Page 54 of Savagely Yours
He left but didn’t shut the door all the way.
It took some maneuvering and silent swearing, but I managed to handle my business and even got as far as washing my hands. Then, I called out, and he swept inside, picked me up again, and carried me back to the bed. Instead of leaving, he climbed in beside me.
I looked around, officially taking the room in for the first time. “I knew they said Woodhaven was nice, but this is penthouse-style luxury.”
He didn’t respond.
“Hey.” I took his hand, wiggled it a little. “You okay?”
“I never wanted this,” he said. “You know me, Tapley. You know that the last thing I would have ever wanted is to have you going through hell without me in the trenches next to you.”
“Dez—”
“Then, I got a copy of your work schedule. Do you know that you work one point seven times more hours than anyone else inSanitation? And that didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, why overworkyouspecifically?”
“Dez…”
“I think someone here knows you from before. I think it’s someone whose case you prosecuted, and they’re trying to get their revenge this way. I feel real sorry for them, though. Imagine how bad their luck must be to end up being killed by me instead of the fucking apocalypse? All because they fucked with the wrong man’s girl. Or, in this case, the right one.”
“Dez, tell me the truth,” I blurted out. “You’re rambling. You never ramble. That means you’re trying not to tell me something.”
Sighing, he smoothed one hand down his face. “It’s not avoidance. I’m trying to distract myself. The whole time you were sick, I was focused on making sure that you got better. Now that you’re on the mend, all this shit’s starting to sink in. You were suffering. For weeks. I almost lost you. The only reason I’m still in this bed right now is because you need me.”
Something flashed across his face and sparked in his eyes. Then, he came closer, and it was becoming uncanny how he seemed to know what I wanted or was thinking.
I raised my hand to his jaw and searched his eyes, doing my best to decipher what was on his mind. But the phenomenon didn’t appear to work in reverse.
“Tapley, I have a proposal for you,” he said. “Would you, uh, marry me?”
My heart started racing at a pace that couldn’t be safe in my condition. “Will I or would I?” I asked. Then, before he could answer, I quickly added, “Can we even get married?”
“There’s a guy. His name’s Cerner. I don’t know if you know of him.”
I only knew what I’d heard from LaSalle.
“He’s one of the generals here, and he said that Totten wants to open up more opportunities for ‘fraternization’ amongst the survivors.”
“I can’t believe that would include me marrying you.”
“Why not? Because you’re too good for me? I can level up.”
“First of all, you’re using too much of my lingo,” I teased. “Second, I have a hard time believing they would let me bypass all the social rungs between us and join you in the lap of luxury. And third, I can’t marry you if it means I’m turning my back on the people I’ve worked beside since I got here.”
“Tapley, you’re not going back there.”
“What were the other options?” I asked. “Fraternization sounds like it comes with options.”
His jaw twitched. “The other option is that a Class One Elite can take a Sanitation worker as a mistress…or a whore. In conclusion, it’s all bullshit I’m not interested in when it comes to you.”
I grinned. “I could be a whore.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m looking at pragmatic solutions. I have to. I didn’t grow up in a world where it was intrinsically reinforced that I could disobey a system and be left unscathed. Infiltrate and change it? Yes. Learn it to then dominate it? Sure. But someone had to tell me that I held the world in the palm of my hand and that ‘someone’ wasn’t general society. Dez, you want what you want, and I get that, but to meet our goals, we might have to operate within the system rather than try to bulldoze through it.”
“I grew up homeless on the streets,” he argued. “No one told me that I held the world in the palm of my hand either.”
“But you saw it. All you had to do was open your eyes. I had to open textbooks and website links buried on the sixth and seventh pages of search engine results. Your default is bruteforce because, historically, when things fell, they weren’t on top of people like you.”
