by Stacy Gail
You’re the epitome of a stray.
If you’re going to do this with Rude, then do it.
Or get out.
No matter where she turned, she didn’t know what to do.
Her text chime went off just as she made it to the plaza that held the Cloud Gate, and as she blinked at the sun reflecting off its mirror-like surface, she fished out her phone yet again. When she saw Rude’s name, she swore out loud.
Sass, where u at?
Maybe this was a sign, she thought, staring at the screen. Do a clean break with him quickly, before their new relationship gained any more momentum. She didn’t do relationships, for crying out loud. She had to make him understand that.
So that was what she’d do.
My message got read, I can see that. Answer already.
Stupid technology. Now she couldn’t even ignore someone without being tattled on.
“At The Bean across the street.”
Stay there. Be with u in a minute.
She didn’t answer. Something told her Rude wouldn’t want to hear that his imminent arrival tied her stomach in knots.
Chapter Ten
The moment Rude caught up with Sass, he knew something was wrong. Way wrong.
She turned when he called her name and looked right through him.
That look.
For a second he suspected he’d pushed things too far too fast, but that idea got bounced just as soon as it surfaced. Sass was skittish, but she wasn’t a wimp. If she had an issue with him, she’d tell him, flat-out.
This was something else.
Something not good.
“I didn’t know you were back in town.” Her voice matched that look—flat, without emotion. Indifferent. She’d pulled the plug and shut down, all right. But now he knew what that look was, and what to do about it. “I hope you had a nice—”
Without speaking or even breaking stride, he caught her by the hand and dragged her across the Plaza, heading straight for The Bean. Ignoring the bright sunshine bouncing off of it, the crowds of tourists that milled about and Sass tugging at her hand to get free, Rude kept moving and didn’t come to a stop until he was directly under the metallic sculpture.
“Rude—”
“Look around.” He turned her so that she faced him, before he wrapped his arms securely around her. Her body pressed to his from chest to knees, and even as her warmth seeped into his skin he focused on enveloping her in the living cage of his arms. “What do you see?”
A baffled frown appeared between her brows, and she looked up at him with eyes that were starting to lose their detached blankness. Halfway there already. “What?”
“We’re under the very center of the biggest, most reflective piece of sculpture in the country, so I know you can see it. Look at the reflections and tell me what you see.”
“I see… us, a whole bunch of times, along with about a hundred other people.”
“Look just at us. Look at every angle.” He waited for her to finish giving him a glance that doubted he had all his marbles. Then she cast her attention over the highly polished metal that arched over them, reflecting their image over and over, some twisted and curved in a funhouse-mirror style, some with perfect clarity. “Tell me what you see.”
“Us. I see us.”
“Do you see me standing with you?”
“Of course.”
“Do you see my arms around you?”
She made a sound of impatience. “Yes. Why are you—”
“Look at us closely and tell me if you think anything in this world can get to you when I’m holding you like this.”
Understanding dawned in her expression, followed by something much darker before her troubled gaze found his. “You can’t always hold me.”
“I can give it one hell of a try.”
“I don’t know that I want you to. If you were anyone else, I’d be more than happy to give you a spin around the block,” she added before he could get his mouth open to ask what the hell she meant by that. “And yeah, I’ll admit I’ve been pleasantly surprised that you and I are more compatible than I ever thought possible.”
“There better not be a ‘but’ coming up,” he muttered, his arms tightening. “I just got home after a grueling thirty-six hour day, and I’ve got no patience for a ‘but,” Sass.”
“But,” she said, clearly not taking his warning seriously, “you’re not just anyone else. You’re Papa Bolo and Mama Coco’s baby boy, and I love them. I can’t be messing around with you like I do with every other guy in my life. Panuzzis do relationships. I don’t.”
“I remember the crash course you gave me on your dating practices after that asshole landed you in the ER.” When she sucked in a sharp breath and looked away, he brought a hand to the back of her head and guided her gaze back to him. “I don’t see what that has to do with us.”
“We can’t play around, then go our separate ways like nothing happened. Unless,” she added on a quick breath, as if struck with sudden inspiration, “we keep everything on the down-low? If we decide to hop into bed together, no one has to know about it, right?”
“Wrong.”
“Oh, so you plan on advertising it, do you? Maybe taking pictures and video of us going at it like rabbits so you can post it on the family Facebook page?”
“No, though I’ll probably take more than my share of pictures,” he added honestly, while his blood heated at the thought. “You’re sexy as hell, Sassy, so I’m not going to lie. Pictures of you wearing nothing but the smile I’ve put on your face… yeah, I’m totally gonna do that.”
“Rude—”
“But those pics will be for my eyes only. No one gets to see you naked but me. I’ll only post the non-naked ones.”
“Geez, you are going to advertise it.”
“No, but I’m not going to hide anything, either. I don’t give a shit who knows that we’ve decided to hook up. All that matters in any relationship are the two people involved—no one else. It’s when other people are dragged into it that things get fucked up. I’m not going to let that happen.”
“Your parents will have expectations. Long-term expectations. I don’t want to disappoint them when we inevitably go our separate ways.”
