He heard the low whine of the police scanner first.

Downstairs the bass was still beating in the walls, down in the basement of the Alpha Delt house the lights were dim and the girls were all pale bare limbs and someone had taken an almost empty bottle of vodka and put it on the hideous shag carpet, the liquid climbing up the sides with every spin, and that was when Ned noticed that Nancy wasn't there, and struggled through the haze of Jagermeister to remember what Bess had hissed to him just before she had dropped Nancy off for an evening of general drunkenness and debauchery.

"Just don't let her be alone tonight."

Ned had responded with a suitable leer and suggestive comment. Then, he had. That was before, and he had known, but then the girls had started dancing and Nancy had been tossing back the shots as hard and fast as he, her eyes heavily lined in black and the straps of her heels pulled tight against her ankles.

"Nancy," he groaned, taking the last three steps with heavy stabs of his numb feet, following the low mournful tone of the scanner. She was on an unmade bed, curled up with her knees bent and he could see up her skirt to the shadowed triangle of her panties, and he blushed and tried to jerk his glance away but he registered it (black) before he could stop himself, and she didn't raise her head. She had one arm slung over the dusty radio as it spoke against her belly, in the muttered shorthand of the exhausted dispatcher.

"There's a fire downtown," she said, her voice hollow. "A car."

"Nancy."

He was so drunk that it was natural that she would be laying on someone's bed with a police scanner he'd never seen before cradled to her chest. He walked over, his foot dragging through a pile of dirty laundry, and he kicked a streaked Emerson t-shirt away and gazed down at her, at the wing of red-gold hair falling over her cheek.

God, she's so beautiful.

"Nancy... baby, what are you doing in here."

The police scanner moaned again and Ned flinched back. It sounded horrible, mournful, and he could feel it vibrating in his skull. He reached down and tugged on the power cord until the plug pulled free of the wall, the moan trailing off to nothing. Nancy's gaze found his, and it was blank.

"Come downstairs."

He couldn't look at her face for very long, so he looked instead at her burgundy fingernails and the pale blue sheet and the five slender silver bracelets pushed against the heel of her hand, standing in arches over her slender wrist.

"Why?"

"We're playing a game," he explained, the words tripping over each other. He reached down and traced his fingertips over her knuckle, watching the skin turn white when her grip tightened and released, then pressed his fingertips just between hers.

"Oh?"

"Please? For me?" He sat down on the edge of the bed and slowly pulled the scanner out of her grip. "Just a minute?"

She dragged one hand over her face, pushing her hair back, and held his gaze for a moment. "I guess," she mumbled, and groaned softly as he helped her sit up. "What kind of game?"

"Just a game."

"A sexy game?" Her voice was almost dripping with scorn and she took her steps slowly, but she still didn't wobble on her heels even while they maneuvered between the laundry all the way to the door. An acoustic guitar was lying abandoned in the hallway. It was that kind of party. Soon there would be girls and whipped cream bikinis and he'd find someone passed out in his backseat in the morning. This was the way it always went. "What, have the girls started doing body shots off each other?"

"They might have while I've been up here," he said without bothering to think, and she leaned heavily against his arm, her fingertips brushing the rail all the way down. "Where'd you even find that thing?"

She shrugged. "Car fire," she repeated softly, not looking at him. He could see a girl with one arm across her breasts, standing on her tiptoes and trying to pull her bra out of the chandelier. It was that kind of party.

Nancy took her place in the circle after shooting him a withering glare, but he passed her a bottle and she twisted the cap off and flung it into the corner without breaking his gaze, then brought the bottle to her lips and took a shot, smooth, her face twisting as she let it fall down again. One of the other girls was staring at her, at Nancy with her legs doubled up to the side and her burgundy nails and the the deep black of her heavily lashed eyes, and the other girl's lips curved up but her eyes didn't match, and Ned's wish that Bess had stayed grew heavy and undeniable for a moment.

One of the girls spun the bottle and it landed on him, but he shrugged it off, his eyes still on his girlfriend. Nancy kept closing her eyes for longer and longer intervals, her head tilting back loose on her neck, her throat gleaming in the low light.

"Hey."

Two girls, nervous giggling, but he just kept gazing at Nancy, and after a moment she forced her head back up and looked at him, and after another shot she passed the bottle back to him across the circle, and no one else cared. He traced his tongue over the rim before he took his own long sip, and it burned all the way down.

When the bottle landed on the two of them Ned pushed himself up in degrees, elbows and knees and one foot after another, then offered her a hand and pulled her up with him. The closet smelled like wet raincoats and muddy boots and the locker room after a basketball game.

