Page 105 of Snake
As Ida whooped and slammed her empty glass down, Autumn’s door intercom buzzed.
They gave each other identical confused looks. Unless she’d ordered food, which they had not yet done, nobody buzzed Autumn’s door. Her dads, like Ida, had the code, the delivery guys left the packages in the mail room, and the, like, three people in the building she knew by name would just knock on her door.
“Whodafuq?” Ida asked, pouring more tequila in their glasses.
Autumn shrugged and went to the intercom. “Yes, who is it?” she said and pushed the receive button.
No response through the speaker.
She tried again. “Hello?”
Again, silence.
Looking back at Ida, Autumn shrugged. She was about to give up and walk away when it buzzed again.
She jammed the talk button. “Okay. Whoever you are, speak now or get lost.”
“Autumn.”
She leapt back from the intercom like it had caught fire at the precise moment a baby Xenomorph broke through the speaker.
“Whoa!” Ida exclaimed. “Who is that?”
Again, the intercom buzzed. From her new position about four feet away, Autumn stared at it.
Ida came to her side. “Who is it?” she asked again, her tone gaining a sheen of worry.
“Cox,” Autumn answered. “It’s Cox.”
Her friend’s reaction was imminently meme-able: very slowly, she dropped her head to one side, her eyes went wide as saucers, and her jaw unhinged.
With the exception of the blackmail angle, of course Autumn had told her best friend all about her tragic sojourn in Signal Bend. Ida had details Autumn would never in a hundred trillion years ever tell her fathers.
Too much detail, in fact, for Ida and Cox to meet. Especially not under these conditions.
But Ida and Cox weren’t supposed to meet! He’d shoved her away, made it very clear that he didn’t want her in his life; ergo he should not be meeting anyone in her life, which she lived in Indianapolis, more than three hundred and fifty miles away from his life.
What the hell was he doing here? At her home?
Once more, the intercom buzzed.
When Ida went for it, instinct kicked in and shook Autumn out of her shock. She lunged forward, beating Ida to the button and pressing it herself.
“Cox?” she said, too loudly, her voice cracking through the middle of his name.
“Yeah.”
“You weren’t kidding about the monosyllabic thing,” Ida whispered, as if Cox could hear from downstairs.
Sending her friend a silent warning to zip her lips, Autumn pressed the button and asked “Why are you here, Cox?
More silence.
Autumn had spent weeks working through her feelings about this man, his life, his town—and, most importantly, his wholesale rejection of her at the very moment she’d basically been supporting his life on her shoulders. Now, out of the blue, he was standing outside her building, hundreds of miles from where he belonged, and he wouldn’t tell her why?
She was extremely over this man’s refusal to communicate.
Monumental, her memory whispered in her mind, using Cox’s voice.
