The egg timer on the next batch of counteragent was due to go off today, and with it, Parker's forced vacation had ended. Truth be told, she was glad. She'd take work over helplessness any day.
The injection was scheduled right after lunch. Parker showed up on the Renewal Wing, room six, with an untouched chicken salad under one arm, to find that Broots had beaten her to the show.
"Looks like he got his second wind," said Parker, sitting down next to Broots after her requisite pat-down.
Jarod was no longer the frustrated, exhausted creature from three days previous. He wasn't quiet, either, if lip-reading was anything to go by — the sound system had not yet been re-installed, so his howls of rage reached his audience only in the abstract. The second straitjacket, the one with the extra bells and whistles, was lying in mangled shreds in one corner of the room, allowing Jarod to terrorize the room with all four limbs once more. His target du jour was the one-way mirror. Somehow, nobody had thought to disarm Jarod of the thick shivs he'd fashioned from flattened cuffs. That, or nobody had dared to try. One way or the other, Jarod was armed with a sharp edge and was using it to scrape away at the glass. Whenever the urge struck him, he diverted from his task for some recreational stabbing: at the mirror, at the window frame, at the wall, at any surface in sight. As he moved, his frantic shadow fell across the huddled mass of Broots.
"You have to hand it to whoever manufactured that glass. It's really holding up," said Broots weakly. "For now, I guess. I suppose the table held up for a while, too."
"No, the table was gone pretty quick, actually," said Parker. She looked over at Broots. Broots wasn't the last person she expected to come down to visit, but she would have put good odds on him staying away until Jarod was back to normal. "Why are you here? Did Brigitte order—"
"I wanted to be here."
Jarod darted away for a moment to gouge long, thin strips out of the window frame; as he did so, the light reached the peaks and valleys of Broots's face: pale, drawn and terrified.
Parker gave him a skeptical look. "Your face says different," she said.
Broots's wobbly composure burst like a month-old jack-o'-lantern under a sledgehammer.
"I told you he was dangerous!" he said. "Do you see this? He's been trying to break through the window for the last hour. If you're quiet enough, you can hear what he's screaming, just one inventive murder plot after another. You — we both need to get out of this assignment. We can't be expected to work with someone who, at any moment, could snap and break our necks with his bare hands!"
Parker scoffed. "You work with Lyle. He's killed before, and he's willing to do it again. Remember his mail-order bride?"
"That's different and you know it. Lyle can choose not to kill. This version of Jarod can't."
She couldn't fault his logic, nor could she fault him for wanting to get out. He probably should get out. She leaned back in her chair, watching impassively as the window between her and Jarod flexed ominously under each blow. The red of Jarod's eyes had deepened to a Merlot-dark hue, spreading across the bridge of his nose and thickening the bags under his eyes.
"Then quit," she said with a one-shouldered shrug. "I know you won't. If you could, you would have done it before taking the first Jarod-centric assignment."
Broots looked past her into the middle distance, like he was planning what to say next.
Finally: "It's been a month."
As soon as Broots said it, she knew where the thought was leading. She sighed.
"So people keep telling me."
But Broots was a dog with a bone. "Sydney told me about your bargain with Brigitte. You could get another assignment, then request Sydney and me to be transferred along with you."
"I'm not doing that."
"Why not?" The question was loud enough that, as one, Jarod's guards looked over at them.
"Eyes front, soldiers," Parker barked their way. They quickly obeyed, and she turned back to Broots. "I want to be here."
"Sure, me too, but then tomorrow—"
"I want to be here tomorrow, too. I told Brigitte I would stay on. You need to find another way out, Broots, 'cause I'm not it."
From the expression on Broots's face, he didn't understand. That was okay. Parker didn't fully understand, either.
The outer door opened and Cox swept in, flanked by four cleaners and carrying a conspicuous case under one arm — the new batch of counteragent, fresh from the griddle. Cox paused to grant Miss Parker a curt nod before pulling a gas mask over his face. His four bosom buddies did likewise, minus the nod.
