Page 64 of Darkness I Become
“Sure,” Cade replied indulgently. “That one, I got because it was cool-looking.”
She clucked her tongue. “You know what I meant.”
He turned onto his side, giving her a better view of his broad, muscled back. The vines connected to a sprawling tree, with branches that spread out up his shoulder blades like fingers, reaching heavenward. Small, delicate leaves decorated the branches, with a few pictured mid-fall toward the ground.
“It’s beautiful,” she murmured, leaning forward to kiss the tree trunk. He gave a small, addictive shudder at the touch of her lips, and so she kept kissing down his spine.
“The Tree of Life,” Cade said eventually, after he’d rolled onto his back and gathered her close again. “I got it back when I was more of an idealist.” He adopted a mocking tone. “Life is sacred, deserves protecting,blah blah blah. Back then, it was supposed to represent what I was protecting as a soldier: the lives of everyone in the compound.” He huffed. “I’m less precious on my views these days.”
“You don’t think life is sacred anymore?”
He shrugged. “If it was, it wouldn’t be so easy to destroy it.”
Asha considered that for a moment before moving on, next tracing the fat, black snake that coiled up his left arm, from his wrist to his shoulder. “What about this one?”
“The snake represents the Delta. Or, maybe more accurately, the people that ran it. The more control they asserted over our lives, the more I saw them as the real enemy—the snake in the grass.”
“Why?” She sat up to look at him. “I know that a lot of the rules were bullshit, but they kept us safe.Youkept us safe, soldier.”
He pulled her back down to kiss her, and she got lost in his lips for a while before he answered her question.
“Might be true,” he replied. “But it came to a point where I wondered if I was keeping dangers out…or keeping people in. We had no real freedom, and no recourse if things went to shit. They controlled every part of our lives: our jobs, who we married, when or if we had kids, where we got to live and who got to know anything about the inner workings of our little society.”
Asha was quiet. Everything he said was, of course, true for her as well. She’d never known anything else…but she had long since understood that much of the misery in her life could’ve been avoided if she’d only had another choice.
“There’s no guarantee that our choices would’ve made us happier,” she said, but it sounded hollow even to her own ears.
“That’s true,” Cade conceded, “but at least we wouldn’t have been stuck. That’s how I felt so much of the time: stuck, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
Asha snuggled closer to him. She knew the feeling.
“It’s only recently that I’ve felt…unstuck,” she admitted. “A lot is still out of my control. But with you…you make me feel like I have agency.”
He stroked her hair. “I’m glad.”
They lay together quietly for a few minutes before Asha worked up the courage to ask, “Is that why you left?”
“Left?”
“The Delta. Did you just get sick of it? Were Leo and Dom sick of it, too?”
He sighed. “It’s not a pretty story, darling. I’d rather—”
Asha lifted herself up on her elbows to fix him with a stare. “Do you trust me or not, soldier? We had sex last night, and I told you a secret. Now, I think it’s time for you to return the favour.”
Cade made a sound of amusement. “Sex and secrets, is that it?”
“Yes,” she replied in a definitive tone. “Every time we fuck, one of us owes the other a secret. Now, tell me yours.”
He laughed and kissed her. “Alright, I guess.”
He paused, but she sensed it wasn’t to stall. He seemed to be trying to determine how to begin. Asha stared at him, waiting. He’d never broached the subject again since she’d first asked, but she was more curious than ever as to how a man like Cade—a man who clearly excelled at what he did and was a natural leader—ended up in the Wasteland, especially if his compound still existed.
“You said before that they would’ve kicked you out anyway,” she prompted, trying to help him.
Cade chuckled softly. “More like they would’ve put a bullet in my head, really. I was—or would’ve been—wanted for a crime.”
“What did you do?”
