I woke up to the empty bed and a cleaned-out cottage. The front door was open, letting in a big bright sheet of sunlight and morning air that smelled like pine needles. At the bottom of the bed, Pest barked.

On the bedside table there were three torn condom wrappers.

Good-bye took three times, and I still wasn’t sure it had stuck.

We didn’t talk. We didn’t say one word, about today or his being a virgin. Or why. We fell into a restless sleep as soon as he rolled off me that first time, and I woke up to him rolling me onto my stomach, his fingers between my legs, an orgasm roaring through me before I was fully coherent.

Hours later, as dawn lit the room in shades of pink and gray, I woke him up with my hand on his dick, and then my mouth.

Three good-byes and I felt worse than ever.

Pest jumped up on the bed, running in circles around my body.

“I’m up,” I muttered and sat up, pushing back my hair. I was naked. And at this point I wasn’t sure if I had any clothes left. But then I saw the stack of clothes on the chair. New sweatpants. The wolf shirt. Another pair of underwear from the three pack he’d bought me.

Tommy came in as I was pulling the shirt over my head.

“I’ve checked us out,” he said.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked, feeling painfully awkward. I took your virginity last night. Honestly, that was all I could think, like we were in high school again. I wanted to talk about it. I had, without exaggeration, a million questions. All of them I knew I couldn’t ask, because he would never answer them. “I mean, we should split the cost—”

“I’m not splitting it with you,” he said and went over to the stash of food, throwing what couldn’t be taken with us into the garbage.

The oranges hit the metal can with a thunk.

“Well, for a kidnapping I have to say the accommodations have been top-notch.” I aimed for a joke.

“I try,” he said, throwing away the carrots and the Doritos I’d brought him.

“You know I’m joking,” I said. “I think… you didn’t kidnap me as much as save me. Again.”

He smiled at me over his shoulder, a tight-lipped thing that spoke of feelings far more complicated than joy. I remembered, all at once, forcing his face into a smile in the art room.

You were a virgin! I thought, wanting to scream it! Wanting to discuss it. Wanting to force him into answering my questions. How is that possible?

But he looked away, and I pulled on the clean underwear and the sweatpants.

“Have you figured out where you want to go?” he asked. “Where you want me to drop you? Back in Santa Barbara?”

“That’s not my house. The label rented it for me. I live in a one bedroom apartment off Le Brea in Los Angeles.”

“That’s where you want to go?”

I nodded. “I need to mend some bridges and start working on some new songs. I leave for Europe in a few months. I have some asses to kiss.”

“Sounds exciting,” he said like he was a stranger, and I smiled at him like I was a stranger. Like he was a reporter in some stupid press junket.

And not the man whose virginity I took last night.

“It is.”

He took Pest out to the car, and I brushed my teeth, put on a thick coat of red lipstick and some winged eyeliner, braided my hair and put it up in a genie knot on the top of my head. And within twenty minutes we were pulling away from the cottage.

Pest was standing in my lap, his paws on the window, watching the cabin behind us. I rubbed my hands through Pest’s fur, happy to have someone to touch.

“Thank you, Yucca Family Lodge,” I said. “You were good to us.”

Tommy was silent as we pulled out of the compound.

“Where are we?” I asked. “I mean…I don’t even know what state we’re in.”

“Western edge of Arizona,” he said. “We’ll be in California in about an hour.”

I nodded like that suited me just fine. “Where are you going to go?” I asked. I looked at him for as long as I could, until all the things we weren’t saying got to be too painful, and then I looked back out the window. “Back to the city?”

He blew out a deep breath. “Not…right away.”

“Because of Bates? Because you didn’t pay the debt?” I felt responsible for that…sort of. This whole thing was twisted around us so hard I wasn’t sure what was whose fault.

“It’s probably not safe there.”

Not now. Maybe not ever.

“What do you think he’ll do?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Will he hurt you?”

“You don’t need to worry—”

“Well, I am, so maybe do the right thing and talk to me about it.”

He blew out a breath. “I don’t think he’ll hurt me,” I said.

