I reach back, and she pulls me inside the truck, yanking the door closed behind me. The bald tires squeal on uneven asphalt, and the last thing I see before we vanish down the road are those terrible eyes peering out from the brush at the top of the ridge. I wonder how long they’ve been watching us.

We drive a little ways, maybe a mile, maybe ten miles, the trees bleeding past us, everything bleeding past.

“I wasn’t sure I’d find you,” Michael says, but of course he did. He must have already been nearby, north across the Golden Gate Bridge and detoured off the 101, cutting down these back roads, searching for me. Searching because I haven’t given him any other choice.

We’re back on the highway now, and Michael’s hands are steady on the wheel. “Where do you want to go?”

I watch the horizon, daylight leaking up over the edges of the world. “Anywhere indoors.”

He takes us back to San Francisco, to a no-tell motel where he’s been staying. It’s a tacky little joint in the Marina District, all the doors painted butter yellow, a red neon sign with half the letters burned out.

We trudge up to the third floor and down a corridor with too many corners, where anybody could be lying in wait. Beneath a fluorescent light, the bare bulb flickering, Michael fumbles with the room key, his hands shaking, everything about him nervous as a schoolboy. I remember suddenly how young he is, all of twenty-two, and how he’s probably never rented his own motel room, let alone invited girls inside.

Not that Bee cares a bit about him. Once he finally unlocks the door, she files in like a weary warrior and collapses on the first bed she sees. She’s out in a minute. I envy her for it.

Across the room, Michael tugs all the curtains closed. Then he wavers at the edge of the second bed where I’ve stretched out, my shoes kicked off.

“I can sleep on the floor if you want,” he says, even though he knows that isn’t what I want at all.

“It’s fine,” I say, and he slides beneath the blanket next to me, his body warm and inviting, his heartbeat thrumming faster.

I curl against him, and I’m so tired, so hungry. He’d let me have a taste if I asked. He’d let me have anything I want. But I won’t. Because it’s not his choice. Because Bee’s in the next bed, and I don’t want a witness. I don’t want them to know what I’m really like.