“When Lurch dug the hole, he dug it too deep. So when he threw me in there, my foot hit a rock sticking out of the wall of dirt on the way down. About six inches above the bottom. And I had to tense every muscle in my body and keep my foot on this little ledge. And it was hard. Because I was looking up at this prick shoveling dirt on me with absolutely no emotion in his face.” She lowered the towel from her breasts toward her waist. “Turn around.”

I turned around, faced the wall as she dried some more of herself.

“Twenty minutes. That’s how long it took him to fill the hole. And he made sure I was packed in tight. At least at the shoulders. Didn’t even blink when I spit in his face. Do my back?”

“Sure.”

I turned around and she handed me the towel as she stepped out of the shower. I ran the thick terry cloth over her shoulders and then down along the muscles of her back as she twisted her hair in both hands and pulled it up against the back of her head.

“So, even though I was on this little shelf, there was still a good bit of dirt below me. And at first I couldn’t move, and I got terrified, but then I remembered what allowed me to stand on that rock with one foot for twenty minutes while Mr. Walking Dead buried me alive.”

“What was that?”

She turned in my arms. “You.” She slid her tongue over mine for a moment. “Us. You know. This.” She patted my chest and reached behind me, took the towel back. “And I moved around and twisted and more dirt fell below my feet and I kept squirming and, oh, three hours later, I started making some progress.”

She smiled and I kissed her, my lips meeting teeth, but I didn’t care.

“I was so scared,” she said, draping her arms across my shoulders.

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Wasn’t your fault. My fault for not picking up Lurch on my tail this morning while I tailed Desiree.”

We kissed and my hand planed through some beads of water I’d missed on her back and I wanted to pull her body so tight it would either disappear into mine or I’d disappear into hers.

“Where’s the bag?” she said when we finally broke the embrace.

I lifted it from the floor of the bathroom. Inside were her dirty clothes and the handkerchief we’d used to wipe her prints from the handles of the hoe and the garden shears. She tossed the towel in and I added the facecloth, and then she took a sweatshirt from the small pile of Desiree’s clothes I’d placed on the toilet seat and put it on. She followed that with a pair of jeans and socks and tennis shoes.