fic: Your face against the morning sun
title: Your face against the morning sun
words: 2.8k
pairing: Bela/Jo
prompt: Bela steals something from Jo. Jo goes to get it back, and it turns into an odd game of cat & mouse.
a/n: written for scorpiod1 for the femslash comment fic fest.
Jo stepped into her room and kicked her sneakers off into the pile of shoes beside her door. She made straight for her computer. After all day working tables at the Roadhouse, it was her one link to civilization, that real world which existed in the more settled United States instead of the middle of God forsaken nowhere.
She didn't make it to the bed, though; something wasn't right.
The creaky wood floor groaned beneath her feet as she stepped to the open window, the curtains billowing inwards with warm, night air. She knew she'd closed it, that was the tell, that and her cup of pens was tipped on its side, sharpies spilled over into the trashcan.
Damn it. She put a hand to the top drawer of her desk, fingers to the handle on a held breath. She pulled and, sure enough, the drawer slid out silently, no need for a key.
It was clearly empty, but she yanked the drawer out anyway and felt around inside like she could have possibly missed something.
"God fucking dammit."
Day was different, song stayed the same.
This was not the first time she'd left home. Hunting by herself over the past few months had given her a taste of a different sort of loneliness, one that didn't fit right on her skin. This time around she took the old car in the early morning, at five AM and leaving nothing but a note and all her stuff as proof and promise she was coming back.
The things she took with her were the necessities: an address written in pink pen on a notepad, her Walther PPK James Bond pistol, and Dean Winchester's warning in her mind.
"Of course," she said. "Of course I'll be careful."
"Can't believe I'm even telling you this," Dean said. His voice echoed, dipping in and out of range.
"Where are you, a sewer?"
He sounded surprised when he said, "Actually yes." There came a splashing sound, followed by muttered cursing. "Anyway, girl's dangerous, Jo."
"Maybe to you. We're something like old friends."
"Friends?"
Jo paused to think of the five--five--times Bela had taken something from her for no reason she could fathom. "Almost. In that 'I pull your hair, you pull mine, sort of way', yeah. I'd say we're friends."
"Fucking chicks--" He started, but Jo cut him off.
"That's real nice, Dean Winchester. My momma was right. Foul mouths, the both of you."
"Hey Sam," Dean called, always quick to tell his brother everything. "Sam, Jo says you've got a dirty mouth."
Jo heard Sam make an outraged sound, heard Dean laugh and say, "Don't act like I haven't--"
"Thanks for the address. You take care of yourself, Dean," she said, which, for some reason, seemed to hit him hard. She hoped they weren't in some kind of trouble.
"Yeah," he said, voice gone gravelly. "Same to you, Jo."
She got to Ohio running on empty. She napped on and off in the back bench of the car for an hour and then it was four o'clock in the afternoon and she ate a Snickers bar for energy, and a pb & j sandwich. They both left a weird stickiness in her mouth but then she brushed her teeth with her pink toothbrush and a warm bottle of water in a rest stop bathroom. Hit the road and made it to Queens that night.
She arrived tired and travel weary, unsure if Bela was even in New York, and the humidity made her straight hair frizz out in a way she wasn't used to. All this combined left her vulnerable to the sort of wonder that was only natural when beholding a famous city for the first time. Disdain would come later, if she stayed long. Longer than a week and she'd grow to hate the elevated cost of food and would realize that there were far too many pigeons on the streets. For now, though, all she saw were the glittering lights as she crossed the bridge onto Long Island.
Bela's apartment was easy to get into. Jo just smiled at the doorman, innocuous and not suspicious in the slightest in her day-old jeans and red hoodie. She pressed the number in the elevator, and that was it. There was no security, no front gate, nothing, a fact which bespoke a certain assurance on Bela's part.
Breaking into the apartment itself was achieved thanks to her mother, who'd grudgingly taught her to pick a lock when she was thirteen. She'd bought her a shiny lockpicking kit and Jo had divied it up and tucked the picks on her person--on the back of her belt, for instance, and one in the soul of her shoe--because you could never be too prepared.