Skirt.

Oh, there were more important things, but not many, not very. He picked her up and pinned her against the wall of the closet, and her breath was close and warm against his ear. Her heart was beating too fast. Her hair was against his cheek. Her kisses burned even though he'd already been numb.

She's not all right. She was alone.

He bit her lower lip and she gasped, her fingers tangling hard in his hair, but didn't pull away. He kissed her again and the sound of it was loud and the shoes he was standing on shifted and he pushed her hard into the wall as he fell off balance. The walls were still shaking and he couldn't see her eyes in the dark and the girls were laughing in the other room, the sound grew shriller with every passing hour, but this was all he knew to do, and when she pulled back he knew he had lost her, again.

"We should get back."

He nodded and kissed her again, his forefinger and thumb stroking the hem of her shirt at her belly, and her fingers rested just over his, the wire of her bracelets brushing over the fine hair on his arms.

She walked out first and the guys hooted and she ducked her head, her hair falling over her bare shoulder blades, and Ned looked at the thin straps over her shoulders and the thin strip of bare skin at the small of her back and remembered proposing to her, and wondered at his own stupidity. Of course she'd said no. Of course. He couldn't even distract her for more than five minutes at a time.

And they were too young and she didn't need him and the thousand other reasons. He reached for her and folded his fingers around hers and she squeezed his hand.

Half an hour later they had managed to drink half the bottle between them, and he was matching her every swallow with one of his own, watching her with a species of horrified fascination. He couldn't really see straight. Her face kept blurring and swimming. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again she was pushing herself up and this time he didn't even bother trying to make himself not look at her panties (still on, still black) as she slowly pushed herself to her feet.

"I need paper."

"Paper?" A guy who had been in the corner and his own personal haze of smoke the entire night found it hilarious, kept repeating it and laughing, and Ned made it to his feet after two false starts, to follow Nancy's wobbly lead.

"And a marker."

He caught up with her but the curve of his arm was too low and she startled, almost losing her balance and falling before he managed to steady her. His hand lingered at her waist and she put her own against it.

"Nan, why," he asked the hair near her ear, and she turned to him, smiling, with her eyes closed.

"Because."

"Because you miss her," he said without thinking, he said thinking too much, and she opened her eyes and he was seeing double and she wasn't drunk at all. Not at all.

She nodded once and her fingers pressed against his until the tips forced between, at the webbing between, just above his knuckles, and then she turned away again and he wanted to kiss her, but he put his other arm around her and stumbled across the carpet until they reached a wall and he sighed in relief.

"We need a marker," he announced to the room at large, and only once he had trailed off did he realize he had been very loud, but it didn't matter.

At the kitchen table, with a heavy chisel tip black permanent marker and a stack of blue-white printer paper, Nancy wrote painstaking slow with her arm curved around to shield it from view and Ned put his head down on his arm, telling himself that the room definitely wasn't spinning and he definitely wasn't going to throw up, he was going to keep an eye on Nancy, although it would take both because one wasn't enough. Her chair scraped back against the floor suddenly and Ned glanced up, wincing, just in time to see her heading for the back door.

"Just need some air."

The door swung shut behind her and Ned looked at the paper to see what she had been writing, and after a few minutes of intense staring to decipher it upside down, he smiled.

I find lost things, she had written in large uneven letters on her rudimentary flyer. Call me.

She was sitting on the dark porch with her legs hanging over the side and her skirt hiked up her thighs and her head between her knees, and Ned knocked over an inexplicable table lamp and a papier mache tiger on his way to her side. Someone had plugged in an entire string of Christmas lights and tossed them into the bushes without bothering to untangle them, and Ned watched them blink silently.

"You okay," he said softly, and didn't touch her, and her hair was red in the faint light.

She drew in a long deep breath and began coughing. "I don't think so," she said when she was finished.

He turned and gazed at her, waiting, but she brushed her hands over her face and when she finally sat up again her mascara was smeared on her cheeks and she was gulping her breaths.

"You shouldn't see me like this."

"Yes I should," he returned. "You know... we didn't have to be at the party tonight."

She looked away and smiled. "It helped."

Ned looked down and half the lights began blinking rapidly, strobing against his fingers, and he sighed. "I don't know what helps," he admitted. "I don't know how to make you feel better."

She reached over and rubbed her palm in slow wide circles over his lower back. "You have."

He scoffed. "All I did was hand you a bottle."

Her hand slowed even further, then drifted down until her thumb was hooked in his waistband at the small of his back, and he darted a glance at her, regretting the quick instinctual movement when his head began to swim.

