by Kelly Meding
“Are you being intentionally dense?”
“Excuse me?” I took three steps toward him, hands balled by my sides, fuming. He stood up, shoulders back, fists loose, anticipating an assault and making no move to protect himself from it. “What the fuck—?”
“I’m talking about us,” he snapped.
No, no, no. We are not talking about us.
He continued. “You and me, Evy, not you and me and anyone else. I love you. I’ve made no bones about that, because it is what it is. I also know you have feelings for me, and I know why those feelings scare you.”
Heat flared in my cheeks. “Oh, really? You know exactly why my feelings for you scare me?”
“I was there at the end.” His voice quieted, was almost reverent.
“It’s more than what Kelsa did to me, Wyatt. I think if it were only that, I could compartmentalize it as just more Dreg-on-human violence and move on. As sick and disgusting as it was, and as … brutal, it was just one more way for the goblin bitch to tear me down and prove she was in charge. It was part of her job to keep me and kill me.”
Wyatt had paled a bit during my monologue. He’d twisted his mouth into a curious grimace, as though unsure what to make of my admission. Hell, I was a little unsure what to make of it. I would forever carry the memory of how I’d died, chained to a mattress, taken piece by piece. But that experience had been altered the morning I’d fully inhabited Chalice’s body. Our body.
My body. A body that had experienced things I hadn’t and recalled those sensations. Sometimes vividly, as I’d felt upon first reentering the apartment; other times, it was just a shadow of feeling. My own memories—of my childhood, of working for the Triads, my friendships with Jesse and Ash, every Dreg I’d ever killed—were becoming gray. Less distinct. They lacked sensation—the touch my old body, long gone and disposed of, had imprinted on itself. Just as Chalice’s life was imprinted on me.
I was glad to lose the pain of my death. I was also terrified of the loss and what it meant.
“If not that, then what is it?” he asked softly. His fingertips twitched, not quite trembling. “When you froze up in First Break, I thought I understood why. Now you’re saying … what, Evy?”
“No, I’m pretty sure in First Break, it was because of the goblins.” More than pretty sure. At the time, the memories were fresh and crystal clear, restored by the magic of a vampire memory ritual. I’d relived the brutality in Technicolor detail less than twelve hours prior to our attempt at sex. I’d only been borrowing Chalice at the time.
He blanched, struggling to understand my cryptic-speak. “Then what? Tell me.”
Something in his pleading tone made me snap. I don’t know what did it, only that I briefly saw red. Fury heated my skin and soured my stomach, barely tempered by the icy grip of fear. My fingernails dug into my palms.
“You really want to know why you scare me, Wyatt?” I asked, voice strange to my own ears. Cold. “You really want to hear why I regret sleeping with you two weeks ago, when I knew I shouldn’t have, and why the idea of admitting my new feelings for you drives me to irrational fear? Tell me you want to know.”
He didn’t reply, and I wanted him to. Hesitation meant he wasn’t sure. “Yes” meant exposing personal bullshit. “No” was easier. If he said no, I’d clam up, swallow the truth, and move on with the other shit we had to deal with. As the silence drew out, the tension became a tangible thing, wrapping cold, icy fingers around my heart and squeezing tight.
He doesn’t want to know. He likes the fantasy warrior woman who kills bad things and doesn’t have a past deeper than four years. The woman who needs him to save her from the terrible memories of torture and death—he wants her. The one he fell in love with, not the amalgamation of two people that you’ve become. He doesn’t—
“I want to know,” he said.
My mouth fell open. A strange chill settled in my stomach. I’d challenged him and he’d called my bluff, and now I didn’t want to say it. Saying it meant he’d really asked, and that meant he wanted me. Not her. Me. Warts and wounds and multiple personalities and all. I retreated until my back hit the door, an immovable barrier. Unless I turned and ran.
Different emotions telegraphed across his face—surprise, concern, anger, frustration, hesitation, even grief. I’d seen them all; I knew his facial tics. I retained the advantage from our old life. He wasn’t so lucky.
