Chapter 18
Distance

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Whitney made it until almost noon before she began to worry in earnest.

Granted, she hadn't exactly gotten up with the sun. Shocking absolutely no one in the history of the universe, she hadn't slept worth shit. Her brain had simply refused to shut down all the way, and it hadn't been solely due to being amped-up physically.

After a point, she had lost track of how many times she had gone over the incident in her head, from his helping her sort through the amassed clutter in the tunnels all the way to his eventual flight response. Now that she knew, it was impossible not to see it: so many signs had been there, she'd just either glossed them over, mistaken them to be something else, or missed them completely, again out of assumptions she'd (stupidly) made. She hadn't had the wherewithal to do any amount of real, deep processing in the moment, and because of that she couldn't help feeling she had mishandled things and rather badly.

Jason was a great many things, but he was neither a coward nor easily frightened. That said, he had never been immune to emotion, either.

Even in her most spiteful moments she had never been able to deem him unfeeling, and what he did feel he felt quite strongly. She had seen rage fit to curdle the blood like sour milk, sorrow deep enough to wound just by witnessing, hollow loneliness, wicked humor, joy so brilliant it was near to blinding. And fear – breath-gripping, paralyzing fear. She had seen that plainly in his eyes last night; reflected in the glass – the whites so stark they had reminded her of those of a prey animal – fear so sharp to look at it had been cutting. Fear that she could not in truth say she didn't understand to some degree.

It had not escaped her notice yesterday that he had chosen to remain near her while she went about her chores. Surely it had been tedious, surely he'd had more important (or at least less boring) things to do. Yet he had lingered.

He seemed to have been comfortable leaving her while she'd slept, but once she was up and awake he had seemed less keen on leaving her alone. It wasn't that she'd minded his presence, because she had truly rather enjoyed it; but she hadn't been able to tell if he was hanging around out of a similar enjoyment of company, or because he had still been worried that were he to leave for too long she might not be there when he came back. It hadn't felt like he was guarding her out of suspected necessity to make her stay, more like he had simply been trying to make himself helpful, or else available to be should she need it. Which was really rather sweet, but also likely indicative of an unexpressed fear.

Throughout the day she'd had to swallow the impulse to drop whatever she was doing, sit him down, and tell him that she was here now because she wanted to be – that she would never just up and go without a word or explanation. But these sentiments, while true, were only words. Words were easily used and easily spent, and even more easily broken. It was something she had to show him, prove through consistence and repetition. Except now she wondered if he wouldn't rather that she did just up and leave.

To experience such a strong reaction to someone, physical or emotional, without any kind of foundational experience or understanding had to have been scary. And ok, yeah, she had been caught a bit unawares, but honestly as soon as her brain had put it together she had known she needed to tread carefully. She should have held her shit together like the grown-ass woman she was. But to be honest, the strength of her own reactions had been a little scary to her, too.

The fumble had been significantly less than ideal, but she had hoped that with a bit of time – a bit of distance with which to process and to breathe – the worst of the shock would ease and he would find his way back come morning. But he hadn't. Time kept ticking resolutely on and no more sign of him than of a sudden freak blizzard, and the longer she waited the more her concern grew.

Since her arrival, not a day had passed whereupon she hadn't seen Jason at least once within a few hours of waking. But she had seen no hint of him since his half-frantic escape from the kitchen. Not as she was scarfing down her breakfast, nor as she ventured to the bathroom building and back to the lodge. She acknowledged that it was possible he'd been around and she had just missed him – he was far stealthier than any living thing had a right to be, after all. Yet she couldn't prevent the suspicion that he had spent his night as far from her as he could get; afraid or repelled or some combination of both.

What if he didn't come back? What if he stayed away until the three days were up and she was forced to make a decision she couldn't be sure was right? How was he supposed to process something like this? He had no way to pose questions or demand explanations, no one to turn to for comfort or for guidance. No one except for her – the cause of the problem.

What if...what if he'd never had an erection before?

It was difficult to imagine that being the case, but nothing about this situation was normal, and even in spite of the number of salacious acts he had probably born witness to she could easily see that being the case. If one didn't know what they were looking at, was a certain response guaranteed? How much was there by nature and how much had to be learned? Had it even been possible for him to see other people that way when so deeply entombed within his own perpetual rage?

She had no idea where to even begin looking for the answers to these questions. But she was not incapable of empathizing with some of the horror and confusion he must have felt.

Learning about sex in all its messy, embarrassing glory was nothing short of awful. It had been for her, at least: an amalgamation of fear-mongering and too-clinical-to-be-reassuring information thrown at her and her classmates in an awkward, stilted jumble. Eventually she had made her peace (as it was) with the injustice that was menstruation and the possibility of pregnancy, and she had come around to being less afraid of and disgusted by the prospect of the acts based around procreation. Some of that had been courtesy of her medical training, some from sheer stubbornness. Some of it had simply come from time and its power to smooth things the way the ocean smoothed the sharp edges of broken glass.

There were very few things Whitney would ever question Jason's ability to handle, but this was one of them. Psychology was not something she had ever studied in depth but she could recollect enough to be worried about the potential effects of a sudden shift in self-perception, and that was in a mind which had maintained a relatively typical social upbringing absent of serious, capital T Trauma.

She had no idea how such a revelation might hit him, lacking as he did so many base layers to ease the transition period which should really have happened in adolescence. An adolescence which he must have skipped. Or else just completely sidestepped in the ways she might have been familiar with. Not that she knew what it was like to deal with adolescence from a man's point of view. She knew only what little she'd been told – minimal snippets at best.

But maybe she was completely off base. He hadn't been so confused that he couldn't put together that he wanted something from her. It had been all over the checked-impulse to touch her, to run a hand through her hair, trace gentle fingertips down her face; and subsequently all over the fact that he'd checked it at all, as though crippled by some deep-buried internal certainty that to do it would be somehow wrong.

She wasn't quite sure what to think about that – how much of it might be a result of the same cruelty that had conditioned him to perceiving himself as so ugly or monstrous that he must hide his face and how much was a result of having absorbed more subtle social biases than she'd expected. Ultimately, it didn't much matter either way: not the root cause, nor whether it was her or himself that had driven him off. What mattered was that her stumbling attempts to reassure him had fallen flat, and she cared too much to allow him to wallow in any kind of shame or distress.

She spent a grand total of twenty minutes pacing back and forth between the kitchen and rec room before she couldn't stand waiting there any longer.

The last thing she wanted was to push him if she wasn't ready, but she didn't want him keeping his distance to the point where it became impossible for him not to associate her with discomfort, either. She was a friend, and he needed to know that nothing about what had happened last night changed that. She couldn't expect him to seek her out now, and if he wouldn't come to her, then she had to go to him. Find a way to smooth this over, to make the new and scary…well, less so.

She had thought it better not to rely on empty words, but that no longer felt like the right choice. Some problems could only ever be solved with words. She would have to prove them, and rightly so, but she couldn't prove what she hadn't said.

She had a voice. She needed to use it.

Her feet carried her nearly halfway down the porch before she retraced her steps and ducked back inside; reaching for the little table beside the door, her fingers closing around the knife sitting there next to the wilting buttercups.

It had been left for her amidst the piles of other things on the porch, housed snugly in a scored leather sheath, and she had set it there mostly because she didn't know where else to put it. It wasn't a very large knife – nothing near the level of the blade Jason kept in companion to the machete – but it was no steak knife, either. It looked tactical, the handle formed with finger-shaped grooves to ensure a solid grip and notches cut into the base of the blade in companion to the wicked, curving point. She knew it had not come to be there by accident, yet in the moment the sight of it had left her stunned.

To present her with a weapon was incredibly significant. It was both a symbol of autonomy and of trust. It also acknowledged that her new freedom meant he might not always be close enough to avert all dangers, and that in the event such a thing ever happened, she would be armed against them. He wanted her safe, and autonomous.

Even with words he could not have made a louder, more blatant statement of granting her power.

And aside from being powerful and caring, it was also wise. It was one thing to walk to the bathroom and back, but another entirely to wander around in the woods without protection. When she jogged down the porch steps and into the trees it was with the knife tucked securely in the back pocket of her shorts.

