, “you need your rest.”

She tries to find the connection between these two things: the large man folded up outside her door, and rest.

“I want you to, you know, feel like someone’s got you covered,” he clarifies. “Looking out for you.”

“Looking out for what?” she asks.

He frowns and looks away.

It’s a great question.

It’s a stupid question.

What the hell is he supposed to answer?

“Bad stuff,” is what he tells her. “Bad guys. You know,” he says. Saying that makes him feel stupid. Bad guys? He’s not sitting in front of her door because he’s expecting bad guys to come crashing in the windows, and his gut knows it. They’re done with all that. Whatever’s got his hackles up, it’s something else.

El stares off with her hair all stiff and splayed straight up up like a bird wing. She hasn’t gotten the trick of washing all the gel out before she goes to sleep.

“You want me to go back to bed?” Hop asks neutrally, pulling the blanket up over her shoulder where it’s fallen. If she wants him to, he’ll fake it.

But El looks over at the dark maw of his open room and shakes her head.

He accepts this, then flips it: “Do you want to go back to bed?”

She frowns. He waits. And she doesn’t answer.

Eh, fuck it. He stares down the hall toward the kitchen, toward the table with the gun grease he forgot to put away, where the windows are starting to glow pale, deep blue.

“Tell you what,” he says. His voice is warming up, finally, starting to smooth out. “Ever see the sun rise?”

The edges of her mouth tic down briefly, and he winces to remember that she lived in the woods like a wild animal. Slept in the snow. Something floods him, intense as a drug, and his hand makes a fist in her blanket.

“Yeah,” he says. “Of course you have.”

El looks down at her knees, but when she looks up, she doesn’t seem upset. “I want to see the sun rise,” she says.

It takes Hop a moment to get back in the swing, but he gets there. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Well, I know a place. This time of night there shouldn’t be anyone-”

“Morning,” she corrects. “Past twelve-zer-- o’ clock.” She grins, and another drug, completely different, socks him in the back of the chest.

“Morning, that’s right,” he amends. His shifts his legs, trying to get feeling back into them before attempting to stand, and gives her a nudge. “Go put on something toasty, kid; I’ll pack up a Thermos.”

She's sleepy and slow to get up, so he counts to three and whips the blanket off her and then she comes alive, fully awake, running for her sweater and coat, the ties of her flannel pajamas flapping out behind her and her socks going long and floppy off her toes against the old carpet. She slams her door behind her and Hopper heaves himself up to make good on his word.

There’s a peach tea in the cupboard that she’s just addicted to, with so much honey he might as well be feeding her Kool-Aid, but that’s exactly what he’s going to make. And this is what his morning is going to be: the dawn hour trapped in a truck with her; the smell of her fruity little shampoo saturating his work jacket to the point where the guys at the station’ll feel like they have the right to make comments; sipping that tea until his blood sugar makes orbit; fielding El’s increasingly chatty questions until he turns on the radio just to get some peace of mind.

He happens to be wearing a silk shirt because it looks sharp, and feels nice on his skin. He bought it with his construction earnings because a man has to own a few nice shirts. For occasions.

He has three long-stem roses on the dash of his GTO because maybe he likes flowers, and Mrs. Bozey down the street grows them for show, and he’s a little loose in the morals.

He’s got a pack of cigarettes because he’s thinking of taking it up. Seems like it might be nice.

He takes one out, sticks it in the side of his mouth and lights it. It tastes… earthy. Not great. Not awful. He coughs for about a minute straight, and stubs it out.

He peers intently out the window, slowly leaning further and further toward the windshield as a fog descends.

Joyce passes by at 8:16, not a hundred feet from his car.

She goes inside on Lonnie’s arm, which is no surprise. That’s exactly what she’d said she was going to do, if he didn’t pay her stupid ransom. She couldn’t actually have expected him to do all that ridiculous stuff she wanted. Rent a suit? Meet her dad? Yeah, right. He had to draw a line somewhere.

Let Lonnie do it, he’d said.

And from the looks of things, Lonnie had.

Real dumb suit he’d gotten, too.

Joyce is gone in a minute, disappeared through the warm gym doors, and Hop’s getting cold.

It’s been real nice, sitting and watching the monkeys fill out the circus, enjoying a smoke, but maybe he’s ready to go.

He puts his seat back up and smashes his box of cigarettes into the glovebox and all of a sudden someone bangs on his window with an open hand. He swears as he rolls it down, until he looks up.

“I’m not here for prom,” he says.

Joyce eyes him. “Okay?” she says. Her eyes drift to the flowers just as he remembers they’re there. “You have flowers,” she says.

“For my mom,” he says.

“Okay.” She waits. “Can I…come in?”

He huffs, but leans across the car and banks the door open. She slips in like a shadow. It’s way quieter in the car with her inside it.

“You want to smoke?” he asks.

“You smoke?”

He slaps at the glovebox until it opens and tosses the mangled pack into her lap. She handles it, turns it over, and looks at him in surprise.

“We smoke the same kind,” she says, half question, half statement. 

“Weird.”

She offers him one. He puts out a hand to refuse. “Just had a few,” he explains. It goes over without a blink, but a few seconds later she’s staring at him like he’s missing something. “Got a light?” she asks, expectant. He tries not to dig the lighter out too quickly.

She pulls on the flame he makes and his face goes slack and rapt. Her smoke fills the car. It’s going to stick to his upholstery and never come out.

“So,” he says, with a bone-dry tongue. “How’s Lonnie?”

She shrugs and picks a speck of tobacco off her tongue. “He’s good.”

“Good dancer?”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I guess,” she says. She stares out the window — not toward prom but toward the football field, toward the bleachers — and swiggles down into a comfortable slouch. He puts his seat back again. They watch nothing.

“Hey, Hop?” she says, eventually. It feels like she’s been here the whole night but she’s not even done with that one cigarette.

“Yeah?” He’s starting to feel prickly, everywhere. The shirt is making him sweat.

“You really hate these things, huh?”

At first he thinks she means the smokes. “Uh, no,” he gets out, before he realizes she’s talking about prom. “Oh, what, prom? Yeah, hate it. I mean, no judgement.” He waves his hand casually through the air, where his judgment would be if he had any. “Just not my thing.”

She nods. Her dress crinkles. He loves that fucking dress. She’s worn it every holiday but Christmas. She takes care of it. She takes care of things.

“But you like them,” he says. “Dances, and stuff.”

She shrugs again, with a tiny, possibly insecure smile. “I guess.”

He can’t stand even the hint of insecurity on her. “Well, you look great,” he says, which turns her smile up enough to get that worried feeling off his back.

“Thanks.” She smooths out the tulle over her knees, making pleats where there aren’t any. Pea green is maybe the worst color he’s ever seen on anyone. She’d picked it herself.

“I mean, you really look great.”

“Thanks, Hop,” she says, a little more sarcastic this time. She takes one last drag on the cigarette and jams the butt into his ashtray. “And thanks for the smoke.”

He smiles and does that slow nod he’s seen on TV. “No problem,” he says. “Anytime.”

She kind of sort of rolls her eyes again and whooshes out of the car in a cloud of skirt, but she comes around to the driver’s side before she goes. Hop’s heart starts to hammer. Her fingers curl lightly over the half-downed window, leaving little condensation halos where they touch.

“You’ve got a year til we’re both seniors,” she says. “So get the fuck over it.” Then she’s off, tripping across the parking lot in her tiny lime-green one-inch heels.

Hop sucks cool air through his open window until the blood stops drumming in his ears.