Chapter Two

      “The Black Book,” Travis said when they got back into the town car that had delivered them to the party earlier that night.

      “What’s that?” she asked, squeezing her hands into fists and trying not to fall apart.

      They were both on the verge of it, and if either of them gave in...well, they would both shatter completely.

      “A hotel. It belongs to a friend of my father’s.”

      “You don’t want to...go back to the dorms?” She’d been planning on staying with Sarah tonight, but obviously...obviously she wasn’t now.

      “You want to go back to the dorms right now?” he asked.

      She imagined the little space she’d shared with Sarah for the past three years. Sarah had been gone from it for nearly a year, but now it would feel so final. There was no chance she would ever walk through the door again.

      “No,” she said, her voice choked.

      “I don’t, either. I don’t think I can stomach the drive time and...I just want to be...somewhere else. Somewhere new.”

      She nodded slowly. “Are you okay?”

      “Fuck.” He dragged his hands over his face and leaned forward. “No, I’m not okay.”

      She didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to react at all, since her instinct now was to do what he was doing. Folding in on herself. Holding her stomach, trying to keep the pain from tearing her into tiny, irreparable pieces.

      But if she did, she didn’t know what it might do to him. So she just sat there, staring straight ahead, unmoving, while tiny claws stabbed into her heart.

      Travis had never seen life’s ugly side. And she’d been spared a lot of it. But growing up she’d seen in her neighborhood violence, poverty and the kind of depressed desperation that went along with it all.

      She’d learned as a child to shut things off when the outside world went insane. And she realized now that Travis never had. Travis’s life had always been beautiful mansions and social niceties. Weekends spent on the Cape and afternoons on the green.

      He’d seen nothing more than the careful facade laid over the reality of life. Had barely seen down into the machine, to see where the cogs, like her family, like so many others, made things work, seamlessly and beautifully for families like his.

      And he’d never seen those more unfortunate people get ground up in the inner workings of the beast before, either.

      He was kind, his family was kind, and they assumed everyone else was, too. His life was charmed and he assumed that all of life was.

      Travis was brilliant, but this wasn’t the sort of thing brilliance could prepare you for.

      Not that she was prepared. Not in the least.

      She’d grown up in a rough neighborhood, with no father and a mother who was wounded and jaded by life. Her mother had taught her early to never depend on other people...to depend on herself.

      She lived by that. She’d moved through life mercilessly ensuring that she guarded her own interests and her mother’s. She’d made sure she’d carved a clear path out for herself, so that at the end of everything people would look and see that while she’d had a hand up, she’d done the work herself.

      Travis was her friend, but she’d never been in a position where she was forced to depend on him before. But tonight she needed him. Tonight, she needed him to be the one who was strong, because she was already broken.

      “We’ll stay together,” she said finally. “All night.”

      He nodded slowly, his eyes staring straight ahead. “Good.”

      He tugged his tie off and threw it onto the seat, then shrugged off his jacket and put it there, too. Keeping busy, she imagined. And she was keeping busy by watching him.

      When the car pulled up to the curb, she pushed her door open and Travis did the same, neither of them waiting for the driver.

      “You forgot your jacket,” she said, when he shut his door. “And your tie.”

      “I don’t care.” He turned and started toward the entrance to the hotel.

      She stepped up onto the sidewalk, her heels clicking on the pavement as she followed him through the revolving door and into the marble-laden lobby of the boutique hotel.

      They walked up to the counter and she stood just behind him, her heart hammering. An evening that had started out surreal and turned to a sort of unbelievable tragedy was getting even stranger.

      She felt like she was having an out-of-body experience.

      Watching Travis check them into a beautiful hotel. Knowing she was going to spend the night with him in a room.

      Knowing that Sarah was gone and never coming back.

      Beyond that, she knew nothing.

      She didn’t know what would happen once the doors to the hotel room closed. Didn’t know what would happen if they crawled into the same bed together tonight.

      Didn’t know what might happen when she went back to the dorm alone, or back to Sarah’s apartment and found it full of her things, and empty of her forever.

      So she would focus on one unknown at a time.

      The ones that affected her the most now.

      The ones that concerned Travis, a locked door and a bed. That was suddenly paramount in her mind.

      When Travis turned away from the counter, he had a key. Not a card like you so often had for places like this. An honest-to-goodness key that looked like it belonged in a door that led to a dungeon or something.

      “Let’s go,” he said.

      She nodded, not sure of what else to say, until they were in the elevator