Page 76 of Sin of Love
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Most nightsshe watches me sleep, but tonight is the first time she’s touched me. Just a graze of small fingertips across my brow, but I feel it like an earthquake in my chest.
“I know you’re awake,” she whispers.
“Am not,” I whisper back.
She doesn’t laugh, but I register her smile on a cellular level. Voice still hushed, she asks, “How many weeks have we been here?”
I’m more awake by the moment. “Coming up on a month.”
She touches me again, a gentle tug on my beard. “It’s time to move on, don’t you think?”
Opening my eyes, I find her face in the dark. Her expression is peaceful. Present. I breathe past the expansion in my chest, the painful joy of witnessing her taking another step back to me.
“Do you want to go home to Los Angeles? Liam did give us the all clear. No one’s looking for us. We’d be safe.” I sit up, shaking cobwebs from my mind. “I can call Nate and tell him he doesn’t need to—”
“I already talked to him.”
I freeze in the process of throwing off my blanket. “Uh, what?”
She sits back on her heels beside the cot I’d love to throw outside and burn. I’m positive it’s given me long-term back problems, though I’m not about to complain when everything I want is here. Bring on the pinched nerves.
Deirdre looks down at her hands, folded atop her thighs. “I told him not to come. And I don’t want to go back to Los Angeles. I don’t like it there. I never have.”
I’m walking across a recently frozen lake, hoping to follow the thickest veins of ice. Chance of drowning is high.
Braced for rejection, I ask carefully, “Where would you like to go?” and not the real question, which is, Am I coming with you?
She shrugs, gaze flickering to my face and away. “Do you remember when you asked me to take you somewhere meaningful to me? And I took you to the abandoned trailer I grew up in? Which was messed up, I realize now. Sorry about that.”
It wasn’t messed up. It was perfect. I haven’t forgotten a single moment with you.
“I remember,” I manage.
Taking a deep breath, she finishes, “I want you to take me everywhere in the world that’s meaningful to you.”
Step carefully…
Ah, fuck careful.
“On one condition.”
Her head whips up, eyes wide. “What?”
“I’m in charge. I say where we go and when we go. And I get to hold your hand whenever I want.”
Slowly, so slowly, her expression clears. The tiniest spark of mischief alights in her eyes, and I think I’m having a heart attack because my heart is pounding so damn hard.
“Okay. But I have a condition, too.”
Anything, anything.
“Let’s hear it.”
Nimble fingers reach and tug my beard. “This comes off, and”—she waves at my head—“that gets fixed.”
I’m well aware I look like a rock band reject with an inch of red roots under brown, but I mock affront.