"We'll give it twenty seconds after he's out, then enter," he said to the cleaner squad. They put Parker in mind of a SWAT team mustering at the threshold to a drug dealer's apartment.
With theatrical aplomb, Cox depressed a button by the door.
Nothing happened. He pressed the button again, then hammered at it four more times, as if the sixth button press would do what the previous five could not. Parker leaned forward and spotted a previously unnoticed highway of thin pipes along the perimeter of Jarod's temporary home, close to the ceiling. They were beaten flat in places, no longer up to their intended purpose. Judging by the masks, that purpose involved some sort of gas.
"First mistake, Cox," she called over. "You left the gas ventilation pipes in there with him."
Cox didn't acknowledge her comment except for a slight stiffening of the shoulders. He yanked off his mask, pulled open the door, and stepped across Jarod's ruined threshold. Two of the cleaners drew weapons, and Parker was halfway to her feet before she realized they were tasers.
Jarod shrugged off the first shock, but collapsed to his knees when the second hit his chest. It took all four men to wrestle him to the ground, two of them holding his head in place to keep him from tearing into their hands with his teeth. Once he was sure Jarod was immobilized, Cox stepped in with the hypodermic.
It was like a light switch. One moment Jarod was an oncoming train; the next, he was out cold. The cleaners lost no time. As soon as Jarod went limp in their collective grip, they darted for the door and hauled in a bed frame and a thin mattress. The mattress was big enough for an adult man, provided that adult man never tossed and turned in his sleep. As they set to work assembling and bolting the bed to the floor, Parker negotiated her way to the door. The cleaners had left it hanging open, no longer concerned about the dangers of Jarod escaping.
Jarod stirred, looked around, and pushed himself up with splayed palms on the sheared floor. He settled into a seated position, crossed arms balanced on his knees, watching in resentful silence as the cleaners worked away at the bed. At first, Parker thought the injection may not have worked, as it hadn't for Angelo. Jarod's eyes were clear, but oh, so angry. But no, that was simply Jarod, angry at having been locked up for a week with no company but the devil on his shoulder.
He glanced from the cleaners to the open door; his eyes fell on Parker for the first time, hovering in the doorway.
"Am I—" Jarod's voice was ground glass; he must have screamed himself hoarse. He stopped and swallowed twice. It did little good. "Am I moving in full-time?"
He'd woken to a tangle of mixed signals: door thrown wide for his escape, yet off in the corner, the grunts seemed to be making room six into a more permanent home. Confusion was understandable.
"No," said Parker.
"No?" Some hope sparked in his expression. "That's good news."
"It's just one more night. Rest and observation, Cox says. Then you go home."
Jarod laughed. The sound made Parker's throat hurt in sympathy.
"'Home'," he repeated. "Right."
"You know what I meant."
"You need to get yourself your own car," said Parker as Jarod slid into the passenger seat. "I didn't get into this line of work to become a one-woman taxi service."
She'd been skeptical about Cox's decision to keep Jarod under observation for one more night, but if nothing else, the extra time had forced Jarod to slow down. According to the logs, he had slept for nineteen hours.
Jarod was ready to be discharged right after lunch, the day after his counteragent injection. He met her at the front doors with goose-pimpled arms and an inexplicable bounce in his step.
(When he'd left for Puerto Rico, t-shirts had been acceptable attire. In the last week and change, however, autumn had buckled down and got to business. They'd locked him up for so long, he'd missed the change of the season.)
"A car would be nice," said Jarod. "With what money, though? The Centre doesn't pay me."
No, the Centre wasn't mailing any cheques to Jarod's little blue house, but that didn't mean he lacked funds. He'd remodelled the aforementioned little blue house, for one, and that couldn't have come cheap. Parker considered raising this glaring fact, but she was pretty sure she knew where the remodelling money had come from. It almost made her pity her brother… but not quite.