There was no path, really, no clear trail to indicate the way – it had gone so long unused. Yet she was becoming familiar enough with the routes to be able to remember where to go in spite of it. She supposed she would head for the house, looping through the camp on her way. If he wasn't there then she would start walking the snare trails. She wouldn't stray from the paths, either the ones properly laid of the ones she recollected clearly from their walks; the risk of getting caught in a hidden trap, or of getting lost, was high enough to caution her. As was the scolding she imagined she would get, silent and glowering but as potent as any verbal lashing, if she did otherwise. If that was unsuccessful, she would return to the house, plant herself like a dandelion, and not move from that spot until he came back.

Fortunately, luck seemed to be with her.

As she approached the house, shoes scuffing lightly against the overgrown trail, movement caught her eye, pulling her gaze to Jason's form descending the shallow steps.

He didn't appear to see her right away, occupied as he was with folding up a sizable length of dirty cloth as he started down the same path toward her. He didn't even seem to hear her – which was as worrying as it was unusual – until she had drawn within several yards of him.

He stopped cold in his tracks, head jerking sharply up, and something about the way his eyes settled on her made her own steps falter.

"Hey," she greeted, conscious of her volume and tone.

She would not be a clumsy idiot twice, damn it.

"I was coming to find you, I—wanted to make sure you were ok."

She had clearly underestimated the affect the previous night's revelations had had on her now that the surprise had faded, for she was suddenly having difficulty focusing on what she was supposed to be doing. Just his standing there looking at her was enough to send her brain skittering into the sensory-memory of the full length of his body against her, wide palm burning hot through her shirt where it pressed against her side. Callused fingertips grazing her lips.

And she'd thought she wanted to climb him like a tree before.

Shit.

But it didn't matter. Truly, it didn't. Sex that would more than likely never take place wasn't worth the loss of the friendship they had so painstakingly cultivated.

"Are you ok?"

She hadn't even noticed her feet move to take another step until she saw his shoulders tighten and hunch ever so slightly inward. Immediately she stilled.

No. No, he was not ok.

The tension was strong enough to taste. He was projecting distance and avoidance, all but radiating it like the glow around the circumference of a full moon, and in truth it didn't surprise her. For once, though, she was having trouble reading his usually quite communicative body language. She couldn't tell if he was afraid of some kind of rebuke, or whether it was the aversion she had been hoping to combat.

Oh, god, did he blame her? Did he consider her at fault for having instigated discomfort and unwanted emotion? A pang of horror sank her stomach like a fistful of stones at the thought.

He wouldn't have been the first man to do so, but she dearly hoped it wasn't the case. She was pretty sure she could handle anything else. Rejection itself was nothing unless it was because of something like that – something toxic and wrong.

"I'm sorry if I scared you last night, I…I didn't mean to. Didn't want to."

No response came, and she could feel herself starting to curl up internally, not unlike the way he had physically, and worked to shove through it.

"It's ok to feel…what you felt."

Oh, sweet jesus.

This was not going well at all. Maybe it would better to throw in the towel now while she still retained most of her dignity.

"It's—it's not bad, it's natural and normal. I promise it's all right."

Still nothing. Nothing but cautious stare and tight, watchful uncertainty. Nothing for long moments wherein she started to think the knots of anxiety might strangle her from the inside.

And then,after seconds that passed with all the slow agony of removing a fingernail broken too close to the bed, he moved.

A single nod. A little short, a little tight, but there. It clearly still felt far from all right to him, and wouldn't unless she found a way to make it so – to paint it in a light that resonated as positive. But it was acknowledgement, and she could work with that.

She cast about for something to use, some way to explain that would accomplish what she wanted and that she could actually say with minimal embarrassment. Surely he had witnessed animals mating, right? Could she use that as an example? Explain that people did the same thing and how? Yes, but hell if she was going to be able to get that out without turning red as the guts of a watermelon and choking on half the words. She hadn't even been able to go into very much detail about her period and its relation to childbirth. So...nope. She needed something simple, straightforward, without any of the heavy emotional or biological baggage that neither of them needed right now. There would be time for that. Maybe. Later. Much later.

"It just means that you...like me."

Jason shifted slightly on his feet, as though in suddenly and intense discomfort. But...no, it wasn't discomfort, per say. She had seen this particular sideways-and-down head tilt before, and while it was faint, she could see even from the distance that the set of his shoulders had actually relaxed ever so slightly. This was shyness.

Just from that she could tell she had, by some clash of luck and timing, put it exactly the right way for him to make the connection. Whatever else was confusing and strange, he understood the concept of liking someone in the way she meant it – if a bit abstractly.

He must have just been starting to develop an interest in girls when his life had taken its plummeting leap off the edge of a cliff. After that he probably hadn't given a damn whether the people he killed were male or female. He'd just wanted them gone. But if he could comprehend liking then maybe she could explain the rest in a way that wasn't so intense. Or gross. Because wow had she thought sex was gross when she'd been younger. Well, more that her own body had felt foreign and traitorous and strange, and most of that had been due to the social side-effects of adolescence.

He might even now feel a similar kind of self-directed betrayal. The crucial difference was that he didn't need to worry about the kind of judgement she had dealt with. She was going to do her damndest to ensure he felt as safe and accepted as possible in order to adjust, and she knew of only one real way to do this in the rapidly depleting time she had: eliminate the isolation. Both in terms of physical distance, and in emotion.

The anxious introvert in her vehemently did not want to make a move like this. She could actually feel the nervous sweat starting to bead at the nape of her neck and line her palms. The impulse to flee and hide away was a fierce one, but her stubbornness – equally formidable – proved hardy enough to combat it. She could not count on him to draw conclusions from a bare-bones foundation and her likely pathetic attempts to hint at it. And whether or not anything came of it, she had to be plain and clear and say it.

Her arms came up automatically, wrapping around her own middle in a defensive reflex that she couldn't bring herself to fight. She forced her tight throat to swallow, and softly, almost too quiet to be more than a whisper, murmured: "I like you too."

Even from several yards away and through the obstruction of the mask she swore she saw his gaze sharpen on her. There was a question there, unspecified, uncertain. Disbelieving.

The statement had been vague and nowhere near as articulate as she had wanted, and he couldn't tell how she meant it. Did she mean she liked him the way a friend did – amicable, even affectionate, but no more – or did she mean she liked him. The other way. The more way. Yes and yes. But she didn't know quite how to say it. Suddenly words required the dexterity and skill of brain surgery and she was sorely lacking in both. But he, for all his lack of direct knowledge, was uncannily perceptive; she just had to hint loudly enough for it to click.

She had always been shyer than was good for her, but it wasn't always quite this bad. At work, for example, with the buffer of being a professional and having the focal point of tasks to be done she didn't have as much difficulty. There wasn't as much at stake as there was in situations like this, high-emotion and high-importance. It didn't matter as much if she bungled an encounter with a patient she probably wouldn't see for another year, or who was likely in a less than ideal mood to begin with, being at the doctor's and all. But the cost of bungling this with the wrong word or gesture or tone was so much greater. She risked ruining everything – of sending them to a place worse than where they'd begun.

Ok, that might be a hair dramatic. She wasn't going to fear for her life again, but she would feel like she'd been kicked in the chest by an especially cranky draft horse.

She shifted, digging her fingers into her sides. God, she was a twitchy, high-strung disaster of a human.

"I just..."

What was she doing? She was going to leave in less than two days, wasn't she? Was she? Fuck, she still didn't know. Keeping that in mind, was it worse to leave it, or to attempt to be helpful? Was this even helping? More than likely no. In fact, she was probably making everything actively worse and it wasn't because her brain was rapidly spiraling into crisis-defense-mode.

And yet she couldn't stop it now. Even if it turned out to be a horrendous mistake in any or every capacity, she couldn't help believing that it was better to be real with herself, and likewise real with him. She would handle whatever came after.

Well, she would do her best.

"If you ever wanted to—"

She couldn't say it. Touch me. The words simply would not release the death grip they'd seized upon her tongue no matter how hard she tried to spit them out.

"—again, that would be ok. N-not that you have to. You don't. But if you did..."

Wow she sounded crazy. And now that she'd said it she found herself sweating almost worse than before. The admission, pathetic and full of holes as it was, had left her feeling more vulnerable than expected, and everything in her was desperate to slip away, toss a shaky "ok, bye" over a shoulder, and run. Yet that very same everything knew as deeply as she knew her own name that to do so would have been the worst possible thing she could do.