"It's kind of ridiculous, isn't it," she said softly. "It's not like I ever... like I ever really met her."

"She was your mom, Nan," Ned objected. "No matter how old you were. It means something."

She ducked her head, her hair falling forward to hide her face, then turned and smiled at him. "See?" she murmured. "And you... and you being here, it means something."

He shook his head again, and didn't turn when he heard the rustle of her movement, and then her fingers were resting against his cheek and she was kneeling at his side, lowering her face to his, pressing the softest kiss against his mouth. "It means something," she repeated against his lips. "And I'm sorry... I'm sorry I'm like this."

"Like what?" The porch was so dark that her eyes were no longer blue, only the suggestion of a gleam and then the fall of her lashes.

"Bess... Bess and George say I can't turn it off," she explained, and he could feel her gaze on his lips even if he couldn't see it. "That I can't stop being who I am. And I have to be... this... to... to deal with it." She trailed off.

"Turn off... turn off the questions? Turn off being a detective?"

She nodded, slowly, reluctantly.

"But... but it's who you are," he stumbled. "This is what you do."

She nodded. "It's just... sometimes, tonight..."

He reached up, burying his hand in her hair, and urged her face back to his again, kissing her slowly. "You don't have to explain," he whispered against her mouth, then chuckled. "My God, Nan. You don't have to explain to me. I fell in love with you with my eyes open."

She vanished inside and came back ten minutes later with the sheaf of papers under her arm, and when he said he didn't want to know what she was going to do with them she just laughed in response, and with her skirt fluttering just against their joined hands he led her out to the chaos of cars parked in the yard. They found a pickup with the tailgate down, and she laughed when he helped her up, his fingers laced together to make a step. They lay on their backs looking up at the stars, side pressed to side, their hands joined between them.

"With your eyes open," she whispered, once one star and then another and another had stopped moving, and his every breath didn't make the world shift underneath them.

He squeezed her hand. "Yeah."

The party grew suddenly louder and then the door opened, spilling light into the yard, the harsh bellowed laughter of a group of guys. He and Nancy stayed motionless, after they turned to gaze at each other, and when they heard the pickup's driver's door open and slam closed Nancy had to smother her mouth to keep from laughing.

"If we're lucky maybe he's going to Omega Chi."

"I doubt it," she whispered back.

He shrugged. "Think we can get out without him seeing us?"

Nancy shrugged, then jumped when the engine roared to life. "I don't know," she said directly against his ear, and he shivered. "You up for an adventure, Nickerson?"

"You're here, aren't you?" he asked, and smiled, and she kissed him suddenly, hard.

Within five minutes they were off campus. He knew when the light pollution began to fade at the horizon, when there were trees at the edge of his vision instead of rooftops. Nancy rolled onto her side, facing him, and kept her arm across her hip to keep her skirt down, which meant their joined hands were close against her waist, and he couldn't make himself move.

"We could end up anywhere," he said.

Nancy nodded, her hair whipping around her face. "I'll climb on the roof and punch him through the driver's side window. You slide in through the passenger side and take the wheel."

He gaped at her and she laughed with her eyes closed, falling onto her back again, and Ned was very, very aware of where her hand was holding his. He swallowed and Nancy was nearly doubled over with it, her jaw brushing his shoulder.

The truck made a sudden swerve and Ned tilted his head back, trying to see the cab. Then Nancy's mouth was at his ear again.

"I don't think this guy should be driving."

"Me either."

Nancy picked up the sheaf of papers and held them where they were blowing hard in the current, then released them in one great handful, and it only took a second before the truck braked hard.

"Stop, drop, and roll?"

Nancy shook her head. "Soon as he's almost stopped, we go to the left and keep running."

"You'd better get your shoes off."

"No time."

The truck finally stopped and the driver's door swung open and with a smothered giggle Nancy followed Ned out, ducking immediately into the brush on the side of the road. The driver walked back toward the mass of mostly blank papers and Nancy knelt down, her breath audible as she unfastened her sandals.

"You gonna carry me when my feet start bleeding, Ned?"

"Even when we're attacked by bears," he murmured in reply, and she glanced up, her eyes dancing.

"Knew I could count on you."

Ned sighed, shaking his head as she wrestled her other shoe off and stood in her bare feet. "You know... I had to be incredibly drunk to get us into a situation that usually requires kidnappers, or at least a little light breaking and entering."

"Just keep telling yourself that," she said, gripping his hand hard in hers, as they set off quietly into the brush. "Look, I have no idea where we are."

Ned looked up, covered the North Star with his thumb, then turned slowly until he was facing the moon. "Uh... me either."