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“I don’t. But all the threats of what would happen to me if I didn’t pay the debt had to do with having another crime pinned on me.”

“And Carissa was going to cut off your balls if you touched me.”

“I suppose I need to worry about that too,” he said with a wry smile.

“Oh my God,” I breathed.

“Beth,” he said quietly, “I made the choice not to drop you off with your mother. I touched you… I knew the consequences, and I still did it. None of this is your fault.”

It felt, remarkably, like it was my fault.

“What about your mother?” he asked. “Will she be looking for you?”

“Oh, she’ll have something up her sleeve. She always does.”

“Are you sure it’s safe for you in Los Angeles?”

“She won’t hurt me,” I said with perhaps more conviction than I really felt. “I’m not a kid anymore. But all your stuff in San Francisco. Your whole life. You just…leave it behind?”

He glanced at me and then away, his gaze searing for just that second.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and his dismissal stung.

“Oh, okay. I just… won’t worry about it. I will in fact completely forget you once you drop me off. Tommy who?”

“That was the deal, Beth.”

“Yeah, that was the deal before I knew you were a virgin, Tommy!”

Pest whined, looking between us like we were scaring her.

“Sorry, Pest,” I breathed, stroking her crazy fur.

“I don’t think that fact changes anything,” he said quietly.

“Maybe not for you, but I fucking deflowered you.”

He smiled at me, but I refused to let this go. “Yes, you did,” he said. “You fucking deflowered me.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“I see that.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“Why were you not having sex? A guy like you… you could have been fucking anyone you wanted.”

“So Simon was fond of telling me.”

“Did something… Was it the Pastor?”

His face sharpened.

“When you got taken to the office,” I said in a shaky voice. “Did he—”

Tommy shook his head. “Rape me. No.”

“It’s been seven years, Tommy.”

“I realize that.”

“There was never another girl? Or boy?”

“No boy or girl,” he said.

“Then why?”

“I think,” he said, hitting the blinker to exit the highway. “We need coffee. And gas.”

“You can’t avoid this conversation forever,” I said.

He pulled into a parking spot and turned to me, his arm stretched out across the back of the seat. So close he could touch me if he wanted.

But he didn’t.

“I only have to avoid it for about five more hours, until I drop you back in Los Angeles, Beth. I’m not talking about the last seven years. It’s over and I think…for the first time in my life, I’m ready to move on from everything that happened there. I’m leaving the ghosts where they are.”

“But—”

“You and I are not meant to be together. Not now. Not seven years ago.”

I exhaled slowly. I mean, we’d been talking about good-bye, but this felt… real now. He didn’t want me. And I didn’t want him…not in any real long-term way, I mean; it wouldn’t work. I had a life to repair, a reputation to rebuild. A metric shit ton of work to do. I had no time for being with Tommy. I knew without having to experience it that it would suck me in. Suck me up.

So, he was right. We didn’t belong together.

But I still wanted him to want me.

I wanted him to feel shitty that it wouldn’t work. Not happy.

“You want to stop and eat here?” I asked in a slow voice. The gas station was attached to a big family-style restaurant, and we hadn’t eaten real food in some time. Him especially. And now that I’d fucked him, I wanted to watch him eat, eat until he was full.

Another thing I’d wished for when we were kids.

“Grab some stuff to go,” he said and handed me cash. “I’ll gas up and go to the bathroom. I’ll meet you back here.”

I nodded, feeling numb. Right. Of course. He needed to drop me off.

We needed to be done with each other.

I wanted to weep. But I didn’t. Because I had a job to do, and that was to get some coffees to go, maybe a breakfast sandwich or three and then I had to get the hell out of Tommy’s life.

I got out of the truck and walked across the puddle-splashed parking area. Jumping over and weaving around puddles.

A bell rang out as I stepped into the family restaurant and I was literally assaulted by sound. People talking. TV’s. There were gaming machines in the corner blinking and chiming. I wanted to put my hands over my ears. Tommy and I had been in a tiny silent bubble for three days and I’d gotten used to it.