As agonizing as it might be, she must hold her ground. She couldn't expect him not to be avoidant if she did no different. So she did. Somehow, with thanks to some hitherto unknown well of inner strength or tenacity, she did.

Jason's head turned, angling his chin slightly to the left. She could almost hear the gears turning over and over in his mind: trying to decode her tone, the awkwardness in her posture, the way she had averted her eyes to the ground for the split second it took her to recognize the reflex and correct it to force her gaze up. He was once again wearing his coat, which she was about ninety percent positive he had left on the porch when he'd fled, proving he had come back at some point in the night or early morning to collect it. There was that, at least. The reason she noted it now was because she had just seen the rigid line of his shoulders ease in entirety. The disbelief was still there, but it seemed more...quizzical now than wary. No longer cautious, but baffled.

"It doesn't have to change anything. That's—"

She had been about to say that it was up to him whether anything changed, but she had swallowed the thought before putting it to voice, afraid it might confuse him even more.

"Not if we don't want it to."

The use of the word we was deliberate – yet one more attempt to lessen the rift between them. What she hadn't expected was how it would feel to say it, or to hear it; and once it left her lips she realized how wistful she was, longing and achy in a way completely different than before. Perhaps that was the cause of the misstep, so focused was she on the sore knots tangled around her breastbone that the transition from thoughts to words frayed and began to falter.

"I mean…you almost killed me once—"

Oh, damn.

Jason visibly flinched, the heel of his left foot scraping an inch-long gouge into the dirt as if having not quite completely managed to curb the reflex to retreat. Guilt and horror flared, and she hurriedly finished making her point.

"—a-and now we're this. It's just another choice. Maybe not as insane of a choice, but…"

Oh, forfuck's sake, Whitney shut up.

He was still just staring at her with what she was positive was the reproach she deserved, half-poised as if considering the option to simply up and remove himself from the unholy clusterfuck she had just made of an already uncomfortable situation. And the more she talked the worse she was making it, but words kept spilling out of her mouth like water from an overturned basin.

"That analogy made so much more sense in my head. Just forget—"

…and then she heard the snort. His chest dipped, his shoulders jerking with the force of the perfectly startled, undignified laugh that just kept going...and going.

He was laughing.

Laughing.

Not only that but he was nearly doubled-over, bent at the waist, clutching the bundle of cloth to his chest and shaking with the ferocity of the laughter she couldn't hear, and she couldn't tell if she was more relieved or stunned. More than anything she felt as though she'd been hit over the head with a sizable rock. Was this a good thing? Had she somehow managed to diffuse the iron tension by accident? Or had she sent him spiraling into hysterics?

She risked moving closer, her steps narrow and cautious as she drew near, only to skitter half a step back when abruptly he straightened – fearful of intruding into his space when he might not want her there.

His chin angled down to look at her, and she did not think it chance the way his eyes found hers so quickly, nor that the caustic mix of unease and wary disbelief of moments earlier were now nowhere to be seen.

Maybe it was just her imagination, but he seemed to be trying to tell her that she'd succeeded in making her point, even if she had made a mess of doing so. Hell, it was possible having been so ungraceful about it had actually worked in her favor. It might have shown him that she was just as nervous as he. Nervous, and not for reasons based in fear or dislike, but because she, too, turned into something of an anxious wreck where serious crushes were concerned. She wasn't actually sure she could call this a crush anymore. She was far too emotionally invested to call it that – not that she knew what word existed to describe it, and she wasn't ready to dig too deep into the possibilities.

It didn't matter. All that mattered was that the rigid lines in his posture were gone, and he was no longer eyeing her like he was waiting for punishment. Or rejection.

The thought stung, sudden and biting like a thorn. The idea that he might assume she would reject him, and the reasons why...but she didn't blame him if he had.

He blinked once, slowly, calmly, as if waiting for her to say something more, and she felt herself take another cautious step toward him. For reasons, she told herself, not simply because she was craving some reassurance of her own.

"Are we ok?"

The question was mousy and tight in her throat, but he seemed to have no problem hearing her. Something about his eyes warmed ever so slightly. There was still a hint of uncertainty there, something tentative and perhaps a bit bewildered, which told her he would likely be doing a good amount of processing during the day. But he seemed far more stable than before.

Adjusting the cloth so that it draped over one arm, he extended the other hand to make the same little patting motion he had used to assure her that she didn't need to freak out over his wounds.

Ok.

The relief was swift, flooding her with the same airy lightness of an intravenous high.

They were ok. Maybe a bit regressed from where they had been in terms of ease and comfort, but that was fine. So long as they were all right, the rest could be mended. For the first time since finding him, her exhale left her without constriction.

She glanced down at the cloth he carried – burlap, she noticed, its rough weave choked with dry clods of dirt – and seized upon the object as a means to shift the conversation.

"Are you in the middle of something?"

Following her gaze to the fabric and gave a little half-shrug, tilting his head vaguely. Yes, but also no.

"Do you want help?"

He lifted his focus to her, the look gone outright bewildered, as though asking why she would ask such a question.

"You helped me all day yesterday, so I'll help you today."

It was partly true, but really she just wanted an excuse to be near him, because how else was she supposed to ease him out of avoiding her like she was the walking plague? That wasn't what he was doing. He had been protecting himself like anyone would, and the reflex to do so had been more than valid. It was very possible he no longer would, but time was not on her side and she wanted to make sure; wanted to ensure any remaining scraps of negative association were smoothed away.

"Unless you don't want me to."

Jason lifted his shoulders in a shrug and gave a sideways nod.

She blinked, bemused.

"Was that a please don't or a do what you want kind of nod-shrug?"

Her reward for her flippancy was the hint of a smile creasing around his eyes, which she celebrated with an internal screech of victory. His empty hand lifted, holding up two fingers.

"Good," she said airily, "I will do what I want, thank you."

The smile lines deepened, and she caught the motion of another laugh in the line of his shoulders.

Yes. Yesyesyes. If she could make him laugh then they really must be ok.

Then he was moving toward her, his unoccupied hand lifting in a beckoning curl, and she fell happily into step with him.

They headed back down along the path she'd just traversed, from the house through the camp and descending into the trees. She didn't recognize the exact spot at which they entered, though she did note that the foliage seemed thicker there than most of the game trails which formed a base for the snare lines – apart from the places where the plant-life had been crushed and broken as though by something large charging blindly along. Still, the going was easier than it could have been, and the silence that enveloped them outside of the noise of her own footfalls was so wonderfully easy that she could almost have cried. It wasn't exactly comfortable, not as it had been. But that was just due to the sense of newness. They were a little awkward again, the way they had been at the start of their walks together, unsure quite where the boundaries lay, or what to do with them. At least, that's how it seemed to her.

It was a situation quite unlike anything she was familiar with. While she'd had plenty of crushes, she had never been the one to declare feelings for someone else, and this...this was nothing like that. She wasn't waiting for him to notice her – he'd noticed just fine on his own. She was waiting to see whether he decided to do something about the shift in his feelings, or whether he indicated he'd rather she do something. And it was still possible that he wouldn't want either. That was as fine as it had been before. But for all she was determined now to act as though nothing had changed for the sake of his comfort, she was not about to say she wasn't a bit of a wreck.

She was excruciatingly aware of just how close he was to her at any and every given moment, how he measured his steps to match hers, often slowing when she struggled with the occasional tangle of brush – which she did more often than she should have because she was so damn distracted. Distraction that was likely to render her mostly bare legs a canvas littered with an artful array of scratches. She was aware of every sound he made, every deep breath, every rustle of clothing or leaves that wasn't of her own making.

She had no idea if Jason was as hyper-focused as she was, and there was nothing in the world that would tempt her to ask. He seemed perfectly composed, and either he was doing a much better job of handling his shit than she was, or he was extraordinarily skilled at faking it.

They continued that way for about a quarter mile, when out of nowhere his hand found her, curving around her upper arm, and she nearly jumped out of her skin at the contact.

She wasn't startled. Not really. It was simply that what had become familiar over the span of weeks was suddenly not so. They hadn't touched since last night, and it was suddenly clear that she couldn't now feel his hand on her without thinking of the way he'd touched her mouth last night, fingertip lingering over the curve of her lower lip as though he'd been thinking about what it might feel like to kiss her.

