by Tracey Ward
“You’re not gonna fight me about calling him ‘your boy’?” Vin teases.
I roll my eyes. “What would be the point?”
“Are you admitting it’s true?”
I feel my cheeks flush instantly hot and pink. I know he can see it. I know I have weaknesses of my own.
“Yeah,” I grumble.
“What’s with you?”
“I’m embarrassed!” I snap, feeling more annoyed than embarrassed at the moment.
Vin nods slowly, looking out over the water. “Yeah, I get that.”
“Really? Then maybe you can explain it to me ‘cause I don’t understand it at all.”
He doesn’t answer at first. I think he’s going to ignore my outburst, but then he’s talking soft and low.
“It’s because you’re worried it makes you weak. You’re afraid and that’s embarrassing enough as it is, but what you’re afraid of is even worse. You’re afraid that you care. That you have something to lose. There’s a lot of angry and a lot more ugly out there and most of it wants to destroy, steal, kill, or just plain ruin anything and everything we have the gall to give a shit about. So in a way, yeah, how you feel about him does make you weak and that’s embarrassing for fighters like you and I.”
He glances over at me, his face striking in the glowing yellow light of the fading sun. His eyes are strange to me. Maybe it’s a trick of the light or maybe it’s a trick of this life, but they’re warmer than I’ve ever seen them. More genuine.
“It’s dangerous for us to love anyone,” he says, his voice deep. Husky.
Horrifying.
My stomach drops out. I’ll go look for it later somewhere in the basement of the building beneath me, but for now I feel the hollow space where it’s supposed to be. My pure fear and anxiety must register on my face because Vin laughs, shaking his head and turning away. When he glances at me sideways with that sly grin of his, the one that’s pure hotness and sex appeal, I relax a little. He looks like himself again.
“Calm down, Kitten. I’m not in love with you.”
“I—I didn’t think—” I stutter, flustered and confused.
“Yes, you did. You definitely thought it.”
I smack him hard on the arm. “Well, the way you said it was pretty leading!”
“I meant it the way it sounded. I love you.”
I am so lost.
“What the hell is happening?” I ask weakly.
“I’m not in love with you, all right? Take it easy. I’m shockingly advanced. I can have a soft spot for a woman without have a hard one for her too, you get me?”
“Gross.”
“So, yeah, I love you, Kitten,” he says plainly. “And that’s embarrassing for me but I’m dealing with it.”
“You’re dealing with it better than I’m dealing with Ryan.”
“It’s because it’s different. The way you feel about him, it’s soft and it’s hard.”
“Quit saying it like that.”
“Quit being a prude. Sex isn’t dirty.” He winks at me. “Not unless you want it to be.”
“I will leave,” I warn him. “I will stand up right now and leave this place forever.”
“No, you won’t.”
“How do you know I won’t?”
“You won’t because you missed me. You’re happy being here.”
He’s right—I feel the most at ease I have in a long time. I feel centered. Safe. I feel like he doesn’t want anything from me that I can’t give or anything that I want to give but I’m not sure how. Being with Vin is… I don’t know. It’s good. Like being alone without being lonely.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“I hate you,” I tell him, looking away.
He nudges my shoulder with his. “You love me too, Kitten.”
“Shut up.”
He slings his arm around my shoulders, pulling me in close to him. “Are you going to ask what you’re dying to ask?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll probably lie to me.”
He chuckles, the sound vibrating through his chest and into my shoulder tucked against him. “You’re tougher than that. Ask anyway.”
“If it comes down to it, who will you side with? Me or Marlow?”
He sighs with his whole body. I feel his chest expand against my shoulder. His hand squeezes me to him once, hard and brief, before going lax again.
“I don’t know.”
I nod, not surprised and not mad. I’m not even a little bit hurt because I get it. I understand being torn between two choices, none of which seem like good ones. I get trying to find loyalty inside yourself when you’ve never needed to know it before.
Vin and I, we’re a lot alike. We’re loners at heart. He may surround himself with people but he doesn’t align himself with them. For as much as he connects to them, he may as well be alone. But now the world is changing and it’s asking more from both of us. It’s forcing people into our space, into our lives. Neither of us is good at being cornered or pressured. Odds are we’ll lash out eventually.
Or run.
Chapter Ten
I leave Vin to sit on his perch on his castle, pondering its fate and his. From the roof I spotted Ryan down in the gardens so I make my way down to him. He’s wandering around, checking out what’s growing, even pulling a stray weed here and there like he knows what he’s doing. The movement gives me a weird feeling of déjà vu.
“How do you know you’re not uprooting a carrot when you do that?” I ask him.
He smiles when he turns to face me. “Carrots don’t flower.”
“Could be a tomato.”
“They grow above ground. All these years on your own and you don’t know much about gardening, do you?”
I shrug. “I was lucky. I had Crenshaw. Where did you learn?”
“Crenshaw.”
“Seriously?”
