I paused, between the front of the wagon and the back of one of the carts, suddenly not so sure of myself. Maybe all of my maybes had been worthless. Maybe we were already done, and he was moving on. Maybe I was the most pathetic woman in the world.
Sanchez noticed me first, then looked at Jason and nodded in my direction. When Jason straightened, when his eyes met mine, I had a total deer-in-the-headlights moment. My heart pounded, and blood whooshed in my ears with each beat. I couldn’t blink.
“I should get back to…that thing,” Sanchez said as she stood. She offered me a tight-lipped smile and strode off toward the creek.
Jason stared at me across the dozen or so yards separating us. For several seconds, that was all he did. Stare. Watch. Assess. Until, placing his hands on his knees, he stood.
I gulped. I hadn’t been so ridiculously anxious—so uncomfortably aware of my own awkwardness—around him since I’d been in middle school. Taking a deep breath, I took a step toward him, then another. And another. I forced myself to keep my eyes on his face, to keep moving.
Jason studied me as I approached, his expression giving no indication of his thoughts or mood, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Ky had been right. Was Jason so closed off, so controlled, because he felt too much and was, for whatever reason, afraid of the intensity of his own emotions?
I stopped a few feet in front of Jason. The skin around his eyes tightened the barest amount.
After a fortifying deep breath, I raised my hand, reaching out to brush my fingertips over the exposed skin of his forearm. I stopped short of touching him. When was the last time we even touched? I thought it might have been the previous afternoon, when my Ability flared back to life, and my eyebrows drew together. That we’d gone a whole day without physical contact seemed impossible.
But I was fairly certain it was true. We hadn’t been intimate in weeks—not with my kidnapping, resulting in a broken arm and many bruises, and the still-healing gash crossing Jason’s face from hairline to jaw—and though we’d been sleeping near each other in our tent, our sleeping bags remained separated. I’d been telling myself it was because he feared hurting me while we slept. Now I suspected that was only part of the reason for the physical restraint.
I searched the sapphire depths of his eyes. “Can we talk? Somewhere more private.” Another deep breath. “I—there’s some stuff you need to know.”
The tightness around his eyes increased, but he nodded. He held out an arm, indicating that I should lead the way.
Taking a deep breath, I squeezed my good hand into a fist and turned to head toward the tiny creek. There was a sharp bend a short ways downstream, and the rocky walls of the shallow ravine and the scrubby pines lining it would provide us at least a semblance of privacy. I had no way to gauge how Jason would react to what I was about to tell him, but I wanted to give him the opportunity to process away from the others.
Silence was our only companion as we descended one of a myriad of paths leading down to the creek. The creek itself was only several feet wide and easy enough to cross. By the time we were hidden from our camp, from our companions, by the ravine wall, I was a ball of anxiety; my hand was shaking, my heart was beating a fast staccato rhythm against the inside of my rib cage, and I didn’t feel like I could draw in enough breath.
I wiped my suddenly damp palm on my jeans and stopped in front of a knee-high rock. Turning to face Jason, I pointed to the rock. “Sit, please.”
Jason did so silently, his eyes never leaving me. His gaze was a tangible thing, burning into my flesh, flaying me open, and laying out my fetid soul for the whole universe to witness…to judge.
I pulled my braid over my shoulder and wrapped my hand around its end, giving a gentle tug. I can do this. I can do this. I have to do this! My stomach twisted, knotted, lurched, and I started pacing. Back and forth. Back and forth.
“Dani.” Just that single word, my name on Jason’s lips, halted me mid-step.
I opened my mouth, swallowed, pressed my lips together. There was so much I hadn’t told him about my time in the Colony, so much I hadn’t told anyone, that it seemed an impossible task to pick a place to start. But I had to tell him something. I had to let him know that I wanted to fix us.
I met your mom, she’s in the Colony, and she created the Virus.
Taking a deep breath, I tried again. “When I was at the Colony, you—do you remember telling me to do whatever it took to survive?” I stared at the rough rock wall behind Jason, just over his shoulder, too chickenshit to actually look at him.
