One More Day

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “I can really do that?”

  “You really can. Don’t hesitate to call if you want. Okay?”

  After a few more moments of chatting, Darla and her parents left. Jenson and I watched them walk out, past the guards.

  “You were very good with her,” Jenson said quietly. I shrugged. She nudged me with her elbow. “That’s the Jolene I know is in there. That’s the Daystar I believe in. You’re holding onto the thief thing, and I think you don’t even know why anymore, do you?” she asked, and I didn’t answer. “You’re so much more. I’ve seen you grow into who you are, bit by bit over the last few weeks. You need to let that old crap go. Be the hero everyone other than you already knows you to be.”

  “It’s easy for you to say that,” I pointed out. “Look at you. Former soldier, police officer. I bet you started as a safety patrol kid in elementary school or some shit like that, didn’t you?”

  Jenson rolled her eyes and started walking back toward the elevator.

  “You did, didn’t you?” I asked with a laugh.

  “For your information, my first position was lunch room helper.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Did you have a badge?” I teased.

  “You bet I did,” she answered.

  “See?”

  “See what?”

  “You were born to be the hero. You’ve probably never done a stupid thing in your entire life. You’re the most sickeningly together person I’ve ever known, Jenson.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Ugh.”

  Jenson laughed. “I was a good girl growing up. And I stuck to the straight and narrow mainly because my parents put the fear of God in me at an early age. They were strict, and I never stepped a toe out of line.”

  I watched her. Jenson never talks much about herself. She’s probably my closest friend on the team, with Caine coming in a close second, probably, but I know almost nothing about her.

  “But I’ve done stupid things. Made mistakes,” she said with a small nod. “There are things I’ve done that I’d love to go back and undo, but I can’t. All I can do is keep moving forward and trying to be the best version of myself I can be.”

  “The best version of yourself,” I murmured. “That sounds like you’re pretending, or acting, or something.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes, all I want to do is haul off and smack some of the people we work with, not to mention the ones we try to apprehend. Sometimes, all I want to do is walk away, take my savings and find a nice little tropical island somewhere where nobody needs me to do anything for them.”

  “You could do that,” I said.

  “I could,” she agreed. “I definitely could. But that’s not the person I’m trying to be. It’s not the version of myself that I’m working toward. You’re right about me. I want to at least try to be a hero. I want to be the type of person people know they can count on. That’s not the kind of person who runs off when they know they’re needed.”

  The elevator doors opened on our floor, and Jenson and I walked down the corridor toward where our suites were located.

  “I mean, you must have had bigger dreams for yourself once upon a time,” she said. “No little kid grows up saying ‘I want to be a thief when I grow up!’”

  “I did.”

  “You are so full of shit, Faraday,” Jenson said. “Wishing you and your mom had more money is not the same as saying that you dreamed of being a person who stole stuff from other people.”

  We reached my door and I pressed my thumb to the keypad. “You’re right,” I said.

  “Of course. So what did you want to be when you grew up?” she asked.

  “A space pirate.”

  Jenson shook her head and gave me an irritated look that I couldn’t help laughing at. “You are the worst,” she said.

  “I know.” I grinned at her.

  “Seriously. Just the worst.” She started walking across the hall toward her suite.

  “And you’re always hanging out with me, so what does that make you?” I shot back, still grinning.

  She turned to look back at me after getting her door open. “I represent the better angels of your nature. Good night. Try not to steal anything.”

  I gave her a one finger salute, which she returned, and then I closed my door and peeled off my uniform as I made my way to my bedroom. I wanted salty, crunchy snacks and something to watch that had nothing to do with heroes or villains or anything even remotely resembling my life.

  I ended up settling for potato chips and old reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard. I wondered, for a second, what kind of crap Connor liked do do in his down time, and then I remembered that it really wasn’t worth thinking about. I may be a mess, but even I know that some things are more trouble than I know how to handle. And Connor was definitely one of them.

  Almost as if on cue, my phone rang. And I knew after the first ring who it was. I looked at my phone, letting it ring. When it finally stopped, I turned my attention back to the television without really seeing it. A couple of minutes later, my phone beeped. Voice mail.

  I took a deep breath and picked it up to listen to the message.

  “Hey, Jolene.” His hoarse growl was immediately recognizable. “I’m back around, so I was wondering if you wanted to get together. I really want to see you. I feel like things went in a bad direction last time.” He paused, and it was silent for a couple seconds. “Let’s just try again, huh? You know nobody will ever want you the way I do, right? You have to know that. You’re all I think about.” There was another pause. “And if anyone ever did try to convince you to choose them over me, I guess we’d see just how much of a bad guy I still am, eh?” A chill went up my spine at the menace in his tone. “I’ll call again. I know you’re too fuckin’ stubborn to call me back. You really should answer next time. We need to work this out and I’m not a patient man. Bye, sweetheart.”

