Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 59947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 300(@200wpm)___ 240(@250wpm)___ 200(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 300(@200wpm)___ 240(@250wpm)___ 200(@300wpm)
Her cat jumps up onto my legs, with two paws and what seems like most of his weight landing squarely on my bruised thigh. Though I’m seeing stars and this goddamn close to crying, I gently urge him over to the other side of my lap.
The Walker girl arrives with my water, grimacing in something close to sympathy. “He always knows right where it hurts. Want me to move him?”
“He’s all right.” Curled up now like any cat, though still looking as friendly as a rabid bulldog. “What’s his name?”
“Hot Biscuit Slim.”
“Nothing about this cat is slim.”
“And you’re not a reed.”
Fair point, but I’m not called Hot Biscuit Reed, either. “Did you make up that name or is it from something?”
“It’s from something.”
She doesn’t volunteer what it’s from. Though now that I’m thinking about it, I feel like I’ve heard the name before. I study the cat, trying to dig through the throbbing depths of my memory. Maybe something I read a long time ago? Or a cartoon character?
He looks like one. Like the animated version of a perpetually disappointed eighty-year-old man watching a bunch of screaming kids shit on his lawn. Fucking adorable.
The Walker woman is currently wearing the same grumpy expression. Not sure if it’s adorable or terrifying. “He never cuddles on my lap.”
Wordlessly I stroke my hand along his back. A soft purr fills the air.
She glowers at us both before spinning and returning to the table. Outside, the wind has eased up but the snow hasn’t. There’s not much light coming in through the window, so she’s set up a small halogen lantern to illuminate a project she’s got spread out. My gaze remains on her face for a while. The brighter light reveals a faint smattering of freckles that weren’t as visible by firelight. In my bashed-head state, those freckles are fucking mesmerizing. As is the way her upper lip is a bit plumper and poutier than her lower one, which I didn’t notice until I saw her in profile. Now I can’t stop looking.
Although I’m watching her, it’s a long time before I actually see what her hands are doing…which is viciously stabbing cranberries with a needle before shoving them onto a string.
“Are you making something or cooking?”
“Making.” She impales another cranberry. “A garland for the tree.”
“What tree?”
“The one I’ll go out and get as soon as it stops snowing.”
Which doesn’t appear to be any time soon. Which means I’m not leaving any time soon, either.
So I’d probably better learn her name. “Which one are you?”
“Which what?”
“I know you’re a Walker. I don’t know which one you are.”
She briefly pinches her bottom lip between her teeth and that top lip pillows out a little more. “Well,” she says, “it depends who you ask.”
“What?”
“To you”—she casts her gaze briefly my way, arching her brows before turning back to her garland and skewering a berry through the gut—“I’m the vicious one.”
My face feels hot again, which irritates the hell out of me. I’m not a blushing man. Yet the heat doesn’t recede as she continues. It just sits there, under my skin.
“But to someone else I know, I’m the disappointing and ungrateful one—and the one who will never live up to my full potential. To someone else, I’m the scourge of the earth, a slave to capitalism and enemy to the downtrodden, as well as a traitor to all that’s good and decent.” She slants me another arch look. “Exactly which one of those depends on what day it is.”
The flush in my face has spread all over now and gone beyond irritating, making everything in my field of vision waver like heated air over asphalt in summer. “I just want your name.”
“Ah.” She seems to consider. “No, I don’t think so.”
“What?” My brain’s sluggish, but I think she just refused to tell me her name.
Who does that?
She gives an unconcerned shrug. “I don’t feel like telling you.”
I don’t know what to say in reply. I stare at her, head pounding, leg aching, skin burning. Trying to fathom the sheer stubborn senselessness of being stuck in a one-room cabin with another person and not sharing your name with them.
After a while, the unreasonable woman asks in the most reasonable tone, “You hate us, but you don’t even know our names?”
“I do my best not to think of any Walkers at all.” Especially not while my brain is in a throbbing fucking fog. Though I know she’s not Laurel or Laura. That’s the one I went to school with. Lauren? Lauryn? That’s it. Lauryn. I’m pretty sure. I remember the Y from somewhere. In a yearbook, maybe. Christ, that was a long time ago.
“I suppose you also do your best not to think about how to tear our lives apart?”
“I honestly haven’t fantasized about that in a while.”