Outside The Lines:: Third Person Narration (19 page)

“Not even Andrea Marcuso?” she asked lightly, sliding her finger across the display. The channels changed rapidly, zipping up the dial. Except there was no dial.
 

“Not even her.” Johnny’s eyes stayed on the road. “She doesn’t want me either, for what it’s worth.”

Crazy lady.

“But mostly, it’s time,” he assured her. “I don’t have the time.”

She knew what that meant. She assumed Johnny did too. If you were interested, you made the time. Johnny hadn’t made the time. She smiled at the glowing control panel. “Me either. No time.”

“Good thing we share a client,” he said absently, glancing in his rear view.

“Right,” she agreed. “Or else we’d never see each other.”

“To have headbanging sex.”

Heat coursed through her as she laughed. “Old married couple, we are.”

He smiled.
 

She found Flock of Seagulls on the radio. He shook his head silently and endured.

“So, why?” she said a moment later.

Johnny stared through the windshield, then said, with only a trace of impatience, “Why what, Jauntie?”

“Why refer Mrs. B to me?
 
I mean, if you did.
 
Why suggest a second opinion at all, when Dan had already done one they were both satisfied with?”

Johnny was quiet a minute.
 
“Dan was right,” he said. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“Yeah, I know,” she agreed glumly. She flipped to another station.
 

Another moment of silence passed.
 
“You shouldn’t stop,” he said in his low voice.
 
“It makes people do what you want.”

She grinned and continued flipping stations.
 
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Johnny was smiling too.

He glanced over, considered her a second, then said in a musing tone, “Juliette Jauntie,” but the way he said it, each syllable was drawn out like he was making sure it touched every part of his mouth on the way by.
 
It was extremely arousing.
 

“That’s my name,” she said brightly, as if she wasn’t aroused.

“It’s quite a name.”

She gave a little laugh and looked out the window. “Yeah, my mother was funny that way.”

“Funny ha-ha?”

“Funny shoot-up-crack-and-dream-of-better-days.” She clicked open the glove compartment. Empty but for the owner’s manual and a single pen. Who has nothing but an owner’s manual and a pen in their glove box?
 
The dim electric amber glow snapped off as she shut it again. She didn’t want even that much additional light on this conversation.
 

She felt his gaze on her profile. “That doesn’t sound too funny,” he said.

She shrugged. “It wasn’t. But Mom tried, I’ll give her that.
 
And she thought the name Juliette was romantic. You know, Romeo and Juliet. Romance.”

“Romeo and Juliet committed suicide.”

“Yeah.”
 
She sighed and looked out the side window. Her reflection peered back, extremely pale. Ghostly. She turned back to the windshield.
 
“I don’t think it’s very romantic either.
 
But Mom wasn’t thinking clearly.
 
She listened too much to what other people said.
 
She thought whatever they told her to think, did whatever they told her to do. They called Romeo and Juliet a romance, so that’s what she called it, too.”

Johnny glanced over. “Did you study Shakespeare in school?”

She sighed.
 
“I did.”

“What did you call Juliet?

She thought about that. The highway lights lit up the black road, swirling with snow, interspersed by long stretches of darkness.
 
No one had ever asked her this question before.
 
What
did
she think of her namesake, the beautiful, smothered Juliette?

“Hopeless,” she said quietly, but inside, she felt angry.
 

 
Johnny looked over at her.
   

“And you?” she said, almost fiercely.
 
What did Johnny think of this old stand-by, this four hundred year old classic, this litmus test for romance?
 

“Cowards,” he said at once.
 
“You get one shot at this life, you don’t throw it away. Not when some people get it ripped out of their hands, and all they want is one more chance to not fuck it up, one more goddamned minute. Have you ever seen someone want just one more minute?”

Juliette stared. She shook her head.

He gave a clipped nod.
 
“You get a chance, you take it. It’s the only rule. You don’t throw it away. Fuck that.”
 

He looked back at the road.
   

Her jaw dropped at his intensity.
 
Then she thought about the scars she’d seen traversing his body like a topographical map, and said, “Yeah,” real softly.
 
“That’s a good rule.”
 
She shifted around to stare through the windshield.
 
“I don’t think people like us get irony.”

“Never been a fan,” he agreed.

She stared at the swirling snow, Johnny’s words echoing in her mind, about chances and cowards.
 
Silence filled the car except for the muted strains of music, so low she could hardly hear it.
 

 
“I spent some time in juvie,” she announced abruptly.
 
She had no idea why.
 
Nor why she’d done it so
loudly
.
   

Silence came from the driver’s seat.
 
Then Johnny looked over.
 
“Did you?”

“Yeah.
 
I was young and stupid.”

“Maybe just young.”

“No,” she countered sharply. “Almost entirely stupid.”

He nodded, accepting that.
 
“What happened?”