  The message ended, and I sat looking at my phone. He was starting to look like one of those Lifetime movies Mama used to watch when I was a teenager, about the perfect guy who ends up being a stalker. And I always watched those movies thinking “how dumb is this chick? Doesn’t she see what a jerk he is?” Guess the joke’s on me. It was just my luck that not only was he kind of turning out to be a class A jerk, but of course he was super-powered as well. When I mess up, clearly I mess up big.

  I shook my head, determined not to let myself obsess over it. I was tired of thinking about Connor and what he’d told me and trying to decide what I should do about it, if anything. He was clearly not doing his old shit anymore, on the news every few days saving one person or another. He’d moved on, but I still couldn’t reconcile what I’d seen when I’d looked into Raider with what I saw every day on the news. And then there was this latest stalkery bullshit.

  I shoved the thoughts aside, but, unfortunately, the next place they went was to my face-off against Maddoc. His threats. And unlike Connor, Maddoc did actually scare me. It’s not a feeling I’m all that used to, and it pisses me off to feel it at all. I remembered what Jenson had told me and I picked my phone back up again and messaged Caine.

  “Hey. Someone told me I should learn wrestling moves to make up for how shit my punches are now. Jenson said maybe you can help?” I texted to him.

  A few seconds later, an answer appeared on my screen. “I can do that. After our shift tomorrow?”

  “Gotta do some looking around with Jenson and Amy tomorrow for Death. Afternoon?”

  A couple seconds later, “Sure. Meet you in the training room around three?”

  I thanked him, then set my phone down, and it beeped again. I picked it back up.

  “Night, Jo,” Caine had texted. “Try not to hurt me too bad tomorrow.”

  I laughed a little, picturing my enormous partner, and messaged back. “I’ll try not to. Night.”

  Action. Doing stuff. I could do that. All of this sitting around and thinking was enough to make me crazy.

  Chapter
Six

  I spent the morning checking out a couple of Dr. Death’s favorite haunts with Jenson and Amy, but it came to nothing. Between the complete waste of time of the morning and my crappy dreams the night before, I was more than ready to spend some time sparring with Caine. I walked into the gym to find him already there, dressed in dark gray sweats and a white t-shirt.

  “You feeling okay?” he asked in greeting. “How are your ribs after the other night?”

  “They’re all right. I’m fine.”

  “Jolene.”

  “Ryan,” I said, mimicking his deep voice. I realized it was the first time I’d actually called him by anything other than his code name. It suited him. And I felt another of those little walls between myself and my team members come tumbling down. These people were slowly but surely becoming more than just a bunch of randoms I had to work with every day. It was weird being part of a team. And the even weirder thing was that I kind of liked it.

  He grinned at me then, a flash of perfect white teeth, and we stood there for a couple of seconds. He shook his head a little and said, “I heard about your thing yesterday with Maddoc. I guess that’s why you asked about doing this now?”

  I nodded. “That, and I’m still frustrated that Death slipped away from me again. Clearly I need to do better.”

  “You did an amazing job with the transporter and Damian and everything the other night. Even if you did give me a heart attack when you disappeared from the museum like that. I hate that shit. I was supposed to be out there with you.”

  “I just wanted to make sure she didn’t slip away again.”

  “Yeah, well you managed that. What if she’d ended up taking you to their headquarters or something like that, where they’d had more backup?”

  “I would have flown away. And then we would have known exactly where to find the bitches.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and watched me. “You have an answer for everything don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I’ll find some way to trip you up eventually,” he said.

  “We’ll see. Are we going to do this or yak all day, because if I wanted to do that, I’d hang out with the assholes in the prison wing.”

  He laughed and waved me toward the left side of the room, where he’d put a few mats on the floor.

  “Okay. The best way to learn these is to have them done to you first so you know what it’s supposed to feel like,” he said. “We’re going to focus mostly on moves that start with your opponent down, since, I think, from what you said before, that the plan is to stun them by flying into them with all of your weight and knocking them down, then using the wrestling moves to subdue them, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Down on the mat then, on your stomach, like I just knocked you down.”

  I nodded and lowered myself to the mat.

  “Are you sure your ribs are okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “If you don’t get going, you’re going to be the one hurting,” I warned him sweetly.

  “Well, you’re such a delicate little flower,” he teased.

  “Ryan.”

  “Fine.” He stepped over me, one foot on either side of my hips, and then I felt him crouch behind me. “So this move is really good if you’re dealing with someone who’s probably going to regain their balance pretty quickly and you definitely want to subdue them fast. It’s not pretty or delicate. Brute force.”

  I nodded. He rested one knee on my lower back and put weight on it, then he put both hands on my chin, pressed against my throat.

  I felt myself starting to panic. I stiffened.

  “Jolene. Relax,” he said.

  My breathing got more rapid, and he lowered his hands to my neck completely. I tried to scramble away from him, but he kept his knee pressed lightly into my back. “Calm down,” he said gently. He massaged my throat gently with warm, firm hands. “Breathe. You’re safe. I’m here, and you’re a hell of a lot scarier than I am.”

