Page 19 of Embers

It’s a long time before I can pull myself together enough to lift my head and look up at his face. I sniff and smile at the almost tender anxiety in his eyes. “I’m okay.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. You saved me.” My heart is suddenly full. Full of so many things. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me, baby.”

He’s never called me baby before. Not until a few minutes ago. I like it so much better thankidorgirl. It feels… special.

“Yes, I do have to thank you. They would have hurt me. Thank you for protecting me.”

He shakes his head and lowers his eyes. “Please stop thanking me. The whole thing was my fault.”

“What? How was it your fault?”

“Because they never would have come here if it hadn’t been for me, if I hadn’t run with them before. They knew me. That’s why they came looking.”

“Maybe, but you stopped running with those guys a long time ago. It’s not your fault they managed to track you down. Why would they even think to do that?”

“Because we pay for our mistakes. Always. And they’re one of mine.”

I’m still on his lap, and his hands are still resting lightly on my back, but it doesn’t feel like he’s holding me anymore. Not like he was before.

I’m suddenly scared of the change, of what the guilt he’s feeling will do to him. “It’s not your fault, Cal. You can’t take responsibility for their nastiness. You took care of the situation. I’m not hurt, and neither are you. We’re fine. We’refine.”

He nods and lifts his eyes briefly, like he’s checking my expression. His mouth twists. “Don’t look at me that way.”

“What way?” I honestly don’t know what he means.

“Like you trust me. Like you believe in me. Like you think I’m… good. You shouldn’t trust me. I’m not a good man.”

“Yes, you are!”

“No, I’m not.” He sounds almost angry, and he’s pulled back his hands. I think he would probably dump me out of his lap if he didn’t think it would hurt my feelings. “Don’t you ever start to think that I’m a good man. I’ll always be a bad guy.”

“No, you aren’t. You saved me. You’ve always protected me. Even when you didn’t like me.”

“That’s got nothing to do with anything. It don’t mean I’m good.” He lifts his hand to cup my face, but it’s not a caress as much as an insistent gesture. He meets my eyes with an urgent ferocity. “I’ll always take care of you. If you get hit, it’s only because they already got me. If you die, I’m dead already. It’ll always be that way. You can trust in that, but don’t you dare trust in anything else.”

I stare at him, dazed and bewildered and upset again, for a different reason this time.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he mutters, looking away from me again. He gently pushes me off his lap. “I’ll take care of you no matter what, but I’m never gonna be the man you want me to be. It’s best that you know that now.”

I don’t know what to say. There’s not really anythingforme to say. He’s getting up, shaking himself off. Then he picks up one of our cleaning rags and starts to scrub the blood off the floor.

Eventually I help him, but everything feels different now. Darkened somehow.

And I don’t know whether it will ever go back.

5

Year Four after Impact, Winter

After that afternoon,everything changes. Cal changes.

He pulls into his shell again and turns back into the hard, silent, grunting asshole he was during our first year together. I hate it—hateit—but there’s nothing I can do to stop it from happening.

We work really hard for the rest of the summer and into the fall. Cal insists it’s going to be a bad winter and we need to be prepared, so we work twice as hard as we used to, hunting, gardening, scavenging, stocking up on food, and better insulating the chicken coop. I’m so tired at night I fall asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow. In some ways, that’s a blessing because I don’t have the energy to brood about the transformation in Cal.

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