Really happy, in fact. Really, really happy. Mac, in particular, was going to be a father and before the shit came down he’d been ecstatic.
His heart gave another big thump and he rubbed his chest, because it freakinghurt.
“Maybe—” Sophie said hesitantly, then stopped.
Jon waited but she didn’t finish the thought. “Maybe?” he prodded.
The surface had turned smoother. This was a stretch of plateau that seemed fairly flat so he could pay attention to what she was saying.
“Maybe what, Sophie?”
She sighed, a little exhalation of breath in the silence of the cabin. “I know it sounds crazy, considering that we’re risking our lives just driving a couple of hundred miles and we can’t even drive on roads because there are too many crashed cars and—” she swallowed, that long white throat working, “too many dead bodies. I know what we left behind in San Francisco and I can’t even think about LA or San Diego or Sacramento. So much death and destruction, it’s hard to even think of after. But the thing is…” She turned in her seat and looked at him. The night vision goggles covered his entire range of sight but he had excellent peripheral vision. He could see her clearly, slightly green-tinged, beautiful and earnest, eyes wide in the darkness. “The thing is—what if we can rebuildbetter?There was so much wrong with the world, Jon. So much needless cruelty and materialism and crassness and exploitation. Suppose we can learn from the past and particularly from this tragedy. From what I could tell from Dr. Lee’s computer, the virus was designed to make huge amounts of money. Dr. Lee was a gifted scientist. He knew perfectly well that there were enormous risks involved and yet he continued the research. He and that idiot Flynn were willing to blow up the world if it made them money. But maybe—I don’t know. Maybe if there are just a few of us left and we have to band together to survive we can build something better. Better than what was.”
Silence. Jon mulled the idea over.Better.Something better.
Like Haven.
Haven was a community of misfits and geniuses and people on the run. They could only rely on themselves and they did. Everyone pitched in, everyone gave, no one complained. It was what drove Mac and Nick and Jon to protect Haven with every ounce of their being.
“But maybe that’s just a crazy idea. Wishful thinking.” She sighed.
“Not so crazy,” Jon said softly.
A world like Haven. He found himself smiling. Oh yeah. A world like Haven was worth fighting for.
It was an endless ride,uncomfortable, rocky, dangerous. And yet Sophie was happy in the dark cabin with Jon. He was doing a magnificent job of steering them through the Badlands even though they were rarely on an actual asphalted road. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that as fast as any vehicle and any driver could take her to safety, that was as fast as Jon was going.
She was almost completely blind. A low cloud cover blocked off the stars and the sliver of moon and there were no lights anywhere except occasionally a column of flame where something burned. She saw nothing. When driving through the redwood forest there had been faint shadows, more an idea of shapes than shapes, the canopy darker than the night. When they reached the middle of the state and open land, she could discern nothing other than blackness. Jon stopped calling out when the car would lurch. They often dove into holes, climbing out a minute later, rocking over fallen trees and boulders. It was pointless for Jon to warn her, he’d spend all his time calling out instead of paying attention to the landscape in front of him.
Sophie simply strapped her belt more tightly and hung on to the handle above the door and endured the teeth-rattling ride.
Still, she’d rather this horrible bone-crunching ride over rough terrain with Jon than the smoothest ride in the latest Mercedes model with anyone else. He sat next to her, grappling with the steering wheel, concentrated on the terrain ahead and keeping them upright and yet she felt closer to him than she’d ever felt to another human being.
He was a warrior and she felt like a warrior too. They were in a war, together, fighting the odds. Teammates and lovers.
There was a very faint light from the scanners lighting Jon’s face from below. Not quite enough to make out features but enough to highlight the strong jawline and high cheekbones. When he said that maybe, just maybe the idea of building something better in the aftermath of the infection was not so crazy, the corners of his hard mouth turned up because it made sense to him, too and at that precise moment, she fell in love.
Hard.
She’d more or less written love off. How to negotiate telling her lover that she could heal but that it was an uncertain gift? That she could, but maybe she couldn’t? That it was a poisoned chalice? He’d either believe her or run for the hills away from the lunatic and she had no idea which would be worse. It would completely skew the relationship, make it off kilter, make it about something other than two people. Her ‘gift’ would lie between them like an unwanted lover.
No, love was off the table. Sex, too, apparently, since she rarely found herself attracted enough to sleep with a man. Casual affairs were sad, intimate affairs dangerous. Better to just take sex and relationships off the table.
Jon had broadsided her. They’d had sex before she even knew him and it had been so intense she thought her heart would blow. And the man was even better than the sex. Her body had told her what to do before her mind could boycott it.
She and Jon were a couple in the most primitive sense of the term—running for their lives, depending on each other completely, in total harmony. He was irrevocably a part of her. She studied his face in the faint light.
Handsome, yes. But there were a lot of good-looking guys around. Buff, too. But again, a lot of men went to the gym religiously, though Jon’s muscles were of an entirely different order. Muscles for work not for show.
She had no idea what his tastes in music and movies and books were.
Didn’t matter. Because those were details, like clothes covering a man. The real man underneath the trappings, the essence of him, was brave beyond compare. Honorable and true. Even when he’d told her his great gift was lying, he was telling the truth. He’d completely glided over how dangerous undercover work was. How one misstep could betray you. She was fiercely happy he was a brilliant liar because it meant he’d survived where other men would have been killed.
“You’re looking at me,” Jon said, eyes straight ahead. “What?”
That was another thing. No games with Jon.
“I love you,” she said quietly.
