"You're in love with that dead girl."
He put his hands down. "Oh, come on, Meg," he shouted at me. "Why does it always circle around to that?”
"Right. Why does it?"
He ran his hands through his hair and held on to the back of his neck, both biceps bulging. God damn him for looking so hot when I wanted to run away.
"You reminded me of her that first night at the bridge," he said. "That's it. You didn't even remind me of her by the time I told you about her. And now you don't remind me of anyone." He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath, gathering courage, before he told me. "I'm in love with you."
I felt the tears coming. I lashed out to keep from crying. "You love me so much that you won't do me when presented with the invite. This is all about you needing to be in control. It's not enough to arrest me. You make me ride around with you while dirty men tell me they want to rape me. It's not enough to take away my spring break. You give me back a little piece of it, but only if you hold me on a leash. It's not even enough to have sex with me."
I gasped for breath, and he stepped toward me.
"You want me to beg for it," I choked out, "so you can say no."
I wished it wasn't true. But I could tell by his silence that it was. Maybe he was just now realizing it himself.
But then he said, "That's stupid. I said no because you don't love me.”
"I do love you," I screamed at him.
"You can't possibly! You're so closed off. You're just saying that to get laid."
He flinched and turned to look as a car swiped past us on the highway. I took the opportunity and ran.
He caught up with me in five seconds and stepped in my path. "We can't leave it like this," he said, feeling for my hand, chasing my hand around my waist when I held it away from him. "Let's talk about it when we're not mad. I’ll call you later today."
I blinked back tears. "I'll still be mad later today."
"Then you call me when you're not mad anymore."
"I don't call people." I brushed past him and escaped.
This time, he let me go.
*
After a mile and a half. I was too tired to go on. I slowed to a stop on the grassy shoulder and bent over with my hands on my knees, catching my breath. I did not have leukemia. This fatigue was of an entirely different sort.
I glanced at my watch in the moonlight. The problem with walking was, I would never make it to the trailer in time to take a shower before my shift at the diner. I needed to wash the sand and the ocean and John off me. I smelled his cologne and his sweat on my skin.
But I couldn't run anymore. I walked along the dark highway, wading through the long grass that had sprung back to life in the past few days. I should have felt scared, a teenage girl walking along the highway alone in a skimpy shirt at 5:30 a.m. I didn't. There was no one to scare me. This section of the main highway through town was lined with pine trees and utterly abandoned. I pictured John driving up and down this highway, nineteen times a night, for the rest of his life.
I had set up my project for the DA to discourage other teenagers from venturing onto the bridge, but also to encourage John to let the bridge go and leave town. Now that I finally faced my feelings for him, I realized I'd hoped all along he would follow me to Birmingham and we'd hook back up. And now that I'd gotten up close and personal with his control freak side, I knew it wouldn't happen. My project alone wouldn't be enough to nudge him off his orbit around the bridge. He would stay. I would go, but I would feel like I'd left part of me here with him, cemented as securely as my handprint tile on the wall in the park.
This wasn't happening, this couldn't possibly be the way it ended, but it was. Unless I did something.
With a final sigh, I started running again. I had gotten my second wind. I had a lot to do after my shift at the diner, before I finally went to bed. I needed to sweet-talk Lois. Then I would make an appointment with a train.
*
And at 6:01 the next morning, I called him.
"Hey!" he said. "I was just about to drive back to the police station." He sounded stoked to hear from me. Little did he know what was in store for him. "Where are you?"
"On the bridge."
Through the phone, I heard the wail of his siren begin. I also heard it in stereo, up on the highway. Somewhere beyond the bridge and the clearing and the dark silhouette of trees against the gray dawn sky, the siren woke the dead.
"John!" I shouted. "John, you don't have to do that. I looked up the schedule on the Internet. I even called to double-check. The train won't cross here for another fifteen minutes."
The siren switched off.
I joked, "And you thought I wouldn't make a good manager."
John had switched off, too. I repeated his name through the phone, but there was only static and the murmur of Lois's voice. He must have thrown the phone down on my seat.
I watched across the clearing, waiting. Finally I heard the low hum of the car's motor. Then the car itself emerged from the trees, blue lights off but headlights on. He drove too fast across the clearing and skidded to a stop in the gravel. A cloud of dust rose in front of the headlights and hung in the still dawn air.
He got out of the car, strode toward the bridge, stopped in front of the No Trespassing sign. I could tell from the way he moved that he hadn't seen the city's new installation before. A new sign bolted below the No Trespassing sign said SMILE! You 're being watched by the Police Department. He turned around and looked for the camera mounted high on a tree.
Then he brought his phone up to his ear. "Is this your surprise for me?" His tone was absolutely flat. But he caught an extra breath at the end, like he was trying hard to stay calm.
"I figured you would have seen it by now, on one of your many trips down here to the bridge on your shift all night."
"I didn't get out of the car." He took two hard breaths in the phone. "Does the camera really feed back to the police station?"
"Yes. Lois is watching us right now. Say hi." I waved in a broad motion that the camera could pick up this far away.
"Meg, you're doing exactly what you got arrested for in the first place."
"I let Lois know what I was doing so she wouldn't tell on me. The only reason it's illegal is that it's not safe. I've already informed you that for the next fifteen minutes, it's safe."
"Somehow, I don't think the DA is going to buy that." His words sounded rational, but his voice was drawn tight underneath.
"Yeah, I should have run away from you and started college and gone on without you. But I would always have regretted it if I didn't give this a shot." I pulled back his leather cop jacket, so maybe he could see even from a distance that I was wearing his To Protect and Serve T-shirt. "Come and get me. You have fifteen minutes before the train comes." I glanced at my watch. "Twelve."