Sliver Of Truth

He was yelling now and I found myself covering my face and leaning against the cool glass until he went silent. I listened to him breathing hard, listened to the cars race by us, their wheels whispering on wet concrete, felt the Peugeot shake with the speed of their passing. When I lowered my hands, I could see that his eyes were wet and rimmed red. There was a grim intensity to the way he was watching me. I could already see regret in the line of his mouth. I stared back at him, mesmerized by what I saw. His was the face of the ugly truth; I recognized it in every pore. That’s what had kept me turning away from him. I realized that I’d never seen it before, the face of someone who had no secrets to hide, no more lies to tell. I hated him for it.

I reached into the back of the car and grabbed my bag, flung the door open, got out, and started walking. The cold air, the now-driving rain, felt wonderful. I heard his door slam and the sound of his feet on the concrete.

“Ridley,” he called after me. “Ridley, please.”

There was so much sorrow in his voice that I almost stopped but kept going instead. I thought I could hitch a ride, go to the police and get myself arrested or deported or murdered or whatever. It didn’t matter.

When I felt his hand on my arm, I spun around and started pummeling him pathetically with my fists. I was so weak, so messed up, that instead of warding me off, he just pulled me into him, effectively pinning me against him. Eventually I stopped struggling. His body was shaking slightly, from cold or emotion, I didn’t know. I could hear the beating of his heart fast and strong in his chest. I let myself sob, standing there on the highway in the pouring rain.

“I’m so sorry,” he said into my ear. “I’m so sorry. You were right. I am an asshole. You didn’t deserve that.” He tightened his arms around me and I wrapped mine around his waist. “You didn’t deserve any of this.”

I looked up at him and saw all the pain in the world in the gray of his eyes.

“Neither did you,” I said. There was a flash of something on his face. I think it was gratitude. And then his mouth was on mine. In his hunger and his passion, I tasted his honesty. I opened myself to it and took it all in-this man, his truth, and his kiss. In that moment, I knew one thing for sure. That Dylan Grace had been right all along. He was the only friend I had.

I FOUND THAT I had about two thousand pounds sterling in my bag, close to four thousand dollars. How it got there, I had no idea. We parked the Peugot in a public lot and then checked into a run-down hotel near Charing Cross Road. The room was ugly but clean and comfortable enough, and Dylan insisted we chill there for a while, wait for the sun to go down. He washed and rebandaged my wound with great tenderness. I let him, though I could have done it myself. Since our kiss on the road, there’d been a charged silence between us. We spoke to each other politely or not at all.

I was eager to get to an Internet café but saw the wisdom in waiting for dark. Plus, I was feeling worse and weaker by the minute. I lay down on the queen-size bed, which smelled vaguely of cigarettes. Dylan took the chair beside me and turned on the “telly.” After an hour of watching the news, we still hadn’t seen anything about ourselves. A check of the morning papers in the lobby on the way in showed that we hadn’t made the print media, either.

“It’s weird,” said Dylan, looking at me from the chair. “I’d have thought our pictures would be all over the place after a mess like that.”

“Maybe they want to keep it quiet.”

“No way. Two cops and a nurse dead? Whoever I killed lying on the hospital room floor? You missing? No way to keep that quiet. They should be using every resource at their disposal to find us.”

“But they did keep it quiet. Obviously.”

He had his head in his hand and rubbed his temples.

“You can lie down if you want,” I said. I thought he must be tired, every muscle in his body aching from driving and sitting up all night.

He looked up at me. “Yeah?”

I nodded. He rose from his chair and lay down beside me. The bed squealed beneath his weight. I moved into him and let him fold his arms around me. I heard him release a long, slow breath, felt the muscles in his chest and shoulders relax. I just wanted to feel safe for a minute. And I did. I drifted off like that. When I woke again, the sky outside our window was darkening.

He was sleeping soundly, his breathing deep and even. My head was on his shoulder and he had one arm curled around me, one flung over his head. I flashed on how his face had looked in the car when he talked about Max, about the things he’d said. How the pain of it had brought tears to his eyes. I hated what he had told me. I felt as if the knowledge was a cancer growing inside me, something black and deadly that would eventually take over and shut all my systems down. I would die from it; I was sure of that.