“You did something different.”
“Yeah. Look at me! Ain’t I somethin’?” I laughed softly, mocking myself. “I’m not poor, but I haven’t beat hopeless yet.” I tried to laugh again, but the truth wasn’t especially funny. My laugh didn’t sound very convincing. Time to talk about something else.
“How’s this for an equation: Bonnie plus Finn equals one big Popsicle,” I said and shivered for affect.
“Yeah. It’s damn cold.” Finn rose up onto one arm, the arm beneath my head, dislodging me and the blankets and making me squeal and burrow down even farther as he looked out the window. “It’s stopped snowing. Someone will come along eventually. And if they don’t, we’ll find a mile marker in the morning and make another call.”
“Come back down here, heat supply,” I commanded. “I’m going to close my eyes and you are going to tell me about math so I can fall asleep. Tell me some theorems. Is that what you called them? Tell me how Einstein knew e equals mc squared. And start with once upon a time . . . okay?”
“You’re a little bossy, you know that?”
“I know. I have to be. It’s to make up for not being born with a calculator. Now share your wisdom, Infinity.”
“Once upon a time—”
I giggled and Finn immediately shushed me, continuing on with his “story.” I closed my eyes, more content and less hopeless than I’d been in months.
“Once upon a time, there was a man named Galileo.”
“Galileo Figaro!” I sang, interrupting the story immediately. “Name that song.”
“‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen.” Clyde sighed with pretended long-suffering.
“Excellent. I just had to make sure you and I could be friends. Continue.” I nestled down again and prepared to be bored to sleep.
“Galileo isn’t usually considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He was a physicist, a scientist, but it was people like Galileo that made me believe that math was magic.” Finn’s voice was a rumble in my ear, his breath tickling the hair against my forehead, and I closed my eyes as he began to expound on something he called Galileo’s Paradox—how there are just as many even numbers as even numbers and odd numbers combined, which should defy reason, Finn said, but which made perfect sense if you compared them in terms of infinite sets. My eyes started to feel heavy immediately, too tired to try to follow the concept for long. Who woulda thunk it? Big, blond, and beautiful also had a brain.
Chapter Seven
RUMORS CONTINUE TO swirl about the reported disappearance of country superstar, Bonnie Rae Shelby. Police are now involved after several sightings of the star with an unknown male have been reported. One sighting resulted in an assault against a salon worker, another sighting led to an altercation outside a Motel 6 just east of Buffalo, New York, where Shelby attempted to use a credit card that had been reported as stolen and was later seen arguing outside the establishment with the same, still unidentified, man. The desk clerk at the motel was concerned for Shelby’s safety after the man grabbed Miss Shelby, at which point the desk clerk called the police. The clerk, in an interview with police, said she had talked to the singer before the altercation and claimed Miss Shelby seemed frightened and under duress. The singer asked to make a phone call when her credit card was declined but was unable to reach whomever she was trying to call. Shelby’s family has issued a statement that they are very concerned for Bonnie Rae and will cooperate with police to ensure her safe return.
IT WASN’T SUNLIGHT that woke him. It was brighter than that. The world around the Blazer was so white he wouldn’t have been surprised if a chorus of angels had surrounded the partially buried vehicle and pointed him toward the pearly gates. But heaven couldn’t possibly be this cold. And the girl in his arms was no angel, though she looked pretty damn sweet with her short brown hair sticking up at her crown and her bow-shaped lips parted on a soft snore. Her hat had come off in the night, and her face was buried where his armpit met his chest.
Finn looked down into her face and waited for the dread and disbelief he’d been feeling, in varying degrees, since becoming shackled with Bonnie Rae Shelby. Instead, he remembered the way she’d looked after he’d kissed her, her lips all pink and swollen. He thought about her diving over the seat to claim the pillow with the case, the way she’d returned her gran’s phone by chucking it out the window, how she’d sung “Bohemian Rhapsody” and fallen asleep to his mathematical mumblings, all in the middle of a crisis. It made him curious as to how she would behave when she wasn’t overcome with grief, when her world wasn’t coming down around her ears, when she wasn’t stranded in a snowstorm with someone she’d only known three days—two and a half, actually.
He grinned and laid his head back down.
“You’re scaring me. Grinning like that, at nothing,” Bonnie mumbled.
“It wasn’t nothing. It was something.”
“Ha ha. Are we going to die in this Blazer?”
“No. But I can’t feel my left arm, and that place where you drooled on my chest has frozen solid, freezing my nipple in the process.”
Bonnie started to laugh and rolled away from him, sitting up and throwing blankets this way and that, looking for her hat. Finding it, she pulled it over her bedhead, yanked her boots on her feet and threw herself back over the front seat, like she’d done it a thousand times.
“Ladies first, and it’s not dark anymore, so no peeking out the windows. I’m going to test you on the color of my panties, and you better not know that they’re red with black skulls.” Bonnie pushed the passenger door open, snow falling from the roof onto the seat as she climbed out.