They pulled away from Centre headquarters and onto the highway. A certain relief settled over driver and passenger, deepening with each mile they put between them and headquarters. Parker glanced over at Jarod, who chose the same moment to look over at her, and she was struck with the mad urge to offer a commiserative smile. She wasn't sure when it had happened — presumably not during his week spent as a raving lunatic — but existing with Jarod had become something close to comfortable. That could change in an instant if Jarod managed a successful escape and they went back to their cat-and-mouse patterns, but for the moment, with no external pressure forcing them into enmity… it wasn't quite like back when they were kids — when the Centre's sub-levels were their whole world and they were mutually lost in the incomprehensible enormity of its controlling power — but it made her memories of that time solidify into something more real, rather than a daydream she'd invented.
"You look exhausted," she said, breaking the comfortable silence.
"Do I?" Jarod flipped down the sun visor and examined the skin around his eyes. "Funny. I feel more alive than I have in…"
"A week? That wouldn't be saying much."
Jarod shook his head. "No, longer." From his stomach came a gurgling, muted growl. He laughed quietly. "That was loud. I hope I have something easy in the fridge, I'm famished."
A grim possibility occurred to Miss Parker.
"They fed you, right?"
She threw a scrutinizing glance his way, taking in the too-sharp cheekbones, the way his clothes hung on his frame a little looser and, yes, he'd definitely lost muscle mass. Had the Centre made starvation part of Jarod's punishment? That seemed too far to go, even for the Centre.
Jarod snorted. "Of course they did. I'm still alive, aren't I?"
"Meals?"
"… ish. Calories, anyway. I missed out on lunch, though. I slept through the last day, more or less."
It was almost dusk. Parker spotted a familiar landmark on the side of the road and made a spur-of-the-moment decision. The driver behind her leaned on his horn — justifiably so, but she dismissed it out of hand — when, without warning or signal, she pulled into the parking lot of her favourite pub.
"The Slippery Fork?" Jarod read off the sign out front. It wasn't much to look at on the outside, but the booths inside were dark, private, spacious and — relevant for the hour — pretty quiet on a Wednesday evening.
"Sure. Good for what ails you, if what ails you is a deficit of greasy, high-calorie food and beers with thick heads." She fished her cane out of the back and rapped it lightly against Jarod's knees. A certain lightness had infected her. "Supper on me. Consider it my peace offering after San Juan."
Jarod looked at her sharply, and already a spark of an argument lit his eye. So inexplicably relaxed a split second ago, the tension cranked up like someone had squeezed all the air in the car into half the volume. He'd promised they would have words about Rayner's death, and so they would. Parker sighed and headed for the door, not pausing to see whether he'd follow her inside. She got her answer a moment later: the crunch of gravel and the slam of a car door.
Inside, they were shown to Parker's preferred booth. She exchanged token small talk with the server on the way in, whose name she'd heard and subsequently forgotten long ago. Jarod stayed quiet, which struck Parker as odd. It wasn't like Jarod not to take any opportunity to make friends. The server committed to memory their appetizer orders and left them a tall glass of amber liquid each. Once she left them alone, Jarod picked up where they'd left off.
"So… San Juan." The argument in his eye had dimmed. Perhaps he'd talked himself down. "Why did you do it?"
She'd gone over her reasons often enough in the intervening weeks that it started out sounding like a rehearsed speech.
"Same thing I did on the west coast. I tried to keep this project running smoothly. It's my job." This was what she'd say to a Centre higher-up, but Jarod wasn't a Centre higher-up. She took a long sip from her beer to give herself time to arrange her thoughts. The result felt like a lie, but she said it anyway. "I knew you wouldn't do it yourself, so I stepped in. I thought we could fool them into thinking you'd followed orders." Her mouth twisted involuntarily as she tossed the blame at Jarod's feet: "If you hadn't shouted, Lyle might have fallen for it."
"Well, that's not true," said Jarod. Blunt. No room for argument.
