“We’re visible right now.”
“We’re alone right now. If something happened – if somebody popped up – I could grab you and shelter behind those bushes. Get behind that wall.” He pointed to those places, voice falling into the clipped, matter-of-fact cadence of a man in an active war zone. She’d done that to him, she thought with a sudden pang; she’d created a war zone from which he could never escape, because it followed them – her – everywhere. “There’s good cover there, and there, and there. We go through that yard, and it’s a clear shot to the motel. We break into a car, we hotwire it–”
“Rooster,” she said, throat tight.
“You drop me anyplace on the map, and I can have five exit strategies worked out in ten minutes. That’s what a Marine does. But you go into some – some fucking VA center,” he spat the word like it disgusted him, and this, this blowup? It wasn’t just about exit strategy. “What is that? A brick box with tiny windows. And I can get outta there, sure, but how much warning will I have? Hostiles on all sides, civilians getting hurt. And you’re up there, right in the front, everybody looking at you, and–”
“Everybody looks at me when I do a show,” she reminded gently.
“Yeah, and then we fucking leave town!” He made a wide, encompassing gesture with both arms. “But we’re stuck here. We’re stuck. And–” He broke off, shook his head, raked his hair back with a shaking hand. “I can’t do my job like that. Don’t ask me to.”
Job.
The word hit her like a fist in the gut.
“I’m your job?” she asked, lips numb. They’d come to a halt in the middle of the street, and he turned to face her.
“It’s my job to keep you safe,” he said, voice dark with fury. “It’s my only job. Most days I can’t get it right as it is. Why would a goddamn bake sale be worth making it that much harder?”
It hurt to swallow. She wrapped her arms tight around her middle. “I’m your job,” she repeated, a statement and not a question this time, because this was the truth. She was his cross to bear. Because she was young, because she was a lab rat with no life experience, she’d talked herself into believing that he felt the way she did; that the dark felt too heavy, lately, and the other’s breathing seemed a little too loud, and a little too far away in the next bed. But she was his job. His mission, and he was a warrior who didn’t know how to let go of the war.
He stared at her, chest working as he breathed.
“I’m sorry I made it hard for you,” she said, tonelessly, and started walking again.
Inside her, something fractured.
*
She got three steps ahead of him before he realized what she’d just said.
And what he’d just said.
Damn, he was stupid.
He was just so scared. That he’d lose her, that he’d fail.
That she wanted the same thing it was getting harder and harder to deny.
“Shit,” he muttered, and caught up to her in three long strides.
She walked with her arms banded tight around her midsection, head down, hair shielding her face from view.
“I’m trying to protect you,” he said, feeling helpless.
“I know,” she whispered.
“That’s all I ever want to do.”
She jerked a nod, hair swinging.
“Red–”
“It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t, and because he was an idiot he didn’t know how to get them back to where they’d been only minutes before. Peace never lasted, no; that was one of the few things in life about which he was absolutely certain. They’d walked down Jack and Vicki’s front sidewalk with full bellies and something almost like contentment brewing between them.
And now it was nothing but anxiety and air as brittle as cheap glass.
They walked all the way back to the hotel in silence, the quivering, loaded kind that made him trigger-happy. By the time he’d let them back in their room, cleared it, and triple-checked that the door was locked and the drapes drawn, he’d worked himself up to saying something. He didn’t know what, and it probably wouldn’t help, but he had to try.
Red beat him to it.
When he turned around to face her, she looked up at him with huge, haunted green eyes, face starkly pale between two curtains of black hair. “You don’t have to do it. Protect me. You could stop.” She didn’t do artifice, his girl, and she wasn’t calling on it now. The steadiness of her gaze, the trembling of the rest of her body: she was serious.
His chest squeezed. “What?”
“You don’t have a life,” she went on, flat, already pulling herself back from him emotionally. “You said it yourself – you only have one job. That’s not fair to you. You deserve–”
He moved. Quick, sudden. Stepped in close until she had to tip her head back to maintain eye contact. She swallowed a sound that might have been a gasp.
“Stop it,” he said, aiming for stern, but he heard the way his voice shook and cracked at the edges. He was terrified, and knew he sounded it. He didn’t care. “That’s not true – I don’t – you can’t–”
“It’s okay.”
“Don’t say that!” he snapped, hating that she flinched back from him, but not able to rein himself in. “How could you think that I–”
“You gave up everything for me,” she said, voice strained. “Your home, and your friends, and your whole life–”
“What life? Huh? I could barely walk; I couldn’t be awake unless I was drunk off my ass because my whole damn body hurt so much. I was leeching off my friends ‘cause they were too decent to kick me out on my ass where I belonged–”
“You didn’t ask for this–”
“Neither did you! What they did to you at that place, the things that – fuck them. Fuck them to hell and back, I can’t wait until the day I get my hands on them, instead of their flying monkeys. It is not okay what they did to you, Red. You didn’t even have a goddamn name when I met you.”
“I shouldn’t have followed you home. I had no right to ask you–”
“You didn’t ask me for shit. Understand? That was my choice–”
“But if I’m a burden–”
“You’re not a burden! You’re my job, yeah, but you know what that means? It means I take it seriously. Keeping you safe is the most serious goddamn thing on this planet to me, because you’re mine. You don’t belong to that place, you never did. You belong to me. Damn it, Red, I do all of this because I love you, not because I have to.”
Someone in the next room banged on the wall. “Shut up!”
They both jumped, strung tight as racehorses. And then they settled, and stared at one another. Breathing through their mouths.
Rooster wished a sudden earthquake would split the world open and swallow him whole. The way she was looking at him…he just…
He cleared his throat. His face felt hot and it took him a moment to realize that he was blushing – possibly for the first time ever. “I, uh…” He coughed. “I didn’t…mean it like that. All…caveman-y and shit. That’s not…I mean…”
She threw herself at him. Pressed her face to his breastbone and wrapped her arms tight around his waist. Gasped, and shuddered, and stood trembling against him.
A sensation too visceral and painful to be called relief swelled inside him, surged out of the cracks of something dark and ugly that had fractured when she grabbed for him, unhesitating and trusting. He put his arms around her in turn, hand cradling the back of her head, holding her there.
Her lips moved against his chest, a quiet murmuring he couldn’t hear.
He dropped his face into her hair, trying to hear, but trying to get closer, too. Smell her shampoo, and her skin, feel the warmth of her, even though she shivered like she was cold. “What?”
It was a chant: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m…”
“No,” he said. “No, no, sweetheart. Don’t be sorry.”
But he was, because he’d made her cry, and made her think that he would abandon her. That was maybe the worst thing he’d ever done.