Page 19 of Bait
“I scared you that night.” The pain in his eyes when he said it was so stark I almost had to look away. It was like he was haunted by the memory. It was comforting to know I was not the only one. “You were grieving Gregorio and scared about everything, and I burst into your room in the middle of the night rambling.” He did scare me, but now I knew he was trying to help me.
“What where you going to do?” It was something that I’d agonized about even before I knew what was really going on. “I regretted pushing that panic button the moment I did it.” It had to be said. He nodded tersely, but I could see his jaw working to a degree that made me feel for his poor molars. Before he answered he rubbed his palms over his face, like he was trying to erase the memory of that night or something.
“I was going to try and break us out,” he laughed, and it was a bitter, hollow sound. He ruffled his hair with an anxious energy I hadn’t seen in him. “After Gregorio, I knew there was something very wrong, and I didn’t want you in there.” The way he said it. Like he didn’t care about his own safety, that it was me he wanted to protect. It made my heart pound like a drum. “I knew I was an ass to you, but I was beating myself up. Gregorio warned me something was going on, that he thought they were lying to us, and I didn’t believe him.” The bleakness in his voice, in his eyes, was an echo of my own. Because there was so much I hadn’t seen too. When I had it was too little, too late.
“I wouldn’t have either.” It was the truth. I was never a fan of the council, but I could’ve never imagined they were lying to us like they were. “I’m sorry I didn’t go with you.” I was sorry for many other things too, but we didn’t have to talk about them this instant.
He heaved a sigh that seemed to come from the recesses of his soul and reached for my hand again. “You’re here now, and that’s all that matters.” In his eyes I could see such pain. Like all these years he’d been beating himself up.
“You didn’t abandon me, Torch.” His head snapped back like I’d slapped him. His eyes grew dark, and I was afraid he’d get mad at me again. But he came closer instead. Close enough that I felt his cool skin touching mine.
The contact was electric. Like any time I touched Candela. Something ignited inside me. I was so aware of my body around both of them. Of the places that had never been touched. Of the places that craved it.
“Will you let me?” I reluctantly let him have the finger, and he made a show of turning it this way and that, with his face pressed so close that I could feel his breath on it. When a little drop of blood pearled on the cut, he lapped it up with his tongue.
I made a gurgling noise like I was choking, which only made him grin. One that looked like sex, dirty sex at that. I had no idea what to say, but my body seemed to be receiving info faster than my mind because something hot and delicious pooled in my belly.
“What if I kiss you?” I asked, sounding braver than I felt.
Something pained passed through his face, and he bit his bottom lip. Like I’d posed a very hard question.
“I don’t deserve your kisses.” I knew he believed that. I saw it in the shadows in his eyes.
“Why don’t I decide who deserves my kisses, Bernal?” I didn’t even know who I was. Maybe the trials of the day had whittled me down to my most primal instincts, but I went with it. I reached for his head and pressed my mouth to his.
He slid his tongue over the seam of my mouth so softly, like a whisper. I moaned, opening for him. It was so different than with Candela, with her, there was no hesitation. It was raw and hungry. This was more tentative, like neither of us knew the script. Our tongues slid against each other while we touched. His hands drifted to my ass and he lifted me, until my feet were not touching the floor.
“Your tits are driving me crazy,” he growled and bent his head to one of them. He sucked one of my nipples through the shirt, making me gasp. “Fuck.”
“Are you two flirting again?” Candela casually walked out of the shower still toweling her curls. Torch didn’t jump back or glare. He kept holding onto me, not breaking the connection. The space suddenly felt way too small for the three of us, and I was the one who broke.
“I wounded myself.” I held my finger up and took the opportunity to slide away from Torch, who was making my body all wobbly.
Suddenly the air in the rig was electric. So much so I thought I could feel the air tightening on my skin. And the way they were looking at me was doing things to my body. It wasn’t openly lascivious or creepy like some of the men in the bunker could be. These two just clearly wanted to fuck. Which was not something I’d ever considered. The suppressors I’d been on had blunted my libido, but even before that, the idea of having sex with two people was not even a possibility. At least not consciously, but now the thought of being plastered between them with their mouths and hands on me ran through me like an tornado, and I needed some alone time to examine all that.
“I’ll clean up in the shower.” Candela gave me a knowing look as I scurried away, and I was pretty sure I heard Torch call me “coward” with an amusement in his voice as I slipped into the small shower and quietly let myself consider what I really wanted from those two.
I didn’t figure much out in the shower, other that I was horny as fuck. But thankfully they caught me some slack during dinner. We ate as we chatted obligingly about the settlement, and other topics devoid of any overt sexual innuendo. After we finished, Candela suggested we go for a walk so I could see the settlement. Soon I was wearing a very cozy sweater over my borrowed sweats and t-shirt and heading out along a stone path with my two oldest friends.
I couldn’t stop looking up at the sky. It was glorious to see the stars. They seemed so close and there were so many. The bunker had a planetarium where you could go anytime and see “the sky.” When we were in school, each class would get to do a sleepover once a year so we could sleep under the stars. It was my favorite thing. I would go to the library and memorize one or two constellations and point the out to my classmates. But that fake sky did not compare to the expanse of this one.
It was humbling. This world had been outside waiting for us, and we’d been down in that bunker being ordered around by Becker and the council. But it made sense for them to keep us all down there. In the bunker, they were still the gods they’d been out here before the Burst. Out here they’d have to band together like everyone else. All the piles of money and stocks that made them so powerful were useless after The Burst. The only thing that helped you thrive in a place like this was to do for your neighbor just like you did for yourself.
“It’s not very easy to make out the constellations, is it?”
Candela, who was next to me, laughed and pointed at something up there I couldn’t quite make out. “That’s Ursa Major.”
I nodded like I could really see it and sighed happily. I thought after what I’d been through I’d be exhausted, but I was energized. Maybe my brain didn’t want to miss any of these new things I was experiencing with sleep. Maybe I didn’t want to risk it all being a dream.
“Flowers.” I marveled at the neatly planted rows of purple and yellow flowers. We had some in the greenhouses at some point, but they’d stopped growing them when we began running low on water. They were called pansies and they grew in the spring. There were no seasons in the bunker, but for a long time the council made a point of marking them. The greenhouses would grow flowers for that reason, but I’d stopped going to see them long before that.
“How did you survive that first winter?”
Candela turned to me for an instant, and I saw a little shiver go through her at whatever memory I’d forced her to conjure up.
“The winters are milder down near the bunker but almost no one stays down there, so we started walking. We tried to get into some of the settlements and a few gave us shelter. We ran into some trouble too.” She went quiet and pointed at some other flowers—daffodils, I thought—as we walked with Torch behind us like our personal guard. Which was second nature to him. I wished he was on the other side of me, but I didn’t say it. “Eventually this settlement was the one that took us in. We kept going back to the bunker to see if more people got out.” I realized she’d never answered that when I asked earlier. “It was slow at first, one or two every few months for years, but once Becker figured out, he could bait raiders with people and get something in exchange, it picked up.”
I looked over my shoulder at Torch, whose face was impassive. In the moonlight he looked like one of those ancient warriors we’d read about in stories on the horrors of conquest who’d defended their lands against the Spanish with everything they had.