Parker raised an eyebrow. "What, you think Lyle's that smart?" she said with a bitter laugh. "Not everyone needs an elaborate Pretend to be conned."
"Not what I meant. We've known each other since we were kids, Miss Parker. You didn't think of tricking Lyle until you'd already pulled the trigger. I saw that, I know that because I know you. You know me, too, just as well as I know you. You know I would have done it if the alternative was… that. Lyle's threat." He stopped beating around the bush. "If it's the only two choices I have, I'd rather commit one assassination than indiscriminate mass murder. So, the question is — why didn't you let me?"
Her first instinct was to argue. She had thought she could trick Lyle… but when had that occurred to her? Not until Jarod shouted — You didn't need to do that! — and she'd remembered who else was listening. As to his second point, however, she certainly hadn't known Jarod would ultimately give in. Surely he'd refuse to be the Centre's assassin — but no, hang on, where had that conviction come from? From him, or from herself? From some image she'd created in her mind, whether as an ideal picture of him, or pure fiction created to rationalize her decision? She let her head fall back against the cool leather of the booth bench. In the end, Jarod's hypothetical decision was academic, wasn't it?
"I didn't want you to do it," she said. She hadn't planned to say it until the words were in the air, and for a moment it took the wind out of her.
"Why not?" said Jarod, to give her a nudge.
Another deep pull at her beer, granting herself the nerve to tug the rest of the truth from wherever it had been hiding. She hadn't acknowledged it at the front of her brain, but it felt like the truth, just as her first explanation had felt like a lie.
"You irritate the hell out of me," she said, her eyes on her drink. "Less now that you aren't luring me into elaborate practical jokes all over the country. Marginally." Jarod laughed, a quiet rumble of a laugh. The sound spurred her to raise her head, and she smiled wryly. "Don't think I've forgotten the time you super-glued my feet to the floor in that room-sized roach motel."
The server came along at just the wrong moment with their appetizers. The look on the woman's face as she set down the platter sent Jarod into a helpless fit of snickering, with Parker following close behind.
"Did you ever get those shoes back?" asked Jarod once the server hurried away with their orders and both of them halfway recovered their respective composures.
"Of course not, you bastard, they were destroyed," said Parker, struggling with a reluctant smile. There was more she had to say. "Like I said, you irritate me. You've made it your vocation to torment me. But…" God, this was hard. "I didn't want the Centre turning you into its indentured killer. Maybe you would have killed Rayner if the alternative was even more collateral damage. But it would have ruined you."
Jarod tapped his butterfly shrimp against the edge of the platter, staring with unfocused eyes at the bench fabric opposite him. Around them, the low murmur of voices slowly grew as regulars getting off work trickled through the front entrance.
"Okay," he said, finally. "I understand that. I saw the same happen to—"
He got caught on the next word. Parker averted her eyes, pretending a sudden interest in the provided dish of dipping sauce.
"To Kyle," she finished. He looked up at her, surprised. "Hey, I was there too."
"I suppose you were."
A warm silence settled over the table. As she sipped her drink, Parker's eyes roved over the damage the last week had wrought. The bruise on Jarod's jaw had faded to a sickly yellow. There were scabs under each of his fingernails where he'd tried to tear the straitjacket away.
"What does it feel like?" she asked.
Jarod blinked at the non sequitur, then caught up.
"Quicksilver saturation?" She noted he didn't use the word "madness". "Hm. You know about the headaches, though I'd guess that's not what you're asking about. It's… when it's about to start, it's like… think of being in your room at night, and you hear someone walk up to the door, but they don't knock. You know they want in, but they just stand there. No matter how little noise they make, you know they're there, and your whole concept of the room has to expand to include this visitor.
"When it hits peak saturation, the visitor bursts through the door and destroys everything, and you have to watch helplessly as he tears everything apart. But at the same time, you are the visitor, and all you know is that by rights, everything and everyone should burn, or it wouldn't be fair."
