Page 61 of Catcher's Lock

Andyes.

“I think you should let me give you a hand job.”

The truck swerves—a bare twitch of the wheel, quickly recovered, but it’s enough. And because the past is crowded close and I’m trying not to think about my parents, because of the truck and the trees, and because I’m the world’s biggest idiot with a kamikaze brain, I quip: “Watch out for the owl.”

He doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the drive.

20

Owls

Josha

Age 22 (Then)

It ended with the owl.

It started with a lie.

“I’m heading out to meet Penny in Santa Rosa for a drink and a movie. I promise I’ll crash at her apartment if I’m not safe to drive back.”

Of course Shilo believed me. I was Josha—responsible, smart,trustworthy—and I never lied to her.

It never occurred to her that the phone call I received as we were rolling up the last of the sidewalls to load onto the flatbed was not from my old high school friend but from her wayward son. The son who should have been in rehab for another forty days.

Our Calistoga run had just ended, and it was my twenty-second birthday—an adult birthday, not an important one like ten or sixteen or twenty-one—but enough of an excuseto let me slip away. Shilo sent me off with a distracted: “Have fun, be safe. Call if you get into trouble.” Followed by a laugh, because I’mJosha, and I never get into trouble.

Then it was me and Gem in a seedy bar, sitting too close together on the barstools. It was knees overlapping and heads together and lips at my ear because the music was too loud for normal conversation. It was the shiny burn of tequila in my throat and beach-blue eyes and warm fingers on the back of my neck.

I knew what it meant when he kept slipping away to the bathroom, but I let it slide because he washere, and he wasmine, and he was bright with laughter and bad ideas, and I’d missed him.

And now it’s Sonoma County roads, winding through dark hills and darker trees. It’s snatches of starlit sky as the light pollution fades in the rear window of the truck—the old Big Top truck that Shilo and Hals let me rig with a camper top so I could have my own place to sleep this year on tour.

Gem is driving, because whatever powders he’s been snorting keep him wired, and I’m too drunk and too high and too giddy with the reckless, unmoored magic of the night.

The bird comes out of nowhere—a sudden flicker-flash of white feathers diving past the windshield. Gem swerves, slamming on the brakes, and I clutch the oh-shit handle and brace against the dashboard as all the drunkenness gets swallowed by the sharp spike of adrenaline. Tires spin on the gravel shoulder, and the back end fishtails when he overcorrects, one rear wheel dipping into the ditch before we grind to a stop.

Now we’re staring at each other on the dark side of an unnamed road as the engine ticks and cools and the trees whisper to the wind, and

we

are

alive.

He’s luminous. All wide eyes and elation, and he could be fifteen again—or thirteen and innocent—all the years of bullshit washed away like sand under the surf. I swear I can hear the staticky thunder of his heartbeat pounding in time with mine.

“Was that an owl?” I ask once I’ve gathered my voice.

“There was no dean’s daughter. I didn’t get kicked out of ENC for partying. I just…failed.”

The confession curls up between us, stripping time to its marrow, and in this liminal, lucid space, I somehow understand perfectly.

A truth for a truth.

So I launch myself across the bench seat and crash my mouth onto his.

His lips are warm and soft, parting effortlessly under my questing tongue, and he tastes like Tic Tacs and tequila, danger and desire.