Page 35 of The Ones We Fight For

Walker’s eyes immediately landed on her sunglasses, and he transferred the drink carrier with two coffees he was holding to one hand. He was wearing a gray T-shirt, one of the few shirts he cycled through, all muted or monochrome in color, and his black moto jacket, which gave him a dangerous bad boy look she had always avoided before in men.

“It's this new thing I'm trying out called responsibility. What are you doing?” he shouted over the music, cocking his head to the side.

“Just… jamming to some tunes. It’s basically a requirement to wear sunglasses with this song!” Talia pointed to the ceiling and wiggled her shoulders to the music like a boppy teenager as Walker stepped into her living room.

“What’s your plan after the song ends? Or are you just going to keep it on loop all day?” Walker cut to the chase, eyes honed in on her shades.

Talia silently berated herself. Nope. That didn’t work at all. Of course it didn’t. Dumbest idea ever. Never murder anyone, because the second you get put into an interrogation room, your story will fall apart.

“It’s a nice day out! The sun is shining, and—”

“It’s overcast and supposed to rain today. How bad is it?” Walker pointed at Talia’s face, unamused by her blatant lies. When she didn’t respond, he reached up to the rim of her glasses with his free hand, and she shook her head. “Tal…”

“It’s not bad at all!” She smiled, hoping her exuberance would soften the blow. Gently, Walker pulled the glasses from her face, and she closed her eyes to avoid seeing his immediate reaction, wishing that, at some point in her life, she had taken a class on makeup artistry. Anything to prevent Walker from feeling guilty.

When there was no shocked gasp or comment from Walker, Talia slowly peeked through her eyelashes. He wasn’t standing in front of her anymore. Spinning around, she wondered offhandedly if the sight of her mangled face had made him disintegrate on the spot. A beeping noise in her kitchen put that thought to rest immediately, and she set off in that direction. Walker was leaning against the cabinets, arms crossed over his chest as he stared at something turning inside the microwave.

“My face made you… hungry?” Talia furrowed her brow, flinching from the pain of it. Walker turned to look at her with a slight smirk, and she rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I enjoyed The Silence of the Lambs, but I’m not so into it that I crave human flesh. I brought a heating pad,” he explained as the microwave finished. “You put it over your eyes and it helps heal the bruising. Plus, it feels good. I know how hard I hit you. I came prepared.”

“You didn’t hit me. The door did. I’m fine, Walker, really. Let’s just get started on your list.”

“We can do that tomorrow. Let’s stay here. We already did the grocery shopping yesterday, and I brought everything I needed from home.” He pointed to his laptop satchel, which was bursting at the seams, the flap barely holding together the top. “I can work from anywhere, and today was just going to be organizational anyway. You need Advil, a heating pad, lots of water, and rest.”

“Walker—”

“For once in your life, don’t argue with me. You know how bad it is! You tried to postpone, then you tried to play a cringey eighties song to hide the fact that you’re wearing sunglasses. Why didn’t you just say you had a migraine?”

Talia groaned. Migraine. Yep, that would have been a more believable option.

“Would that have worked?” she asked.

“No. I know you said you’re a human lie detector, but you are also a terrible liar.” He stepped toward her, holding up the cloth heating pad that had holes cut out for the eyes, and his voice dropped lower. “Stop trying to shield me. You look terrible.”

“Wow, thanks! So, not only am I a liar, I’m also ugly,” Talia replied sarcastically.

Walker shot her a look of reprimand and reached up to cup her face, gently turning her head from side to side to inspect the damage. The heat radiating from his skin felt good, but the desperation and guilt behind his movements didn’t. On an impulse, she leaned forward a little, pressing her cheek harder into his palm, locking eyes with him. Comfort. They both wanted it. She could tell. It would hurt to kiss him when half her face was bruised, but if his touch didn’t heal her, maybe his lips would.

The way he was looking at her like she was an injured animal on one of those commercials with Sarah McLachlan was agonizing. And maybe she was looking at him the same way, pathetically begging him with her eyes to use her to take the pain away. His breathing slowed as he continued to take stock of her bruising. She perused every crease on his face, too, every out-of-place tuft of hair atop his head. He must have been anxiously raking his fingers through it before he arrived. The bedhead look made him even more attractive.

