In the Afterlight - Bracken Alexandra - Страница 22

“What? Why?” At her shrug I asked, “And Zu?”

All at once, her expression shuttered again. When she spoke, her voice could have cut the skin from my bones. “Do I look like I give a single shit where she is?”

“Vida,” I said, “seriously—”

Whatever it was, she didn’t want to talk about it. Vida was already backing away, heading toward the stairs.

“We need to talk about this,” I said, starting after her. The look she shot back stopped me. That was the expression of someone who wanted to be left alone.

“By the way, if you decide you f**king care, when Cate was walking down into the tunnel,” Vida said, “she said something to me: tell Ruby playing with fire only gets you burned. That mean anything to you?”

“No,” I said finally. “I have no idea.”

Vida had been partly right. Liam was in the kitchen—only he was actually in the pantry, past the stoves and sinks, in the darkened back corner. He’d left the door wide open, likely to encourage some light inside other than the small flashlight he had clenched between his teeth. He was scribbling something down on a small flip notebook. I reached over to flick on the light switch, about to laugh at him for missing it, but...nothing. I tried it twice to be sure.

Liam took the flashlight out of his mouth and smiled. And just like that, the past few hours seemed to melt away into a murky puddle that I stepped clear of.

“Did you know this place needs thirty-six new light bulbs? Why in the world did they have to take the light bulbs, too?” Liam asked.

“Thirty-six is very exact,” I said with a faint laugh. “Is that your best guess?”

He seemed confused. “No, I counted. I did a walkthrough with Kylie and Zu earlier. We also could use five new door locks, several gallons of laundry detergent, and about two dozen towels. And this—” Liam gestured to the sparse shelves in front of him. “This is pathetic. I have no idea how they even found this many cans of beets, but good Lord. What can you even do with them?”

“Well, there’s fried beets, beet soup, pickled beets...”

“Ugh.” He covered his ears and actually shuddered. “I’d rather take my chances with the stewed tomatoes.”

“Is it really that bad?” I asked, stepping into the pantry with him. I didn’t really need to ask—it was. Actually, it was worse. Aside from a few loaves of bread and deli slices in the refrigerator, we had mostly canned vegetables and junk food like pretzels and chips.

I leaned against him as Liam went on about trying to find pasta, cans of soup, and oatmeal, and closed my eyes. His chest was warm against my back, and I liked the way I could feel every animated word as it rumbled through him. He reached over and gave my hair a gentle tug. “I’m boring you, huh?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m listening,” I said. “You were talking about Lucy?”

“Yeah. She was one of the girls who kept track of the food at East River. I think she’ll be able to give some insight into how to rotate supplies and what we should be looking for.”

Right. We would need to set up some kind of team to handle supply runs, though there were already so few of us, I couldn’t imagine Cole giving consent unless the situation was absolutely desperate. And I couldn’t imagine him giving consent at all if Liam were the one going out.

“You’re tired,” he said, running a thumb under my eye. “Where did you disappear to? I tried waiting up for you, but passed out the second I lay down.”

“I took a shower and was too tired to figure out which room you guys were in,” I said, because how could I admit that I’d purposefully avoided the bunk room they chose? I didn’t want to deal with the questions, not when my head felt as heavy as my heart. After having it out with Cate, there just hadn’t been any kind of fight left in me. “I found the first open bed and tried to sleep.”

He reached up and pulled one of those small, individual servings of canned fruit off the shelf and popped the lid off before I could refuse. He continued his careful count of the shelves as I tipped the can into my mouth and downed the fruit. I saw each and every possible conversation play out across his features, every question he wanted to ask, and felt a prickle of anxiety with each silent second that ticked by.

“I don’t want to ask this, but...you were going to tell us about the agents and what you did eventually, right? You wouldn’t have just let us figure it out when only cars of kids showed up?”

“I should have told you guys as soon as we were out of the city,” I said. “It just...slipped my mind with everything that happened.”

“You could have told us before we left,” he said gently.

“It had to happen fast,” I said, “and if anyone showed a hint that they knew what was going on, it could have clued the agents in to what I was doing. We had to scramble.”

“You and Cole.”

“He knows the other agents better than any of us. I needed his input on how to make the suggestion feel real.” And if I had told you, you’d have tried to force us to leave.

Sometimes—most of the time, actually—it was hard to think of us as having had any kind of separate lives before they converged. Our lives were so closely knit together that it was a compulsion to tell him everything, to hear his thoughts on it all, to see if they matched mine. I’d held back from him before, about what I was, what I had done to my parents, but somehow...it wasn’t that it felt worse, exactly, more like there was just this nagging, this unflinching sense that something wasn’t clicking the way it had before. I’d interrupted some natural pattern in our lives. I bit my lip, watching his brows draw together the same way Cole’s had as he concentrated.

“That’s why you panicked, isn’t it? You’d just found out about it...” Liam rubbed the back of his hand against his forehead. “Damn. So what’s the plan now?”

“We’ll all meet for dinner to talk through a plan for freeing some of the camps.”

“Maybe not dinner, if this is all we have...” he started. “But I’ll figure something out. Everything will be all right.”

Liam draped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me in. I pressed my face against his shoulder and let out a shuddering breath. My arms locked around his waist.

This was right. Being close to him like this was right. For the first time all day my mind wasn’t racing. Here in the dark, my pulse fluttering at his closeness, everything else seemed far away. He kissed my hair, my cheek, and I thought, Can’t lose this, can’t lose this, too—I couldn’t tell him everything, not if I wanted him to benefit from what we were trying to do, not if I wanted to protect him. But we could have this, couldn’t we?

“Do you trust me to keep you safe?” I asked. I knew it must have seemed like I pulled the question out of nowhere, but all of a sudden it felt vitally important. I could see that he’d been hurt by my not telling him about the agents.

“Darlin’, if it were a choice between you and a hundred of Gray’s finest, I’d pick you every time.”

I caught him by surprise, rolling up onto my toes and kissing him full on the mouth.

My fingers were still gripping his shirt when I pulled back. My voice sounded low, rough to my ears. I had to fight for the words, and I was so self-conscious I wasn’t sure I was ever going to pick the right ones. “I want to—”

The dazed look faded from his face as he watched me, waiting.

I want to...I felt my face flush, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of embarrassment or because of the images flashing through my mind. I’d never felt so awkward and tense. I’d kissed him before, really kissed him, but every time before had felt like it had been prompted by stress or urgency or anger, and each had been cut off by the demands of the world around us. This was really the first chance I’d had to think about him, all of him, slowly; to make a thorough study of him. The feel of his hands. The rasp of his stubble. The small, breathless sounds he made at the back of his throat.