After, Hurt walks her to her car. She’s barely eaten all day, and she probably shouldn’t drive, but it’s too far to walk back to her apartment outside of town. She tells herself there’s no one even on the road in Spring Falls. The closest cabs are Mount Snow. There’s no Uber in a town this small.

She leans against the side of her car, parked next to Hurt’s, and takes a cigarette from her purse. Hurt looks amused.

“You want one?” she asks after she lights it. She loves the first smell of a lit cigarette, the paper burn, the raisiny sweetness of the tobacco.

“No,” he says. He laughs and looks at his feet.

“Did you ever?” she asks.

“Sure,” he says.

“When’d you quit?”

He looks at the sky, hands in his pockets. “Fifteen years ago,” he says.

Tonight, the sky is extra blue black, thick with stars that appear only in the country dark. Kateri feels loose in all her joints.

“You want me to give you a ride?” Hurt asks.

“We both had three drinks,” she says, and thinks, he knows about the accident. He knows why I’m here.

He shrugs. “I outweigh you,” he says.

Kateri laughs. “No, you don’t,” she says. There is no way Hurt is any more than one fifty, and Kateri is a solid one forty. He is built like a swimmer, lean, like a runner with bird bones.

“I’m a guy?” he offers.

“A dainty guy,” Kateri says. She tilts her head and finishes her smoke, and the light from the parking lot shines on the underside of her chin, and she sees that Hurt notices it. The slice, the scar. The place where she almost lost her own head.

“Come on,” Hurt says. He looks like he wants to touch it, and she wants to let him.

“Do you think I’m drunker than you?” she asks. She breathes in the cold air after the cigarette, slow, blows it out through her lips.

“No.”

She stares at him for a minute. Part of her wants to break open, to ask him, Do you want to see it? The mark on me from my mistakes? Part of her wants to push him at the shoulders and watch him windmill to catch his balance. Part of her wants to kiss him.

She looks at his mouth when he relaxes it, the release of his lips and his jaw. He looks beyond her.

“Joel,” she says, half reprimanding, half taunting.

“Just text me when you’re home, okay?” he says.

She drives a little too slow, and she watches every tree, every peripheral movement for deer jetting out in front of her car. She thinks she hasn’t had that much. She thinks the Subaru is a safer car. For a length of road right before her apartment, she closes her eyes and lets the road go, feels like flying, like sinking, like waiting to hit the ground.

It’s twelve thirty when she falls into bed, still in her clothes. She wakes once, predawn, when the sky is still dark but the trees outside her window are loud with bird noise. It’s then that she remembers Joel Hurt’s warning and texts him—home—but sees above that that she sent him a text at one fifteen that reads you don’t know anything about me.