She shut the door behind her with a quiet click. Traffic sounds were still seeping in from behind the blinds, but they fell muted in the shadowed white of Bela's living room. The place looked comfortable, barely lived in and more than Jo would ever be able to afford, with a nice couch and a big TV.
In the three seconds she stood there, eyes adjusting to the dark, she went from road-weary to alert, the cool weight of a gun suddenly at her back.
"Big city for a young--"
"Don't give me that," Jo said. She held still, hands out at her sides. "We're almost exactly the same age last I checked."
It was true. Ash hadn't asked her why she'd wanted to know, he'd just gotten her any information she could win out of him in two pool tournaments and a round of darts.
"Now," Jo said, slowly turning so the gun was pressed at the V of her ribs. "I believe you have something of mine."
Bela was bone achingly familiar in jeans and a blue top, a real sight for sore eyes. She looked unruffled by finding Jo breaking and entering, kind of smug actually, as she said, "Sold it."
Jo rolled her eyes. "This again? How many times do I have to tell you, I don't play games. Now give me back my daddy's gun."
"Play nice," Bela said. "It looks to me like you haven't got any leverage."
"Look, you're the one who lured me out here," Jo said, voice more steady than she felt. "Now how about you put down the gun and I can pretend I've forgotten about the one you stole from me. Take me out to a late dinner and then I'll steal my stuff back while you're sleeping. Does that sound good?"
Bela laughed and the tension in the room left off, dissipating like old smoke. She put the safety on and dropped the gun on a bookshelf by the door with a clunk.
"I can't believe you drove all the way out here," she said.
"Why'd you drive all the way to Nebraska in the first place, anyway?" Jo asked. "I'd be flattered except I'm sure there was a job in it."
Bela switched on another lamp, casting the room in gold light, and said, "Flatter yourself."
They never made it out of the apartment. Within five minutes, Bela had shown Jo the jewelry she was currently selling on e-bay for fifty thousand and a case of cursed daggers that she was keeping for herself. In the space of an hour, she got Jo liquored up on strawberry wine coolers. Or maybe it was the other way around.
"How long have you failed to drink these?" Jo said, because the bottles were shoved behind condiments.
Bela replied sharply, maybe embarrassed, "I'm not big on drinking alone, all right?"
"And you only have a six pack? Well, we're having all of them, that's for sure." She twisted off the caps of two bottles and leaned against the counter behind her like she was back in the bar, exposing her midriff, angling for tips.
Bela arched an eyebrow until Jo sighed and came to hand her a bottle.
Jo had this suspicion that she and Bela weren't all that different. Yeah, Jo had been homeschooled, and Bela had probably attended some sort of selective all-girls school, but neither of them really understood how to talk to people her own age. Jo had figured that one out when Bela had come into the Roadhouse for the first time, dressed down and throwing on the charm, how she'd gotten some of the most suspicious hunter-types to warm up to her but when Jo had leaned over the bar and asked her what she could get for her, Bela had fumbled.
She was like another lost kid. Jo could read the signs. The two of them belonged to the same underworld even though Bela had somehow made it big despite being an orphan and on the wrong side of just about everybody.
Half an hour later, when they'd gotten down to their underwear and t-shirts, Jo decided to make snacks. She leaned into the fridge once again to show off her ass.
"That won't do you any good," Bela said, sounding unmoved, but one could never tell with her. "I've only got canned beans and a loaf of bread. When I'm here I tend to order delivery."
Jo turned and spread her hands. "So make me toast."
They ate it with butter, standing up, crumbs all over their palms. Jo was wire-happy and Bela didn't seem to be too bothered by standing around in the kitchen, either, Jo acting pleased, not talking.
Because even though the last time they'd seen each other had ended poorly--Jo had stolen her locket back, but then Bela had lifted it and snuck out into the night while Jo was sleeping, hence Jo's earlier, pointed comment--it would probably prove best not to talk about past transgressions. Everything out of Bela's mouth was always sneaky and kind of sultry, and Jo had a habit of getting too honest, too fast.