“Yes.” His voice was carefully controlled.
Another deep breath. “Because of the issues they’ve been having with pregnancies making it to full term, one of the regular commands the General gives newcomers is to actively attempt to procreate…” My voice sounded hollow, dead. “…with pretty much anyone.”
Jason’s jaw clenched, and it remained that way.
“The men are encouraged to approach any woman they desire, and the women are discouraged from denying them.” A disgusted laugh caught in my throat. “God, he’s such a chauvinistic bastard—he doesn’t even give that choice to the women. It’s just, ‘If someone wants you to spread your legs, spread ’em.’”
“Dani…did someone—”
I shook my head once, sharply, and whatever Jason saw in my eyes silenced him. “The night I met Mase and Camille, I was searching the warehouses, doing my first round of scouting out their supplies. I—there was a soldier, a yellow-band, who I may have antagonized just a bit when I first arrived.” My hand clutched the side of my jeans. “He propositioned me, I said no, and when he found me wandering around the warehouses that day, no longer mind-controlled—though he didn’t know that—he decided to take advantage of those particular commands.
“He forced me into one of the warehouses and—” I looked down at my hand; my nails were digging into my thigh painfully. I embraced the sensation, drawing strength from it. “He was big and armed, and I wasn’t.” I raised my gaze to meet Jason’s; his eyes were bottomless pools of midnight set in granite. “I stopped fighting him, and…” I cleared my throat. “I stopped fighting him…let him believe I wanted him…so I could steal his sidearm.” A soft laugh. A one-shoulder shrug. I was thinking about you the whole time, I didn’t say. “I managed to nab his key, too.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Nothing.” I refused to look away. As the words had come out, I’d started to realize that my actions weren’t something to be ashamed of. I had been doing what I had to do to stay alive…to survive. “Mase did all the heavy lifting, really. He was going to kill the guy, but I asked him not to.”
“Why?” So very, very cold.
“He was a yellow-band.” I shook my head again. “You don’t know what it’s like, to have no control over your actions, but to believe everything you’re doing is your own idea, that it’s what you want, your choice. The guilt once you remember…he was only doing what the General commanded him to do.”
“So you spared him.”
I didn’t have a response to that, so I simply stood there. I’d spared a man who’d had every intention of forcing me to have sex with him, but I hadn’t hesitated to shoot—to kill—a little girl to protect Zoe. She was a Crazy, I told myself. She was going to attack Zo…
Seconds passed in handfuls until, finally, Jason said, “Tell me what it’s like.”
I blinked several times. “What what’s like?”
“Having no control over your actions…being mind-controlled.”
“I—it—” Mouth still open as though the words might form at any moment, I shook my head. “I don’t know how to explain it. It doesn’t seem bad until you’re awake, really awake, and you realize what you’ve done. When I was under—” I pressed my lips together and squeezed my eyes shut. Panic was a living thing inside my chest, a trapped bird flitting around, making my heart skip beats and stealing the space my lungs so desperately needed.
I too
k several steps and knelt on the rock-strewn ground before Jason. Resting my chin on his knee, I met his eyes. His face softened minutely, and he brought his right hand to my head, smoothing back the flyaway curls that had escaped from my French braid and running the backs of his fingers over my unbruised jawline. His body, however, was humming with tension.
Turning my head, I rested my cheek on his knee. “The General made me forget everything that happened once I got sick,” I said softly. “I thought I had amnesia, and since I was told I’d been found alone—other than the Crazies who’d supposedly been attacking me—I assumed that everyone I knew was dead. I didn’t remember the journey from Seattle to Bodega Bay, or the one from there to Colorado, and I didn’t remember us ever being…us.”
The soft brush of Jason’s knuckles against my skin stilled, but I couldn’t bring myself to look up at him. I didn’t think I would be able to continue if I saw his expression, and I had to keep going. Things wouldn’t be right with us until I’d shed at least some of my secrets.
