Page 132 of Bones
No.I shoved him back down.No, I’m making my own damn decisions.
I heard Trey coming back and my heart fluttered in my chest. I looked up when he came around the side of his makeshift walls and blinked in confusion. He had an armful of large rocks. He looked amused at my expression as he crouched and placed four rocks into the fire.
“You makin’ rocks for dinner?” I couldn’t help asking.
“No, smartass.” He grinned. “I’m heating up rocks so we can dry out our boots.”
“How do you know all this shit?” I asked, impressed again.
"Part of the training to join the Safeguard. The Vault is pretty isolated, so members of the Safeguard crews gotta be able to survive the elements when we're traveling on missions."
I remembered him saying he and Mac had trained hard to join. “Why the Safeguard?” I asked.
"We wanted to get outside the walls, see what else was out there." He paused. "Well, that was my motivation anyway." Pain flashed across his face. "Mac was forced to join the guards super young. Madame wanted to keep a close eye on him after what his dad did. He worked his way up from the inside. He had a much more brutal training experience than I did. He used to come home covered in blood from the other guards beating on him. But he—" he hesitated, "he eventually established himself as someone people didn't want to mess with, and he worked his ass off to move up through the ranks. He impressed Madame enough that she offered him the position of her second, so he woulda been one under Sax. That's when he asked if he could start a Safeguard crew instead, which was a few steps down in power, but she let him."
Guilt pricked me that I hadn’t bothered to learn any of this while at the Vault. I’d made assumptions about all of them, but probably the most assumptions about Mac.
We fell into silence as we ate another small meal and drank the last of our water. Trey had a small metal pot that he put over the fire and filled with snow to melt and boil so we could refill our bottles.
“You can have the bedroll,” Trey said, just like I thought he would.
“No.” I had to suppress a grin.
"If you think I'm gonna sleep in it and watch you?—"
“Let’s sleep together.”
He cut off mid-sentence and stared at me. The shock on his face made one corner of my mouth curl up in amusement.
“What?” he asked in a choked voice.
“Let’s sleep together,” I repeated. My amused smirk grew, and his eyes kept darting down to my mouth.
“You and me?”
“No, me and that other dumbass who tagged along.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you gonna run off again in the morning?”
I winced, but I deserved that. I shrugged. “Didn’t work to get rid of you the first time, did it?”
He glared, but his eyes sparkled now. “Iknewthat’s what you were doin’.”
“And you callmestubborn.” I rolled my eyes.
He stared at me like he wanted to read every thought in my head. “K, I’m gonna need you to be real clear, Bones. Are you sayin’ you want to share a bedroll just to keep warm or do you want to share a bedroll to be with me?”
He was giving me an out, even though I could see how desperately he hoped I wouldn’t take it. It made my eyes burn again and I had to swallow hard.
“I want to be with you,” I said.
He shifted closer, his eyes warmer than the fire. "I know I already said this, but just in case there's any confusion, I want to be with you too. I've wanted to be with you for a long time now."
I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic, but the last of my defenses crumbled down as every single one of those damn flowers in my chest bloomed all at once, and I ended up whispering, “I’m sorry I made you wait.”
His cool fingers cradled the side of my face, his thumb brushing gently over my lips. “I’d wait a thousand years for you.”
“You’d be long dead in a thousand years,” I said dryly even though my heart pounded.