“He’s been teaching me for years. I’ve been learning about medicine too. I had to with Kevin and what he did at the Arena. The stuff I brought you for your arm, he and I brewed that together.”
“So that’s what all the ‘master’ and bowing stuff was about at his house?”
Ryan nods. “I’m his apprentice.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s weird. He never offered to teach me.”
“He didn’t offer to teach me either. I asked. But he’d never show you anyway. He said you don’t have the patience.”
“When did you two talk about me?”
Ryan tosses the weed out across the open grass. “The day you were a jerk to him.”
I tense at the memory but I don’t argue with him. I was there, I know what I did. “I left you guys alone for like two minutes. Did you spend the whole time talking ugly about me while I stood right there?”
“‘She doesn’t have your patience, Helios,’” he says in a nearly perfect Crenshaw drawl that makes me grin. “‘It is why I never bothered to instruct her.’ That’s how much we talked about you.”
“That’s it? Really? You didn’t say anything about me at all?”
He grins. “I said you had other redeeming qualities that made up for your lack of patience.”
“Like what?”
“Like strength. Intelligence. Bravery. Humor.”
“Pft,” I scoff. “I am not funny.”
“I think you are.”
“I think you’re laughing at me more often than with me.”
He shrugs. “You’re still funny. And sweet, too.”
“This is getting really far-fetched.”
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, coming to stand in front of me.
I look at the edge of the field where it meets the water. Where the wet green grass turns to brown mud in a perfect rectangle that’s just long enough.
The laughter he built inside of me slips away.
“I came to say goodbye to someone,” I say hoarsely
.
“Who is it?”
“Nats.”
“I’m so sorry, Joss. Do you want company?”
“I’m not going over there.”
“Okay. What are you going to do?”
“I never got to bury my parents,” I blurt out, my eyes still on the mound. I can feel Ryan’s surprise in the air around us, but he stays silent. Waiting. “I was too young to do it alone and I didn’t go back into the house after it happened. I was hiding in my dad’s car for a long time. Days. I probably would have died in there, but eventually a family found me. It was a mom and a dad and two kids. Both boys. They took me with them. It was stupid because I was worthless. I could barely walk I was so weak and I didn’t speak a word. Not for weeks. The first time I spoke was to tell them zombies were in the building.” I swallow hard, remembering how my throat hurt as I screamed, using my voice for the first time in too long. Using it too hard. Too late. “They all died. Even the boys. I didn’t see it because I ran. I left them. I tried to warn them, but I left them. Two more groups took me in after that. Two more times I saw everyone around me die. Torn apart the way Bryan tore apart that girl in the showers. I stopped talking again. I got quieter. Faster. I started moving alone because packs will get you heard and get you killed. People are dead weight. Even me. I knew I was worthless to whoever picked me up, so I stopped letting them. I started running from people and zombies and animals. Everything. Nothing was safe. I knew I had to be smart. I had to be fast and silent. A ghost.”
You need to choose whether or not you want to survive or you want to live.
“I didn’t want to die, but I knew I couldn’t live,” I breathe brokenly.
Ryan stands beside me silently, his hand clasped around mine, somehow warm despite the cold air.
“Can I show you something I found?” he asks, tugging on my hand.
I nod mutely, reluctant to pull my eyes from the brown earth. I feel like I’m failing her. I won’t go over there, I know that, but it hurts to think I’m abandoning my friend. She’s the first person I’ve lost in years, and while we weren’t that close, it still stings. It’s still an opening of a wound that should have been closed forever a long time ago.
It’s still a strike of flint, an itch in my veins that makes me want to run.
When I realize where Ryan is taking me, I want to dig in my heels. I want to root myself like those carrots out in the garden, buried under the ground and oblivious to the burn of embarrassment that’s building in my gut and on my cheeks. But I don’t back down because he’s right—I’m brave. And stupid. I’m beginning to think the stupid is getting stronger every day. Ryan doesn’t see it that way, though. Stupid to me is what sweet is to him.
When he stops in front of the wall at the back of the building, I cringe. It’s still there. The writing in white rock that I impulsively scrawled on the rough brick. The message I wrote to him in the hopes that it would find him someday. It was a moment of plain, simple honesty that was too big to keep inside at the time. Now standing here next to him, it seems too big to hide. It’s always been too much, this thing with him. It always has been and always will be more than I can manage.
I miss your kiss.
“That’s your handwriting, isn’t it?” he asks softly.
He’s doing me a favor by not looking at me. His eyes are fixed on the wall, his shoulder pressed up against mine.
“Yeah,” I admit weakly.
“You wrote it before you got out?”
“Yep.”
“Why did you write it?”
“Because I couldn’t say it.”
“Because I wasn’t here.”
“No. Because I’m broken.”
I feel him look at me, but I stare straight ahead. My eyes are fixed hard on the ‘m’ in my message. They keep following the lazy roll of it—up and down, up and down. Like waves on the ocean.
“You’re not broken, Joss.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re alive.”
I shake my head in silent protest.