Jason didn't seem to have thought much of it beyond the purpose of gaining her attention – and of pulling her to a stop, as he did. Not until she looked up to meet his eyes and saw the spark of what might have been a very similar realization in them. He released her, slowly, and she could see his throat work on a compulsive swallow. His fingers folded inward briefly, skimming together as if to rid them of the ghostly remnants of the texture of her skin – which she might have found offensive had she not completely understood it. Once recovered, he pointed to her. Then he pointed to himself, the two fingers he used to point spread in a narrow V to clearly indicate his own eyes, telling her to watch, finally angling his fingers down at his feet as he took a deliberate step forward.

She understood what he couldn't say. They were going to be crossing terrain with which she was completely unfamiliar and which was more heavily protected. More dangerous. He wanted her to follow, and he wanted her to be careful where she put her feet.

"Walk where you walk," she echoed, and he nodded. "Got it."

She expected him to set off now that she'd confirmed she understood what to do, yet he lingered for a moment, hesitating, and she had the distinct sensation of standing at the edge of a precipice she couldn't see. She spared a glance for the burlap he carried, seeing now the coppery stains amidst the dirt, remembering the bodies she had seen him haul down to the tunnels to do away with – each wrapped in a length of cloth.

All of a sudden she wondered if it had been the right decision to force her company on him. She didn't know what they were doing or where they were going, but she knew right then that it was going to involve at least one dead body.

Right on the heels of that doubt came a strange sort of awe. He had brought her this far knowing at the end of the line lay something he knew full well she would more than likely find distasteful? She was actually somewhat shocked that he hadn't sent her away at the offer of help, which made her wonder why he hadn't. Was it because he had given her free will and was refusing to go back on it? Or was there something else beneath that?

Was he trying to remind her of the lives he had taken, of all the things he'd done? As if she'd somehow forgotten between this moment and just two nights ago when she'd watched him split a girl's rib cage in half to get to her?

It seemed ludicrous to imagine it, but somehow she couldn't help thinking that was exactly what he was doing.

Turn back now.

It's not too late to change your mind.

It was another little layer of defense meant to spare him from potential wounds that would heal nowhere near so quick or so cleanly as the ones she had found vanished overnight.

She knew he had taken lives. She knew it just as she knew that he tended to cast his eyes down and hunch his shoulders when he felt shy or embarrassed or vulnerable. But he hadn't always been a killer. Men weren't born killers. They weren't born shielding their faces from the world. They weren't born rigid, unchangeable things. That above all other things he had proven. And he was only a man: flesh and bone, born of love, capable of joy and laughter and deep feeling. Capable of wanting companionship.

Whatever she was walking into, she wasn't going to like it. But she was going to go nevertheless. She figured it was her turn to prove some things.

Mustering a smile, she gestured him onward with a sweep of her arm.

"After you."

Altogether the trek was considerable – well over a mile if she was any judge – though she didn't starting thinking it until the trees had begun to disperse, grateful for the reprieve from what had been a challenging romp over fallen trunks and gnarled roots and other obstacles. She hadn't dared stray more than a few inches from the places where Jason's steps had marked a safe path for her, and just the concentration it had taken to do so had been tiring.

She didn't realize they had crossed out of the woods and into a yard at first. Not until she registered that there was grass beneath her feet – burnished with the yellow-brown patina of summer. Grass of a kind that was never found in the wild. That was when she looked up and saw the house.

Well…in truth she really just glanced at the house itself; long enough to register that it was huge and that it was clearly the kind of place someone with far too much money than they knew what to do with kept as a summer vacation home. Other than that she didn't pay it much attention. There were other, much more engaging things to look at.

Such as the police cruiser parked out front.

Such as the thick, red-brown stains which streaked the front door and pooled, dry and flaking, on the stoop below.

Such as the body of the boy laid out at the base of the shallow porch, blood drenching the front of a pale plaid shirt stiff, dark hair tousled around his lolling head.

Without a single hitch Jason headed straight for the boy, unfolding the cloth as he went in order to cast it over the body as though covering something unsightly. Though not, she recognized, as though he'd hoped she wouldn't see. It was a weird combination of impassivity and respect. Neither the death nor the mess bothered him, but he didn't particularly relish it either.

It had been meant as a courtesy, unquestionably. He knew how she felt about the killing from her reactions to seeing previous bodies alone, and had acted to remove the visual so as not to cause her undue distress. But as she considered it she began to wonder...had there been a hint of shame? Not guilt – he felt his cause justified and likely would until either he met his grave or time stopped, whichever came first. But shame, she could see. Either for a judgment he might think she had for him, or because of his own need for it, the origins of the purpose or the catharsis it served him. Or maybe it wasn't that at all, but simply regret, as though this had been a kill he would rather not have made.

Although frankly she was pretty convinced that every kill was a kill he would rather not have had to make.

She surveyed the scene around her; the front door which stood open on its hinges, as though someone had left in a hurry and hadn't bothered to close it – because they'd left at a dead run, most likely. Who had time to think about closing doors in the midst of a panic? The dirt had been churned up by many feet, which the heavy rain only seemed to have solidified into shape instead of smoothing everything away. There was a fireplace poker lying a foot or so away from the body, next to what looked like a wok pan. Weird, but there it was.

Then her eyes fell on the motorcycle – a classic Triumph chassis customized over years spent in labor and love. Clay's bike. She would have known it in her sleep.

What had happened here?

Some things she could surmise. The missing flyers in her brother's bag told her he'd been out looking for her. Posting them would do little good somewhere so rural, so he must have been going door to door and asking, which must have been how he'd ended up here. Was this where he'd run into Jenna? And surely she wouldn't have been out here on her own. It was summer break and she'd had something of a college look about her, so she must have been out here with some friends.

Oh, how familiar that scenario sounded. Whitney, Mike, and his buddies might have gone about the poor-man's version of it, but it wasn't all that different really. Except she and her unfortunate camping companions had, in their ignorance, actively trespassed upon land they'd had no rights to. This was someone's house, on someone's legal property, and while obviously a seasonal retreat, it didn't appear unlived-in. If Jason considered it part of his territory, there would have been conflict enough by now to ensure the owners and any guests of theirs stayed well and clear away, surely?

"This isn't on camp grounds, is it?" she asked. She was still looking at the bike, but she saw the white shape of the mask move from side to side as Jason shook his head in answer. "So they must have—"

Aside from the motorcycle and the cruiser, there were no other vehicles to be seen, which couldn't be right. Homes out here were not within walking distance of anything except maybe a neighbor, and that had to be especially true for the wealthy. They would have had to drive in, and if the car was gone then that could only mean that some of them had left in it – and for all the signs of someone having left in a hurry, she didn't think whoever had fled had done so in a car. There was no way Jason would have allowed that. She wasn't actually sure he wouldn't be capable of flipping a truck onto its back if he was good and pissed, and that he wouldn't have done so in order to prevent his prey from fleeing.

They must have gone to the lake, then. It had been hellishly hot that day, and the lake was the only body of water that could be used for recreation in the area (as Wade had researched, and proceeded to tell anyone with near-to-functioning ears). Some of them had likely driven out to the water – thinking to splash around and cool off – only to be met with the same penance given to all other trespassers. Maybe others had come looking for them? Or maybe one of them had managed to evade capture long enough to hightail it back here. Jenna, perhaps? She could think of no reason why Jason would leave the grounds except to track down someone who owed him a death. Except maybe one.

If it had been intolerable before to allow people to set foot on his soil, it had become doubly so simply for the risk they represented to her; whether to her safety or to her remaining there with him. It was the reason behind his choice to come back to her rather than immediately setting after the rest of his prey, the almost pained response when she had asked him to let her go that final time. It was why he had reacted the way he had to her being taken away, and what had tipped him fully from captor to something else. She didn't need confirmation to know any of this to be true.

"All right then," she heard herself say, the words coming as if from far away rather than her own mouth.

Had she known that she had been offering to help clean up the scene of probably more than one murder? She must have – deep down. She'd known what she would find here and had come along anyway. And it should bother her – all of it, from the scene itself to her willingness to tag along, to the fact that said willingness hadn't so much as budged now that she was standing there in the aftermath. But it didn't really…which, frankly, probably should have bothered her even more. Was it callus of her not to be bothered by the deaths that had occurred here? She wasn't uncaring; she was sorry for the waste, for the loss and the pain suffered by families and loved-ones, and she didn't particularly want to have a hand in dealing with the bodies. But the death itself, and Jason's part in it, wasn't much of a problem anymore.

