Trying to pray for clarity was a joke that he had abandoned weeks ago. He inevitably wound up daydreaming about her, daydreams that were not PG-13. This infatuation…he had not had a crush like this in years. In ever. He told himself every day that was what it was: a hard-ass crush. Sooner or later it would wane if he could just back off enough to let it run its course. But the knowledge that it would wane was so depressing that he never did.
The way she moved had gotten under his skin. Whether she was teaching the kids how to climb or stacking dishes in the dining hall kitchen or, like today, climbing the palisade to escape a horde, she inevitably did something—a flick of the wrist while pushing her hair out of her eyes, the twist of her waist when she reached up to help a kid with a handhold—that literally took his breath away.
It won’t be the end of the world, you know. If you want something different for your life.
Miranda’s words had echoed in his head almost nonstop. And Miranda was pregnant. Holy ever-loving shit.
Doug had only known Miranda since the ZA. She had always been one hundred percent adamant that she was never having kids. She was never bringing a kid into all this. She had even gotten her tubes tied to make sure it never happened.
“So much for permanent birth control,” he muttered.
It didn’t surprise him that she planned to get an abortion. What had surprised him was how ambivalent she sounded about it. Maybe that was just because she hadn’t talked to Mario yet, hadn’t gotten confirmation that he agreed. Doug had no doubt that Mario would be on board with whatever she wanted to do. But maybe it was one thing to not want to bring kids into this admittedly terrible world, but something else altogether to find out you actually were pregnant. By the man who was the love of your life, no less. Who you never thought you would get a second chance with.
I’m glad I’m not in their shoes, he thought, and not for the first time. That they were right for each other was obvious, but it had never been easy for Miranda and Mario. It had to be cool, though, to see how your DNA combined with someone else’s. It was the natural world, natural selection, which was all part of God’s design, at work.
I wonder what mine and Skye’s kids would look like.
Doug froze in his tracks. The world around him seemed to spin.
“You can’t think things like that,” he hissed aloud.
It won’t be the end of the world, you know. If you want something different for your life.
So many people depended on him back home. He was going home, back to reality, eventually. Ever since they left Santa Cruz, something had felt off. One day he was using his service to God to endanger the success of the mission to save the town, and then, within weeks, he felt disconnected from that same God in a way he never had before. And he hadn’t been able to get it back.
Just now, thinking about a child he would never have with Skye, was the first time in months that he’d thought in terms of God’s design, writ large or only his small slice of it. He hadn’t felt that connection, had not been able to feel it, since Santa Cruz. That was the weirdest part of all. Downtime, which was what the voyage to Seattle had been, had always been when Doug could relax into God’s embrace. When he could feel God’s purpose for him, and his calling to his vocation. But not this time, for months now. He hadn’t been able to get the door on his side open.
Every time he thought of leaving Walter to handle everything on his own—safeguarding the settlement, keeping the City Council at bay—the weight that settled on his body felt physical. Felt like it would crush him. The only time it didn’t feel that way was when he was with Skye.
“This ends today,” he said.
He had indulged this crush long enough. Too long. He had to get his head together, and he had to do it now.
He pushed the dining hall door open. A day’s worth of cooking and baking had not yet warmed the building. He picked up a tray, filled it with food, then looked around. Maybe five other people were in the dining hall besides Skye. She sat at a table in the far corner. Seeing her there, looking exhausted but alive and whole, sent a rush of dizzy relief through his brain. How was he supposed to get his head on straight when he wanted to shout from the rooftops because she was all right? He was just about to spin on his heel and take the food to Miranda’s when Skye looked up and caught his eye. He couldn’t duck out now, not without making things weird, so he walked over and sat down across from her.
“How’re you feeling?” she asked. “How’s Miranda?”
“I’m beat. Miranda looks terrible, but she’ll be okay. It’ll take more than hypothermia to kill her.”
Skye smiled. “You’ll be hanging around for a bit.”
“Looks like.”
“It’ll be nice.” When it was clear he wasn’t going to respond, she said, “You’ll be staying at Miranda’s while you’re here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I don’t know if River wants to keep an eye on her, so maybe not.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wanted to snatch them back. He had not meant it to sound like he might be looking for a place to stay. He was afraid to speak again in case he said something stupid or dangerous like ‘Come stay with us.’
He had to shut this down. Ideally in a way that he and Skye might still be friends.
Skye reached over and touched his hand. “Thanks, for before. For insisting I not give up.”
Her hand barely touched his, but the heat that radiated from it felt like lava flowing into his veins. She had come so close to not being here, sitting across from him, looking at him with those eyes that were so goddamned blue. Thinking about how differently this day could have gone made the room around him spin. An overpowering urge to reach over the table and pull her to him, to kiss her, caught Doug in its undertow. He wanted to feel Skye’s lips on his, taste her, touch her, more than he had ever wanted anything.
“I was afraid—” he said, then stopped. He snatched his hand away. “It’s what we do. No big deal.”
Skye almost recoiled. “It was a big deal to me.”
“You know what I mean,” he said, brushing it off.