She finished her toast and her last strawberry drink, tired but feeling like a million bucks. When she started yawning into her wrist, Bela pushed the empty bottles to one side and backed her into the counter.
"How are you?" she asked. "How's living with your mum and serving at the bar?"
Jo was fizzy pink in her mouth and only a little tipsy as she curled a strand of Bela's hair around her finger. "You mean hanging with hunters and learning how to shoot the wings off flies from thirty paces? It's good."
Bela pushed a hand up Jo's shirt.
"I haven't seen you in six months. Are you still loaded and on the run?" Jo said. "Or do you spend all your time sneaking into my room?"
"Oh I'm positively rolling in money," she said, ignoring the second question. "Although I've had to keep most of it in Switzerland, which is, between you and me, very out of the way. I make it a point never to go there."
Jo couldn't imagine a situation where she'd have to actively avoid part of Europe. She just looked sternly at Bela and said, "don't get caught. I'd like you at liberty to visit my country whenever you please, thank you very much."
"I think I'd like to kiss you for your good intentions."
"But we're practically sober," Jo said as Bela led her away from the kitchen by both hands, walking backwards and barefooted. "And we haven't even gotten to the half-hearted and obligatory pillow fight."
Bela took this complaint seriously, apologizing, "I've only got one sofa pillow. I keep the rest in the bedroom."
Jo kissed her against a lamp, which fell over.
"It's fine," Bela said, pulling Jo to her by the hips. "I nicked that from the lobby."
They stumbled back into the bedroom.
"You're the most beautiful person I've met," Jo said when she crawled over Bela on the bed, pushing her into the pillows. "And I mean that objectively."
This was true. Jo was gorgeous herself, and she knew it because everyone she'd ever met had basically told her. Well, maybe not Sam Winchester, but he always seemed kind of distracted, trying to pull Dean off in some direction that wasn't hers.
Bela splayed a leg so Jo would fit against her. She kissed Jo at the corner of the mouth, the bridge of her nose.
"You're a goddamn thief, though," Jo continued, eyes fluttering closed. "And that really tempers any compliment I'll ever give you."
Bela looked up at her in the half-light of the room and said evenly, "I could tell you I'd stolen your heart, but--"
"I might have to shoot you, yeah."
She kissed her down into the comforter.
"We're all going the same way," Bela told her some time later. It figured that pillow talk with a criminal would revolve around death. Bela touched her hip, pushing a careful hand up the soft dip of Jo's side and Jo leaned into it, shifting closer under the covers. She had wrapped them both in the same blanket.
"Yeah?" she asked. "And how's that?"
"Not with a bang but with a whimper," Bela said. "And I'm not one for cliches, so I mean it."
"Not me," Jo said, accepting another slow kiss at the corner of her mouth. She felt like she'd crossed half the planet in a day and still had miles to go. "I'm going guns blazing. There'll be fireworks."
"Fireworks."
"Yes, and flowers and noise, real badass because I'll be saving the world."
"I'm sure you will," Bela said, but she sounded like she believed it, was actively trying to believe it. It fit their mutual ideas, after all; they liked to think of one another as daredevils, indestructible.
"This is a ridiculous conversation," Jo decided, and what she meant was clearly lain out between them in the coiled sheets. They were young and they were beautiful, and really fucking good at whatever they put their hands to. The end wasn't even worth thinking about.
"Jo," Bela whispered, later still, after they'd had sex again and were nearly asleep. "I have a plane to catch tomorrow in the morning. Sorry, darling."
"Are you expecting me to be furious with you?" Jo said into the pillow. "I didn't even tell you I was coming."
"I thought you might, though."
People weren't supposed to dip in and out of one another's lives at random, so it figured that these sort of moments would be cut short, would fall few and far between. People were supposed to be constant and true, but Bela left only a trail of missing pieces to remember her by.