“I could guess,” he said evenly, “from things you’ve said in the past, adding details from my own imagination. But I don’t want to guess anymore, Evy. I’ve never known anyone who could still surprise the hell out of me after four years, not the way you do. Who hurt you?”
“Who didn’t?”
His face crumpled. Not out of pity—good for his looks, since I’d have pummeled him if pity had even pretended to come my way—but out of the acknowledgment of hidden fears. This wasn’t the conversation I’d expected, but there was no sense in holding back, either. He wanted the truth? He’d get it.
“Don’t worry,” I said, my voice a little too poisonous. “I wasn’t molested by my mom’s rotating boyfriends or raped by the guards at Juvie. My entire life before the Triads, I was just never treated like a person.”
“Abuse isn’t only sexual, Evy,” he said. Low voice, nostrils flaring. “No one deserves to be ignored.”
I snorted—if only being ignored had been the problem. “Oh no, they paid attention. Just the wrong kind, and mostly it was my own damned fault. To my mother’s boyfriends, I was a leech that needed occasional feeding and slapping around. To the people at the group foster home, I was another pathetic orphan with anger-management issues that was locked in the closet at least once a month for fighting with the other kids. When I was in Juvie, I spent more time in solitary or the infirmary than anywhere else.”
He scowled. I could almost see his blood boiling in his veins. “What about your mother?”
“She’s dead. What about her?”
“Did she love you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. She stopped saying it when I was four. After my stepfather left us, I think she stopped loving everything, including herself.”
“She filled the void with heroin?”
“You know she did.” Where the blue fuck was he going with this?
“Just like you filled the void with killing Dregs?”
The entire world seemed to go absolutely still. My heart pounded so loudly I was sure he could hear it. It drowned out any other sound. Panic set in, colored with fear and anger. He had no right to get into my head like that. He wasn’t allowed to know me so well.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Just don’t!” My chest hurt. It was hard to breathe. Tears stung my eyes, sharp and hot. It was too much. I didn’t want to analyze why I was the way I was. I didn’t want to know why I had a hard time letting people in. I didn’t want to understand why killing Dregs made me feel good—gave me a sense of purpose I’d never felt as just another angry orphan.
Psychology was stupid.
Wyatt walked toward me, and I recoiled. Didn’t even think. The loneliness was there from our conversation; I just slipped into the electrical current of the Break and moved. The jump was brief, barely irritating, and I found myself standing on the other side of the bed, by the bathroom. Wyatt’s back was still to me, attention on the space where I’d been.
I’d just run from him.
God, can I sink any lower than this?
An angry sob tore from me and I fell to my knees, helpless against the shame choking me. Shame over what he knew, and all the things I couldn’t bear to tell him—about the scared thirteen-year-old who’d let an older boy touch her down there for the price of a plastic necklace; the confused twenty-one-year-old who fucked strangers in dirty bar bathrooms to prove she was a woman and not just a killer.
Tears blurred my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut, gasping for air, desperate to keep it together.
Warm a
rms circled me from behind. I pulled away, but he held tight. Unafraid of my weakness. Not seeming to care that I wasn’t the strong, independent Hunter he’d trained. I turned and collapsed against his chest, unable to fight anymore, and let the tears come. Cheek against his shoulder, I sobbed until my head ached and I’d soaked his shirt through with tears and snot.
He didn’t speak until I was choking back soft hiccups instead of shaking gasps. “You scare me, too, you know,” he whispered, breath warm by my cheek. “You barrel into situations you don’t always understand, and you’re way too fond of questioning my orders.”
“Good thing …” I wheezed a bit, cleared my throat, and tried again. “Good thing I don’t take orders from you anymore.”
“I don’t want to give you orders. I want to be your partner, Evy, not your boss.”
“My partners have a bad habit of dying.”
“Well, I’ve already died once, so we can strike that off the list of objections.” He stroked my hair with one hand, gentle brushes, like I was fragile glass. “Why did you disappear like that?”
Tell the truth, dammit. He deserves that. “I was afraid.”