Hurt flashed in her eyes. He was being a dick, which was not how he meant to be. He shouldn’t need to be a dick to disengage, but it was so much harder than he had realized.
What he needed was to leave. To get the fuck away from her.
“I’m gonna split,” he said, standing, his tray of uneaten food still on the table. “I need to figure out where Miri and I are staying and get food and whatnot. I’m sure you do, too.”
Doug walked away as fast as he could without running. He heard the scrape of Skye’s chair being pushed back but didn’t stop. He stepped into the cold, damp air outside. The sun had been crowded out by heavy clouds. A gun-metal gray mist hugged the ground.
“Doug! Wait!”
He kept walking, but Skye’s footsteps grew closer until she caught his arm. He stopped but didn’t turn around, so she yanked on his arm until he did.
“What is up with you?”
Her eyebrows were drawn together, the anxious, vertical line between them. Her pink lips puckered in a frown.
He feigned a nonchalance he did not feel. “Nothing.”
“Then why are you acting like this?”
“Like what?”
“Like you didn’t just save my life an hour ago. Like we don’t even know each other. Like we aren’t friends.”
Doug took a deep breath. “Of course we’re friends.”
Skye’s eyes filled with tears. Clearly, it was the wrong thing to say. Or maybe it was the way he had said it. Dismissively, like it wasn’t worth mentioning.
This wasn’t how he had meant this to go, and he wasn’t sure how he had let it happen. But he had to fix this, and he had to do it now. If he didn’t, he was afraid he’d chicken out.
“I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“What?”
“I get the feeling you might—”
He
stopped.
Her eyes narrowed, any trace of tears replaced by wariness.
“You get the feeling I might what?” she said, her voice flat.
“It’s just that I’m a priest, you know? And I get the feeling that you—”
Silence stretched between them.
After what seemed an eternity, she said, “Oh. Oh, I see. You get the feeling that I have this one-sided thing for you?”
Doug shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He held his hands up, helpless. “I— I think you might think something’s going to happen here. Something that…can’t.”
Relief flooded Doug’s body when Skye started to laugh. It was going to be okay.
“You asshole. How dare you try to dump this all on me.” She waved her hand back and forth between them. “Whatever this is, it’s not just me. You’re the one always seeking me out. You’d do jumping jacks if you thought it would get my attention, and now you want to pretend it’s me getting the wrong idea? If I have the wrong idea, Doug, it’s not because I imagined it.”
Doug took a step back, retreating from her anger.
“Look, Skye,” he said, whiplashed from his delusional relief back into a conversation that had careened off the rails. “It’s not like we can’t be friends.”
“Really?” she said, incredulous.
“But that’s all we can be.”
She stared at him, her eyes flashing. They were still so goddamned blue, but burned with the intensity of Mount Saint Helens’ infamous eruption.
“You want to be a priest?” she spat. “Fine. Be a priest. But you have a lot of balls standing in front of me, hiding behind that Roman collar I never see you wearing and trying to shove whatever it is you feel for me into my lap, pretending it’s not yours. I can own my part. I care about you.” Her voice grew tight. “A lot. And I thought… Goddammit.” She shook her head and sighed. “I thought maybe this could be more.”
Doug’s heart twisted at the pain in Skye’s voice. She glanced away, blinking hard. A single tear escaped and rolled down her cheek. But when she looked back, her eyes burned with reproof.
“I can own that I want to be more than your friend, Doug,” she said softly. “And that I’m a fool because of it. For thinking you wanted that, too.”
“You’re not a fool, Skye,” Doug protested, desperate to backtrack. “I’ve never thought—”
“I don’t care what you think! I know what I saw when you pulled me over that palisade, and it wasn’t that I had gotten the wrong idea. And now you’ve got the balls to stand here and—no. No.” She laughed, the sound like acid sizzling on metal. “You don’t. You don’t have the balls at all. Your God has them.”
She turned on her heel, fury radiating from her like ripples of heat distortion shimmering up from desert hardpan. Doug could only watch, the air sucked from his lungs, every molecule of his body aching for her, shouting at him to follow and make things right between them.
He took a step, then another, before he stopped. The weight of his denial crashed down. His chest felt scraped out, and his empty stomach roiled. Loss snaked through his body like a contagion.
This was always how it was going to end. Thinking otherwise had been a fantasy.
Selfish.
Sin.
Painlessly undoing the wrong he had done Skye was impossible, just like the heartache he felt watching her walk away.
23
Just another minute. You can do another minute without screaming.
Doug’s jaw ached. For the first five minutes of the trip, he kept reminding himself to relax it, but he clenched it again so quickly he gave up. Skye sat in the front passenger seat of the SUV, her eyes straight ahead or looking to her right, where she would not accidentally catch sight of him. Her posture was so stiff she looked like she would break if jostled. She answered Rocco, who was driving, in one-word sentences. Normally the two talked up a storm. Doug had no idea why she had decided to accompany them to the Institute, but if her intent was to torture him, she was succeeding.
