Page 34 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
“The distinction being?”
“Lurking implies intent to creep. Observing implies intent to document.” She held up her notebook like a shield. “I’m documenting.”
“You’re documenting me putting tape on my hands.”
“It’s a process piece. Very journalistic. The New Yorker would kill for this level of access.”
He turned then. Full face. And the thing that happened in her chest when Jake Reeves looked at her without his game face on—with those ridiculous blue eyes—was the kind of thing that should come with a warning label and a consent form, and possibly an insurance waiver.
“You’ve got ink on your face,” he said.
She slapped a hand to her cheek. “Where?”
“Everywhere. You look like a Rorschach test.” He grinned—the crooked one, the real one, the one that wasn’t for cameras. “What do you see in it?”
Bad decisions, Lily thought. I see an avalanche of extremely bad decisions, and I’m standing at the top of the mountain in a sundress with no poles.
“Journalistic integrity,” she said instead.
He laughed. And the sound bounced off the concrete and wrapped around her like a warm hand on a cold night, and she was suddenly losing a fight she hadn’t realized she’d started.
-----
The cursor blinks. My fingers hover. The scene has gone from funny to honest without asking my permission, which is how all the best writing works.
-----
And heaven help her, Lily stayed. She watched him finish the tape, and she let herself want something she’d spent three months pretending she was too smart to need.
I don’t know how long I’ve been typing when I hit the last line of the scene. Could be an hour. Could be four. Time has no meaning when you’re writing. (Same is true for calories. Anything you eat while writing goes straight to your brain, I’m pretty sure.) I type the final period. My hands still. Twelve pages. The best twelve pages of my career.
I pull out one earbud.
It’s very quiet.
No, not quiet. Silent. The silence of a building that has been vacated, sealed, and abandoned by every human being except one idiot novelist wedged between bleacher rows like a raccoon in a dumpster.
I’ve been left for dead. Or the rapture finally happened…which doesn’t bode well for me.
The rink lights are off. The ice, a dark mirror. The stands are empty. No Zamboni. No music. No nothing.
I yank the other earbud out. My heartbeat takes over as the loudest sound in the building.
My gaze travels to the row of tiny windows across the opposite wall of the rink. Outside, snow is already piling across the glass, scraping away in hurricane-level wind only to be replaced by more snow.
It’s March in Minnesota, so the second coming of winter shouldn’t be surprising.
I scramble for my phone. The time reads 8:02 p.m. And wouldn’t you know it, that little No Service icon blinks across the top of the screen.
Four hours. I’ve been tucked in this bleacher gap for four hours, invisible, inaudible, completely absent from the physical world while apparently an entire blizzard arrived and the building died around me. This is a new personal record for dangerous creative dissociation, and I am not adding it to my résumé.
I slip my laptop back into my bag—it’s dying anyway—and unfold myself from the gap, knees cracking, back protesting, and scramble down the bleachers. The wood screams under my boots. The sound is enormous in the dead arena, bouncing off the boards and the dark ice and the banners hanging limp in air that’s already turning cold.
I head through the double doors and back into the mall.
Amber emergency lights pour over the halls, painting the corridors in stripes of sickly gold and deep shadow. The stores are gated, metal shutters pulled down for the night. A sugary aroma wafts from Sutton Sweets, evidence of a shop closed down in a hurry. Blue Line Books sits empty and dark. Even Blake’s Café is dark—Helen’s gone, stools inverted on the counter, chalkboard facing the wall like it’s been sent to the corner. Norah Jones is silenced for the night.
This is beyond spooky. And I write murder for a living.
