She met his gaze from across the room and kicked up one of those black-wing eyebrows. “Are you ready?”
“As I’ll ever be. Just lemme fetch my stuff.” He ducked into the med lab, grabbed his med kit and bag, but Mari stalled him on the way back in. She pressed something into his hand, a heavy something. He looked down. A gun.
“What…?”
“No safety and no biometric locks, so just pull the trigger hard when you mean it, and then keep on pulling. This little gem’s got tight tolerances, smooth action, and dead-on accuracy. Slide’s nice and loose, too. All that said, you’ll want to practice with her a couple of times before you go full-on badass. I just slipped a box of ammo into your bag there, and she’s got a full clip, ready to go.” She looked solemn and serious as a funeral when she stepped back. “Y’all take care.”
He sort of hated the feeling of the gun in his hand, but he wasn’t about to tell Mari that. Sharing a gun, for her, was like him sharing a toothbrush. Or a bar of dark chocolate. She got pretty attached to her weapons. So all he said, all he really could say after he slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, was, “Thanks. I will.”
Not to be outdone in the grand-farewell department, Fanaida handed over keys to her dragon. “You’ve got two fresh MOX rods in the reactor, so you don’t have to stop for nothing except for rest and recharging your own batteries. Be sure you do that once or twice. Driving overland is a helluva thing. There’s no rush here, mijo. World’s gonna be as fucked up tomorrow as it is today.”
That wasn’t a hundred percent true. Those Texas drones were still in the air, still blowing things up. Still killing. Still threatening his people. His com went off every twenty minutes or so with updates. If he and Angela could get to Vallejo faster and somehow divert him from whatever crazy scheme he was in the middle of, maybe they could keep some of those bombs from happening. Save the world. Yeah.
Mari’s gaze tracked them while they prepared, and before they left the Vault, she nodded toward Angela. “You go kill it, Senator.”
Okay, then. They turned, the two of them—well, two and a half, if you counted Yoink as a half a person—and left via a tunnel that would take them past blast doors and then up to the garage and Fan’s dragon.
After they got far enough away, he had to ask. “Mari didn’t just tell us to kill her daddy, did she?”
“Too bloodthirsty for you, cowboy?” Angela asked, shooting him a look replete with more eyebrow action. She glanced down at his jacket pocket, and her look turned downright lascivious.
Just like that, the tension and uncertainty fled his body. He centered his world over her smile.
“Matter of fact, that is a gun in my pocket,” he returned, absolutely cool. “And I’m glad to see you.”
• • •
Overland travel: not Angela’s favorite thing. Twenty-plus hours trapped in a wheeled metal box with Kellen Hockley, no witnesses, and a self-imposed prohibition against touching him. This was going to kill her. For real this time.
However, despite her apprehension, once they got away from the Pentarc, away from mech-Daniel, it was like she’d just surfaced from a deep dive with no atmo suit. The near-silent car flung her eastward through the desert, and she could breathe. Wide open breathing. This might be what freedom tasted like: crunchy travel rations shared with a needy feline and the man she had never managed to get out of her mind.
When Yoink finally curled up and fell asleep on her shoes in the seat well, Angela logged onto her com, tapped in two darknet addresses, and sent invitations to rendezvous. She got a reply from one almost immediately and pushed a swallow through her emotion-tight throat. She should have done this weeks ago. There was power in knowing that someone out there mourned her, even a near stranger.
Oddly, she didn’t experience the trepidation she expected from reaching out like this, for setting up assignations without having her schemes vetted and cleared in committee. It might make her the worst public servant ever, but she had to be honest, it felt fucking terrific.
She could get used to this dead-girl thing.
“What you up to, or should I ask?” Kellen had his hands on the steering wheel, probably a little too tightly. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was a vehicle control rig in this car. Fanaida hadn’t used the steering wheel much on the drive in from Kingman.
Plus, watching him work through tension was hypnotic. Long fingers, tendon-strung and sun-bronzed. He always did have good hands. Did the act of driving a car upset him enough to make him clutch the steering wheel like that, or was it something else? She thought about asking him if the sugar skulls on the dash were creeping him out or if forced existence in close proximity to her was his kryptonite. Latter would be better.
They’d driven in near silence for most of the afternoon, and night was falling fast on the desert. Out there in that monochrome black, bombs were flying, and people were dying, and civilization might very well be collapsing. But she didn’t want to know about it. For the first time in her adult life, knowing the details wouldn’t get her any closer to repairing the cause.
Night was a blanket tucked snug over this car, and she could pretend, for a few hours at least, that the world outside it simply did not exist.
Angela shut down her com, half turned on the ultrasoft seat, and propped one knee up on the console that separated her body from Kellen’s. She had shit to say, and it needed saying right now. “Yeah, you can ask. I have been working on possibly becoming undead. Not in the zombie sense undead, of course, although you know what, we—I mean the UNAN, not you and I personally—lack good laws governing the personhood of zombies and we probably should spin some up, but no, I mean I’ve decided to let some key people know I’m alive and will see how they handle the resultant cardiac incidents. And also, I’m really sorry I made you uncomfortable with my whoa-pushy horniness a few weeks back, especially sorry since we’re currently stuck in a tiny car together for twenty-plus hours. And finally I brought you a present.”