“Other people. Not listening.”
“And Frankie’s head would explode if we got hot and heavy, then brought things to an end.”
“Other people. Still not listening.”
“Damn it, you’re impossible.” She popped completely out of her Nowhere Place to blast him with a baleful glare full of nice, healthy pissiness. “Try to understand my position, okay? You’re not the one who’ll have to deal with the fallout when we break up, do you understand? You’re a Panuzzi. You’ll always be a part of that family. I’m not. I’ll lose the only thing I’ve ever had in my pathetic life that I can call family when we’re no longer together, and the thought of that makes me want to throw up.”
“So, let me get this straight. You’ve already got us hooked up, going at it like rabbits, and then broken up? Talk about thinking ahead. Sass,” he said when she tried pushing him away in a huff. His arms locked her to him, rocking her side to side in a way that slowly took the fight out of her. “I get it, okay? You’re scared. The situation’s volatile, it’s brand new territory, and you have no idea what everyone’s reaction will be, or how to handle it yourself. I don’t either. But I’m not going to let any of that unimportant bullshit stop me, or you, from exploring just how hot we can get.”
“Yeah, you jerk, because you have nothing to lose, unlike me.”
“You don’t know your Mama Coco and Papa Bolo as well as you think you do, if you think a breakup between us would ostracize you. They don’t choose sides. They don’t interfere, and they don’t judge, so if you’re looking to them as an excuse to get out of being with me, it won’t work. And they sure as hell wouldn’t appreciate being used like that.”
That made her frown deepen, but still she shook her head. “You’re not
listening to me. For all I know you can’t even hear what I’m saying. You know why that is? Because you’re safe. You’ll always be safe. You’ll always have people around you, a family who loves you. You have no clue what it’s like to be utterly alone. Shit, no wonder you can’t hear me. It’s like I’m speaking in a language that’s totally incomprehensible to you.”
“Not nearly as incomprehensible as you might think.” Rude searched her stormy, mistrustful eyes and saw he had one hell of a lot of convincing to do. “I know I’m lucky to have my family, because I know what it’s like to be without them, or anyone, to depend on.”
“I’m not talking about a few—”
“My last tour ended in the worst possible way,” he pressed, talking over her until she fell silent. “I’d been all over the world with my team, Sass. We ate together, trained together, bled together, partied together. Our CO, a guy by the name of Captain Maxwell Gold, had gotten us out of more scrapes that I can count, so after a while he’d earned himself the nickname Miracle Max. Before each mission he’d tell us to have fun storming the castle.” He smiled a smile that hurt, and she seemed to understand that, if the faint sorrowful sound she made and they way she rested a hand against his cheek was any indication. “He was walking only three feet in front of me down this dirt pathway in the middle of a refugee camp when his head just… exploded. I still don’t know what hit him. The docs have told me not to fixate on that, but it’s so fucking hard not to. I loved that guy, Sass. And he’d always been there to be loved—not just by me, but by all of us. I depended on him the way a kid depends on his father to save him whenever the world turns to shit, and suddenly I’m wearing his brains all over me. So I just stood there for what seemed like forever trying to figure out what… the fuck… hit him.”
That vivid nightmare of a memory was so prominent in his mind’s eye, he was astonished when it was wiped out by the glitter of unshed tears in her eyes. No other sign of distress crossed her expression, save for a small puckering between her brows. She didn’t protest the violence he shared, and she didn’t shy away from it with a wince of distaste like he’d expected. She simply tilted her head, a gesture that told him without words she was listening, while the hand at his cheek slipped around to his nape to gently stroke his hair.
Until that moment, he’d never appreciated how much could be communicated through touch.
“Micah, a close buddy I’d had since our first MCTs together, knocked me into a tent and screamed at me to head for the foothills. I remember that distinctly. Yet when I looked back to see if he was behind me, I found that he was lying next to Miracle Max. Sloaney was a few yards away from him, sitting on the ground in a daze, one of his arms hanging off while a guy in a black uniform and mask popped out of a refugee tent and slit his throat. Then guys in black were swarming everywhere. It seemed like there were thousands of them.”
For just a moment her hand tensed before resuming its soothing rhythm. “How did you get out?”
“I laid down cover fire in the hope that at least some of my guys would come running out of that clusterfuck, but only one, Boomer, staggered out toward me. He was seriously fucked up, and even as he made it to me he passed out and stayed that way. I was just getting him on my shoulder when I felt an icy-hot sting in my back.”
“Oh, no.” It was barely a thread of sound. Any quieter and it wouldn’t have been audible. “You got hit. Whatever got Miracle Max, you got hit with it.”
