Page 26 of Joker

“I’m not cold.”

His brow lifts the slightest bit. “You’re visibly shaking.”

The fact that he says it without judgment somehow makes it worse.

I hesitate another second, then take the sweatshirt because refusing would be ridiculous and because I am, apparently, too tired to keep pretending I’m less affected than I am. The cotton is soft and heavier than I expected. It’s still faintly warm from being in the cab, and when I pull it over my head, it smells like him.

Not in a way that should matter. Not in a way I can even properly explain. Just clean detergent, skin, leather, something darker and masculine beneath it that doesn’t smell expensive or polished. It smells real. Grounded. Like the truck and the road and a body that exists firmly in the world without asking permission. The comfort of it hits me so unexpectedly I almost go still.

That makes no sense.

It’s just a sweatshirt. A borrowed layer from a man I’ve known for less than an hour. There is absolutely no reason the weight of it settling over my shoulders should feel like relief.

And yet.

I tug the sleeves down over my hands and stare out the windshield, trying very hard not to think about it. “Thanks,” I say quietly.

He shrugs one shoulder. “Didn’t need you freezing to death before the state line.”

The dry edge of it makes me smile before I can stop myself. Small. Barely there. But real.

I’m almost certain he notices.

He doesn’t say anything about it.

The miles keep slipping beneath us. The road changes slowly, almost imperceptibly, from one stretch of dark highway to another. Every now and then Joker takes an exit I wouldn’t have expected, then loops back onto a different road ten or fifteen minutes later. At first I assume he’s just following directions I don’t know about.

Then I notice he keeps checking the mirrors.

Not casually. Not the absent kind of scanning most drivers do. Purposefully. Constantly. Rearview. Side mirror. Road. Tree line. Rearview again.

He does it with the same calm rhythm he does everything else, like it’s second nature and not worth mentioning, but once I notice it, I can’t stop noticing.

He’s also not taking the most direct route.

I know enough about driving north from here to recognize that. We should’ve stayed on one of the bigger highways longer than we did. Instead, he peeled off twice, cut through darker stretches, circled back around onto roads that make less sense if your only goal is speed.

That should scare me. It should make me feel more hunted, not less. But the opposite happens. Because for the first time in weeks, I’m not the only one paying attention.

I’m not the only one calculating where a car behind us has been for too long. I’m not the only one trying to remember what color the headlights were two exits ago. I’m not the only one carrying the mental weight of every possible thing that could go wrong.

Joker is doing it too. Not nervously. Not in a way that makes me think he’s panicking. In a way that says this is what he does when he wants something protected.

And God help me, I feel myself easing because of it. Not fully. Not enough to be stupid.

But enough that my grip loosens on the sweatshirt sleeves by degrees until my hand is just resting there instead of clampedaround it like a lifeline. Enough that I stop checking the side mirror every thirty seconds because I know he already has. Enough that my breathing starts evening out without me having to force it.

That realization is so foreign I almost don’t trust it.

I watch his profile in the low light for a second before I can stop myself.

He’s exactly what I thought when I first saw him. Big. Hard. Dangerous in a way that doesn’t require theatrics. He doesn’t look like a safe man.

He looks like the kind of man you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw him in daylight with that expressionless face and those tattooed hands and that rough-cut presence that feels too sharp for ordinary life.

And yet sitting here beside him, wrapped in his sweatshirt with my daughter asleep in the backseat and the night stretched wide around us, I feel safer than I have in longer than I want to think about. That contradiction should probably bother me more than it does.

Instead, it makes something in my chest ache.