Was it possible to understand and accept an act without directly sanctioning it? A month ago she would have answered that question very differently.

Turning to Jason, she pointed to the cruiser. "Are there keys for this?"

~/~

All through the night Jason's head had been reeling. The way it had when he'd been little and beset with a fever, when days had bled together in a swirling fog amidst the channels of his brain. He had thrown himself into the work of hauling bodies, starting with the one left crucified upon a hay hook at the back of an old farmer's truck – untouched, which he had expected, but which also succeeded in adding a dash of much-deserved guilt to the slurry of other less than pleasant emotions. He worked half by muscle memory, and far more slowly than he normally would. For all that his flesh seemed wired with an excess of energy, it felt as though every movement required him to wade through the soupy mess in his head as he might have deep water or mud. He knew it was only in his own mind, and knew after the hours he'd spent trying to combat it that struggling did nothing but exacerbate the difficulty. Not that knowing it stopped him.

He fought it all through the dark hours and far into the daylight. He fought it as he trekked back and forth through the woods to the wealthy house on the slope to the tunnels, hefting bodies gone cold and stiff with death, heavier by far than they should have been – or than they truly were.

Had he deigned to look at the reasons he would see his shame at his lack of control, both for its own sake and for the witness to it. That of all the witnesses it had been her. He would see his own fear that he had offended her – whatever words she had given to the contrary – that he might never see her again. A fear trumped only by that of its opposite, because the idea of seeing her again came close to rendering him right back where he had been the night before – a trembling wreck of unsteady joints and unreliable flesh, clinging to the bark of a tree and trying in vain not to drown. He would see the burgeoning threads of self-loathing just starting to take root inside himself.

Blame was something Jason was intimately familiar with. He knew and accepted the things he'd done, whether willful or un, and that most of the world (his victims more so than most) considered them beyond the realm of simply bad. In his worst days he might approach the realm of internalized degradation, but he had never hated himself. If he'd had the time to cultivate it further, he very well might have from that point on. Fortunately, that was time he was not granted.

At first he'd thought her a figment of his apparent delirium, but for the fact that as soon as his eyes found her standing there on the path everything around him stopped – including the reeling in his head.

It wasn't that he had been avoiding her. That would have required active intent, and the only intent Jason had allowed himself had been in the pursuit of seeing to the mess he'd made. He supposed it could be said that he had avoided the thought of her, but it had been avoidance tattered by utter failure, so he wasn't sure that counted. Pitiful as it had been, the effort he had made in the attempt had shattered the instant he laid eyes on her again, and for all he tried he could not quash the spark of want that seemed to flush like adrenaline through his blood.

It was that quick, the space of a glance, of a breath, and he felt as incapacitated as something small and furry ensnared between the coils of a snake. Yet as frightening as it might have been, he relished it too, and he understood there was much he would do - and not much he wouldn't – just to be allowed to look at her.

He understood immediately that she had tracked him down purposefully and braced himself for whatever came next. He expected her ire, or perhaps more of her selfless reassurance, and when it became clear it would be the latter he found himself wishing she would drop the kindness and, if not yell, then simply leave him be. He didn't want to hear her tell him yet again how normal everything was. He had no concept of normalcy; the word was as meaningless as air stripped of oxygen and just as helpful. He didn't want to hear her tell him over and over again that everything was fine when nothing would ever be fine again.

She had to know she didn't need to do this, that she didn't need to pretend. Well...no, she didn't. Even now she had perfect reason to be feel she must pretend, either for her own sake or for her brother's, not realizing that he could no longer feel the pull to find and kill even had he wanted to pick it up again. And yet if she was pretending it was extremely convincing, which would have been new, for she had never before been anything close to a good liar. Yet he couldn't imagine why she would lie even to be kind. What good would it do her? What would a lie gain her after all these weeks? He couldn't think of anything, and everything about the way she spoke and held herself implied a shy uncertainty bordering on the edge of terror quite similar to the one he'd felt thrashing around inside himself since yesterday. Thrashing like a grounded fish drowning on air.

She seemed to be trying to convey something beyond simple reassurance and while glad that she was still able to bring herself to speak to him, he was not above admitting that her lack of directness about what she was trying to say without actually saying it was causing his own quite unsteady nerves to fray even farther than they were already.

And then, as if she'd read that very thing straight from his bones, the bland reassurances stopped. She regarded him, head tilted ever so slightly to the side, eyes warm...soft, and when she spoke again it was to utter six tiny, seemingly insignificant words that resonated where soothing platitudes about normalcy had all fallen flat.

It just means you like me.

The relief that came over him was almost profound. This wasn't the false sympathy of someone kind-natured. She didn't think he was rude or crass or any other foul thing he couldn't think of. She didn't think he was like all those other...

His mind stopped mid-motion, grinding to a halt as it caught up with the feverish things the relief had been throwing at him. He had been pleased she hadn't linked his behavior with that of the other people he had drawn the similarity to, only to realize he couldn't know that to be true. Nor could he know whether it was a good thing to not be like them in this particular situation. Now that he considered it; if she kept calling it normal, whether it felt (or even was) that way, then she believed it to be, which meant she did view him as any other person. And as thoroughly as he had rejected humanity or personhood as a part of his identity, it all of a sudden struck him that this was exactly what he wanted. Because if she saw him not as a monster but as just another person, then maybe...

Maybe what?

He did like her, yet like as he understood the meaning of the word came nowhere close to what he truly felt. It was inadequate, wasn't enough to describe the craving for her company, for her touch. The sharp desire to spend the rest of time sitting next to her in the shade of a tree listening to her read, or watching the crinkle of her nose and the fine, faint creases at the corners of her eyes as she laughed. The urge to abandon what he had been before; to shed it like a snake's old skin, to be no longer hunter, killer, but instead...something else.

He wanted to be hers, Jason discovered. To be with her in the holding of hands kind of way, the resting of a head on a shoulder kind of way – the way she had been with that boy he had butchered before ever seeing fully seeing her for the first time. She was here now because she had chosen to be, but he wanted her to want to be there, not simply to have chosen for whatever amalgamation of reasons she had to do so. To be with him not just because she cared as she might have cared for any other lonely, wounded thing. He wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything. But just as he could not be sure whether even a small part of her had stayed for any reason other than to protect her brother, he could not expect it of her.

There was no maybe.

It wasn't her fault – none of it was. If she thought she must stay to keep him from hunting down and murdering her family it was only because he had given her reason to believe it, whatever anguish it might cause him to think it might be true. It wasn't her fault that things had happened the way they had. It wasn't her fault that he felt what he did, or that he no longer understood his place in the world without her. He could not...would not punish her for that. He wouldn't have had the will even if he wanted to.

"I like you too," she said then, and it was nice, in a way, to know that in spite of all that had changed, his propensity for cycling through a near-constant state of bafflement had not. Or it might have been, had the revelation come to him at any other time.

Suddenly he had no idea how to read her. He knew what he thought she meant, what the word itself meant literally, and yet there was a part of him that questioned whether he fully understood what was going on behind the topmost layers of her voice and lovely face. Whatever the intent was behind the surface words, she meant it, that much he could tell. But he didn't understand the way she said it, with the almost-hushed tone of a confession, as though divulging a secret.

What was she actually trying to say to him – that she cared? But he already knew she did. It was echoed in her actions, the way she spoke to him, interacted with him, showed concern when he was hurt; and whether simply the actions of a kind person or not it was her conscious choice to bestow them on him. Something he could not see her having done had she not grown to see and know him the same was he had for her. But it seemed as though she were trying to say more than that, and he didn't understand what else there could be because it wasn't as if...

He saw her arms tighten around her own middle as though she were trying to reassure herself, and there was a part of him – an uncomfortably strong part – that itched to cross the distance and somehow perform the act for her. Reassurance, that was, not so much the embrace...although he would not have been opposed to that part either. Well, he was opposed on sheer principal, because it had been made clear he could not be trusted within five feet of her. Not that he could have gone to her anyway. He was rooted in place, his focus narrowed onto her, for in spite of her silence the latent energy in her posture informed him he was waiting for something, the heavy sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach telling him everything her words had not.

