“She’s still classy as shit,” she decided.

“She is.”

“And pure sex. If she gave me a clear signal, I’d go to town and I’m only a bit into women.”

He drew in a deep breath, then like a robot, recited the practiced line, “I decline to comment on the grounds that it would self-incriminate.”

“Baby,” she cooed. She stumbled along the heaped branches and rocks to get close enough, and he caught her, the hand at her front going rigid and providing some of the leverage to keep her from falling. She leaned hard into the hand and reached up to touch his face. “There’s no criminating here. No discrimination, no incrimination, no cremation. You’re safe from me.”

She felt his hand at her chest move reflexively at the line.

She’d never known a guy like Disjoint, and she had known a lot of guys. When she had been fourteen she’d dated sixteen-year-olds. They’d wanted one thing. That hadn’t changed when she’d been sixteen and dating eighteen-year-olds.

It might have continued as a pattern, except shit had gone down when she was eighteen, and she hadn’t come away in one piece. It had taken her a while to try again. When she had, she’d been twenty, offering herself to thirty-year-olds to see if they’d bite. Some bit.

She hadn’t realized what she’d been looking for until she stumbled into it. A guy her age, who’d been hurt when she’d been hurt. She could offer him the sort of thing that other guys wanted, and he liked it, but it wasn’t why he stuck by her.

No. It was fucked up, but he stuck by her because he liked it when she was nice to him. It revved his engines and it made him happy in a day-to-day way.

She wasn’t good at being nice.

“Headlights.”

She saw. Across the parking lot, vehicles were convening.

“I brought binoculars if you want ’em,” D.J. said.

“I trust you.”

D.J. brought his hand to his face, two fingers at each eye. He pulled his hand away, and his eyes were each between two fingers. His own eye sockets were black pits, rimmed with red flesh and the horizontal ‘blindfold’ of white grease paint that he’d applied.

He stuck that hand out in the direction of the headlights. The eyes fritzed like a bad video tape, then disappeared.

“Breakthrough,” he said. “Some of them. No Damsel. Nobody else. I’m going to have to put my ears over there to catch what they’re saying.”

“I’ve got you.”

She drew closer to him, supporting him with her body. He reached up to remove his ears, which was a little more involved than simply removing the exterior portion, then he cast them out as he had the eyeballs.