She pulled a wad of papers—real, old-school paper, no kidding: she’d begged it off Fan, who had a strange but endearing fascination with origami—out from under her ass and laid the sheaves over the center console.
An offering. Just like those offerings of information he’d been leaving her for weeks. Which she chose to interpret as clear evidence that he still gave half a shit. At least, that was her hope. She didn’t dare breathe.
“Did you punctuate even a part of that in your head before you said it?” he asked.
“No. I couldn’t.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and then let it slip out slow and painful. “If I’d paused at all, I wouldn’t have said anything. Do you have any idea how hard it is to self-describe your own motivations as whoa-pushy horniness?”
“Not really. Waste of time to regret emotions you don’t have any control over to begin with.”
“I wish to fuck I was you, then, because my past is crammed full of regrets.”
His hands slid off the steering wheel. (Ha! He did know about the vehicle control rig! He’d just been pretending to steer the car. Wait. Had he done that so he didn’t have to look at her, speak with her?) It recessed back into the dash. Their destination and route were programmed, and they were within the paint rails of a federal highway. Barring an emergency, the car could drive itself to Texas.
Which was just as well, since Angela didn’t plan on letting him pay a lot of attention to the road. She couldn’t touch him, fine. But she could talk to him.
He ran one hand through his hair, making it even more strokably disheveled. This man had no idea what he did to her libido on a near-constant basis.
He turned to her, half-lidded blue eyes burning like the Caribbean in July. Okay. Maybe he had a very small, very tiny idea.
“Hold the first four words of that sentence in your mind for a minute,” he said, “and tell me about th
is present. I know you haven’t been shopping a whole lot, so I’m curious what you rummaged up in the Pentarc.”
She widened her eyes in pretend shock. “Why, Doctor Hockley, have you been spying on me?”
“Yes. A whole lot, actually. Present?”
Angela had spent most of her life surrounded by liars. Half-truths, spun truths, and discarded truths were pervasive as air on the Colina Capitolina. She worked in lies, had built her career on them, so she knew Kellen could have sidestepped the accusation. He could have pretended offense that she’d even think he was hiding out and peeking. But he didn’t do either of those things. He admitted straight-up that he’d been watching her. That kind of honesty wasn’t easy, no matter how innate he made it seem.
She tapped the top paper.
He focused on the spot her finger indicated and read out loud, “‘The Armenian Lady’s Love,’ by… Aw shit, gal, you know I hate Wordsworth.”
“Just keep reading. Please.”
“‘The Armenian Lady’s Love: Abbreviated, Annotated, and Illustrated. P.S., It’s a fuck poem.’” His eyebrows cranked up his forehead when he read the postscript at the bottom of the page. (Technically, it was a footnote and was formatted as such, but nitpicking served no one.) “Now, hang on, I might find the dude’s poetry shitty, especially later stuff like this one here, when he was trying too hard to be Byron, but don’t you think defacing his work like this is even a little bit disrespectful?”
“Not even a little bit,” she said, unable to contain her grin. She set the heels of her hands on her bent leg and leaned forward, getting a good look at the paper and teasing the veriest edge of his personal space. Totally permissible. No touching involved. “Would you like to read it yourself, or shall I orate?”
“Both. Maybe at the same time? Says here there’s pictures, and I sure would hate to skip those.”
“Oh no, don’t do that. The, ah, artist put a lot of effort into drawing them.”
He picked up a corner of one page and flipped through. He would be admiring her Kama Sutra stick figures. She’d been hoping for a chuckle, something to break the ice. Instead he inspected each drawing thoroughly, skimmed through her margin notes, and carefully read the whole thing. Twice. He said nothing.
Nothing. Um, not encouraging.
She pointed near the top and cleared her throat like she was about to give a floor speech. “‘Hear now of a fair Armenian daughter…how she loved a Christian slave, and told her pain by word, look, deed, with hope that he might love again.’ That’s, ah, me. The Armenian chick.”
“I gathered. Am I meant to be the Christian slave or the gardener?”
“You can’t tell by the drawings?”
He turned the paper sideways. Squinted. “Oh, I see, they’re the same. See, here she’s… Well, that’s definitely a fresh reading on ‘Rusty lance, I ne’er shall grasp thee.’”
“Academic, would you say?”
“A-plus for effort.” He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and set the papers aside. “This is real clever, and I’m duly impressed you can remember, line for line, a subpar poem we were forced to learn more’n a decade ago. But I gotta ask, what is this all about?”
“It’s not obvious?” she replied. “I’m wooing you.”
“Wooing?” He stopped and squinted at her a bit like he’d looked at the sideways copulating stick figures: bemused but amused at the same time.
Great. She had to spell it out. “Woo? You know, poems and flowers and…wooing? Look, in the elevator, you told me I needed to woo you. But then you went into self-preservation mode—no judgment here; I understand—and I was at a temporary loss. I started thinking about your objections and what you need from me at this point in your life, and I determined that, well, there’s precious little. I’m not used to being useless, but you have ordered your world perfectly to suit yourself, and about the only thing I can offer is this: an impetus to read really shitty poetry that you hate.” Angela sucked in her bottom lip and held it untrembling between her teeth. Well, now at least he knew.