This was the part where she told him but not like that, that it could never happen again. And he knew that. He knew better than to so much as imagine she could ever want anything to do with him in that way.

He knew what he was, had heard it so many times that it would be forever ingrained in his mind. Ugly, freak, stupid – monster. No. As affectionate as she might be, she didn't want anything more from him than what they'd already established, and he understood. He did. But he couldn't shut out the sting of it entirely. Nor could he cut her off, prevent her from vocalizing what he already knew full well to keep it from cutting even deeper, so he braced himself for the impact, resolving himself to dull the pain to come as best he could.

Nothing – nothing in the vast, limitless span of the world – could have prepared him for what next came out of that soft, pretty pink mouth.

"If you ever wanted to—" She paused mid-statement and his brain struggled to catch up with the words that didn't match his expectation, with the faint flush that dusted her cheeks. The breath she took, seemingly in place of an unspoken words, caught in her throat. "—again, that would be ok."

In that moment Jason would have sworn upon his mother's grave that his heart had stopped.

"N-not that you have to. You don't. But if you did..."

Shock collided into him with the force of an avalanche, burying him within the span of a second. He actually felt physically unsteady, as though he might knock himself over were he to breathe or blink or think too hard.

He knew he was staring at her, knew she could probably tell that his mouth had dropped open in spite of his obscured face simply by the way he was gaping and he almost couldn't bring himself to care. Had she just...surely not. He didn't even want to consider it, because if he was wrong – if he misinterpreted this, of all things – it would be beyond humiliating. It would be devastating. He would never be able to look at her again. His grip had tightened upon the burlap he'd been using to wrap and carry the bodies in, to contain awkward limbs and potential mess, he could feel his knuckles whitening as he clung to it as though it had the power to anchor him, to pull him out of the roiling quagmire his brain had been reduced to.

What would be ok? If he wanted to what, again? Not have whatever the tightening in the groin was happen again, surely. He had no control over that whether he wanted to or not and he suspected she knew that. So what did she mean?

He cast his memory back, intending to scour through the tense, awful, wonderful minutes he had been working quite hard not to think about since they'd occurred. Yet all he could think of was the soft strands of her hair gliding between his fingers, the copper tones in them burning like raw metal in the hard light of a battery-powered lantern, and the texture of the skin lying over the delicate bones in her face, the warmth of her cheek. The inexplicable, almost magnetic pull of his gaze down to the curve of her lower lip. The way the tightness in his stomach had stirred with the sudden, powerful need to trace the shape with a fingertip. He had done it before he could truly think about it, so consuming had been the compulsion.

In the moment he had been convinced that her tolerance was only due to her good nature, that it could be the only reason for it. He had been sure that he had been out of line – that he had frightened her, disgusted her – but now, with space to ease the panic and make way for new logic, he found he was no longer so certain.

In order for that to be true, he would have to ignore everything that had come before it: the way she'd sought to include him in her joyful dancing, the subsequent invitation into her new home. It would require forgetting the tender focus she'd shown him as she'd rubbed soap into the creases of his palms without seeming to care about the grime. The look on her face in the split second it had taken the current of his terror to jolt his body into motion had been nowhere close to fear. Nor horror, nor disgust. Surprise, perhaps, but more, too. All of a sudden he was forced to wonder if he had been interpreting the expression he had thought to be founded in fear that way because it was the nearest thing he knew and understood, even when her body language said something different.

Now that he was able to think beyond the panic he could remember: the pressure of her hand on his as if to lock him in place when he had tried to back up and give her the space he'd thought she wanted, the subtle curve of her shape as if fitting her own body against him – a move that had been purely hers, not his. Heat curled beneath his skin just at the memory. He could almost feel the graze of her fingertips against his stomach, a soft, barely-there touch through his shirt as she'd released her grip on the worn cloth, so close to the tight, urgent throb in his groin. Soft, yet lingering. Too lingering to be completely absentminded.

And that's where his logic met the chasm of what he didn't know. At that point she'd had no need or reason to touch him, not even to curb his reflex to escape. But then, just because she hadn't needed to didn't mean she hadn't wanted to...

The thought caught in his mind as though he'd walked through a spiderweb, fine and clinging and impossible to dislodge.

Had she wanted to touch him? Wanted him to touch her? But it couldn't be that simple – it couldn't be that at all. That was…personal. That was the word his mother had used. Personal. Spoken with the explicit implication that this meant out of bounds to any and everyone else, that no one would or should have anything to do with it, including himself. Which, now that he considered it, clearly could not be the truth in full. He could accept the probability of a few deviations from a rule like this, but it did not account for the sheer number – vast enough he could not have counted even if he'd made the effort – of people he had witnessed breaking it over the years. There were times, he surmised, that within certain contexts, what was personal became somehow less so. Enough that sharing became acceptable, perhaps even expected. But that couldn't have been what she meant.

And yet...

He couldn't dislodge the recollection of the sound she had made, breathy and faint and perfectly pitched to rattle the bones in his spine.

In his undeniably agitated state he had mistaken it for a negative response to something he'd done, whether by touching her or standing too close or looking at her in a way that scared her. But it had been an assumption made based on responses garnered from other people over many years, one based in muscle memory and the reflex of repetition, and for all that he had heard such a sound in very different contexts having it directed at him could only have been a bad thing. But it had not been. She was as good as saying it...or so it seemed.

Or was it?

She was throwing words at him again, half tripping over them in a haste that read like nervousness he didn't understand, as if the silence she knew he could not change was making her nervous. She said that nothing had to change; yet while the word she used was we, he had a very distinct feeling that what she meant was you. Nothing had to change if he didn't want it to. Yet it was far too late for that. Everything had changed, and the things he had wanted he wanted still, both vague and sharp at once.

But what did she want? Why did it feel like her saying it was in the hope of the opposite? Why had it seemed that her telling him he didn't have to do...whatever it was she was referring to had been a courtesy, when what she really wanted was for him to do it.

The words muddled again, the syllables running together like paint and oil for all they were perfectly audible he lost track of what she was saying until he heard her reference to his having nearly killed her. He had barely caught it yet she might as well have slapped him. The flinch was purely instinctual, his mind so helplessly overwhelmed that the reactions had nowhere else to go but to spill out into the physical, rendering him rigid and brittle. He nearly staggered as though she really had hit him, and he dug his heel into the earth to steady himself.

He was still staring at her, and once the stars left his vision he could see her again – more specifically the look on her face. She was startled, so completely horrified by what had come out of her own mouth that he couldn't help the surge of sympathy, nor the amusement which followed on sympathy's feather-light footsteps.

She wasn't making the point he thought she was trying to. The choice she was referring to had not been just a choice, its impact nowhere near insignificant. She was trying to convince him that it was no big deal, this other choice she was supposedly laying at his feet, but he knew better. There was nothing simple or easy about it, especially not when he had minimal clues as to what this choice actually was and no way to plead for more information.

The laughter caught him by surprise, as did the half-hysterical force of it. It crashed against his ribs and wrenched its way out and he laughed like a man deranged, clinging to the length of burlap and curling into the burn of pure exertion in his belly. He was wheezing by the time he managed to wrangle some composure, nearly winded and nursing a cramping stitch in his ribs.

Whitney's eyes were cautious when he found them again, a tiny crease between her brows making her worry clear.

"Are we ok?" she asked, and it was so tentative, as though she were afraid of the answer. Afraid, he realized, that she had somehow ruined things.

The idea was so ridiculous to him that it nearly pitched him into to a second bout laughter, but it was what lay behind the concern that truly reached him, because he recognized it as surely as if he were looking in a mirror. The clinging, desperate need for it to be ok, to not have destroyed something precious. He had felt it almost constantly for the better part of two days. And if she could be feeling as much concern about it as he was, then logically that must mean that everything was all right.

Logic. There was no logic in this. It was impulse and longing and wildness and everything but, and yet it pulled far more strongly than the comfortable structure logic ever had. And that's precisely what was happening, he realized. He was being pulled into her and he was fighting it tooth and nail. He had fought it before too, and it had been fighting an inevitability which had done nothing but lead him straight here. It seemed that the answer was not to fight it, but to embrace it.

