“No, not later.” I turned to face him again. “If you’re going to tell me that you’ve turned into a power-hungry asshole and you now won’t let anybody even touch that thing or take it?—”
He raised his hand, took the bracelet off,threwit in the marble sink near the toilet.
“Iaman asshole, but not a power-hungry one. And I don’t care about anybody touching that thing as long asyoudon’t.”
I flinched until the bracelet settled on the marble and stopped making so much damn noise.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s dangerous.” I opened my mouth to argue, to ask, but he didn’t even let me. “Shower.Now.”
It was a damn order, and my body had a way of obeying him without much caring about whatIthought on the matter. So, before I knew it, I was standing under the shower while he was kneeling in front of me, taking my boots and my jeans off, and lastly, my panties.
His hands moved up my legs, and I could have sworn that he looked at every inch of my body as if for the first time, even if he had no pupils for me to be able to even tell where his focus was.
Talking now would be pointless—he’d just insist on waiting, and to be honest, when he turned the water on, I no longer feltthe need to want to know everythingright now.I just stayed under the shower and allowed myself a moment to breathe while the water washed away most of the dirt and dried blood, and I watched Taland take his own clothes off and join me. It wasn’t sexual, that moment—at least not as sexual as usual, and we just hugged each other for a good long while, rocking slightly from side to side, then in slow circles.
“What’s going on, Taland?” I said after a while. The words slipped from me almost accidentally because I was still trying to pretend that my tears weren’t actual tears, just water from the shower pouring on us.
“Things…escalated,” Taland whispered, then kissed the top of my head.
“You brought a dead army back to life.”
“They tricked us. Betrayed us. Which I saw coming, but I thought they wouldn’t act while we were still on the battlefield.” His hold around me tightened as he remembered.
And I remembered, too. I remembered that bitch Helen Paine when she gave that order—kill them all.
Goddess, if I was ever face-to-face with that woman again…
“My grandmother basically told me she wanted me to become the director of the IDD when we came back.” More tears. “I wonder if she knew. If she just said it to throw me off, to distract me from what was coming for me.”
“Does it matter?” Taland asked.
Unfortunately, it does,I thought. “It doesn’t,” I said.
“I’m going to rub this dirt off us now, baby. Can you just stand there under the shower for me?” said Taland, stepping back. And I pretended he thought it was just water on my cheeks, not tears, too.
“When we’re done, we’re going to sit down and eat, and we’re going to talk, okay?”
Not like I had any choice, but I nodded anyway.
Then I stood there and cried in silence while Taland scrubbed every inch of my skin clean, then proceeded to clean himself, too, until the water turned cold. We used the old towels that kinda smelled like rain on the rack near the door, and finally, when I dared to look at myself in the mirror over the sink, I was clean.
No dirt, no blood, just me.
I didn’t cry again.
We got dressed in clothes we found in the rooms. The brown pants and white shirt I had on were a size too big, but they worked just fine because neither of us wanted to wash or dry the same clothes we’d fought in. I’d rather wear anything else.
Taland dried our washed boots and socks, and then he took us to the kitchen, which had a large glass door on the third wall that slid open to let you out onto another narrower porch that wrapped around half the house.
From there, I could see just how far up we really were, and the mountain on the side of which this house was built was so incredibly green—and steeper than I realized. I could make out no sign of civilization—not even a road in the distance.
The food wasn’t ideal—canned tuna and frozen vegetables that Taland put in an air fryer, but there was plenty of it, at least, and our full bellies had us feeling a bit closer tonormalwithin the hour.
But even after we ate, we just sat there on the chairs by the dining table that Taland had dragged to the porch, and we looked out at the view, at the green trees and the clear blue sky. We breathed in the air and listened to the birdsong.
We just existed in those moments, with no attachment to the past or future. That was all we had.