by Zoe Chant
Tara started to tell him how ridiculous he was, but then his hands folded around hers. It should have been too much, too close, but somehow, it wasn't. In the dim light of the room, his eyes were almost black, and she felt something in her, something warm and bright, shimmer.
“Tara ... please. I have to know more.”
She sighed, standing up.
“All right. Let's go to the kitchen.”
“Why?”
“Because I am not telling this story without getting some more food in my belly.”
The cold pizza was almost as good as it was fresh, and there was something inviting about the low kitchen lights, something cozy. It made sense. This wasn't a hotel or some place that you could rent for twenty bucks a night and a promise not to turn on the lamps. Tara found her mood turning a little contemplative as she ate her pizza. Across the table, Reese was waiting patiently, but from the copper glint in his eyes, she knew that that patience wasn't going to last forever.
After all, she had made a promise.
“We used to live a house like this before my dad died,” she said at last. “I mean, maybe not this nice, but you know. A house. A place with beds and couches and a television, things like that. I still remember it. It was in Indiana, I think, though I couldn't tell you the town. It was ... I didn't even have the words for it. It was good, and it was the world to me. And then Dad died, and it all went to hell.”
“How did he die?” Reese asked, and she tried not to be hurt at the clipped way he spoke. She told herself to remember that, that she was really just a means to an end for him, no matter how he made her heart beat faster or her stomach turn over.
“That's the hell of it, I don't know. I asked my mom, and she said a few different things over the years. She mostly said that it was an accident or something that went wrong at the factory where Dad worked. But I got older, and Mom got ... I don't know. Paranoid, maybe. She got really scared, and that's when we started moving around so much.”
To Tara's surprise, Reese reached for her hand, squeezing it gently. She was grateful when he didn't say anything, only waited patiently for her to continue. She took a few deep breaths before starting again.
“She said it was accident, but when I was twelve or so, she also mentioned something about men who had come looking for him, for something he knew. She said that they had threatened him, and he had fought them. And then she got scared and refused to say anything else. For like, the rest of the week. That was a pretty bad week. She got fired.”
“Do you know if there's any truth to what she said?”
Tara shrugged. There was a bone-deep weariness that came over her whenever she thought too much about her past, and it was pulling her down now.
“I know that my dad's factory got shut down right before my mom and I skipped town. I know they thought it was some kind of sabotage and that my dad was listed as one of the casualties. But beyond that, I don't know. All I did know was that my mom was getting more and more afraid. She was always kind of on the fragile side, for just about every definition of the word. The world was scary to her, and she didn't really have anyone she could go to.
“She started moving us around really fast, so fast that she left all of her friends behind, so then there was no one at all.”
“Just you,” Reese said, and there was something soft in his eyes, something she wasn't sure she wanted to examine. “You're not no one.”
“I was maybe six when Dad died, and everything changed. Mom tried to make out like it was some big adventure, some kind of amazing trip we were on, but that didn't last long. We were always tired, always moving. I didn't understand why I didn't have my room or my toys anymore, let alone why Dad was gone. We were on the move, and we settled down in Wisconsin for a year. That was all right, but then Mom said that there were some men asking around where she was working.”
Tara paused, and then shook her head ruefully.
“We stayed in Pulaski, Wisconsin for a year, and that's been the longest I've lived anywhere since I was a little kid. We stayed there long enough for our things to catch up. We kept it all in a storage unit until we could get an apartment, but we never did. We left it behind when Mom got scared again. Mom kept us moving, getting more and more afraid as she went. I fought to go to school, and we managed it most of the time.”
“You must have both been so strong,” Reese said quietly. “That kind of life is hard on grown men, let alone a single mother and her child.”
“You should have seen all the other single mothers with kids we met along the way. They were so used to being invisible that you might have thought they were ghosts. That's what it felt like, being a ghost, haunting the back of the pizza parlor for leftovers, digging through the bakery bins for the day-olds. We were invisible. That's what I remember most from that time.”
Tara took a deep breath because she didn't want to say what came next. She had made her own peace with it, sort of, but that didn't mean that she liked showing off her scars to other people.
“And I grew up, and I turned into a little jerk, like a lot of kids do. I was tired of moving around, tired of my mother's fears, sick to death of having to live in whatever squat Mom could find for us. I wanted to be like the girls I saw when I managed to go to school, with a real family and a real home. That was what I yelled at her when I was sixteen, anyway, that she was the reason I didn't have a real family or a home.”
Reese's hand tightened over hers. She expected his face to be neutral or perhaps even condemning, but instead there was a compassion in him that went right to the heart of her.
“We say a lot of things to our parents when we're going through difficult times. I said some terrible things to my mother, and I'm grateful that I got to make them right eventually. From the way you are talking, from the look on your face ... I am assuming that you didn't.”
Tara uttered a half-hearted, shaken little laugh.