"Fair?" echoed Parker. Jarod jerked slightly, like her voice had pulled him out of a reverie, and shrugged.
"It doesn't make sense after the fact, but yeah. Fair. All that violence and destruction feels like… balancing the scales. The scariest part is that, while I'm in it, I don't notice any part of me that's not the same as I always am." As he spoke, his hands tried helplessly to mime the amorphous ideas he was trying and failing to convey. "When I come out of it, everything comes back, of course — compassion, reason, love, understanding — but before that it's still… me. Me with some parts switched off."
"So you remember all of it," said Parker.
Jarod nodded. "And I remember being me, the real me, when I'm under. I can remember all the things I care about, they just seem unimportant."
Parker thought back to the creature she'd watched through the one-way mirror, and juxtaposed the image with the man sitting across the booth from her. Same person, just with a few switches flicked one way, a few the other.
"I visited you, you know," she said.
Jarod winced. "Oh?"
"On your third day. And then again when they brought you back, but that was less of a visit. Broots visited on the last day, too."
"Broots," said Jarod, with a slow nod. "How scared was he?"
You couldn't hide anything from Jarod.
"Pretty scared. I'd recommend refraining from sneaking up on him with nobody else around, at least for a while. He might have a stroke if you try it."
He fixed her with a look that held her in place.
"How scared were you?"
"I wasn't."
This was the truth. Maybe if she'd visited him a day earlier, when he was tearing the padding off the walls and fashioning shivs, she might have struggled to keep her sangfroid. But she hadn't. She'd seen him as a frustrated ball of misery, so exhausted he'd fallen asleep on the floor. The memory must have shown on her face, because Jarod abruptly looked away with an expression of discomfort.
"Great," he said, with a great whoosh of an exhale. "You feel bad for me. When all this started, I hoped the new arrangement would have a silver lining. I hoped things between us might change for the better." He swallowed a gulp of beer. "I didn't figure on winning you over through pity, though. Wouldn't have been my first choice."
"I don't pity you," said Parker. "Don't look at me like that — I don't. I—" Why was this so difficult to put into words? "I… want things to be better for you."
The uncharacteristic earnestness caught his attention, if nothing else. He bent his head at an angle, considering her.
"I don't know if that's the same thing or not," he said slowly. "But I suppose it's… phrased differently. I want things to be better for you, too."
She held his gaze for long enough that neither of them noticed the server was hovering, laden down with their dinners. Parker coughed in surprise when the woman's shape registered in her peripheral vision.
"That's settled, then," said Parker, for something to say. They both thanked the server and ordered refills.
A lull in conversation followed as they dug into their meals. Enough food for two people sat piled in front of Jarod, and he tore into it with unabashed enthusiasm. After polishing off a burger, he bit into a fried pickle and beamed.
"It's very good," he said, grinning through a mouthful of pickle. Parker wasn't sure if she was being condescended to — surely it wasn't his first time eating a fried pickle. But then, in terms of lived experience in the outside world, he was the equivalent of a seven-year-old.
Parker exhaled a laugh, almost choking on her beer. "So you'd come again?"
His smile faded.
"It's not my first time. We've been here before," he said.
She frowned. "I've been in here many times. I like it. But you—" And then she remembered.
It had been right after Tommy's death. She'd come here to fulfill the cliché of the grieving quasi-widow drowning her sorrows. Too many drinks in, Jarod had sat down opposite her. Not before nor since had she ever been less interested in chasing him, but there he'd been, bearing condolences and vague hints about the mysterious circumstances of Thomas Gates's death. It should have been maddening, but it had helped. He had given her something to focus on, something other than the jagged, Thomas-shaped hole that had been torn from the fabric of her life.
It had been — damn. She wasn't sure, three beers in, how long ago it had been. At least eight months, not yet a year. She didn't think about Tommy most days. The habit of distraction had proved addictive.
"Right," she said. She cleared her throat. "If I'm remembering correctly, you didn't order anything that time. You're hardly the greasy spoon expert that I am."