It felt like the pivotal moment in a book or movie where the dam broke and the characters ravaged each other like feral animals on the floor. She needed to stop reading the book Walker had written. It was causing a lot of unseemly fantasies to play out in her head, all of which involved herself, Walker, and a lack of clothing.

The book was super problematic, too. That should have been enough to put it down. The male character gave off actual Hannibal Lecter vibes with how stalkery he was toward the female protagonist.The storyline was garbage. The writing, though, was captivating. Walker deserved all the credit, alongside whoever else co-wrote it, for doing their absolute best not to make the supposed sexy contractor, who kept breaking things in the female main character’s house so he could come back, not seem like he was going to bottle his victim’s sweat as a perfume and pull her used tampons out of the trash can to inhale the scent Joe Goldberg style.

In romance books, there was always a fine line between romantic and Ted Bundy. For some reason, Edward Cullen creepily standing in Bella’s room to watch her sleep was acceptable, but offering to keep someone from freezing to death by stripping naked and cuddling was not? Teenage Talia had always been firmly Team Jacob, but the adult version of herself no longer cared about the love triangle. On her latest rewatch of the Twilight movies, post-breakup with Clifford, Talia was too busy thirsting after Charlie and Carlisle to pay attention to the man-children that were Edward and Jacob.

Walker still managed to make the contractor seem cute in a non-off-putting way that was sure to make many men and women swoon, while still maintaining the shitty storyline that involved a lot of sex (quite possibly how the female protagonist was paying for the constant contracting services). Too bad there was no way in hell Talia was going to stop reading it. It would be more likely that she’d buy annotating pens and tabs to mark her favorite parts. Especially after yesterday.

Something felt different after the parking lot incident. Walker had crumpled into her arms, and Talia had clutched onto him for dear life. They held each other like it was the only way either of them would survive. She didn’t think he realized just how broken she was, too, the grief and loss of her mother combined with the loss of her dreams overwhelming her at the same time he’d cracked. The shared experience of a mental breakdown was an intimacy she couldn’t pull back from. The only person she’d had that kind of a connection with before was her mother, and she’d never experienced anything like it with someone she was physically attracted to. Only Walker.

Every person that Walker cared for got his full attention, and the way he dragged his eyes over the purple sprouting out from the bridge of Talia’s nose said she was one of those people. She was spellbound by the longing in his eyes, staring into the sea of dark brown surrounding his slightly dilated pupils, like she would drown if she didn’t. The tension between them was a cord about to snap. Walker tucked a strand of her hair back, his fingertips brushing over her ear. She watched the lips she so desperately wanted on hers part ever so slightly, his throat swallowing, she hoped, from arousal. It would’ve only taken the tiniest of movements to connect with him, to do what she had been trying to convince herself she didn’t want and now knew she wanted more than the air in her lungs. The smallest step forward, and she could…

“Uh,” Walker coughed loudly and dropped his hand away, quickly thrusting his bag up on the countertop to rifle through it, breaking the trance. He pulled out a bottle of pain reliever, popping off the top and shaking a few pills into his hand. “Where are your glasses at? Over here?” He scurried over to the cabinet to the right of the sink and pulled down a drinking glass, guessing correctly on the first try, and filling it with water at the fridge before walking back over to her. “Here.”

“Really, I’m okay,” Talia mumbled, but held out her hand anyway for him to drop the pills into. Bringing them into her mouth, she reached for the glass, ghosting over the tips of his fingers when she took it from him. She looked him deliberately in the eyes as she placed the cup to her lips, pulling the cold liquid over her tongue. Walker’s Adam’s apple dipped low in his throat. It was either guilt from the way her bruised eye sockets looked over the rim of the glass, or maybe lust. She sincerely hoped it was the latter, but given that it was probably impossible to look sexy when her face looked like she got into a fight with a brick wall and lost, guilt was more likely.

“Should we get started, then? I started watching this documentary yesterday and it’s really… well, it’s a serial killer documentary.” Talia gestured to the main teal couch in her living room, wondering why her brain constantly leaned toward murder. “We could watch that in the background while we work on your lists?”

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