Page 90 of Don't Let Go

Thirty

PATCH

“Fallon,” Remy said, in between terrifically sharp and biting kisses. “You’re safe.”

They’d been telling me that a lot. Locke had promised me. McQuade promised me. Now Remy—only he promised me before too. Falling back against the bed, I stared up at him.

It was mostly dark and the hum of wheels rolling over highway filled the space. It was kind of soothing in its way. The low lights at the top were on, a yellow-gold cast. Bright enough to see, but not so bright as to blind me.

Remy was a man of complicated shadows. I stroked my hand from his nape to his head. The faint prickles at the base of his skull and around to just over his ears belied the smoothness of his skin.

“Yes,” he said in that perfectly delightful accent. “I shave part of my head.”

“I don’t care,” I whispered. “I mean—I do, but I don’t. I just love that I can touch you.”

“Well, then,” he said, a slow smile curving his lips. “Touch away.”

Licking my lips, I studied. He really was a contradiction. So there, and present, on the surface, you didn’t see the shadows. You saw the simple man who didn’t bother with pretense. Yet, he wore a mask.

We all did.

“Honeysuckle,” I said, exploring all the dips and divots of his skull. The head was such an odd shape and hair hid so many of its features.

“My favorite.” He touched his nose ever so lightly to mine. “And yours?”

I grinned. “I don’t think I ever really had a favorite…or maybe I did. But that Fallon isn’t me anymore.” The Fallon who believed the lies, who drank the Kool-Aid, who took the job. That Fallon had stars in her eyes and a streak to do good.

I had no idea how much bad I’d actually done and someday, I would make myself learn. I would find a way to make up for the work I did in the service of liars.

“That Fallon—she used to like sunflowers, because they were beautiful, and did you know that a sunflower will turn to look at another sunflower if the sun isn’t out? They need the light so much, they will look to each other to find it.”

I was rambling.

“They’re quite beautiful,” he agreed.

“They are—that Fallon loved the poetry of them. I thought I was like them. I looked to my fellow workers for the sunlight because I worked in the shadows.” I shifted beneath him but when he would have moved, I hooked a leg over his hip. “Stay.”

“You’re sure?”

“That I want you? Yes. That I want you to stay right here, where I can wrap around you? Also, yes.” No hesitation in me at all. We’d been on a course for this for a long time. The flirting and the playfulness had been there.

He settled himself into the cradle of my legs and let his weight rest on me more fully. Oh, I liked the way he felt. All long and lean. Where McQuade was big and brawn, Remy was lean and sharp. Locke was somewhere in between, but they were all perfectly them.

“I pretended to not notice the flirting.” It wasn’t so hard to admit. “I’m very good at pretend. When I walked away from Section Five or MadOg or whatever they want to call themselves… that Fallon died in a way. She had to die. She had to leave the life she’d been building, the friends, the few family relationships I still had, and just—vanish. One day I was there and the next not.”

Framing his face with both of my hands, I indulged myself in exploring his features. Remy also lived in the shadows and at a distance. Contact had to be as alien to him at times as it had become for me.

“It was really easy,” I admitted. “Maybe too easy. I’d already been isolating myself so much because of the work. I had few relationships that didn’t include time at the office. I think I had maybe four friends who weren’t online gamers too.”

Grimacing, I shook my head.

“I know how I sound.”

“Do you?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Kind of pathetic.”

“Not the word I would use, luv.”

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