“Of me?”
“Not you.” I pulled away far enough to see him. The look on his face broke my heart and my resolve to shield any more of myself. Building that wall had been easy, placed brick by brick over twenty-two years of loneliness, ignorance, neglect, and pain. Keeping the wall up against something as simple as love … not so easy.
I was tired of it. Tired of battling my emotions. Tired of fearing the future. Why continue to fear what I couldn’t stop? I had too many other enemies out there, too many other things to fight, without fighting with myself all the time.
Wyatt hooked a finger beneath my chin, drawing my attention back to him. I tried to focus on the bridge of his nose, afraid if I looked into his eyes I’d fall in and never climb back out. He didn’t speak. I gave in, looked, and barely held on.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Of us.”
“Why?”
My stomach quaked. A tremor tore down my spine. I balled my hands in front of his shirt and closed my eyes, sure I would break into a thousand pieces if I didn’t hold on tight. Wyatt pulled me close, abandoning his quest for answers, and just held me. I pressed my face into his shoulder. Inhaled him. Felt his heart beat.
“I told you I’d never pressure you,” he said.
“It isn’t that. I want to be with you and let myself care for you, but it’s those things that scare me the most.”
He tensed a fraction, barely noticeable. “I don’t understand.”
“It feels like …” I struggled to put into words what was so clear in my head. My mixed-up, tired, pain-addled head. “No, not feels like. It is. Giving in to this thing between us—to my physical attraction to you—means losing the old Evangeline Stone for good. It means the sensations I feel in this body are well and truly mine, and that what I was before? She’s gone. It means accepting I will never be her again, and that this is my life now. Period.”
I’d finally said it, and I felt strangely good. Relieved, even. There it was—my fear in full-color detail, and even if I’d been able to take back the confession, I wouldn’t. I knew in my brain that I couldn’t go back to what I’d been before my death, but I had not accepted it in my heart. Saying it drove that acceptance home. Made it impossible to ignore, for both of us.
Besides, it was better he know it all up front, so he could weigh the totality of my issues against his feelings for me. He’d more than earned it.
I drew back and searched his face. “Sorry you asked?”
“Never.” The vehemence in his voice made my heart soar. “Are you sorry you told me?”
“No.”
He smiled. I couldn’t decipher his expression. It seemed like … awe, but that wasn’t possible. “I can’t begin to imagine these last few days from your perspective, Evy. Your entire world changed when you came back, and I never considered that, or how inhabiting a new body would affect you. You’re allowed to be scared of this.”
I bit the side of my lip, considering my words. “I hate not knowing if my feelings for you are mine or hers.”
“I thought you and she were the same now.” He touched my cheek, then let his hand drift around to rest on the back of my neck. “It’s all semantics. Everything you are now is because of the woman you were and the woman you’re in, and both of them are you.”
“Semantics, huh? So my existence has been boiled down to what came first? The chicken or the egg?”
“It sounds goofy when you put it like that.”
“It sounds just as goofy when I say it my way. Everything changed when you died, Wyatt. This is me now, and I need to get over the damned past and just … live.” I drew the tip of my finger across his brow, down his temple, across the hard line of his jaw and over rough stubble.
“So live,” he whispered.
A tiny shiver stole down my back. “Help me?”
His answer was in the slight tilt of his head and in the way his hand gently stroked the back of my neck. In his parting lips. My other hand snaked around his neck and drew him down to me. The first kiss was hesitant, the barest brush of lips. I still felt a thrill all over my body. My stomach fluttered.
His other hand slid to my hip and rested. He waited for me to come to him, and I did, claiming his mouth with mine. Falling into the intoxicating taste of him, letting it overtake my senses. Warmth settled in my stomach, then drifted lower. My skin tingled wherever we touched, and I thought I could kiss him like that forever.
Or until my knee started to cramp from our awkward position on the floor.
I hissed and pulled away abruptly, twisting to unlock my angry joints. “Ow, shit, shit,” I muttered.
“Evy?”
“Inconvenient cramp.”