“You got that right. At the time, we were staying in this ugly squat in Louisiana, somewhere close to Baton Rouge. It was this big house full of people who scared me half to death, and I'm not saying it was the safest place in the world, but it caught fire one night.”
Tara's voice broke a little, but she would damned if she was going to cry in front of Reese. She swallowed hard, staring at the ceiling and hanging on to his hand tight until she thought she could go on.
“So I woke up, and my mom was there, shaking my shoulder and telling me I had to get up. I had to get up, and I had to get out. I actually pushed her away because I was sick of running. I just wanted to sleep. But she shook me again, and when I woke up, I could smell the fire. God, I could hear it. There was a bucket of water for washing in our room, and remembering something from when I was a kid, I dumped it over me.
“My mom was getting frantic by then, shoving me towards the door, and I started to run. We were on the third floor. I actually had to go through the flames to get out, but the water trick worked. I heard the water sizzling off of me, I could actually feel it steam up next to my skin, but it let me get to the ground floor and away from the house.
“By then, someone had called the fire department. There were so many people around, trying to fight the fire, trying to find their loved ones, screaming from inside the house still. I lost my mother in the tumult. I learned that the fire had started downstairs in the kitchen. I remembered that my mother had been in the kitchen, giving us some time apart so we could cool down.”
Reese stared.
“Your mother...”
“I don't know. I went crazy a little, I think. I kept grabbing at people, telling them I had to go find my mother. I tried to run back in, and I only stopped when a cop threatened to arrest me if I took one more step towards the house.”
Tara shrugged, feeling almost as exhausted as she had that night. Every step she had taken away from that time weighed on her, made her feel as if she was going to sink into the floor. When she spoke, her voice was as low and as even as she could make it.
“I believe you.”
She looked up in surprise.
“I've never told anyone that story before.”
“The world's full of strange things. I would never pretend I knew how strange it could even begin to get.”
Tara found herself smiling a tiny bit. She wasn't happy. She was a very long way from happy, but she wasn't as miserable as she thought she would be, either, telling this story. The rest was easier.
“It was just coming up on dawn when I heard someone say arson. We were still mostly milling around in the lot across from the house. None of us had anywhere to go, some of us were minors. The ones with outstanding warrants had already disappeared, but the rest of us were like zombies. Then I heard someone talking about the fact that the fire had been deliberately set. And my mind went back to that time when I was little and my mom had put me in the car with my favorite bunny in my pajamas and started driving.”
“And you ran.”
Reese's voice was so quiet, so kind and compassionate, that Tara could almost feel the tears start. She swallowed hard and nodded.
“And I've been running ever since.”
The silence stretched between them, and Tara shook her head, almost angrily. She was tired of this story. She hadn't liked living through it the first time, and telling it wasn't much better.
“There you have it, the end,” she said, her voice harsh. “I hope it was everything you wanted, because that's all I have to give you.”
“No, never,” Reese said, and for a moment, she was lost in the warmth of his copper eyes, and something inside her, something living and warm while the rest of her felt frozen solid, pulsed in time with something in him.
Reese was the one who broke first, looking down with what she might have sworn was a blush on his cheeks.
“I refuse to accept that that's the end, for me or for you,” he said, and she frowned.
“It is. That's it...”
“There's Pulaski, Wisconsin.”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“You said your things caught up with you there, but you left them behind?”
Tara frowned.
“Those things are long gone. I was just a kid when we left Pulaski. People sell the contents of those storage units off if they go a single month without being paid up. There's nothing there.”
“But what if there is?” Reese persisted. “I don't have any more leads, and I'm not going to stop here.”
“Even if you should?” she persisted, and he gave her a grin that warmed her straight through her heart.
“Maybe,” he said. “Come with me. All expenses paid trip to glamorous Pulaski, Wisconsin. I'll show you the world.”
Tara felt suddenly dizzy, as if all her life before, and all her life after was split on this moment. She could keep on doing what she was doing. She could keep running and hiding in the shadows, or...
Or she could say yes.
Looking in Reese's eyes, she knew somehow that he was offering more than a trip to Wisconsin, maybe a lot more. She could sense the trouble that hung on to him, and the strangeness as well, but somehow, none of that mattered.
“Fuck, all right,” she said, putting her hand in his. “Not like I have a lot of other offers coming in.”
“That's the spirit,” said Reese brightly.
Chapter 8
Neither of them could sleep much after that. They tried, and then mutually, they gave it up as a bad job, packing what little they had and hitting the road some time before dawn. Reese could tell that Tara wasn't much of a morning person. She roused herself to make a call to her employer at the diner to make her excuses — ”Mrs. Cooper, I can't lie to you, I'm off on a cross-country journey to find myself” — but otherwise she was silent. She curled up against the door, bare feet tucked up under her, her eyes fluttering open every time he glanced at her.