Next to him in the back seat, Miranda twitched and fidgeted like an unmedicated kid with ADHD hopped up on sugar and caffeine. Her anxiety was palpable, even with Delilah next to her. The pit bull had picked up on Miranda’s anxiety and lay beside her mistress, her head resting on Miranda’s knee instead of hanging out the window. The dog’s presence usually relaxed Miranda, but several times already, Doug had asked her to loosen the death grip on his hand.
When the SUV finally came to a halt in the front of the parking lot at the Institute, Doug sagged with relief. Skye and Miranda were out of the vehicle so fast it might as well have been on fire, and Delilah was already on hind legs, peering up a tree at an angry macaque. Doug watched them go, feeling more demoralized than he could recall. His hand that Miranda had held was still blotchy red and white. She had left fingernail marks on his palm.
Miranda needed to talk to Mario. Her growing anxiety during the ten-day-long shelter-in-place at LO had been tough to watch, mostly because there was nothing he could do to alleviate it. Things had started off well enough as she brave-faced her way through the first two days. They had stayed with River, who busted out her emergency Blu-Ray player. She had everything from The Godfather to John Wick, which was impressive since Blu-Rays were obsolete tech before the ZA started. It had been an almost successful way for Doug to not think about Skye until River selected Notorious with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. The combination of a secret, tortured love affair and Nazis had done him in. The movies lost their special treat charm. By day three, Miranda spent her time brooding or scribbling furiously in her journal and cursing when she needed to sharpen the pencil with a ferocity that was impressive even for her. There was, apparently, a better kind of pencil but it was at her place. Doug wallowed in self-recrimination and self-pity about how spectacularly he had fucked up with Skye. He had done the right thing the wrong way. He told himself he should feel relieved, but he was dying inside.
Doug got out of the SUV and shut the door. The monkeys were screeching as they scooted on the ground or leaped from tree to tree. Doug caught sight of Goldie, the large, blond, perpetually frowning male macaque on the roof of the one-story building directly opposite the main Institute building. Goldie seemed to find people lacking. Doug felt that he had validated Goldie’s low expectations.
“She’s pissed now, but you did the right thing.”
So lost in thought of his inadequacies as a human being—never mind as a priest—Doug had not noticed Rocco lingering nearby. He didn’t want to think about any of it, much less get compliments he did not deserve.
“I didn’t mean to,” he started. “I never— Christ, I fucked up.”
Rocco shrugged. “She’s a great person and a beautiful woman. It’s been known to mess with many a man’s head. Many a woman’s, too.”
“I’ve never felt so disconnected from it before. Being a priest, I mean. I got confused…and then I was selfish.”
“You’re human, and you fucked up,” Rocco said. “Welcome to the club. What matters is you did the right thing, even if you were a little slow doing it.”
Doug felt minutely less wretched knowing that Rocco did not hate him. Rocco had sent some distinctly unfriendly vibes Doug’s way over the past weeks. Doug had known it was because Rocco was worried about Skye getting hurt, which made him like Rocco even more.
“Heading back right away?” Doug asked, looking at the brewing thunderheads to the south. “There’s weather heading this way.”
“As soon as Skye’s done with the blood sample.”
Doug’s anxiety spiked. “They need a blood sample from Skye? Is she sick?”
“No, no,” Rocco said, his tone reassuring. “She’s got AB negative blood. They wanted some, don’t ask me why. It’s the rarest one, she said.”
Doug nodded, but he didn’t see why River couldn’t have drawn Skye’s blood and sent it over. He headed up the path, then realized Rocco hadn’t joined him.
“A
re you coming inside?”
“You didn’t hear me tell Skye I’d wait for her here?” He continued at Doug’s head shake, a knowing grin on his face. “Guess you were a little distracted on the ride here.”
Doug turned back up the path. He should check in on Jeremiah later, make sure the whack job wasn’t doing something he shouldn’t. Or maybe he just wanted someone he could take his shitty mood out on. Ixnay that welfare check for now, he decided. The person he needed to check on was Miranda, once she and Mario finished talking. Mario, too. He’d be as blindsided as Miranda had been.
Doug nodded to Rich, who stood just outside the main doors.
“How’s it going, Rich?”
Smith had sent Rich over as one of the Watch Commanders when she beefed up security after learning what Mario was really working on. He exuded a quiet competence that usually relaxed Doug, but not today.
“I’m well, thank you,” he said, his Southern drawl blurring the edges between thank and you. “Is Miranda okay? She looked a little out of sorts.”
Doug said, “That seems to apply to a lot of people these days, but Miri’ll be fine. She always is.”
In the atrium where they had set up their common area, Miranda sat at a table. Her head was in her hands, and it looked like she was crying. Delilah hovered next to her, looking distressed.
Oh shit, Doug thought. He would never have pegged Miranda as a hormonal pregnancy crier, which showed how much he knew about women. There were people in the lobby she didn’t know well, and she was still crying. This was not good.
“Miri, what happened?” he asked as he reached the table.
Miranda looked up, embarrassment filling her face. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
“I hate this crying shit,” she said, her eyes welling up again. “He’s in the BSL-3 running an experiment for the next twenty-four hours. Alicia’s there, too.”
The Undead Age Series (Book 2): Damage In An Undead Age Page 20