“Every day when I saw your writing on the wall, I knew you were still out there. You were telling me you were still alive. Do you know what this message tells me now?”
I feel my chest tighten, my fear of the words I’ve told him not to say rising in my veins so thick they might burst. “No.”
“Even in here, even in prison when they had you trapped, you didn’t give up. You don’t know how to quit. You don’t know how to die. You may have been a ghost for six years, Joss, but you’ve always been alive.”
I close my eyes, a wave of dizziness rushing over me. I’m not surprised when he kisses me softly, lighting me up inside like the sun rising over the river behind him. I’m grateful for it. His arms around me, his lips on mine—it steadies me. It pushes away that dizzy, sick feeling in my head and my heart until I’m standing straight. Firm. Solid.
Until I feel more like me as I’m wrapped up in him than I have in a very long time.
Everything is changing. Everything is different than it ever has been before. I’ve always felt like Ryan was taking something from me, stripping away the layers of shadow and shroud that I’ve covered myself in while trying to hide. To survive. And I let him. I grudgingly let him do it, and now that I’m standing in the sun beside the water with him holding me, seeing me, knowing me more than anyone has in my short, painful life, I feel less afraid and more alive than I ever thought I could.
***
We sleep for most of the day. My schedule is getting all turned around. I’m going nocturnal and I don’t know how much I like it. I prefer the daylight. I like the warmth of the sun on my skin and light in the sky. I like seeing what’s coming. Too many shady things happen in the dark for me to ever trust it completely. I read once that up in Alaska there are weeks in the summer where the sun never sets. I thought that sounded like heaven until I got to the next chapter. Turns out in the winter there are times where the sun never comes out. Hard pass on that noise. Alaska can keep their wonky hours.
Once we get up, Ryan and I join Vin in his office again to talk about where we go from here. Trent is MIA—he was gone before we woke up—but I know he’s somewhere; he wouldn’t leave Ryan on his own, and part of me is pretty convinced he wouldn’t leave me either.
“Who do you have locked up?” I ask Vin.
He eyes me shrewdly. “Who are you looking for?”
“No one. It’s just a question.”
He stares at me, unmoving.
“Fine,” I groan. “Melissa.”
“Why Melissa?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Penance? Forgiveness?”
“No.”
“Yes. She was Caroline’s closest friend. Do you have some things you want to say to her? Or more importantly, do you have some things you want to hear from her?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Stop that,” I growl.
Vin sits forward in his seat, his arms coming to rest on his desk. “Melissa won’t forgive you and even if she did it wouldn’t help. You don’t feel bad for her. You don’t even feel bad for Caroline. You feel bad for yourself.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“He’s right,” Ryan says quietly.
I stare at him, shocked. “Are you siding with him?”
“He’s right,” he repeats.
“Even your boy knows,” Vin tells me. “And I bet if we brought your buddy Trent in here, he’d agree too. That dude has definitely killed a time or two, but you don’t see him wandering around all sad-faced and begging everyone who will listen for forgiveness.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I tell him hotly.
“Not yet. But if you go in there with Melissa, you’ll start. She won’t say it’s okay, because for her it’s not. You killed her friend. You gotta learn to live with that.”
I shake my head in frustration.
“You told Hyperion here beca
use you thought he’d make it all better, didn’t you?”
I want to leave. I want to pull my knife, take my best shot at him, and shut his mouth.
“But he couldn’t do it, could he? What’d he tell you, Kitten? That you’d never get over it?”
“I killed a woman.”
“You’ll never get over it.”
Stupid freaking know-it-all pimp!
“You’ve done it, haven’t you, Hyperion?”
There’s a long pause, a silence that fills the room, expands then bursts, leaving it feeling empty and cold.
“Yeah,” Ryan admits roughly.
“We all have. Anyone who really wants to live has done it.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m okay with it,” I mutter.
“No one says you should be.”
“This is pointless,” I snap, sorry I brought it up. “We need to decide where we go from here.”
“I told you, same as I told the people out there: we don’t make a move with your friends until we get our hands on the guy who killed Rebecca.”
“They’ll never hand him over,” Ryan tells him honestly.
Vin spreads his hands. “Then where we go from here is nowhere. Not with the cannibals.”
“You’re being impossible,” I growl. “You know you don’t stand a chance without their help.”
“I also know everyone here won’t work with those people, not in a million years.”
“Not even if they get Bryan,” Ryan agrees.
“Nope. It’s just not going to happen. So I don’t care that they won’t hand him over. In fact, I’m counting on that.”
“Because then it’s their choice that you don’t work together, not yours.”
“We tried to be reasonable,” Vin says in mock sadness.
I begin to the pace the room, unable to hide my frustration. “You’ve already been living on borrowed time here, using the Leaders you captured to put on a show. That can’t last forever. Eventually one of them will get sick of prison and betray you, even if it means dying. Then what will you do? The Colony will be at your door in a heartbeat and your Guard can’t hold them off.”