Jo kissed Bela's neck slowly in the darkness and hid a hand at the back of her knee, thinking that this was inexplicable. She had heard and seen a lot of crazy shit, given how she'd been raised. She preferred horror comedies to love stories, had once killed a ghoul by herself when she was fourteen and could beat just about anyone at poker with little remorse, yet Bela remained one of the most interesting things that had ever happened to her.
She ran her hand up Bela's arm, curled their fingers together in the comforter and said, "Next time you be brave. Give me a call and I'll be there."
Bela looked bemused, like she would never dare to hope. She touched Jo's hair instead of answering, touched her at the shoulder, and said, "Finders keepers."
Before she left the apartment, she beat Bela at her own game of deception. She slid her second favorite gun, the Walther PPK, into the drawer to replace her daddy's gun. She put that in the pocket of her hoodie before kneeling back onto the bed, fully clothed. Bela pulled her down to make out for a second before she left, one hand twining into Jo's hair and the other slipping into the back pocket of her jeans.
If Bela wanted something of hers, she was going to give it freely, Jo thought as she left. When she drove out of the city there were multicultural markets opening in the gray city dawn and she passed a park where people were sitting with coffee like they'd yet to go to sleep. A day's drive and she'd be pulling back into the side lot of the Roadhouse, that accidental scratch on the dusty map of the United States. Her momma was gonna kill her. She had fifteen unheard voice mails to prove it and a text from Ash that was just an emoticon of a boobs and a question mark.
Jo drove out of New York City knowing it wasn't the last time that she would leave home. She was impulsive and knew it, and it would all work out, provided she had the cash for gas. Even if she didn't, she'd get by. She felt herself getting addicted to the feeling, too, that ache of the open road which could have been loneliness, but was more probably the sloughing off of everything that bound her.
It was an act of freedom, a Midwest coming of age story, she and Bela at once both central and subsumed in the greater narrative.
Once she hit the 80, Jo switched on the radio to something not too static and sped off into the sunshine. The highway slicking off behind her wheels was a constant that would take her places she hadn't yet even dreamed of, cat-eye sunglasses on her face and the wind in her hair.
words: 2.8k
pairing: Bela/Jo
prompt: Bela steals something from Jo. Jo goes to get it back, and it turns into an odd game of cat & mouse.
a/n: written for scorpiod1 for the femslash comment fic fest.
Jo stepped into her room and kicked her sneakers off into the pile of shoes beside her door. She made straight for her computer. After all day working tables at the Roadhouse, it was her one link to civilization, that real world which existed in the more settled United States instead of the middle of God forsaken nowhere.
She didn't make it to the bed, though; something wasn't right.
The creaky wood floor groaned beneath her feet as she stepped to the open window, the curtains billowing inwards with warm, night air. She knew she'd closed it, that was the tell, that and her cup of pens was tipped on its side, sharpies spilled over into the trashcan.
Damn it. She put a hand to the top drawer of her desk, fingers to the handle on a held breath. She pulled and, sure enough, the drawer slid out silently, no need for a key.
It was clearly empty, but she yanked the drawer out anyway and felt around inside like she could have possibly missed something.
"God fucking dammit."
Day was different, song stayed the same.
This was not the first time she'd left home. Hunting by herself over the past few months had given her a taste of a different sort of loneliness, one that didn't fit right on her skin. This time around she took the old car in the early morning, at five AM and leaving nothing but a note and all her stuff as proof and promise she was coming back.
The things she took with her were the necessities: an address written in pink pen on a notepad, her Walther PPK James Bond pistol, and Dean Winchester's warning in her mind.
"Of course," she said. "Of course I'll be careful."
"Can't believe I'm even telling you this," Dean said. His voice echoed, dipping in and out of range.
"Where are you, a sewer?"
He sounded surprised when he said, "Actually yes." There came a splashing sound, followed by muttered cursing. "Anyway, girl's dangerous, Jo."
"Maybe to you. We're something like old friends."
"Friends?"
Jo paused to think of the five--five--times Bela had taken something from her for no reason she could fathom. "Almost. In that 'I pull your hair, you pull mine, sort of way', yeah. I'd say we're friends."
