If I were with him, I’d press him to the center of my chest until our breathing matched. Until his breath became mine, and there was nowhere left to run, but to each other. It was a broken clockwork that didn’t need to make sense because it was ours.
“Will you sing to me?” I asked, lying on the kitchen floor.
“What song?”
“You choose,” I yawned.
Thay closed his eyes, his quiet, raspy voice easing intoJust Pretendby Bad Omens. I smiled, remembering the steady boom of his heart, pumping blood in and moving it out, waiting for the tiny flutter that happened every fourth beat.
“Daphne.”
Hours passed, my body aching as I rolled onto my side.
“Daph,” Thay said again, prodding me awake.
When I opened my eyes, the kitchen was dark. I focused on the night sky pinging off the metal sink, tracking the shadows until I realized where I was.
“Holy shit. How long have we been asleep?” I asked, noticing the screen had gone black when the rustle of Nathem and Jessie’s voices echoed in the distance.
He was in the car. Damn.
“You? Almost all day.”
I loved that he hadn’t hung up, knowing how empty it would have felt to wake to a cold phone and him just… gone.
“I’ve got to go, okay? Call me if you need me. Oh, and uh, Wolfe says he’ll talk to you tomorrow and not to be pissed at him.”
“Be safe,” I pleaded, shivering when the phone went blank.
My mind stalled in strange pauses, shifting between the broken pleas of a man who wanted me to have a better life and the promise of all of him. To anyone else, it would not be a choice. Not with Maine sitting in the palm of your hand. You do not tether yourself to a criminal, and you sure as fuck do not fall in love with one. But Threx came after Thay, a monster he created to keep us safe. And if I left our darkness to play in the light, he wouldn’t become the monster. I would. Or already was.
Finn: Be there in thirty!
Oh, shit.Finn.
I breathed, scrambling to my knees and lunging for the shower. I wasn’t sure if I’d thoroughly rinsed the conditioner from my hair or shaved more than three uneven lines into my legs, but I somehow squeezed into a black dress and my usual pair of Chucks just in time to hear a knock on the door.
“Hey!” I smiled, throwing it open while hunting for my keys.
“Wow. You,” Finn turned his head ever so slightly, “look different.”
I made a face, fully aware that the standard yoga pants and placenta-covered shirts usually kept me in a perpetual state of disarray.
“Thank you, I guess,” I laughed, bending low to scoop the key off the floor. “Where are we going?”
“Kalico’s,” he answered like it meant something. “It’s a bar. I thought we’d have a drink, and I’d introduce you to a few of my friends.”
I halted, my face scrunching into a pale ball of disgust before I shoved my phone into my bag. I wasn’t great at socializing on my best day, but add cheerleader types and jock muscles into the mix, and my brain got twitchy. Mainly because when acquaintances don’t know what to say, they default to safe, run-of-the-mill questions about family and childhood, things other people found harmless but turned me into a bigger freak than I already felt.
“Or not,” he ran his tongue over his teeth. “Is there something wrong with basic human interaction, or do you just do the big bad stuff?”
Rude.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing,” he shifted, raking his fingers through his golden tresses. “But if that phone call this morning was any indicationof your personal life, I thought maybe you could use some normalcy.”
I eyed him warily, knowing full well his idea of a standard evening looked nothing like mine. In fact,my normalright now was masking up in an unmarked car under the shitty light of a broken streetlamp, while I was pretty sure Finn’s ended with body shots and a hot pink bra stuck to his ass.