Folding the burlap over the crook of his arm he sent her the soothing, placating signal she would recognize. More direct, he felt, than a nod. He had nodded before and it had been something of a lie. This was not.

The moment he truly believed that things really were ok was in the midst of her offering him help. Not the offer itself, per say – that had taken him quite by surprise and his immediate response had been of clash of puzzlement and a swift throb of terror, until he remembered that it wasn't his place to shelter her from a reality she had already faced in far worse ways. No, it was the flash of gentle humor in her voice as she hassled him about his lackluster answering shrugs, the snarky assertion that she would do what she wanted and the automatic amusement it brought him which convinced him that everything was all right. Except...it wasn't really.

All he knew for sure now was that she wasn't angry, she wasn't demanding that he keep his distance. That she still wanted to maintain their friendship as it had been. But everything else was simply conjecture. She had implied, mostly through things unsaid and nonverbal cues that no doubt any other man raised around other humans would have seen and understood. All she had really succeeded in doing was making him almost more desperately confused than he had been in the heat of his panic the night before, simply in a different way.

She followed along beside him as he led the way into the trees, and while he was doing his best to project calm nonchalance, inside he felt as though he were going to burst with the desire to stop, grab her by the shoulders and demand that she tell him all the things she hadn't said – what she wanted from him. Something he couldn't do for at least three reasons.

He made sure to keep a healthy distance – enough so that they wouldn't touch, but not so much that it was obvious he was doing so. In spite of what had happened, she clearly felt safe to be near him. While he wasn't sure how much of what had happened had been due to contact or something else, he would not risk her willingness to stay with him for something he didn't as of yet know how to control.

He wasn't thrilled with the idea of her coming with him to a place so freshly tainted with death. Yes, she had seen worse, right up close and screaming, but it was different in the moment; in the midst of the killing he had been able to justify it, but in the light of day, in front of her...the shame chilled him. And yet there was a part of him that wanted her to see, wanted the punishment her inevitable revulsion would be. He needed her to prove the truth he knew deep in his bones – that whatever she might have thought right now in this moment, she could not truly want him. He had to kill the possibility, kill the hope, before it ate away at him to the point where he couldn't recover.

The walk was not a comfortable one. He had been in the lead for the majority of their walks together, so this should have been a return to pattern, but just now her presence at his back was oddly unnerving.

He very clearly recalled insisting to himself once that he absolutely was not afraid of her – such a small, slender wisp of a girl. But he was no longer too proud to face the fact that he absolutely was. Yet he wasn't sure what he feared most, her, or that he wanted her, and that the things he wanted tended to be ripped away from him in brutal, scarring ways.

Upon rounding the house he was already unfolding the dirty length of fabric. He went straight to the body left out for quick retrieval, swiftly tossing the burlap across the length of it, effectively concealing the shell of the boy he'd killed in the overlarge shed. He wanted Whitney to remember what he was, but he didn't want to add to the already lengthy list of horrible things she'd been exposed to in his company. Not that she seemed overly concerned with this particular sin.

She was surveying the remnants of the carnage. He fancied he could see her fitting the details together like puzzle pieces.

Her eyes fell on the motorcycle. Jason had written it off as just another vehicle belonging to the people in the house, but he saw the recognition in the lingering stare, the slight furrow between her brows, and knew his assumption had been incorrect. Inexplicably he felt the itch to move, to conceal it as well, though he was at a loss as to why.

Vaguely she asked him whether they were still on the camp grounds, and he shook his head in answer though he suspected she had already known. His stomach sank, certain that she was asking in order to gauge how far she might be from the road – a certainty confirmed, he thought, when she abruptly pointed to the car the policeman had driven and inquired about keys. Regret and sour, ugly relief twisted in his belly at his having tossed both sets of keys to the mercy of the woods. She couldn't leave if there were no keys, after all, and he loathed himself for thinking it.

She was still looking at him expectantly. He quickly shook his head, gesticulating toward the brush and dearly hoping he hadn't projected the guilt thick in his veins.

"Damn," she groused, dropping the hand she'd used to point and lifting it to her mouth instead. Running the edge of her thumbnail along her upper lip she studied the car. "Well, I guess we could just get it down the road a ways…"

He blinked, the lash of self-condemnation easing beneath his sudden confusion. What was she talking about?

Approaching the driver's side of the car she pulled open the door and bent to poke her head inside. A muted noise of satisfaction emerged a moment later, and Jason found himself rounding the front of the metal beast to peer over her shoulder, part curious, part in trepidation, as Whitney bent one knee and slid into the seat.

There were two levers of some kind in the center panel between the seats. She reached for the one farthest from the dash, gripping and pulling it into an upright position with a quiet mechanical screeck. Leaning forward, she braced one hand against the steering wheel and reached around to her back pocket and extracted the little knife he'd left for her.

The sight of it elicited an unexpectedly complex surge of emotion from him. Pleasure that she had accepted the gift, contentment that she was not helpless as she had been, possessive satisfaction that startled and frankly scared him in its intensity.

Slipping it from the sheath, Whitney lowered the blade to the panel beside the second lever, fitting the sharp tip to something he couldn't quite see over her bent head. There was a quiet snap of plastic, and she put the knife away. Then she gripped the lever, the slender muscles in her arm taut with strain as she wrenched it backward with an unpleasant metallic grinding noise from whatever mechanism she was forcing into pace against its will.

He watched her, fascinated. He knew very little about cars, though he'd found them interesting as a child. He'd had a great deal of time to while away over the years. An inquisitive and lonely child, he'd found ways to occupy himself that had often included taking things apart and figuring out how they worked before putting them back together – sometimes successfully, but more often not. There were so many questions he wanted to ask her about what she was doing. Bypassing the starter which normally required a key, obviously, but how and why and how did it work?

Only in the wake of his curiosity did it occur to him what this activity meant; that she knew a way to start the car without the keys. That she meant to use it, meant to leave.

"Got it!" she crowed, evidently victorious. The lever had slipped into place, shifting down along the panel by about four inches, and she was beaming happily up at him. "If I steer," she added next, "can you push this thing back out to the road? We won't be able to get it far enough away to really hide it, but that's ok."

He stared at her, once again thrown by the lack of cohesion between what he expected of her and the words she spoke. It took him an embarrassingly long time to understand, and when he did it was with a lingering flare of disbelief.

She didn't mean to drive away. She wanted…she wanted to hide the car.

As his mother would have said: what on God's green earth was going on?

~/~

Whatever Jason had been expecting her to say, it hadn't been asking him to help her remove the cruiser from the crime scene. Which was understandable. She'd been half a breath away from telling him that she was so deep in this already that she might as well dive the rest of the way, but she'd bitten her tongue instead.

Surprised by her request as he had been, Jason didn't waste much time in proving that he could, indeed, push the whole entire car on his own. She had suspected he could, but the confirmation made her downright giddy as she sat in the driver's seat and did her job of steering them up a long-ass gravel driveway lined by trees.

She wished she had a way to start the darn thing, but while forcing a dead car into neutral was a skill she had acquired out of necessity she had not happened upon the need to learn how to hotwire, and she was wise enough to concede that any attempt was more likely to cause more damage – and possibly some to herself in the process. Plus, when someone came investigating they would sure as shit be able to tell what had happened by looking. And she wasn't keen on spreading even more fingerprints in places she wouldn't remember to clean up.

At the very least they could push it down the road. She hoped to do so back toward town in the hopes of making it look like the officer had never made it to the house, although she had no way to know which way that was with how turned around she now was. Either way, so long as they could eliminate any signs tying the location and the car together, she was reasonably confident that would be enough.

Once all four tires cleared the gravel onto pavement Jason paused, not tired, simply seeking direction. She had wanted to get to the road, after all. Cracking the door open she leaned her head out and urged: "let's keep going a ways." Immediately he hunkered back down and the momentum continued.

They kept going like that for a while, and Jason never let up even for an instant, evidently not needing to rest. She was almost tempted to let him keep going just to see how far he could get – a silly, purely selfish idea based part in the scientific curiosity of it and mostly in girlish delight. She chewed at her lip, trying not to think about how much money she would have paid to watch him do it with his shirt off as she shifted the wheel to ease the car toward the left side of the road.

She felt the motion of the car slow beneath her, saw Jason's head lift in the rear-view mirror, mask crosshatched by the grating separating the backseat.