"Fucking chicks--" He started, but Jo cut him off.
"That's real nice, Dean Winchester. My momma was right. Foul mouths, the both of you."
"Hey Sam," Dean called, always quick to tell his brother everything. "Sam, Jo says you've got a dirty mouth."
Jo heard Sam make an outraged sound, heard Dean laugh and say, "Don't act like I haven't--"
"Thanks for the address. You take care of yourself, Dean," she said, which, for some reason, seemed to hit him hard. She hoped they weren't in some kind of trouble.
"Yeah," he said, voice gone gravelly. "Same to you, Jo."
She got to Ohio running on empty. She napped on and off in the back bench of the car for an hour and then it was four o'clock in the afternoon and she ate a Snickers bar for energy, and a pb & j sandwich. They both left a weird stickiness in her mouth but then she brushed her teeth with her pink toothbrush and a warm bottle of water in a rest stop bathroom. Hit the road and made it to Queens that night.
She arrived tired and travel weary, unsure if Bela was even in New York, and the humidity made her straight hair frizz out in a way she wasn't used to. All this combined left her vulnerable to the sort of wonder that was only natural when beholding a famous city for the first time. Disdain would come later, if she stayed long. Longer than a week and she'd grow to hate the elevated cost of food and would realize that there were far too many pigeons on the streets. For now, though, all she saw were the glittering lights as she crossed the bridge onto Long Island.
Bela's apartment was easy to get into. Jo just smiled at the doorman, innocuous and not suspicious in the slightest in her day-old jeans and red hoodie. She pressed the number in the elevator, and that was it. There was no security, no front gate, nothing, a fact which bespoke a certain assurance on Bela's part.
Breaking into the apartment itself was achieved thanks to her mother, who'd grudgingly taught her to pick a lock when she was thirteen. She'd bought her a shiny lockpicking kit and Jo had divied it up and tucked the picks on her person--on the back of her belt, for instance, and one in the soul of her shoe--because you could never be too prepared.
She shut the door behind her with a quiet click. Traffic sounds were still seeping in from behind the blinds, but they fell muted in the shadowed white of Bela's living room. The place looked comfortable, barely lived in and more than Jo would ever be able to afford, with a nice couch and a big TV.
In the three seconds she stood there, eyes adjusting to the dark, she went from road-weary to alert, the cool weight of a gun suddenly at her back.
"Big city for a young--"
"Don't give me that," Jo said. She held still, hands out at her sides. "We're almost exactly the same age last I checked."
It was true. Ash hadn't asked her why she'd wanted to know, he'd just gotten her any information she could win out of him in two pool tournaments and a round of darts.
"Now," Jo said, slowly turning so the gun was pressed at the V of her ribs. "I believe you have something of mine."
Bela was bone achingly familiar in jeans and a blue top, a real sight for sore eyes. She looked unruffled by finding Jo breaking and entering, kind of smug actually, as she said, "Sold it."
Jo rolled her eyes. "This again? How many times do I have to tell you, I don't play games. Now give me back my daddy's gun."
"Play nice," Bela said. "It looks to me like you haven't got any leverage."
"Look, you're the one who lured me out here," Jo said, voice more steady than she felt. "Now how about you put down the gun and I can pretend I've forgotten about the one you stole from me. Take me out to a late dinner and then I'll steal my stuff back while you're sleeping. Does that sound good?"
Bela laughed and the tension in the room left off, dissipating like old smoke. She put the safety on and dropped the gun on a bookshelf by the door with a clunk.
"I can't believe you drove all the way out here," she said.
"Why'd you drive all the way to Nebraska in the first place, anyway?" Jo asked. "I'd be flattered except I'm sure there was a job in it."
Bela switched on another lamp, casting the room in gold light, and said, "Flatter yourself."
They never made it out of the apartment. Within five minutes, Bela had shown Jo the jewelry she was currently selling on e-bay for fifty thousand and a case of cursed daggers that she was keeping for herself. In the space of an hour, she got Jo liquored up on strawberry wine coolers. Or maybe it was the other way around.