She smacked his arm lightly, still laughing. "Oh, thanks."

"But the way we were going..." He found her hand again and started walking. "In about two minutes we're going to hit an all-night gas station."

"You can't make it a diner, can you?"

Ned shook his head sadly. "Just passable coffee and maybe some stale donuts."

Nancy sighed. "I guess I'll take what I can get."

"Yeah." He released her hand and looped his arm around her waist before she even had time to glance up at him. "You know you can talk to me."

She hissed as she stepped on a rock, then nodded and cupped her hand over his. "I know," she said, and she was quiet for a minute. "I just don't have any words for this."

He nodded. "Okay."

Mike didn't ask, when he pulled up to the gas station twenty minutes later and Nancy was sitting on the island next to the gas pump, on the concrete ledge, a styrofoam cup of coffee between her palms and her face scrubbed bright, still wet, her shoes beside her. It had just been that kind of party.

In the back of Mike's car Nancy watched the clock flip over another minute and looked at Ned, who, despite his own cup of coffee, found himself unable to stop staring at her skirt. She reached up swiftly and joined her arms behind his neck and pulled him down to her, until their foreheads were touching.

"I miss her," she said softly. "And I love you."

Ned nodded, and kissed her, and she closed her eyes, and in the morning she woke up sprawled across him in his bed, back at Omega Chi, and she was still in her skirt (panties still on and still black), still wearing her bracelets, and Ned had a smear of her mascara against his cheek.

It had just been that kind of party.

She smiled and brushed her thumb over the smear, then buried her face against his shoulder, and he tightened his arm around her. "You okay?" he mumbled.

Her fingers and toes felt numb and blurred and if she stayed awake too much longer the hangover would hit, she could feel it there just at the edge, but she turned her face toward him, her cheek nestled against the hard muscle of his shoulder, her arm flung over his chest. The sadness that had throbbed in her the night before, keeping her sober no matter how many shots she took, had concentrated again to the familiar wordless longing of unspoken grief, and that she could handle, that she had lived with every day of her life.

"I'm okay."

He pressed his fingers into her side in answer and she closed her eyes, his sheets in a tangle over her feet and his breath faint against her scalp. The sun made a thin bright line at the edge of his curtains, so bright she could feel it through her eyelids, and she started to shift to her side, bend her knee and draw it up, when she remembered where she was and felt the stiff fabric of his pants against her bare legs.

Her mother had been like this once. Safe in the arms of the man she had loved.

Nancy was crying before she could even realize or stop it, and Ned made a soft noise and rolled onto his side to face her, pulling her tight in his embrace, and she buried her face against his shirt while he stroked her back, his mouth against her hair. Her nails bit into his side but he didn't complain, just made soft comforting noises, his leg over her, inner thigh against her hip, and her skin was sticky with sweat and night air and flushed with shame and drink, because he wasn't supposed to see her like this. He wasn't.

"I'm sorry," she gasped, her voice clogged with tears.

"Remember," he said softly, "last year, we were dressed all in black and standing on top of the store at two o'clock in the morning and you were shouting down at the drunk people, and the flyers you made were all over the parking lot from when we dropped them, and then the cops came but they wouldn't believe we were who we said we were until they ran our fingerprints and your father showed up right before dawn and bailed us out."

She giggled and hiccuped. "Yeah," she said.

He kissed her forehead. "Don't apologize for who you are," he whispered against her skin. "That was the third most fun date we've ever had."

She laughed again and breathed him in, the sharp spicy smell of sweat and night and the last traces of cologne, and him, and rubbed her face against his shirt as his hands stilled on her back.

"I love you, Nan."

She pushed herself up and he shifted, folding his knee against her leg, her skirt sliding down against her hip, and she kissed him once, briefly, their lips closed and his fingers tangling in her hair before she pulled back.

"I love you too," she whispered, and smiled. She pushed his shirt, still wet with her tears, up until it was just under his arms, and kissed the skin just over his heart slowly, softly, feeling his pulse under her lips, and he pushed her onto her back, pinning her under his weight, his palm resting between the hem of her shirt and her bare side, trailing his mouth down her neck until his lips came to rest just at the lowest point of her neckline, his chin between the rise and fall of her breasts and her skirt shoved dangerously low on her hips.

She fell asleep with her fingers buried in his hair and the crown of his head just under her chin, her shirt shoved up to just beneath her breasts and their bellies bare and warm and full against each other with every breath, and while the salt dried in its tracks on her skin she dreamed of a three year old girl who would never have to ask her father why her mother wasn't coming home.