I took a deep breath. “Gabe”—Jason’s tense body stiffened further—“was the only person I knew. He was the only familiar thing in a terrifying world, and I was so, so lonely.”
“Did you—did he…”
I shut my eyes. “No. I—we kissed, that’s all. He stopped things before it could go any further than that.” Trembling, I pulled away so I could look up at Jason.
He was staring at the opposite side of the ravine, jaw clenched and nostrils flaring.
“Jason, I swear that whatever I felt for him when my mind was twisted to hell and back, it pales in comparison to what I feel for you. It means nothing.”
“It means something to me,” he said quietly. “Is there anything else?”
I met your mom, she’s in the Colony, and she created the Virus.
“No,” I whispered.
With a gentleness born of great strength and intensive training, Jason pushed me away from him and rose, not even looking down at me before walking away.
I wanted to call after him so badly, to stand and chase him down and beg him to stay and talk to me, to help me fix things between us. But I couldn’t. I watched him go, grief silencing my voice, paralyzing my limbs. I watched him walk further downstream, my heart crushed in his fist, and I couldn’t even fight for us, for what we could be.
This is what I deserve…to be alone. Jason, Zoe, Camille, even Gabe…I only hurt whoever gets close to me. I was wrong; my secrets aren’t poison. I am poison.
But there was one thing I could do that wouldn’t hurt anyone, one place I could go where I wouldn’t feel the waves of desperation caused by having my heart torn out, and where neither Ky nor Zoe would have to feel the reverberations, either. There was only one way I could escape.
“Jack,” I said in my dog’s mind. He was on the other side of camp, frolicking over the barren land with Cooper. I crawled one-handed closer to the ravine wall and, leaning my back against the rocky surface, pulled my knees up to my chest. “Please, Sweet Boy, let me in. Let me run with you.”
“Yes, Mother. Run. Chase. Hunt.”
With a sigh, I slipped out of my shivering body.
~~~~~
I was Jack.
The moon was high and bright, and the night was filled with promise. My prey ran ahead, its heartbeat rapid. I could taste its terror on my tongue.
Abruptly, it changed direction, heading upward. It was climbing a tree. No!
I lunged at the tree’s trunk, standing on my back legs and scratching at the rough bark with my front claws. I opened my mouth and barked, begging my prey to come back down and play some more.
“Dani!”
“What?” I blurted, sitting bolt upright and jostling my broken arm. “Ow!” I curled in on myself, clutching my sling with my good hand. My eyes were shut tightly as though that act alone could block the pain.
“Dani—Red…”
That voice. My eyes snapped open. “Jason?” He came back?
His hand was clasping my shoulder, and his face, which I could barely see in the darkness, was mere inches from mine. “You’re shivering.”
“I’m cold,” I said, with an extra big shiver that made my teeth chatter. “What time is it?”
“Late…everyone’s asleep back at camp.” His hand moved up my neck, and the pad of his thumb brushed across my lips. “We missed dinner.”
My pulse was suddenly racing, and I shivered for another reason entirely. It took me a moment to speak. When I did, it wasn’t much. “We?”
“Yeah.”
So he’s been gone all this time? I took a shaky breath, a byproduct of the nighttime chill and my anxiety. At first, I couldn’t believe that nobody had come looking for us, but then I realized they probably thought we’d snuck off for some amorous alone time. Boy, were they wrong.
I cleared my throat. “Where’d you go after I, um—earlier?”
Ever so carefully, Jason nudged me forward, wedging himself between my back and the rock wall, and my God did he feel good—so warm and firm and there. He cocooned me with his body, his chest to my back and his legs propped up on either side of me. His left arm slid around my middle, just under my sling, and he raised his right arm, tracing a slow line along my collarbone, up my neck, and along my jawline with his fingertips.
“Walking,” he said. “I just walked around. I couldn’t be here.”
“Why?” I whispered.
Jason held me, kindling a gentle, sizzling promise I hadn’t felt in weeks. Warmth blossomed in my lower abdomen, his touch arousing my desire with embarrassing ease.