  I felt myself start hyperventilating, and he got off of me with a muttered “shit.” Ryan pulled me up so I was sitting, then he left for a second and came back with a bottle of water. I guzzled it and tried to calm my breathing, the knot in my stomach. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “I should have stopped right away.”

  “No. If I’d wanted you to, I would have told you so. I need to get over this shit,” I said angrily. “Again, and I’ll try not to freak out.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I nodded and got back on my stomach. A few seconds later, I felt him settle his knee into my lower back again.

  “I’m putting my hands on your chin now,” he said quietly, and I nodded. He placed his hands back on my chin, and I could feel myself starting to panic a little but I focused on my breath, on breathing through the panic. “So this one works because you use your body weight on their lower back, which hurts like a bitch. I’m not putting my full weight down, because I’m balancing on my other leg. If you were doing this, you’d put all your weight on the leg that’s resting on your opponent’s back.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Then you rest their arms over your thighs, so they can’t use their arms to leverage themselves back up. Take control away from them, right? That’s not enough, in and of itself to subdue someone, though. That’s what you use your hands for. While your knee is planted in their back, pull their chin back and up.” He started pulling my chin up, back. It was majorly uncomfortable, and would have been excruciating if he’d been resting all his weight on me. As it was, I already felt like I would crack in half. He released me.

  “Your turn to try it,” he said. He got face down on the mat, and when I stood over him, he told me to put all of my weight down, the way I was supposed to.

  “Don’t be stupid. I’ll hurt you.”

  “Right now the only thing you’re hurting is my ego. Just do it, Jolene. I’m a hell of a lot bigger than you, and you’re not the only one here who can hold their own in a fight.”

  “Fine.” I pressed my knee into his back, letting all of my weight rest there.

  “Okay. Do it. Put your weight on it,” he said.

  “I am!”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay. Then do the rest of it.”

  I put my hands under his chin, and he adjusted my hands so they were in the best position, then I pulled his arms up over my thighs, locking them back so he wouldn’t be able to use his hands, and I pulled up and back, the way he told me to.

  “Good,” he said, and I let him go. “Again.”

  I did it a few more times, and then he stood up. “Okay. Come at me the way you’d come at an enemy. Knock my ass down and then do that hold, just like we practiced. The key will be getting fast at it.”

  “You want me to just bash into you at full strength?” I asked him unsurely.

  Ryan grinned. “Don’t worry. You’re not going to break me.”

  “I might.”

  “Doubt it. You should totally try though and see what happens.”

  I backed up. “Just remember that this was your idea.”

  He nodded and gestured for me to come at him. I rose into the air, reared up, and flew at full speed toward him. I hit Ryan at full strength and he flew across the mats, landing in a heap at the end of the sparring area. I flew over to him, settled myself onto his back, and was starting to pull at his arms when he started fighting back, refusing to let me get a good grip on his arms, then eventually flipping me over and pulling my arm, hard, behind my back.

  “You need to be faster,” he said. “Again.”

  We did it a few more times, and I failed to get him down every time.

  “Oh, come the fuck on,” I said after the fifth time. “This isn’t even fair. Most of the assholes I have to fight aren’t as big as you are.”

  “
I’m just gonna bask for a while in having a woman tell me how big I am,” he said with a grin.

  I crossed my arms and glared at him.

  “Wasn’t it like, what? Ten minutes ago that you were worried about hurting me?” he asked, walking past me to grab another bottle of water from the cooler.

  “I didn’t know you were that strong,” I muttered.

  “Do it again,” he said after gulping down the entire bottle of water.

  “How about showing me something else?”

  “This is the most effective one for what you’re talking about.”

  “Something else,” I repeated, and he shook his head.

  “Fine.” He got behind me. “This one works a couple of ways. If you manage to sneak up on someone from behind, you can subdue them with this from a standing position. And if you get them down, you can still do it, with the added advantage that you can put your weight on them if you really need to. “ He stepped close behind me, put his arms under mine, then bent his elbows, pulling my arms and shoulder blades back. He joined his hands behind my head, and, hard as I tried. I couldn’t get out of it.

  “This is a basic nelson hold,” he told me. “You can make it hurt more if you push their head forward more.” He put a little more pressure on the back of my head, and I felt the tension along my neck, back, and shoulders. “Try again to get out of it.”

  I did. I tried. I tried bucking him off of me, slithering out of his hold, and none of it worked.

  “Fuck,” I muttered, and he let go.

  “See? It’s a good one, right?”

  I nodded. “And if they’re down?” I asked.

  “Same general idea.” He gestured to the mat, and I got down on my stomach. He straddled my back, rather than resting his weight on me, and did the same hold, pulling me back hard, and I struggled against him. In my struggling against him, I lifted my backside up and into him. I heard Ryan groan, and then he let go of me abruptly and moved away.