By unspoken consent, neither of them turns on a light in the room. Light from the parking lot drifts in through a slit in the curtains. Blink doesn’t ask, just heads to the bed farthest from the door, where he starts stripping off his jeans and sweatshirt — not what he arrived at the lodge wearing. His brand-new clothes from the Army Surplus are gone.

Too tired to care, she strips herself down to her bra and panties, and climbs into her bed, shivering at the touch of sheets they might have been keeping in a deep freeze. She curls up tight.

“Night,” he says, but she wonders if he’ll even remember having said it in the morning.

“Night,” she says. The cold has woken her up a little, though the clanging baseboard heater is pumping out some kind of second-rate warmth, tinged with the scent of mildew, household cleaner, and stale cigarette smoke.

“Kitty?” he says, his voice only half conscious.

“What?”

“Thanks.”

She can’t speak. Thick hands seem to have come right out of the mattress under her and wrapped themselves around her neck, choking off her windpipe. The horror movie she had been afraid of.

By the time she has recovered enough to respond, she knows Blink is asleep. She lies there, listening to his breath go in and out. She listens as a car drives by, waiting for it to slow down, turn into the motel, and stop — expecting it to. What was this place even called? She hadn’t noticed. Journey’s End? They have not gotten away; she has resigned herself to that. She will keep on escaping and keep on being caught. This could go on for millions of years. It will be tiring, she thinks.

Spence is lying on the end of the dock.

“Hey,” she says. “No goofing off.”

He doesn’t move, and as she approaches him, she sees the way his arm lies under his body, the palm up in a way that would be too uncomfortable to bear.

Then she sees his iPod dangling just above the surface of the water, still plugged into his ears. There is a fly on his cheek. A tiny red stain on the back of his collar. A hole at the base of his skull.

Her arms are around you, her face pressed against your back. She is sobbing. You are confused. You are back on that ATV hurtling through the night. But somehow now you are naked, and as she presses her body against you, you realize that she is mostly naked, too. So it’s a dream, but if it’s a dream, why is she crying like this?

Her hands claw at your chest, as if she can’t hold you tight enough. She is holding on for dear life, hurtling through some other darkness, far worse than this cheap and musty room.

You want to turn and face her, hold her, and kiss away her tears. It isn’t love she’s after — you know that. She’s clinging to you the way the survivor of a shipwreck clings to a piece of door, anything that will float. She loves you like a raft, Blink.

Her breasts are pressing hard against your back. And now her legs coil themselves around your legs as if to keep them out of the treachery of the waters. There are sharks down there, circling this queen-size bed. You are her raft — all that separates her from cruel, unforgiving teeth and the freezing darkness of the deepest ocean.

She is struggling, and you are struggling. She’s wearing only her underthings. You’ve never been this close to a girl wearing this little, but even when she loosens her grip on you enough for you to turn and face her, you know that holding her is all that is going to happen for now, despite the crying out in your body.

Her wrenching sobs slacken, and then the tears come, staining your face. You wipe her tears away with your free hand, while the other cradles her head. After a few light-years, she starts to relax, and her arms hold you less in desperation now and more as if in passion. A part of you — that restless male part — will not listen to reason. It pokes away at her with a mind all its own, and you pray that it will not drive her away because holding her is enough right now.

She isn’t fighting. And you worry that maybe she thinks there might be a price to pay to have climbed onto this raft that is you.

“Shhh,” you say into her hair. “It’s all right.” And what you mean is just that — this is all right. You expect nothing more than this. And you wonder if this is what love might be. And you wonder if you knew it would take so much for it to happen. And you wonder how anything that felt like this could ever die. And then, because you can’t help yourself, you wonder again if you are dead and this isn’t purgatory anymore but a kind of heaven suitable for the likes of street urchins and losers. And you know that it is enough of a heaven as long as it includes her.

There’s one good thing about thinking you’re dead: the merciless poker down there between your legs has stopped prodding away. There is sadness in that, but it makes things a little easier.

“Shhh,” you say again, you’re not sure to whom. “It’s all good.”

She sniffs and hugs you.

“I wouldn’t mind,” she says. “If you want to.”

“It’s okay,” you say, your voice just a tattered bit of white cloth now, a flag of surrender.

“I would like it,” she says.

You press her head into your bony shoulder. “This is good,” you say, your voice raw with emotion and weariness and thankfulness.

She sniffs again. “Sometime,” she says. You can hear the sleep in her voice taking her over. It is so sweet.

“Sometime,” you say.

You wake up and she’s gone.

It’s light outside, dim inside. You roll over and look at the other bed. She’s not there. From where you are lying, you can see the bathroom door, open, dark.

She is gone. What did you expect, Blink? Did you really expect that you deserved anything so good to happen?

You hurt all over. So many bruises. Falling into boats. Falling out of windows. Falling in love. None of it gets you anywhere. You shift your gaze to a chair by the window. The foolish designer jeans Wallace gave you hang over the back, nicely folded. You left them in a heap on the floor. You left the money in the pocket — what was left after you paid for the motel room.

On another morning you might have leaped out of bed to see if it was still there. But you don’t bother now. You have come such a long way, young man. Such a great distance. And where will you go from here? How will you get there? She will have taken the Jeep. The keys were there, conveniently, in the pocket with the cash.

You are rested now. You feel as if you slept deeper than you have in years. Maybe that’s why you are so calm.

Something happened to you last night. It wasn’t a dream. And if she has stolen all that money and the car as well, that was the least of what she got away with. You can’t summon up anything like rage. That would require having a heart, and she took that as well.

Then the door to the room opens, letting in a flood of daylight. You shield your eyes, and when the door closes and you can see again, she is standing there.

“Sorry,” she says. Then she holds up two handfuls of paper bags. “Turns out we were only a couple of kilometers from civilization. I bought us breakfast.”