“You think forcing me outside the boundaries of a well-ordered life is gonna make me want to kiss you till neither of us can breathe?”
It wasn’t like breathing was especially easy right now. But whatever. “Yes, exactly that, and please do feel free, if the need strikes. I’m pushy. Bossy, I think is the term you used the day we first met. I haven’t changed all that much, in case you hadn’t gathered. But I think you, specifically you, need to be bossed sometimes. So you don’t get too comfortable, so you don’t forget.”
He was quiet for a long time, sizing her up with those liquid-crystal eyes. “I called you boss, not bossy. And I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your darknet message,” he said. “I knew what it was, what you were telling me to do. I just couldn’t trust.”
“Me?”
“Nah, sweetheart. Couldn’t trust myself.” He half smiled, ruefully, and shook his head. “Also yeah, maybe there was a little bit of doubtin’ you, too. You’re a hard person to read sometimes, especially that public persona you tend.”
She needed to stop biting her lip. It hurt. Instead she shrugged. “No worries. Mech-Daniel evaluated the situation, determined that I would perform better if I thought you”—still loved me—“had replied, and initiated a series of false replies in your place.”
“Am sorry for that, too.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It was a brilliant solution on his part. Thinking that you were there in my com somehow, flirting at me, I killed it that night. Even the trillionaires were impressed enough to donate to Zeke’s campaign.”
“Fundraising was your aim in going there?”
“Fundraising is always an aim,” she said. “But this was fundraising on an entirely different level. Trillionaires, right. If you want a shitload of money poured into an undisclosed, scantily monitored fund, you want Ofelia Ortega y Mars de la Madrid’s attention.”
He frowned. “That fund was for the president’s campaign?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he do with that kind of money with only nine days left before the election?”
Angela opened her mouth to reply but then shut it. She didn’t have a strong guess and certainly not an answer. Sure, campaign war chests were always a thing, always needed filling. But on the other hand, Kellen was sort of right. The main media push had already been over by the time Angela had attended La Mars Madrid’s party.
She let her head fall back against the seat. “I suck at wooing, don’t I?”
“Maybe a little bit,” he replied gently, but with a hint of laughter tucked deep in his voice. “I mean, Wordsworth? That was your play? And twice now, too.”
He made a tsk sound in his throat, and Angela couldn’t peel her gaze from the peek of his tongue behind his teeth when he did it. The sun-bronzed line of his neck, now limned in the blue light from the car’s instrument panels. The easy movement of his body. Though granted, it wasn’t moving a whole lot right now. He was watching her, a slight, almost mysterious smile pulling at his mouth. Just on the left side. Like he knew a secret and wasn’t telling.
Fuck. How had she ever thought she could make this trip, with him, in this car, and keep her distance? She had promised herself, though, and she was holding steady. Just.
“Now, about those four words,” he drawled.
Chapter 10
“Um, the words. Right.” Her perfect memory whirred, replaying their whole conversation so far, all of it. It took her a while, but she finally caught the thread and recited it: “I wish to fuck that…”
“Back up,” he interrupted. “Just four.”
“I wish to fuck?”
“Them’s the ones.” He held her gaze but didn’t so much as twitch in her general direction. The space between them crackled with potential energy. “Do you?”
Did she
…wish to fuck?
Yes, oh God yes. Holy batfuck yes. Every nerve in her body went live, and she struggled to contain a shudder. No use, though. She nodded, scuffing her hairpiece against the seatback.
“Yes,” she said, not surprised her voice came out on a whisper. “But here’s the problem. I promised myself I wouldn’t paw you without permission on this trip. I want you to know I don’t think you’re easy or easily taken advantage of. I want you to know that I myself have dealt with…”
He was panther-silent and just that fast across the console, framing her face in his big hands, pressing his mouth to hers, warmth to warmth, creating a point of white-hot synchrony. She was too startled even to open her lips. His kiss was impossibly sweet.
“Shh, princess,” he murmured against her mouth, around the edges of that kiss. “You don’t need to explain anything else to me. And you for damn sure got my permission.”
He was wrong; she did need to explain. She really did. But what she needed even more was this, his hands on her body, his touch. Oh God, the touching. She soaked it up like vitamin D, vital, necessary, the sort of thing that made her ill with its lack. Now an ocean of it poured over her, and she waded through the onslaught of bliss. She let it knock her over and wash all her best intentions away.
He tasted perfect, man and heat and want. Desert sand and library binding glue. Okay, maybe she didn’t really know what binding glue tasted like, but all those delicious things they’d done in the library were seared on her brain, and studies had shown that taste and smell were strongly related, so if she recalled the one, the other followed automatically. Wasn’t that how the synaesthetes all said it worked?
Also…he had stopped. What?
She opened her eyes to find him staring at her, still with that nipple-perking slow-sugar smile, but now a shadow of concern had drifted over his face. It fell between them. Well, that was not acceptable.
“You went away for a while,” he said.
Perfect Gravity Page 17