Cracking the door a second time she called, "it's ok, keep going."

He obeyed, but not without reluctance. The closer she steered them toward the edge of the road the slower he went until they were creeping along like a lethargic caterpillar.

Once the nose of the car began to tip she was grateful for his caution. The slope from pavement into the forested edge was steeper than she had realized, and she quickly braced herself, gripping the wheel and the grab handle above the door as the car pitched forward, gaining a faint, rolling burst of speed in the instant before it smacked into a sturdy old tree with a crunch.

"Oof…"

Her wince was reflexive, a response to the shuddering flex of the metal around her, the burst of glass that was one headlight cracking. The impact had been paltry – nothing near what it would have been had she been actually driving. The speed limit out here had been fifty-five, which of course would be considered a loose suggestion rather than a rule somewhere so remote and jump by at least ten ticks on the speedometer, easy. And if she'd been going sixty, sixty-five, she would have gone careening through the windshield and shattered skull and spine against the broad trunk in front of her. Fortunately, she had not been.

The car was wedged against the tree at a near-perfect forty-five degree angle, forcing her to maintain her grip on the grab handle to keep from smushing into the steering panel. Switching hands, she grappled for the door latch, pleased that it, at least, was stull perfectly functional. Gravity aided her in pulling the slab of metal open, but it was not so helpful where it concerned her getting out. The ground sloped dramatically, and combined with the uneven earth and the hindrance of trying to clamber out of something while also trying to stay relatively upright was a struggle.

She was attempting to use the door frame as leverage to heave herself up and out when Jason appeared at her side, one foot planted firmly against the incline, eyes flicking down her form in the way she recognized as a cursory check for injury as he reached for her. His hand cupped her elbow, allowing her arm to turn and grip him for balance, which she did, wrapping her fingers around the thick column of his forearm below the bend.

He steadied her as she climbed awkwardly from the vehicle, free hand going to her back when she scrambled back up the slope to the road; and it was just her back, barely low enough to be called her waist, yet she felt the gentle pressure all the way down to the tips of her fingers and toes.

It seemed he wasn't afraid to touch her again. At least not enough to keep him from helping her as he had before. That was good. She hadn't managed to work up a good fret about it yet, but she was glad to know she might not need to.

She turned back to survey their handiwork as Jason scaled the steep incline in two long strides.

"Well," she mused, cocking her head to the side, "no one's going to look at that and think it crashed naturally."

She saw him look from her to the car and back to her out of the corner of her eye. Tilting her head a bit more she met his gaze and smiled.

"But that's ok. It doesn't have to be convincing, just confusing."

Jason just looked back at her, not appearing to follow. In fact, she was pretty sure he'd been sporting the same set of tiny frown lines at the corners of his eyes since she had asked about the missing keys. Poor man. It seemed all she did lately was confuse him.

Knowing he would follow she headed back the direction they'd come, following the bend onto the driveway and making her way back to the house. Sure enough, she heard a second crunch of gravel after her.

So he wasn't as quiet on gravel. Or maybe he was letting her know he was there? Either way, her lips curved at the corners in answer.

He passed her when she paused at the bike, so it was to his back that she posed the question.

"Would it be ok if my brother comes back to pick this up? I'm pretty sure he has a spare key. I can let him know when I meet him…"

Jason stiffened, the tension rolling down from his shoulders, looking almost the way nausea felt during the seconds right before vomiting. His steps faltered, his body stilling the way a predator's did, as if determining how to respond to a threat.

That was unexpected.

He must have heard her say it, must have understood her. Had he thought she'd merely meant it as placation, that she'd lied to get Clay to leave? Was it the thought of her leaving that had elicited this response, or just the mention of Clay? Did he not intend to let her go? After all, he'd made no promises that night, and her increase in freedom had not been a guarantee that he would be keen to let her leave. He would have had perfectly sound reasons for believing it unwise. Reasons she couldn't argue with, and wouldn't, if that was his decision.

She spent the tense moment with her eyes locked to the back of his head, so focused that his sudden movement almost made her jump. He angled his head slightly to one side, the fine, thin wisps of pale hair sliding over his collar as he directed a tight, terse nod over his shoulder at her before resuming walking toward the porch.

In spite of having hoped for it, his acceptance shocked her. But there was no mistaking that nod: intentional, direct. He could have been clearly only by turning to look at her, and yet she thought she knew why he hadn't – perhaps couldn't.

Probably for the same reason her heart felt like it was being clutched in a too-tight fist.

He went straight to the body, making short work of wrapping it securely in the burlap like a gigantic burrito (inappropriate analogy, much?) and slinging it over a shoulder – which he did while standing at the same time. Whitney indulged in a quick gawk. Sure, the boy she'd briefly glimpsed had been slight, probably smaller than her. But still. Who did that? Who did that with grain or feed or anything, let alone a goddamn body?

Giving herself a rough internal shake, she approached the stoop, examining the blood marking the porch and the door cracked open on its hinges. The stains were much larger up close. She could make out the gouge in the solid wood of the door, made, she would guess, by the blade currently at home strapped to Jason's thigh. The scored mark was surrounded by an aurora of blood and…bits of something more solid that she was pretty sure were brain matter but abjectly refused to examine further. Too high on the door to have belonged to the skinny kid, whose skull had still seemed intact from what she'd seen, confirming her theory that there had been multiple casualties.

Well.

She was in it now.

"I can work on this while you do that," she told him, indicating first the stains pooled at her feet then the body draped over his shoulder.

He shrugged with the other, appearing bemused. If that's what you want.

"What do we have to clean with?"

Digging in a coat pocket, he extracted and proffered a handful of rags, wrinkled and smelling faintly of pine sap.

"No, I mean—we have to wipe all this down with bleach and…" She stopped, noticing the look he was giving her, curious and politely puzzled. "So the police can't trace anything?"

Puzzlement gave way to a distinct lack of concern. Jason shrugged, clearly unbothered by the prospect of being traced back to what had happened here, probably because he never had been before. Everyone that lived within a hundred-mile radius of the camp knew what it meant when someone went missing or turned up dead in these parts, including law enforcement. She knew for a fact the cops in the area didn't even take missing persons cases but for rare exceptions – something she'd thought weird and shitty upon learning it. She got it now.

But while that was all well and good, regardless of the fact that the house was within said radius, the owners clearly were not residents enough to know. Simply that they'd kept their property here said as much. And wealthy people accustomed to getting their way with no concept or acceptance of local understandings were not going to react the way locals did.

Now, how to explain that…

With a sweep of her hand she indicated the blood, the body, the bike. "How often are you doing this in people's houses?"

He didn't answer, just waited for her to continue.

"You don't, do you? You stick to the camp unless someone forces you to leave, which doesn't usually happen because you're good at your job, and everyone here knows better than to want to mess with that. Right. Well, whoever lives—lived here is obviously on the other side of rich. If there's family, they'll push the cops hard to find an answer. What if someone comes this time?"

Now he just looked like he was listening to humor her.

And now she was annoyed.

Fine.

"Oh, just—" she grumbled at him, snatching the rags from his hand. "Move," she snapped, pushing roughly at his arm until he stepped aside, clearing her way to the door.

Stubborn, infuriating, gigantic, sexy idiot. If he wasn't going to worry about a perfectly reasonable threat then she would.


NOTES:

So…hi!

Yes, I'm still alive, and yes, I'm still writing – never fear. I said I would finish this story and so help me, I will. The delay on this was due to a combination of being stupid busy and Jason and Whitney being a pair of problem children who did not want to cooperate. There's another chunk of un-deep-edited material at the last third because I didn't want to make you all wait any longer.

I didn't plan on ending this chapter here, but my estimation of my own wordiness was ridiculously off and its already longer than I thought it would be. So, bonus, longer chapter. Second bonus, I'm already writing the next one. Anti-bonus, I feel like this one is a bit boring. :/ Sorry about that. It's sloooooooooooww going on this struggle bus, folks. Next one should be worth it.

Once again, thank you so incredibly much to you, my readers, for all of your love through my nonsense and real life bullshit. My appreciation for you is undying. Every comment I get from you is like a literal dose of serotonin and I swear to god it spurs my writing like said doses would. There's a couple of you I haven't heard from in a while, and I hope you are doing ok. Know that I'm thinking about you.

I love you guys.

Until next time!