He scooted around to crouch in front of me, concern blaring from his face like a siren. “Your left knee?”
“Yeah.” The pain was already going away, and it faded quickly as I massaged my knee through my jeans. “Now that’s what I call a mood breaker.”
He chuckled. “I didn’t want to say anything, but my ass was starting to go numb.”
“A numb ass,” I said, grinning. “There may be a market for that as an insult.”
“Says the queen of foul language.”
“You always say to go with my talents.”
He laughed again, and I followed suit. It felt good, knowing that a little personal information hadn’t completely altered our existing patterns. I found comfort in them, and I was sure he did, too. A little continuity in the midst of chaos. He stood up and offered his hand. I accepted, and he pulled me to my feet.
I didn’t let go of his hand. “So what happens now?”
“Nothing you don’t want to happen.”
The petty part of my mind wanted him to promise that went for the things going on outside this room as well as in. Only I knew he couldn’t make such a promise. Everything outside of us was beyond our control. Instead, I replied by obliterating the pocket of air between us and pressing up close. Hips to hips, stomach to stomach. I licked my lips; he accepted the silent invitation.
His mouth moved against mine, soft but insistent, and I met his every movement. Fingers caressed my throat and wandered back to massage my neck and shoulders. My lips parted, allowing him entrance to my mouth, and for a moment we shared a breath. His tongue traced along my upper lip, sending delicious tingles through my belly, and I responded by gently sucking his lower lip into my mouth. I nibbled with my teeth, and his hips surged against mine.
A niggle of old fear returned, and I swiped at it with a mental two-by-four. Not here. Not now. Not again. I won’t let the past continue to control me, or my emotions. Instead, I allowed a delicate dance to begin.
Wyatt’s tongue darted into my mouth, stroked across my teeth, until it was met by mine. I raked my fingers down his chest and earned a soft moan. He trailed cool fingertips along
my back, down over my ribs to my hips, drawing me into him. His mouth left gentle, tasting kisses across my cheeks to my throat, and each hot caress drove another small spear of pleasure through my abdomen.
I groaned at the sensation. Felt his lips curl into a smile. He raked his tongue across the hollow at the base of my throat, and my knees buckled. Strong arms kept me upright. We inched sideways, closer to the bed.
A digital ringtone skewered the moment and brought progress to a screeching halt. We froze mid-grope, and I started laughing.
“This better be good,” Wyatt grumbled as he fished the cell phone out of his pocket. It was a city number, caller I.D. unknown. We disentangled, and he flipped it open. “Yes?” He looked at me and mouthed, “Phineas.” My racing heart skipped a beat. “Here’s fine,” Wyatt said, and rattled off our location. “Twenty minutes, then.”
He hung up. I didn’t have to ask—the brief conversation told me all I needed to know—but did anyway. “Phin’s coming here?”
“Yeah. And apparently with big info, too. Said he met Call.”
I could have throttled him for his lack of interest in the new development. It was the phone call we’d been waiting for. “This is good news, Grumpy. We’ve been stewing over this guy’s identity for two days, and Phin might be able to tell us who he is and what the hell he wants.”
“You’re right,” he said with more energy in his voice. “Forgive my selfishness in wishing he’d waited another thirty minutes to call.”
“Only thirty minutes?”
He grinned wolfishly. “It would have at least let me finish kissing you the way I wanted.”
Dammit, heat blazed in my cheeks and neck. I cracked my knuckles, suddenly full of nervous energy.
“I love that for the brave fighter you are,” Wyatt said, “I can still make you blush.”
“I’m sure I could make you blush, too, if I tried hard enough. Only it would be more from words coming out of my mouth than anything going in.”
He laughed at the moderately lewd joke. Since we had no time to continue our previous activities to a satisfying conclusion, I worked on putting the touch and taste of him out of mind. My skin still seemed hot where he’d kissed me, and I missed him in my arms. Not good, since I once again had a problem to solve. And a bad guy to stop. The world had briefly paused; Phin’s phone call hit the Play button again.