“Needed a breather.” His fingers clasped my jaw tenderly, and he turned my head so the side of my face was pressed against the worn brown leather of his coat. He lowered his head and nuzzled my neck, and when he next spoke, his breath tickled skin made overly sensitive by weeks of neglect. “I need to know one thing. Why didn’t you tell me earlier…and why now?”
“That’s two things,” I managed to say, though the words were breathy.
He chuckled, the sound fanning the flames of desire. He was doing a really good job of warming me up, inside and out. “Tell me,” he said against my neck.
I sighed. “I was afraid.”
“Of…?”
“You.” I felt Jason tense, his lips stilling on my neck, and rushed to explain. “I mean, saying ‘do whatever you need to do to survive’ and actually being cool with me making out with some other guy so I could steal his gun are two entirely different things. And then the thing with Gabe, I—it terrified me every time I thought about telling you.”
“But you did tell me.”
I laughed, a dry, bitter sound. “I had to. I—the secrets, the guilt—I couldn’t be around you without thinking about the things I wasn’t telling you.” Like about your mom. I took a deep breath, still not sure I would ever tell him about her, because despite how understanding Jason was being about the other secrets I’d divulged, I wasn’t worried the one about his mom would break us; I feared it would break him. “At first, I thought you were pulling away. I thought you’d changed your mind, that you didn’t want to be us. But it wasn’t you; it was me.” I tried to sit up, intending to turn around so I could see his face, but his arms tensed, holding me in place.
I had no choice but to relax back against him. “I was distancing myself from you without realizing what I was doing, and once I did realize it, I knew I had to, you know, confess…because I missed you. I miss you.”
Jason made a rough noise low in his throat. He raised his head, and the hand holding my jaw moved lower, his strong fingers dancing along the side of my neck. “Did either of them touch you here?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
His lips replaced his fingers, a searing brand on that sensitive skin. His hand moved lower, dipping under the collar of my sweater. His fingertips traced the edge of my bra. “And here?”
“Just a”—my voice hitched as he pushed the thin fabric out of the way, his fingertips trailing
a blaze of pleasure—“just a little…bit.”
His lips, still on my neck, curved, and imagining his possessive smile was like lighter fluid on my burning desire. The arm he’d wrapped around my middle shifted lower, his hand slipping under the hem of my sweater. He ran charged fingertips up and down my side, from my hip up to my bra and back. “And here?”
“I—I don’t—”
That hand, those fingertips, moved to my stomach, sliding ever so lightly over the skin of my lower abdomen, just above the waistband of my jeans, and I whimpered. Jason’s responding chuckle was so knowing, so male, so heated. “Here?”
Breaths coming faster, I shook my head. My hand clutched his thigh in an effort to stave off my mounting, needy ache.
Jason popped the top button on my pants, then drew the zipper down more slowly than I would have thought possible. My hips lifted off the ground, seeking, wanting.
He tsked me. “Patience, Red.”
With a low groan, I moved my hand higher up on his thigh. His arousal showed in the unmistakable hardness pressed against my lower back.
My hand was just below his pocket when he stopped unzipping. “No, Red.”
The fingers on my breast pinched in a way that would have hurt had I not been so painfully aroused. The pleasure-pain earned another whimper from me.
“Just feel.” He lowered the zipper the rest of the way with a quick jerk. “Close your eyes and just feel.”
Thankfully, he stopped teasing. He thrust his hand into my pants, and I groaned, and again my hips lifted off the ground. I shifted my hand closer to his knee, my fingertips digging into his jeans. To say my body ached for him would be a gross understatement.
“Jason…please. I need…”
He laughed, low and rough, then shoved that final barrier out of the way. “Tell me if I’m hurting you,” he said as he finally gave me what I craved. Remotely, I registered that he had to be talking about my arm, but at that moment, with his fingers doing such tantalizing things between my legs, I really didn’t care. His fingers were everywhere in the most delicious ways. Mounting pleasure was my whole world.
The Ending Series: The Complete Series Page 96
