And he’d have sex with me in a heartbeat. Against his better judgment, with no tenderness at all, but he’d do it. I don’t get men. If I thought he’d betrayed me with … say, Fiona, a day after he’d helped kill me, I’d make him suffer for a good long time before I slept with him again.
He believes that I had sex with my sister’s lover the day after I stabbed him, that I forgot all about him and moved on. Men are wired different. I think for them, it’s about stamping out all trace, all memory, of their competitor as quickly and completely as possible. And they feel that the only way they can do it is with their body, their sweat, their semen. As if they can re-mark us. I think sex is so intense for them, they can be so easily ruled by it, that they think we can, too.
I look up at him, into those dark, bottomless eyes. “Can you die—ever?”
For a long moment he doesn’t speak. Then he moves his head once, in silent negation.
“As in: never? No matter what happens to you?”
I get that silent slice to the left and back to the middle again.
The bastard. Now I understand the anger I’ve been feeling beneath the elation. Some part of my brain had already put this together:
He’d let me grieve.
He never told me he was a beast that couldn’t be killed. He could have spared me all the pain I’d endured with one tiny little truth, one small confession, and I’d never have felt so violent and dark and broken. If he’d only just said: Ms. Lane, I can’t be killed. So if you ever see me die, don’t sweat it. I’ll be back.
I’d lost myself. Because of him. Because of his idiotic need to keep everything about himself secret. There was no excuse for it.
But even worse was this: I’d thought he’d given his life to save me, when all he’d really done was the equivalent of take a little nap. What did “dying” for someone mean when you knew you couldn’t die? Not a damn thing. An inconvenience. IYD hadn’t been a big deal after all.
I’d wept, I’d mourned. I’d built a massive and utterly undeserved Monument to Barrons, The Man Who’d Died So I Could Live, in my head. I’d thought he’d made the ultimate sacrifice for me, and it had milked my emotions brutally. I’d let it consume me, take me over, turn me into someone I couldn’t believe I’d been capable of becoming.
And he’d never been willing to die so I could live. It had been business as usual—Barrons keeping his OOP detector alive and functioning, coolly impersonal, focused on his goals. So what if he was the one who would never let me die? It didn’t cost him anything. He wanted the Book. I was the way to get it. He had nothing to lose. I finally understood why he was always so fearless.
I’d thought he’d cared about me so much he’d been willing to give up his life. I’d romanticized it and gotten swept away in a misguided fantasy. And if he’d stayed here last night, I’d have made a complete fool of myself. I’d have confessed feelings to him that I’d felt only because I’d thought he’d given his life for mine.
Nothing had changed.
There was no deeper level of understanding or emotion between us.
He was Jericho Barrons, OOP director, pissed off at me because he thought I’d taken up with the enemy, irked that he’d had to endure an inconvenient death, but still not telling me a thing, using me to achieve his mysterious ends.
He bristles with impatience. I feel the lust rolling off him, the violence beneath it.
“You said you wanted something. What is it, Ms. Lane?”
I smile coolly. “The deed to my bookstore, Barrons. What else?”