Chapter 9: One Night

Cade looked at the bat, then at the man holding it, and I watched him decide.

"Boone doesn't send a bat to find me," he said. "He calls."

"He called. You didn't pick up."

"He didn't call."

The man with the bat shrugged and took a step closer.

Cade turned his head toward me and said, quietly:

"Run."

He kicked the stand and the bike roared.

I threw my leg over the seat and caught his waist as he cut the wheel, and we shot out from under the canopy into the rain.

A truck door slammed behind us.

An engine caught.

Cade took the first turn on a slick two-lane so hard my knee nearly scraped asphalt.

He took the second onto a farm road with no markings and the third onto a logging track where the trees closed over us.

I looked back once.

Headlights flashed in the gap, then dropped away.

He didn't slow until the lights were gone and there was nothing in the mirror but rain.

The motel was a low brown row off a state road, six rooms and a neon sign with half its letters dark.

He paid cash for room four with a wet twenty from the rag in his pocket.

I stood in the doorway while he locked the door and braced a chair under the knob.

The room held a bed, a lamp and a radiator that clanked.

We were both dripping.

Cade stood in the middle of the carpet with his bare leather hanging off his shoulders and his hands ruined and his hair plastered to his forehead.

"They're going to look," he said. "Every motel on this road by morning."

"Then we have until morning."

"Becky."

"I want rules."

He went still.

"One night," I said. "That's what this is. And you never say sorry to me again, not once, not tonight, not tomorrow."

"You want me to stop apologizing."

"I want you to stop using it. If you say it, I stop."

"One night," he said slowly. "No sorry."

"Say you understand."

"I understand."

"Say you want it."

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