She pursed her lips, looked out her window.
 
“A lot of things. Mostly, my mother died. Well, first she did drugs, then she married a low-life,
then
she died. My brother tried raising me. That didn’t work out.”

“It rarely does,” he said, his voice never leaving the calm, low-pitched range.

“No.”

“How much time were you in?”

All added up? Years.
 
“Not a lot,” she said vaguely. “So I don’t think this was about proving myself to Mrs. Billings, or impressing anyone, so much as…I just…had a feeling.”
 
She looked out at the dark, whirling snow.
 
“Just a feeling. I know that sounds crazy.
 
It’s just…after spending all that time with all those budding criminals, you get a sort of sixth sense when you’re with someone who’s up to no good.”

“Yes, you do,” he agreed quietly.

Something about that made her shift around, peer at him closely. “Did you spend any time in juvie?” she asked suspiciously.

He was quiet for so long she figured the conversation was over.
 
She figured she’d done what she usually did, pushed too hard, pissed someone off, the usual m.o., then Johnny said, very quietly, “Only to pick people up.”

Uh-oh.
 
That didn’t sound good.
 

It sounded almost as bad as all the things Juliette wasn’t saying.
 

“Family?” she asked tentatively.

He nodded.
 
“I have a lot of brothers. Some of them couldn’t follow the rules.”

She took a breath, released it.
 
“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” he said, and for the first time, she heard something in his voice that went beyond cold reason or detached amusement or body-firing lust.
 
He sounded…weary.
 

She inhaled deeply.

Nothing more got said.
 
Now the conversation was definitely over.
 
She was sure done with it.
 
She had no idea why she’d brought it up in the first place.
 
It made her skin prickle every time she talked about the past or her family.
 
It was the same thing that happened when the ominous music started playing in an old movie, right before the scary creature leapt out of the shadows.

When she thought about her family, she felt like covering her head with a blanket.
 

 
She gave her scalp a hard, vigorous, all-over scratching with both hands, wiping away the prickling.
   

Then Johnny’s voice rumbled out of the driver’s seat. “You should trust your feelings, Jauntie.”

She looked over slowly. She couldn’t look quickly, because her head suddenly felt light, buoyant, like a balloon. It might float off.
   

“I do trust them.” Her voice seemed to come from a long ways off. “I just piss off a lot of people in the process.” Her family. Her probation officer. Coworkers. Most of her bosses. Just about every person she’d ever met, in fact, including a good portion of her clients.
 

Everyone, really.
 
Except Johnny.

“Fuck ’em,” he said, still looking forward at the road.

He sounded so sure about that.
 
His certainty was like a little boat, sailing past her as she bobbed in a sea of self-doubt.
   

“Yeah. Fuck them,” she echoed softly, then settled back in her seat and practiced it a few times “Fuck.
 
Fuck.
 
Fuck them.
 
Fuck ‘em all,” she added in a fit of enthusiasm.

Johnny laughed.

She snuggled back in the seat, leaned her head back, let her eyes drift shut. After a moment, eyes still closed, she said quietly, “Johnny?”
 

“Hm?”

“Did you really think my valuation was science fiction?” She shouldn’t care. She
didn’t
care. She just…wondered.

He was silent. She opened her eyes and looked over.
 
He was looking at her, his gaze level.
 

“I thought it was a thing of fucking beauty,” he said.

A smile spread over her face and she let her eyes close again.

They drove home that way, Juliette occasionally napping, Johnny driving, listening to music, not all of it from the eighties.
 
They even found a late-night talk show where people insulted each others’ opinions about the Oakland A’s prospects for the upcoming season as they drove across the long, lonely, snow-swept highway.
 
Sometimes they talked, mostly they didn’t.
 

At some point, Johnny’s hand ended up in her lap—she might have reached for it, she didn’t recall, exactly—and it stayed there.
 
Maybe because she was gripping it.
 
But he didn’t pull away.

She slid her legs out, toward the center stick shift, and pushed her jacket behind her back. His hand, warm and heavy, rested on her thighs. She dozed.

Later yet, the snow turned to rain, then went away entirely and the sun rose behind them, pushing a long pale cape of light over the world they were driving into.
   

Chapter Fourteen

JULIETTE SHOOK herself awake when the morning sunlight glowed too bright against her eyelids to be ignored anymore.
 
She sat up clumsily.
 
They were almost over the mountains. Down below lurked the city.
 
People.
 
Problems.
 

Johnny was driving silently, looking straight ahead.
 
Tousled hair and a day’s growth of beard suited him.
 
His eyes were a little tired, but mostly he looked rumpled and sexy.
 
He had one forearm slung over the steering wheel, his hips rotated slightly to the side, pressing his faded jeans against the musculature of his thigh.
 
His dark grey cotton long sleeve clung to his chest and flat belly.