The house was dark when I got home. That didn’t make me feel so good. Rev said he’d take a taxi back when he was done at the Piper. Either he had gone to bed already, or he wasn’t back yet. I’d come home to an empty house a thousand times. But for some reason, it felt emptier than usual. Darker than usual. Scarier than usual.

Probably because of Rev’s commentary on everything that was unsafe about it.

Much appreciated, but not very comforting.

And what if he wasn’t coming back at all? What if he decided that he didn’t actually want to do any of this, helping me or anything, and found someplace else to stay? What if I was on my own again?

I sat out in my car for too long. Finally, I had to suck it up and enter my house. My own damn house, and my mouth was dry, my heart thudding in my chest as I let myself in.

Light was a blessing that couldn’t come soon enough. I flipped the switch, illuminating my living room, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Then I heard something.

“Oh shit,” I said aloud, my voice high but soft, the words pushed from me in panic. At least I only said ‘shit’, instead of the more embarrassing alternative.

The sound was metal falling on wood, and it came from the study. A room I rarely used. In fact, the light bulb had burned out the week before and since the ceiling was too high for me to reach without a ladder, I’d just let it stay burned out. Standing in my doorway, keys in hand, I was keenly aware of my own bladder and its limitations.

Fuck it, though.

Panic dissolved in my spine like sugar in coffee, and I was crossing the living room, stalking down the hallway, and throwing open the door to the study. It had been ajar, and it banged against the wall loud enough for me to know I’d be replacing the plaster as well as the light bulb. I had my keys clenched in my hand, so any punch I had to throw would have just a little more pain to deliver. The hallway light leaked into the room, which only made the shadows seem menacing.

“Mrow!”

Dammit, Purrloin! She marched up to the doorway from the recesses of the study, looking very pissed at me, gray tail high and flicking. She gave me one long look of utter contempt before taking herself somewhere else, where stupid humans wouldn’t bang doors and shout things at her. My father’s old ashtray lay on the floor, a casualty of Purrloin’s careless treatment of my possessions.

She was a right bitch sometimes. I had half a mind to chase her down and give her a talking to, but I knew it would fall on deaf ears. Nobody told Purrloin Constatino what to do or how to behave. I sighed, my shoulders relaxing. I rolled them onto my back, and then forward again, trying to get out the last knots of tension.

Two heavy hands landed on my shoulders. And squeezed.

I screamed, twisting around and raising my key-filled hand high in the air, meaning to slam it into the nearest nose or eye.

“Shit!” Rev hollered, stumbling back with his hands in front of his face.

His heavy hands.

“What the hell were you doing?” I shrieked, somehow even angrier now that I knew it was him that scared me halfway to the grave and back.

“You looked like you saw a ghost,” he spat. “I was trying to help.”

“What? What?” That was his excuse? That bullshit was almost enough to warrant a key to the face, in my opinion.

“Jesus, Misty,” he said, dropping his defensive stance. “Calm down.”

“No!” I felt something horrible happening inside me. You know when something fucked up happens, and for a few minutes you don’t feel anything, and then you feel like you’re breaking all over? Yeah. The fear I should have felt when I first heard that noise started pressing down on me, and my tense shoulders started shaking, and my eyes were getting teary. “Why didn’t I hear you come in?”

“The door was open,” he said, seeing my distress and looking unnerved by it. “You didn’t close it behind you. That’s not very…”

Safe, I finished for him, because he didn’t finish the sentence himself. He couldn’t, not with me suddenly crying in front of him, like a lunatic. I had to get away from him before he could see how much I wanted him to lift me up and hold me tight. I barged straight past him and down the hall, not letting anything slow me down until I crashed straight onto my bed.

All of this was getting to me, more than I wanted to admit.

Even at work that night, with the company of thirty yipping pups, purring cats, and tail-wagging dogs, I’d been looking over my shoulder every five minutes.

Dad, would you have lived your life any differently if you knew what kind of damage you left behind?

After ten minutes, Rev knocked on the door. I coughed for him to come in, certain that the worst of my episode had passed.

“I’ll know better next time,” he said. “Hands to myself, scouts honor. I didn’t think you’d react so…violently.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s alright.”

“I’m impressed, though,” he said, sacrificing a grin on my behalf. “I wouldn’t want to be in that same position if I was trying to hurt you.”

His grin demanded me to return it, so I did. And that old cliché about smiling making you feel better rang true, at least a little bit.

“So, I got a lead,” he said, and now it wasn’t just my forced smile making a difference. I leaned in. He told me about Suzy Jag and her girl, the kid on drugs and his weird fixation on being a pirate. It seemed like something - it seemed like a start. The next day, he said, he’d pick up a picture of the girl from Suzy and stake out the motel.

I was friendly with Suzy but never even thought to ask her. I guess Rev was starting to be worth his while, after all. When he was through talking, I sighed and leaned back against my pillows. I’d been sitting up in bed while Rev stood in the doorway. The moment I reclined, though, I saw something dark flash across his already-dark eyes. Like seeing me laid out on a bed triggered some animal instinct inside him. I sat up again, but not before some small, desperately wicked voice in my head said why not invite him to come lie down beside you?

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s…pretty comforting, actually.”

He nodded.

“You’re working tomorrow?”

“Yeah, during the day. Um. I talked to Janie. She’s going to drop off the keys to her car in the morning, and you can use that.”

He quirked an eyebrow.

“She’s trusting a total stranger who just got out of prison with her car?”

“Well, I trust you, and she trusts me,” I said. It had occurred to me that giving Rev the keys to a car might be the dumbest thing I ever did. After all, he was a getaway driver by trade. There was nothing he did better than drive fast in cars that weren’t his. But I wasn’t going to be his chauffeur. I couldn’t be his chauffeur.

“That’s sweet,” he said. “But Mickey is going to pick me up. Got some catching up to do, and he agreed to be my strong arm.”

“Mickey Tucker?” I asked, taken aback. His name, to me, was synonymous with “dirty rat bastard”. In fact, I couldn’t even think his name without hearing the way my father always spit it out like the worst curse in the world.

“Big Mickey,” Rev said, and that made a lot more sense. I knew him as Michael, though. We didn’t exactly grow up together, but he and I were something like friends, back when I was trying to make it through high school yoked with my father’s name.

With him being the only black kid in his grade and me being the daughter of one of Sorghum Bend’s most infamous criminal, we were both keenly aware of our status as others. We’d lost touch, though. My father had a lot to do with that. He never did like to see a boy hanging around me, no matter who they were. And I guess he smelled the bad boy inside Michael before that bad boy was even born. Suffice to say, our friendship was not encouraged.

“Tell him I say hi,” I said without really thinking. I was bone tired. I felt like this new information, vague and unsatisfying as it was, was going to keep me up all night despite my exhaustion. I was wrong. Rev said his good night and retired to his own room. I wondered if he’d sleep well, and if he’d have any dreams. I wondered if he’d dream differently now that he was out of prison. And right before I fell asleep, when I was only just barely clinging to the real world, I wondered if he’d dream of me.