It was a transparent attempt to divert away from the topic of Tommy. Jarod noticed and pushed back.
"Thomas was a good man, a good friend. The world is a lesser place without him."
Parker polished off her latest glass.
"What the hell would you know about it?" she said, but without any real malice. "He wasn't my friend, he was…" This was exhausting. She shook her head. "I'll be honest, I'd rather chew glass than talk about this with you. Unless you have intel on who was behind his murder, let's leave it there."
Jarod opened his mouth, reconsidered, and gave her a placatory nod.
"I heard through the grapevine that you decided to stay on the project," he said, changing the topic without finesse. "Now that your negotiated month is up. I can't say I understand why, but thank you."
Parker grimaced. "This again." She paused. "The grapevine. Who — not Broots?"
Jarod nodded. "He didn't tell me he visited yesterday. That would explain his… skittishness this morning."
"Poor guy," said Parker with a dry laugh. She sobered. (Not in the toxicological sense. In that sense, she was still very much the worse for drink.) "Yes, I decided to stay on. What about it?"
"Why?"
"Do I need a reason?"
"I guess not. I just can't imagine volunteering for something I'm being blackmailed into. You were sold on Project Quicksilver after our adventures in the Pacific Northwest and Puerto Rico?"
She swallowed a bite of her burger. "I'm not saying I'm having the time of my life. This is… it's important."
"Project Quicksilver?"
"No. My role, specifically," she said. He nodded, seeming to understand. "I'm hoping these first two outings were a trial by fire. When things go smoothly, we're not an awful team."
"It's like I said about the silver lining," said Jarod. "The Centre told us we were enemies, so we acted like enemies. Now the Centre says we have to play nice, and here we are. It's not quite how it was when we were kids, but it's…" He searched her face. "We're better, aren't we?"
Her face was warm from at least two too many beers. She suspected that, sober, she would have kept conversation lighter. Jarod always had the tendency to skip the small talk and jump right into the deep end.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "Yeah, we're better." She hiccuped. "Don't get too comfortable, though. You pull another move like you did in Spokane and we'll be right back to the Tom-and-Jerry shtick."
"Oh, don't worry. I'm not comfortable," said Jarod wryly. "We do make a pretty good team, though, you're right. Remember the bank?"
A laugh lit up Parker's face at the memory.
"Of course. We beat up a bank robber together. As I remember it, your moves weren't too bad."
"And I pity anyone on the wrong end of your stilettos," said Jarod with a matching grin.
Reminiscing about her hunting days should have been a minefield, but somehow it wasn't. The harassment and bruised egos that had made up the bulk of their respective artilleries seemed barely to matter now that the hunt was over. As the technical victor, Parker was feeling generous.
"That time you slipped away after the thing with the human trafficker in the Florida Keys — that one hurt," she said, a half-dozen dredged-up memories later. "I got snide comments about that one from the Clean-Up department for, for months. That guy was a piece of work, though. Between you and him, I'm not too broken up that he was the one to go down. He in prison?"
"S'far as I know. I should check."
"I still can't believe I chased you into a damn hurricane. Christ." She raised her glass for another drink. "That hurricane. Christ. I was such a mess when they picked me up."
A guileless smile from Jarod.
"Still beautiful," he said.
The glass paused halfway to Parker's lips.
It should have been an innocuous comment. He'd been drinking, the alcohol loosening his brain-to-mouth filter, and that was fine. This wasn't even the first time he'd called her beautiful; he'd said as much at Nikki Angus's fundraiser, and that had simply been The Done Thing. Not worth comment.
She set her glass down.
"You know," she said. "I think I've had enough for one evening."
Jarod raised his eyebrows unsteadily. He looked much worse off than her, but then, he hadn't eaten since breakfast. Plus, having a head for liquor was probably one of the few things he couldn't Pretend his way into.
"I've made you uncomfortable." He grimaced. "I'm sorry."
"You didn't."