The real world was loud.

And abrasive, even the smell of bacon and coffee and fried potatoes in the air – which I loved, almost seemed like too much.

And one of the real perks of my career being in disguise was that I could go out in public without people being all over me, but it felt walking through the crowded restaurant, like people were staring at me.

It’s the hair, I thought.

But when I passed a man in a trucker cap who quickly tapped the shoulder of the woman next to him and tried—with zero skill—to not point at me while totally pointing at me, I started to wonder if it wasn’t just the hair.

TVs lined the dining room, and I passed one with the sound turned up. The picture changed and I stopped in my tracks.

It was my mother on the screen.

“My daughter, Beth Renshaw, known better as her stage name Jada” she was saying in that voice… that fucking voice that meant people would be doing what she wanted because she expected it, “is in danger. From herself and from the man that kidnapped her from the drug rehab facility where she was to undergo rehabilitation for opiates and get psychiatric counseling.”

And then it wasn’t my mother on the screen with her perfect suit and her do-as-I-say voice. It was a picture of me taken when I was out at Mc Donald’s just the other day. Like… yesterday. I gasped. Walked backward.

The picture changed and the next one was Tommy and he had a pair of emoticon socks in his hand.

Bile rose up in my throat. My mother was having me followed. My mother…

I turned and, trying really hard not to make a scene, walked back to the front door. But at the gas bays, Tommy wasn’t standing by the truck.

I watched Beth jump over a silver rain puddle on her way into the family restaurant just as the meter clicked to a stop and I put the gas nozzle back. The smell of gasoline and a recent rain filled the cool air.

She was pissed, I was pretty sure. Pissed that I wouldn’t answer her questions about why I’d still been a virgin. Mostly I was embarrassed to talk about it. Who confessed those kinds of things? And a little bit I was scared to talk about it, which didn’t make a lot of sense but this feeling sat in the back of my brain warning me not to get into this with her.

I was scared that talking about it would make it real, make what we’d done some kind of tangible tie between us – and it was, of course it was – but I needed it to stay indescribable.

Beth wanted to talk and frame out the parameters of everything. She wanted every thought and feeling to be turned into something concrete. It’s what she’d been asking for in the cabin. To name all our ghosts. Pin down all our demons.

But I didn’t know how to do that and keep on living.

Because it was going to be hard enough to walk away from her.

I kicked open the door to the men’s room that was on the outside of the gas station and couldn’t get too worked up about the the disgusting condition of the place.

That was the sex, talking, I imagined. Even terrible things didn’t seem so bad with this easy boneless feeling I had going in my body.

I hoped the women’s room was better, for Beth’s sake.

Jada, I reminded myself and then realized it didn’t matter. It was over.

We don’t belong together. We didn’t seven years ago. And we don’t now.

And it didn’t hurt. Not in the sharp way I’d grown used to. But it ached. And it would ache, I guessed, for the rest of my life.

The wall of urinals was on the far side of the bathroom. Two stalls on the side near the door. The door closed behind me, and the bathroom became a dark cave. I picked the far urinal and unzipped.

The door opened behind me, and I finished peeing, zipped back up and turned, only to find two men standing in front of the door, their arms crossed over their chests.

The door closed behind them, making the room dark, and one of them reached over and flipped on the light.

They were still looking at me.

“Morning,” I said, my skin tightening over my body, and I walked over to the sink, watching the men in the mirror as I turned on the faucet to wash my hands.

The guys weren’t here to use the bathroom. They were here for me.

“You Tommy MacNeill?” one of the guys asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“We got a message for you.”

“I’m not interested,” I said, scanning the room for some kind of weapon. There was a mop bucket in the corner, with the mop in it. The paper towel dispenser looked like it would come off the wall without any effort. I edged sideways, closer to the mop. I’d break the handle over my leg, and I’d be able to do some damage.

The other man, a thin Filipino guy, took out some black gloves and started putting them on. He smiled like he was really looking forward to trying to beat the shit out of me.

“My name’s Sammy,” he said. “And I got a message for you from Mr. Bates.”