Around midmorning she breaks. “Do you know why I play the game?”
“The one-question game?” I want to make sure I understand her.
“Yes. I play it because then I can pretend we aren’t in the jungle and that we’re on stage two of getting to know each other.”
“What was stage one?” I ask against my better judgment.
“Stage one was when you took me to the café and bought me food. Granted, now I know that you were doing that as part of your mission or whatever, but at the time, it was flattering.”
“Seems to me you get to stage one plenty of times.”
“Not me. Rose. Her other friends, maybe, but I haven’t been to stage one for a while.” Is that wistfulness I hear?
I stop and turn abruptly. “You have to be kidding me? How’s a girl like you not getting chatted up nonstop? You must be having stage one dates all the fucking time.”
She grins then a true, happy smile stretches across her face. It’s a good thing my boots are planted shoulder-width apart, because that sort of beauty knocks a man on his ass if he’s not prepared. “Have you seen Rose? She’s a model. A real runway model. I’ve got pretty hands.” She holds up her hands and we both look at them. One is covered in mud and the other is still swollen and purple. Her hands are not pretty anymore. They are soft, but right now, the only modeling she’d be doing would be in a survivalist magazine. I see the moment that realization hits, because her grin fades away and the light in her eyes dies out. “Okay, maybe not right now, but I did have pretty hands.”
Suddenly nothing seems more important to me than for Ava to know how fucking beautiful she is. I cup her neck and tilt her head back and for once when I look at her, I don’t try to hide a thing. “I don’t know who you’ve been hanging around but you’re a knockout. You’ve got the type of body that makes men want to fight for you. Your face is like a goddamn sun; it’s so beautiful that you can’t look directly at it. If you were any more fucking gorgeous, I’d probably die of a heart attack. In fact, I’m going to have to mud up some of your features so that when we do run into natives, they don’t try to keep you as some goddess that they worship.” I run a muddy, sweaty finger over her forehead and then down the bridge of her nose. Her eyes soften and her lids get heavy. Even with my shitty experience with women, I know what that means, and my body strains toward her.
I step back, drop my hand, and turn away. That’s all I can give her now. Reaching down I shift the monster toward my inseam, hoping that the little extra fabric there can give me some breathing room.
I resume walking and she follows, but this time the dam’s broken and the questions come relentlessly.
“Do you really own an island?”
“Yeah. It was owned by a former Columbian drug cartel owner. He terrorized the locals, cleared land for an airstrip, and built a compound. He was killed by a rival gang when he was in Sanibel doing business. It was semi-abandoned. My men and I pooled our resources and bought it. We moved everyone there who wanted to move because the Brazilian government wasn’t friendly anymore.”
“What’s it called?”
“Tears of God.”
“Where’d you get that from?”
I hack at the branches. Her hand slips into the back of my pants, and whatever room I had left disappears. It’s tight but I decide that I don’t want to lose her touch, which probably means I’m losing my mind. Hopefully we’ll find some natives soon and they can just spear me to death and put me out of my misery.
“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” I quote Revelation.
“And is there no death or sorrow or pain?”
I snort. “No. No matter how high the fence or how strong the barricades, death illness, heartache—all find you.”
“So why the island?”
“Because it was the safest place I could find for the people who trust me to protect them.” I pause. I probably shouldn’t be sharing this information with her, but she deserves to know why I was following her. “A friend of mine was taken by the U.S. government. He helped me form the Tears of God. It might have even been his idea. Hell if I know. We were captured by rebels in Tehran. They brought us to Dasht-e Kavir and said if we could make it out of the desert then we’d be free. We were meant to die but a few of the natives found us and helped us. When we got to safety, they begged for us to take them with us.” I squint up at the canopy of leaves remembering that hot day when Davidson and I were faced with abandoning our saviors or taking them with us. There really wasn’t any debate, though. We wouldn’t have survived without their help. “We walked out of the desert, away from the army, and set up base in a small slum in Brazil. Seemed like a good place to hide from the world.”