"How long have you failed to drink these?" Jo said, because the bottles were shoved behind condiments.
Bela replied sharply, maybe embarrassed, "I'm not big on drinking alone, all right?"
"And you only have a six pack? Well, we're having all of them, that's for sure." She twisted off the caps of two bottles and leaned against the counter behind her like she was back in the bar, exposing her midriff, angling for tips.
Bela arched an eyebrow until Jo sighed and came to hand her a bottle.
Jo had this suspicion that she and Bela weren't all that different. Yeah, Jo had been homeschooled, and Bela had probably attended some sort of selective all-girls school, but neither of them really understood how to talk to people her own age. Jo had figured that one out when Bela had come into the Roadhouse for the first time, dressed down and throwing on the charm, how she'd gotten some of the most suspicious hunter-types to warm up to her but when Jo had leaned over the bar and asked her what she could get for her, Bela had fumbled.
She was like another lost kid. Jo could read the signs. The two of them belonged to the same underworld even though Bela had somehow made it big despite being an orphan and on the wrong side of just about everybody.
Half an hour later, when they'd gotten down to their underwear and t-shirts, Jo decided to make snacks. She leaned into the fridge once again to show off her ass.
"That won't do you any good," Bela said, sounding unmoved, but one could never tell with her. "I've only got canned beans and a loaf of bread. When I'm here I tend to order delivery."
Jo turned and spread her hands. "So make me toast."
They ate it with butter, standing up, crumbs all over their palms. Jo was wire-happy and Bela didn't seem to be too bothered by standing around in the kitchen, either, Jo acting pleased, not talking.
Because even though the last time they'd seen each other had ended poorly--Jo had stolen her locket back, but then Bela had lifted it and snuck out into the night while Jo was sleeping, hence Jo's earlier, pointed comment--it would probably prove best not to talk about past transgressions. Everything out of Bela's mouth was always sneaky and kind of sultry, and Jo had a habit of getting too honest, too fast.
She finished her toast and her last strawberry drink, tired but feeling like a million bucks. When she started yawning into her wrist, Bela pushed the empty bottles to one side and backed her into the counter.
"How are you?" she asked. "How's living with your mum and serving at the bar?"
Jo was fizzy pink in her mouth and only a little tipsy as she curled a strand of Bela's hair around her finger. "You mean hanging with hunters and learning how to shoot the wings off flies from thirty paces? It's good."
Bela pushed a hand up Jo's shirt.
"I haven't seen you in six months. Are you still loaded and on the run?" Jo said. "Or do you spend all your time sneaking into my room?"
"Oh I'm positively rolling in money," she said, ignoring the second question. "Although I've had to keep most of it in Switzerland, which is, between you and me, very out of the way. I make it a point never to go there."
Jo couldn't imagine a situation where she'd have to actively avoid part of Europe. She just looked sternly at Bela and said, "don't get caught. I'd like you at liberty to visit my country whenever you please, thank you very much."
"I think I'd like to kiss you for your good intentions."
"But we're practically sober," Jo said as Bela led her away from the kitchen by both hands, walking backwards and barefooted. "And we haven't even gotten to the half-hearted and obligatory pillow fight."
Bela took this complaint seriously, apologizing, "I've only got one sofa pillow. I keep the rest in the bedroom."
Jo kissed her against a lamp, which fell over.
"It's fine," Bela said, pulling Jo to her by the hips. "I nicked that from the lobby."
They stumbled back into the bedroom.
"You're the most beautiful person I've met," Jo said when she crawled over Bela on the bed, pushing her into the pillows. "And I mean that objectively."
This was true. Jo was gorgeous herself, and she knew it because everyone she'd ever met had basically told her. Well, maybe not Sam Winchester, but he always seemed kind of distracted, trying to pull Dean off in some direction that wasn't hers.
Bela splayed a leg so Jo would fit against her. She kissed Jo at the corner of the mouth, the bridge of her nose.
