Chapter 2 The Meeting

He watched the steam curl from my mug like it was telling him a secret. “You ever play for people?” I asked, because if he was a wandering guitarist there was no better nonchalant probe.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Mostly to convince bars I’m worth letting in. Or to make truckers cry softly into their napkins.” He made it sound absurdly heroic.

“You make truckers cry?” I deadpanned. “That’s a niche talent.”

He laughed, the sound sliding warm across the table. “Yeah. I specialize in sad choruses and bad puns. It’s a thing.”

Marge refilled my coffee with an efficiency that suggested she had been practicing for the apocalypse. “You two gonna solve all the world’s heartbreaks tonight, or do you take reservations?” she asked, and I almost liked her for a second because she treated our chaos like a Tuesday special.

Travis shrugged. “We’re taking names. Heartbreak’s expensive these days.”

He leaned in like he was about to reveal a magic trick and then looked at me as if deciding whether I was the sort of person who appreciated sleight of hand. “Seriously, though. Out there—” He gestured vaguely toward the smeared windows. “It’s quieter than it looks. Rumors travel faster than people. I heard whispers about a woman who could make hunters look like amateurs.”

My mouth tightened on a shape of words I didn’t want to speak. “Rumors are usually wrong.”

“Not this time?” he asked, eyes bright with that maddening mixture of mischief and something softer. He was deliberately trying to poke at me. I let him.

“Maybe,” I said. “Depends on who’s telling them.”

“Fair,” he said. “I like fair. Keeps people honest. Keeps me alive.” He thumped the guitar case with the flat of his palm like it was a talisman. “So,” he said, shifting topics like a man changing the radio station, “what’s your escape plan? Because wandering aimlessly in the rain is a very privileged form of danger.”

I almost told him to mind his own business, because that was the kind of line people took when they wanted to be left alone. Instead I said, “No plan. Just a map of towns and a habit of leaving before people get attached.” It came out flippant, but the edges of it were sharp.

He lifted his hands like a man surrendering to a joke. “That’s poetic, if a bit melodramatic.”

“You’re one to talk. You play sad songs for truckers.”

He grinned. “Melodrama pays the gas.”

There was a pause where the jukebox decided to warble into something ironically upbeat. The diner’s clock ticked like the kind of judge that never blinked. Somewhere outside a car door slammed — a normal sound. Somewhere a heartbeat sped up — mine, because that’s what happens when the world decides to remind you there are teeth in the dark.

I noticed it then: a shadow crossing the steamed glass, too deliberate to be someone seeking shelter. A reflection of boots, not a hurried commuter but someone who moved with purpose. I felt the old reflex curl under my ribs, a practiced smallness, the instinct to disappear into any seam of the world.

Travis followed my gaze. His fingers paused on the guitar case. He didn’t look surprised. He looked—prepared. “Hunters?” he asked, not asking.

“Maybe,” I said. My voice was small. “Probably.”

He didn’t argue. He smiled that ridiculous grin, the one that made my mouth want to argue with reason. “We should probably go then. The storm’s prettier if you see it from the road.”

I found myself standing because that’s what you do when something in your chest decides for you. I slid my jacket on and shoved my hands into the pockets like I’d never learned to be graceful. Travis put the guitar case strap over his shoulder and offered me his hand for balance like an idiot and a hero in the same breath.

“It’s not a rescue,” he said. “Just company.”

“Very specific rescue policy,” I muttered, because I had to keep my sarcasm somewhere when my insides were trying to remember how to be steady.

He winked. “Company with bad jokes. And maybe the occasional song you didn’t ask for.”

Outside the rain hit like a curtain. It slapped the world into smaller pieces and washed the neon into smeared watercolor. We stepped into it and the air took in our smell like a new verse. The guitar case felt heavy and ordinary against him. My jacket squelched. The diner’s light made us two darker shapes among puddles.

We walked side by side though we didn’t agree to it. He hummed something tuneless under his breath, probably a bad chorus about rain and redemption. I matched my steps to his because there’s an odd comfort in marching with someone else’s rhythm.

A car rolled slowly past and two figures inside turned their faces toward us like a pair of instincts deciding. For less than a second they appeared curious, for less than a second they looked like agents reading a page. Then they drove on.

We left the town behind like you leave a memory—fast and reckless and pretending you’ll never look back. But as we turned at the highway I felt the stone I’d set down earlier tremble. It was still there, but lighter. For the first time in a long time it didn’t feel like an ankle shackle. It felt like something I’d dropped to see what would happen.

Travis glanced at me, rain beading on the tip of his nose. “Where to?” he asked.

“Anywhere but here,” I said. I meant it and I didn’t. The road was long and dangerous and ridiculous and possible.

He nodded like that was a plan. “Anywhere but here it is,” he said, and then, because he was the sort of idiot who could not help himself, he flipped open the guitar case and plucked a single, graceless note that sounded like a promise and a dare.

I didn’t laugh aloud. I felt something like a smile tug at the corner of my mouth anyway. The road hummed beneath us, and the rain wrote us into the night. Behind the smear of town lights, two distant headlights stopped at an intersection and someone reached for something that might be a phone or might be a crossbow. The world kept its secrets. We kept walking.