Chapters (41)
I tried, for a while, to feel for the threads again for someplace I could bring us all. The quiet in my head was gone.
* * *
I skipped dinner and happy hour in the hotel restaurant, where Logan had decided tonight was the superhero disco, and the wolf pack was tying curtain capes around their shoulders and doodling sigils on their bare chests with stray markers. Like some summer camp craft game, only with more vodka, with their laughter rising over the driving electronic thrum of music from the ceiling speakers.
I know Yusuf wouldn’t have cared if I cut a mask out of a pillowcase, stayed with the boys, and stumbled back to our room to him before the sun came up. My throbbing head had other plans for me. I found him asleep in our room, propped up in bed in the lamplight, bare-chested, with his superhero secret-identity black glasses and a hotel magazine limp in his lap. I shucked out of my clothes in the dark. I switched off the lamp and crept into bed beside him, tossing an arm over his chest and burying my face into the curve of his neck.
“Hey,” he murmured. “All done with work for the day?”
“Yeah. I think I got us a way outta here. Found us a tropical paradise with indoor plumbing and pool parties to drop right into.”
“Uh huh.”
The starred sky where the Earth watched over us streamed light through the wall of windows. I could just make out Yusuf’s heartbeat at his collarbone, above the dark patch of hair at his chest. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The steady metronome of him. His breath was the rolling tide of the ocean on the shore.
We slept for a while—behind my eyes was the dreamless black of space between stars—our door barricading us against the music from the party. The low bass thrummed like the heartbeat of some huge, underwater animal. Louder. Then, louder again, the shockwaves of liquid sound flowing through me until—jesus—I bolted up in bed at the pounding on the door. Yusuf rustled up by me and winced against the invasion of light from the window. More slamming and screams at the door, with something that sounded like breaking glass on the floors above us, but that couldn’t be right.
I whipped out of bed while he fumbled in the slice of light for his glasses and clothes. I ripped open the door to find Logan in the dim hallway, half of the pink burn wound on the side of his face covered with a drawn-on hero mask of pen ink. He shoved his two-way radio at me.
“Joel’s back and he brought some company,” he said.
I turned behind me to Yusuf, who was silhouetted by the wall of windows. Outside, a beam of light swept over hulking shapes, for an instant lighting up the shadowed faces of a crowd gathered on the snow.