Page 58 of Worth the Ruin
“Goodnight, Melody,” he says quietly. His tone isn’t entirely unkind, but it tells me loud and clear that he doesn’t want to discuss this and just wants to go to sleep. I sigh and snuggle down beneath my blankets.
“Goodnight,” I say softly before rolling over and trying and failing to ignore the fact that he’s so close…and that I want him closer.
I’m rummagingthrough the closet in the hall when he comes back from grabbing more wood for the fire.
“What are you looking for?” he asks.
I turn and hold up the stack I found.
“We have Uno, Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, a deck of cards, or a Disney Princess memory matching game.”
He arches a brow but otherwise hides his surprise at my (sort of lame) attempt at an icebreaker. I’m tired of being cooped upin this apartment and acting like two gun slingers in the wild west, ready to draw and fire any second.
“Do you know how to play Rummy?”
I smile. “Rummy it is.”
I head back over to the mattress and settle on one side, eyeing the spot across from me until he sits down, leaning back against the couch. I look up at him from under my lashes as I shuffle.
“Don’t read anything into it,” I say, but flash him a tiny smile.
His lips twitch. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
And so, we play. All day long we play, pausing occasionally to get snacks or to build up the fire. We don’t talk much, but it’s better than it has been in weeks and I feel much lighter when I drift off to sleep that night. He sleeps on the floor again, but I lie closer to the edge this time. The next day is pretty much the same, but we switch up the games. We finally start to talk. Just random things at first, nothing too heavy, but eventually, we start to dip intorealconversation. My pulse quickens, but I find that it’s only partly in fear, the rest is in anticipation and excitement to learn more about him…and maybe it’s even a little from excitement of sharing my life with him.
“Where were you?” I ask as I throw down a Draw Two card. He gives me a look that says there will be payback as he grabs his extra cards. “On Day Zero?” Though it was quietly going on for a few weeks before news officially broke, most people considered the day they started dropping bombs as Day Zero, the start of the Bloody Apocalypse.
He takes a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before letting it out slowly. I get the feeling he doesn’t talk about this much…or ever. Because, I realize in this moment, who the fuck would he talk to about it? He has plenty of people surrounding him almost constantly, but I don’t think he confides in mostof them, at least not about personal things. It must be lonely.Heavy is the crown…
He plays a blue card and though his shoulders are tense, his voice is clear and even when he speaks.
“I was on a bus with a bunch of high school baseball players.” I quirk a brow. “I was the head coach—varsity baseball, football, and for one ill-fated but fun as hell season, girls volleyball. That’s a story for another time,” he says with a grin but then it fades. “I was also an English and shop teacher, while we’re on the subject. Anyway, we were playing in a tournament a few hours away. We were supposed to have gotten back a day earlier, but games got delayed and we ended up staying an extra night and then news started to break about the virus and a few people at the tournament started to show symptoms and they called the game, right in the middle of an inning. It was crazy.” Something flashes over his face at that, pain and regret and guilt, I think, but it’s gone quickly.
“So we were headed back that day. We lived in a small town on the outskirts of Atlanta, but had to drive through the heart of it to get home. We were on the highway and could see the city in the distance…and then we saw the first of the bombs explode.” I inhale sharply. Of course I knew that bombs had been dropped on the bigger cities, but I couldn’t imagine seeing it happen from a distance. Watching, knowing your family and friends were out there and there was nothing you could do to help them, to stop what was coming for them. “It was…bad. Chaos. The kids were freaking out and we didn’t know what was happening, we thought a terrorist attack or something maybe, but had no idea what it really was. I mean, none of us connected the virus outbreak that had stopped the tournament with explosions in the city, ya know? We had no idea how bad the outbreak was, what was really happening with the Bloodies. Our driver said he’d heard rumors from a buddy up in the Capital, but none of usknew anything for sure. They kept it all so quiet until it was too late.”
A lump forms in my throat, thick and heavy and threatening to choke me. I’d known. I’d known in time to get my family somewhere safe, but Traeger and all those kids on the bus, thousands upon thousands of others—they hadn’t been given any warning at all. They hadn’t even been able to tell their families goodbye. I know they originally had plans to evacuate healthy people from the big cities and spread warnings across the country, but then Bloodies started popping up out in the world and it started spreading like wildfire, and someone with a finger on the End of Days button got a little trigger happy I guess. No one had any warning. No one had any idea what was happening.
Except me.
My eyes burn. Will he hate me when I tell him the truth? I want to ask what happened after that, what the first days and weeks and months had been like for him, what had happened to his team, but I stop myself. I’ll let him tell me as much as he wants for now, I won’t push. He’s looking at the wall over my shoulder but I know he’s seeing something else entirely.
“So a baseball coach and a teacher, huh?” I say with a smirk, trying to change the subject and get that horrible haunted look out of his eyes. “Told you I had your number. That first night at FOS, remember? I said you worked with kids.”
“Speaking of that night,” he says, a cunning look in his green eyes. He leans forward. “What exactly did you do in the old world, Melody?” I force myself not to shiver when he says my name like that, low and smooth and full of so many dark promises. “And none of this ‘a little of this a little of that’ bullshit.” I eye him, impressed that he remembered exactly what I’d said all those months ago. A lifetime ago. I take a deep breath. This is the first big reveal, the first step in letting him know thereal me. Or, rather, the old me. I somehow feel like he knows the real me better than I even know myself most days. And, yes, I’m very aware of how big a green flag that is, but I’ve been choosing to be colorblind. Sue me.
“First off, the shrimp boat and the Hooters stories were completely true.” He gives me a look that says he’ll want more on those later, but waits patiently for the real answer.Alright. Here we go.
“Officially, I worked for an agency of the government that went by three letters. Pick any three, it doesn’t really matter in the end.” His eyes widen, brows inching upward toward his messy hair.
“And…unofficially?”
“I worked for an agency of the government that didn’t exist at all. Very, very deep, off the books, Blackwater on steroids kind of missions. Things that didn’t everofficiallyhappen in places no U.S. government agents were everofficiallyin.”
“Jesus Christ,” he says, exhaling roughly. “Seriously?” I hike a shoulder and nod.
“I was only out in the field for a few years before…before I transitioned back to a more, uh, tame job as a profiler mostly behind a desk.”
He stares at me for a long moment, taking it all in. The card game’s completely forgotten—which is really a shame because I’m sitting on three Draw Four Wilds and two Skips and could already see the look on his face when I hit him with that epic combo for my finale. C’est la vie, I guess.