He hadn't. She heard comments on her looks all the time; if a single "beautiful" was enough to make her uncomfortable, she'd never step out of doors. What had made her uncomfortable, she realized, was her reaction. The pleased ache in her chest, the flood of warmth spreading outwards — she hoped she'd be able to blame it on the alcohol in the morning.
"I did."
"You didn't," she repeated, with an unspoken, leave it, Jarod. She looked around for a distraction from this pointless ping-ponging. "Damn. I should have thought about how we're gonna get home."
In the end, Jarod insisted on paying for the drinks, with what Parker was ninety-five percent sure was Lyle's credit card. The bartender assured Parker that she wouldn't get ticketed if she left her car in the parking lot overnight.
"Thanks, uh—" His name wasn't coming to her. "Thanks. Do you have a number for a cab?"
Parker couldn't think of a reason why the two of them shouldn't share a cab, so they did. The vehicle smelled like fast food grease and hair gel, and the seats hadn't been vacuumed in the last calendar year. Jarod tried twice to strike up a conversation, but Parker shut both attempts down fast, too caught up in her head to spare more than a few curt words.
She was getting far too attached, far too fast. It wasn't that she preferred being at odds with Jarod — though she came across to many as the sort who craves conflict, verbal boxing matches weren't her favourite pastime. Being good at sparring didn't mean she had to like it. Getting chummy with Jarod, however, led inevitably to emotional involvement, and that was a terrible idea for two reasons.
Reason one was morbid yet practical: Project QS-9300, aka Quicksilver, was doomed. Anyone would admit it if pressed. Jarod's life expectancy had never been anything too ambitious while he was on the run from the Centre, but his new neural gland had brought it down even further. Getting attached to Jarod was like handcuffing herself to a rabid dog.
Reason two was harder to articulate, even in the privacy of her own head. She could admit, at the very least, that she was physically attracted to Jarod. It wasn't unusual for her to catch herself trailing her eyes over the broad expanse of his shoulders or the sharp line of his cheekbones, or watching the way his back muscles moved when he walked, or appreciating the strength of his — she shook her head. Physical attraction was easy, like acknowledging a fact. The sky was blue, the pope was catholic, Jarod was nice to look at. Beyond that, though, that's where things got dangerous. Dangerous potential lurked there, potential she would be remiss to ignore, lest she stumble head-first into it while she wasn't keeping an eye out. Looking was fine, but anything else was too much, too soon after Thomas.
(Not that she was hoping for anything else.)
She wasn't ready to move on from Tommy's memory; or, perhaps more accurately, she wouldn't let herself be ready to move on from Tommy's memory. (No, hang on, what was all this about moving on? Moving on to what?)
This was not to say that she hadn't had sex since Tommy was killed. She had. Around a month after they'd lowered her boyfriend into the ground, Parker had thrown herself into a self-destructive pattern of one-night stands with people — mostly guys — she encountered along the road, people she'd never meet again because she'd be state-hopping as soon as Broots reported the latest Jarod spotting. In case anyone confronted her about it, she had an excuse ready at hand: she was playing the field, soothing her heart with a couple of rebounds. Nobody noticed, so nobody asked, so nobody heard her ready-made lie. The truth was that she was doing it to prove to herself that nobody could measure up to what she'd lost. She did it to prove to herself that she had reason to hurt.
And the orgasms. She did it for the orgasms, too.
They pulled up to Jarod's house first. His mailbox was overflowing, though with what, Parker couldn't guess. Jarod slid out of his seat onto the bare pavement of his empty driveway, then turned back to her. Something in his eye… she was reading too far into it, she already had the subject on the brain, but for a moment she thought he might invite her in. The answer would be no, was no. But. But, what if he asked?
"Goodnight, Miss Parker," he said, with a soft wave and a softer smile. "Thank you for dinner. And for staying."
"'Night," she said, and shut the door behind him.
The cab pulled away, trailing second thoughts and bitter fumes.