He shook his head. “When I turned I saw a young woman standing there. She’d come out of the tent I’d fallen into, and she was holding a bloody knife that she’d just stuck in me. I knew just enough of the language to understand what she said—‘you’re here to kill our babies.’” He shook his head again at the memory and had to laugh, but even he could hear hopelessness in it. “These people… you really gotta feel for them. They have nothing, and they know even less about what’s happening around them. No internet, no cell phone towers, no electricity to get television reports, and many of them can’t even read. They have nothing to keep them updated about what’s happening around them—they don’t even know who their enemies are. They only know what they’re told by whoever is in charge that day. Most of them had lost their homes due to the assholes in black, yet those bastards had the balls to turn right around and tell these poor refugees that we were the ones who’d chased them from their villages and ruined their lives, not them.”
“She stabbed you, and you defend her?” Her breath trembled before she lifted a shoulder, and he could almost see her trying to shake it off. “You got away, obviously. She didn’t kill you. You got away.”
“At that moment I understood that every single person I ran across …they were the enemy. Whether it was their fault or not, it didn’t matter. That was just how it had to be looked at—they were the enemy. They wanted Boomer and me dead, and they were willing to do anything to make that happen.”
He thought she muttered “Damn it,” under her breath, but he couldn’t be sure.
“For eight days I dragged Boomer with me. I think the vital part of Boomer’s brain that made him who he was had already died, but his body was so strong it hadn’t gotten the message yet. I kept us alive by hiding out, trying—and failing—to keep our wounds clean, and taking anything that I could find to keep us alive, including lives. It wasn’t until I stumbled across another patrol that I was able to get us extracted from that hell, more dead than alive. And Boomer… he took his last breath just as we were being evac’ed out of there.”
She swallowed hard before nodding, accepting it in silence, her gaze never wavering.
“So while I lived like that for only eight days, alone and fucking helpless to fix any of the shit that was going on around me, I do know what it’s like to have no one to turn to when the worst kind of pressure’s on. I’ll never forget what it was like to be utterly alone, so don’t tell me I don’t know what it’s like.”
“I’d never presume to compare my life to what you went through,” she said after a long moment, looking at him instead of through him. “Thinking that every minute’s going to be your last, frantic over a friend’s life as it slips away and being helpless to keep it from happening, versus my ordinary child welfare upbringing… it’s embarrassing to even think of comparing them.”
“Don’t be so sure about that. I’ve thought a lot about this from the moment I saw your deadened expression in my eyes when I got back to civilization. There might not have been bullets or mortar fire or knife attacks going on around you. But you were always in hostile territory no matter where you went, weren’t you? You were always surrounded by enemies while growing up. Shit, I was even one of them. Wasn’t I?”
She tilted her head in the faintest—but still damning—nod of agreement.
“When I looked at myself in the mirror and saw your expression, that was the day I realized you were probably the one person who would understand me best. You’d been surrounded by hostiles your whole life, with no one to fight for you but you. And irony of ironies, I’d antagonized you so much that you wouldn’t even speak to me once I decided to come back home. I couldn’t even blame you for it. My wanting to make peace must’ve seemed as ridiculous to you as the idea of me sitting down to tea with those fuckers who obliterated my friends and comrades.”
“Rude, you weren’t that bad.”
“Yeah, but an enemy’s an enemy, because they’ve proven themselves to be fuckers who can’t be trusted.” He tugged on her hair to raise her face to his. “I need to know, Sass—is that what this is all about? You trying to put the brakes on us… is it because you don’t trust me?”
“I don’t trust anyone.” Her smile was infinitely sad. “Try not to take it personally, okay? I broke a long time ago, but that had nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me, since I’m the man who’s going to put you back together.”
That sad smile vanished under a wave of surprise. “You’ve really got a thing for impossi
ble missions, don’t you?”
“I know there are a lot of jagged pieces inside of you, and I know how it feels when you think you can never be put back together. Believe me, I know. But that doesn’t mean you stop trying. And right now, as I’m looking into your eyes and you’re looking back at me, I don’t see anything inside of you that can’t be fixed.”
Something shot through her expression, something torn between a beautiful hope and a desperate fear. “Are you sure you’re looking deep enough?”
“I’m sure I’ll never want to stop looking.” With his fingers tensing at the back of her head, he drew her in to meet the descent of his mouth.
The electrical current they created whenever they touched was crazy; it made every nerve in his body hum, and breathing was something he forgot how to do. Even as he pulled her closer, the hand at the back of his head did the same, pushing him deeper into the kiss as if she wanted to drown in him. He understood. If he could wallow in the taste and feel of her for the rest of the day, that’d be a day well spent.
The stroke of his tongue was met by hers and then toyed with, and he had to work hard at stifling a groan. But damn, he was nuts about how she responded to him. There was a wildfire locked beneath the wariness that kept her distanced from the rest of the world, and every time he got close to her, he felt the increasing intensity of its heat.
He wouldn’t be happy until that wildfire burned him alive.
“Look at those two, Aaron. I think I read in one of my travel books that if you kiss under this Bean thing, you’ll be blessed with eternal love. Isn’t that romantic? Quick, kiss me.”
“It’s called the Cloud Gate, and you’re thinking about the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.”
“No, no, I’m sure this is the eternal love spot. Kiss me, stupid.”
Rude’s laugh mingled with Sass’s and she turned her head, breaking the kiss as she glanced covertly over at an older couple a few feet away.