“Who was that from?” Amelia asked.
I glanced down at her as she rested her head on my shoulder.
“Why couldn’t I have come up with that?” I questioned, and she didn’t answer. Apparently I wasn’t poetic. “Carl Sandburg. But I butchered it.”
It was one of my favorite poems because it was the only one that adequately described what it was like to be from this city. The love/hate relationship we all had, the relief we felt to leave, and the relief we felt to come back. It was always trying to kill us, and we were always fighting to live anyway. If you could survive here, you could survive anywhere. That was the lesson I had learned.
“Amelia, we’re here,” Austin said when the car came to a stop.
She didn’t move.
“Amelia.”
Sighing, she sat up, her face whipping back to me. She grabbed my face, hers only inches from me.
“I don’t understand everything. I know you’re about to do something. I don’t care what it is. Just be safe, you hear me?”
Damn, I loved her. “Loud and clear.”
Nodding, she grabbed her purse, sliding out of the car. I didn’t want to bring her at all, but she wasn’t having it, and so the best I could do was make her promise to stay in a hotel while I head back “home.”
“Daniel, you’ll be staying with her,” I said to him, and without arguing, he got out of the car as well.
Austin and I exited on the same side of the car. He left the passenger door open and went around to the driver’s side. Luckily, since we had lied about where we were going to be on Twitter this morning, the press wasn’t here, though that would change the moment someone found out.
Plus, we had chosen an old black Honda, something that wouldn’t stick out much to drive in.
“How much did you bring?” I asked him when I sat down.
Pulling away from the hotel, he nodded at the briefcase by my feet. “Thirty large.”
“We don’t need that much—”
“They know who you are, Noah. They aren’t going to talk for less.”
Rubbing the side of my head, I tried to ignore the headache coming on.
“You good? You haven’t had an attack in three months. Is it the new meds—?”
“I’m not on the meds,” I replied.
“Goddamn it, Noah!”
“I’m fine.”
“Last time you said that, you needed rehab,” he muttered, shaking his head at me.
Sighing, I reached into the glove compartment, taking out the pill bottle.
“How did you know they were there?”
I glanced over to him, popping one in my mouth. “You’re kidding me right? Your brain only has one setting—”
“You mean keeping your ass alive and out of trouble.”
“Exactly.” I grinned, leaning against the seat. “You wouldn’t keep my pills anywhere I couldn’t reach if you weren’t around.”
“So this would be a good time for me to ask for a raise?” he mocked.