“You can sleep if you want,” Reese offered. “I don't need anyone to navigate this part of the trip.”
“I've been thinking,” she said.
“About?”
“About why you didn't just take off for Pulaski yourself.”
Reese suddenly found the road ahead very interesting.
“The way I see it, because I couldn't see it last night when we were doing all the heart-to-hearts, Pulaski's about the size of a postage stamp. For someone who's as determined as you are, it wouldn't take you much more than four or five days to search it thoroughly, if that. But instead, here I am. Why?”
“Because you lived there, and I didn't.”
Tara made a gentle scoffing sound, and then to his surprise, she reached out to put her hand over his where it sat on the steering wheel. Reese shivered at the touch of bare skin on bare skin. If he was looking right at her, he knew his eyes would be dilated until they were almost black. Her effect on him was only getting stronger, and he would have been worried about it if he didn't like it so much.
“Nope. Want to try that one again? I was a tiny child when I lived there last. I probably remember things like what the playground looked like, not where my mom stashed our worldly possessions.”
He was barely paying attention to her words, too focused on her touch. He didn't realize he was growling until Tara pulled her hand back in surprise. He flinched a little at the lapse. It was instinctive, but that didn't mean that it was excusable. Growling told humans on some kind of basic level that he wasn't like them, that he was something from the bad old days of hiding behind fires and hoping the predators on the plains were full that evening.
He started to apologize, but then to his surprise, her hand came back.
“Neat trick, but it's not going to make me shut up unless you actually put some fire behind it,” Tara noted calmly. It startled Reese so much that he laughed, shaking his head. He could feel Tara's eyes on him, and finally he sighed.
“I should have known that my one true mate was going to be harder to scare than that.”
It was the hardest and the easiest thing in the world to say. This time, Tara jerked her hand back and stayed away. She stared out the window, and then she turned back to him. If she had been dragon-blooded, he guessed there would be thin streamers of smoke spilling from her mouth and nose.
“No.”
Reese wasn't sure what he was expecting, but it hadn't been a flat denial. It hit him a lot like her unexpected touch had, leaving him raw and pared down to his instincts. His dragon hissed in offense, and he made it shut up quick because that was not going to help things.
“This isn't something that you can deny,” he said, staring straight at the road. The desert unrolled in front of him like a flat black ribbon, nothing for miles but rocks and sky and brush. “You can't tell me that you don't feel it too. Last night ... what we felt for each other wasn't just-”
“I'm horny, all right!”
The words seemed to shock them both, but Tara was shaking her head, speaking so quickly that she almost tripped over what she was saying.
“Look, you're good looking, it's been a long time since I got anything like decent male attention ... I'm horny, you're really handsome, and I make dumb choices sometimes! I just want to stop making such dumb choices.”
Reese waited until he knew she was done speaking. It gave him time to calm down, because he knew with an acute certainty that if he didn't, he was going to say something he was going to regret. He didn't know how much he could stand to regret things with Tara.
“It's more than just being turned on,” he said. “I know it is. But Tara ... whatever you're afraid of, it's not going to happen. I'm not going to ... to hurt you. Or hurry you. I just want you to keep your mind open. Your heart open. I know what my mind and my heart and my instincts have been saying practically from the moment we met,
and I would stake literally everything I own and my own life on the fact that your heart is saying the same thing.”
Tara took a hiccuping breath, letting it out slowly. When she spoke, it was more level, but he could tell that it was a calm that was hard-won.
“What is your heart saying?”
“That you're mine, and that I'm yours. And that I should give you time, and let you figure that out on your own.”
She paused, and he waited.
“It sounds like there's a but coming up,” she said, and there was a strain in her voice that sent a deep shiver of longing through him.
“But I don't want to wait,” he said, and it was the truth. “I want to show you. Prove it to you beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
The silence stretched out between them. She was silent so long that Reese thought that the matter closed. They might not speak again until they crossed into Wisconsin, two days from now.
Then Tara spoke, her voice soft but full of fire and steel.
“Then prove it.”
Chapter 9
For a moment, Tara wasn't sure that Reese had heard her. He didn't look at her, only staring down the road. The only sound was the whir of the air conditioner and the soft hum of the car itself. Something had changed between them, though. Something had snapped tight, pulled all the air out of the car.
Tara felt her heart pounding in her chest. She worried at her lip, but before she could say anything, Reese turned the car off the road. The sky was just lightening, edging blue against the endless black of the desert sky. Reese pulled to a stop behind a copse of trees. It was scant shelter from the road, but the road was deserted, as empty as an old bone with the wind whistling through it. They might have been the only people in the entire world.
Prove it.
Her words hung in the air, but Tara couldn't take them back, wouldn't. A strange heat had started low in her body, restless and wild. It made her feel as if she were capable of anything.