"You're a goddamn thief, though," Jo continued, eyes fluttering closed. "And that really tempers any compliment I'll ever give you."
Bela looked up at her in the half-light of the room and said evenly, "I could tell you I'd stolen your heart, but--"
"I might have to shoot you, yeah."
She kissed her down into the comforter.
"We're all going the same way," Bela told her some time later. It figured that pillow talk with a criminal would revolve around death. Bela touched her hip, pushing a careful hand up the soft dip of Jo's side and Jo leaned into it, shifting closer under the covers. She had wrapped them both in the same blanket.
"Yeah?" she asked. "And how's that?"
"Not with a bang but with a whimper," Bela said. "And I'm not one for cliches, so I mean it."
"Not me," Jo said, accepting another slow kiss at the corner of her mouth. She felt like she'd crossed half the planet in a day and still had miles to go. "I'm going guns blazing. There'll be fireworks."
"Fireworks."
"Yes, and flowers and noise, real badass because I'll be saving the world."
"I'm sure you will," Bela said, but she sounded like she believed it, was actively trying to believe it. It fit their mutual ideas, after all; they liked to think of one another as daredevils, indestructible.
"This is a ridiculous conversation," Jo decided, and what she meant was clearly lain out between them in the coiled sheets. They were young and they were beautiful, and really fucking good at whatever they put their hands to. The end wasn't even worth thinking about.
"Jo," Bela whispered, later still, after they'd had sex again and were nearly asleep. "I have a plane to catch tomorrow in the morning. Sorry, darling."
"Are you expecting me to be furious with you?" Jo said into the pillow. "I didn't even tell you I was coming."
"I thought you might, though."
People weren't supposed to dip in and out of one another's lives at random, so it figured that these sort of moments would be cut short, would fall few and far between. People were supposed to be constant and true, but Bela left only a trail of missing pieces to remember her by.
Jo kissed Bela's neck slowly in the darkness and hid a hand at the back of her knee, thinking that this was inexplicable. She had heard and seen a lot of crazy shit, given how she'd been raised. She preferred horror comedies to love stories, had once killed a ghoul by herself when she was fourteen and could beat just about anyone at poker with little remorse, yet Bela remained one of the most interesting things that had ever happened to her.
She ran her hand up Bela's arm, curled their fingers together in the comforter and said, "Next time you be brave. Give me a call and I'll be there."
Bela looked bemused, like she would never dare to hope. She touched Jo's hair instead of answering, touched her at the shoulder, and said, "Finders keepers."
Before she left the apartment, she beat Bela at her own game of deception. She slid her second favorite gun, the Walther PPK, into the drawer to replace her daddy's gun. She put that in the pocket of her hoodie before kneeling back onto the bed, fully clothed. Bela pulled her down to make out for a second before she left, one hand twining into Jo's hair and the other slipping into the back pocket of her jeans.
If Bela wanted something of hers, she was going to give it freely, Jo thought as she left. When she drove out of the city there were multicultural markets opening in the gray city dawn and she passed a park where people were sitting with coffee like they'd yet to go to sleep. A day's drive and she'd be pulling back into the side lot of the Roadhouse, that accidental scratch on the dusty map of the United States. Her momma was gonna kill her. She had fifteen unheard voice mails to prove it and a text from Ash that was just an emoticon of a boobs and a question mark.
Jo drove out of New York City knowing it wasn't the last time that she would leave home. She was impulsive and knew it, and it would all work out, provided she had the cash for gas. Even if she didn't, she'd get by. She felt herself getting addicted to the feeling, too, that ache of the open road which could have been loneliness, but was more probably the sloughing off of everything that bound her.
It was an act of freedom, a Midwest coming of age story, she and Bela at once both central and subsumed in the greater narrative.
Once she hit the 80, Jo switched on the radio to something not too static and sped off into the sunshine. The highway slicking off behind her wheels was a constant that would take her places she hadn't yet even dreamed of, cat-eye sunglasses on her face and the wind in her hair.