The sole of the sneaker met the small woman in the middle of her body, square across the front of the red bandeau top, just below the breastbone, and the woman's hands tore off the nozzle as if they had been burned.
There was a sound. A dull, soft, heavy thump, the sound of a rubber sole against a body, that Theo's phone would catch at the eighth second, and that people would play over and over, turning up the volume. And then another sound, high and sharp and sucking, as all the air went out of Brooke Halston at once.
She gasped.
It was a huge gasp, a whooping, ragged, astonished intake of breath, her mouth wide open, her eyes enormous. And she went backward. She went backward off her heels as if she had been yanked on a rope, her arms flying up and out, her hands clawing at the air, her platinum hair flying across her face, her glossy red skirt flaring, one red stiletto skidding out from under her on the wet gasoline-slick asphalt. She staggered two steps, three, back toward the gleaming orange hood of the car, her balance gone completely, tilting and windmilling, her mouth still open on that endless astonished breath.
And Dara Whitfield stood alone at pump one, her left foot already coming back down to the concrete of the island, settling, planting, her weight returning evenly to both feet. Her hands had not moved from the grip of the nozzle. It was still locked in the tank of her grandmother's SUV. Not a drop more had spilled.
Her face had not changed at all.
On the screen of the pump above her head, the numbers had stopped climbing. Five point nine gallons. Twenty-nine dollars and eighty-eight cents.
The whole forecourt was utterly silent except for the rain.
Brooke did not fall.
It was a near thing. Her left heel skidded on the wet asphalt and her right ankle turned over and for one long, slow, sickening moment she was tilting backward through the air with nothing under her, her arms flung wide, the gray sky wheeling overhead. And then the backs of her thighs hit the curved front of the orange car, and she sat down on its hood with a hollow, heavy thud that dented the glossy carbon fiber, and slid off it sideways, and landed on her knees on the wet ground beside the front wheel, and stayed there.
She did not get up. She knelt on the asphalt in her red skirt with her hands pressed flat against her chest, over the place where the sole of the sneaker had touched her, and she gasped. She could not stop gasping. It was not pain, exactly. The kick had not really hurt, not the way she had always imagined being kicked would hurt. It had felt more like being shoved very hard by a door. A huge, flat, irresistible pressure, and then the air simply gone out of her, all of it, as if someone had opened a valve in her chest. Now her lungs were trying to fill again and could not quite remember how, and every breath came in as a high, ragged whoop, and went out as something closer to a sob.
The rain fell on her bare shoulders. It ran down through her platinum hair and dripped off the ends of it. Her gold hoops swung. Her makeup, the dewy base and the pearlescent highlight and the bronze smoky eyes she had spent nine minutes on, which was a record, was starting to run.
For two or three seconds, nobody else moved either.
Then Dara reached up and squeezed the handle of the nozzle, once, to release the lock, and lifted it carefully out of the filler neck of the SUV, and hung it back on its cradle on the pump. She did it slowly. Methodically. The way you would put away a weapon. She pressed the button on the screen to end the transaction. She did not take her receipt. She screwed the fuel cap back onto the SUV and turned it until it clicked three times, and pushed the little fuel door shut with two fingers. And then, and only then, she turned around and walked the four paces across the wet asphalt to where the small woman in red was kneeling beside the front wheel of the orange car, and knelt down on the ground in front of her, in the puddle, in her new leather shorts and her sheer black tights, without hesitating.
"Look at me," she said.
Brooke looked at her. Her eyes were swimming. Her lips were shaking.
"Breathe out first," said Dara. "All the way out. Push it out. Don't try to breathe in yet. Just out."