Free Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy Page B

were kids, but where you’re different is that you’ve actually got something that can get you there. You’re smart enough to do any fucking thing you ever wanted to do, and you’re stubborn enough to make it happen. But I’m not, Maggie. I’m not getting out of here and I know that. I came to terms with what I was born into a long fucking time ago. I can’t get out of that. So how in the fuck would that work? One way or another you were going to get hurt. I loved you too fucking much to drag it out.”
    “There’s nothing keeping you here, Jacob.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “There’s never been anything keeping you here but you.”
    “Bullshit, Mags.”
    “I mean that.” Maggie moved closer and that closeness cut my words. She stood directly under me now, her head almost pressed into my chest, gorgeous blond curls wadded up close enough to nuzzle. “I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you if it weren’t true.”
    I wasn’t quite sure what to say and so I said nothing. I just stood there staring into her eyes. And in that moment that passed between us, there was this energy in the air that seemed to cup the two of us like lightning bugs in closed hands. I felt numb. I felt weightless and numb, and it was the closest thing to perfection that I’d ever felt. And out of that feeling came words. And maybe they were the perfect words, or maybe just the closest thing to perfect words that I’d ever had, and so I spoke them.
    That same look I’d seen appeared again. Those silver blues dilated like she was on some fine drug. She pushed up onto tiptoes, her head cocking sideways as she came, and before I knew it I could feel her lips pressed into mine and I struggled to catch up. I hooked hair that had fallen along her cheeks back behind her ears, and continued with my right hand down her arm till my fingers found their place along her ribs. I ran my left hand down her cheekbone and feathered my fingers under her chin to hold her there a second longer if I could. The numbness stayed with me. It was an old feeling that I had all but forgotten, a feeling that I never knew I’d missed until right then. She pulled back and smiled, and I was left there wide-eyed as a child when she ran away.

10.
    The roach had no more than caught the wind when I saw that son of a bitch hiding out in the Jehovah’s Witness parking lot at the three-lane. I’d scrounged up a skimpy pin joint by plucking what little bit of bud clung to stems picked clean at least twice by now and had brought it with me on the ride to smoke after seeing Maggie. I’d figured it for a disappointment-easing kind of smoke, but after what had just happened, I was riding high. It was a fucking celebration in the cab of my pickup, and now this son of a bitch was pulling out to cut the music at the first dance.
    He rode along behind me a good six or seven car lengths back for the first half mile, gave me time to light another Winston and let the morning breeze soften the stench. I reckon it was about the time I held that cigarette out the window to let the wind carry ash that he sped up and put the Crown Vic right up against my tailgate. That’s when the lights came and sirens blared, not one of those chirps like pull over and everything will be fine, but full fucking sirens. Though the first thought in a McNeely is always
Floor it
, I knew that my old beater might just give out coming through Glenville and there I’d be racking up charges. So instead, I slowed down, flicked the blinker, and pulled into a real estate office just Cashiers side of Bee Tree Road.
    He stepped out in the same way all those bulls do, opening the door and leaving it wide as they resituate the weight on their belts. He rolled his neck around to push out cricks left from sitting in a cruiser too long, and he shut the door across his body with his left hand as his right flipped the snap on his holster and settled onto the grips.
    I was eyeing him awfully hard in the side mirror as he came