Page 84 of After All The Wreckage
As night started to fall and it neared bedtime, I told Monte we had to clean up. He moaned, and Demi smiled at me softly before she slammed a pillow into my face saying, “Lighten up, Gage.”
It stunned me. The attack as well as her laughter that followed it—light and whimsical. My frozen state allowed Monte to crawl on top of me and pound his pillow into my face a few times before I rolled out from beneath him. I returned their attacks with vengeance until we all lay exhausted andsmiling on the floor beneath a flowered sheet, the world hazy and dreamlike.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I said, but I was grinning.
Demi shrugged at me. “You only get one life. Don’t let your responsibilities leak all the joy out of it.”
Her hand was resting on my bare skin, and I saw the moment she got the vision. Saw the way it changed her eyes and made her face blank out. When she came back to me, there was sadness in her eyes. Grief I’d never seen in Demi before when she’d looked at me. As if she’d lost me rather than the other way around.
“Trust me,” she said. “It’s important to savor every happy moment because you never know when it’ll be ripped away.”
She got up and crawled out of the fort. I almost called out after her, asking what she’d seen that made her so sad. Almost asked if she was okay. But then Monte hit me again with his pillow and I turned to my brother and tickled him until he howled.
My mindand heart whirled with those memories as I turned into the same garage I’d parked in on Monday. I didn’t want to remember the good times with my mother because those moments were the ones that made her abandonment so much harder to bear. She’d left us again mere days after the fort-making incident, taking the joy and draining it away.
As Rory went to get out of the SUV, I stopped her with a hand on her arm. She turned back to me with furrowed brows.
The vague threat we could interpret as being aimed at Demi was nothing to the direct one West had lobbed at Rory. I inhaled and exhaled several times, trying to get ahold of my emotions as she watched. The air between us was charged as always, but the desire was now blanketed by fear for the people I loved. “I don’twant anything to happen to Demi, but if trying to stop it means putting you or my family at risk… If I have to choose…”
God, could I even say it? My thoughts were torturous, drawing deeper crevices down all the breaks inside my soul that had bloomed into existence since the first time my mother had walked out the door.
Rory leaned over the center console, cupping my cheek. “I won’t let anything happen to any of you. I promise.”
I could hear the surety in her tone as much as I could read the determination in her eyes.
“But what about you? Do you promise nothing will happen to you?”
Her hand dropped away, and I felt the loss of it as she shifted in her seat, avoiding my gaze. I grabbed her wrist, twining our fingers together, setting the joined hands over my heart, and forcing her to focus on me.
“What happens if he sends someone after you? What ifyouend up shooting a U.S. congressman, even in defense? We don’t know what happens after Dunn falls in Monte’s vision. What if one of the men guarding him returns fire? What if you…”
It made me want to throw up. Rory was tied into my soul as much as my family. She was part of me. I wasn’t sure when it had happened. It was ridiculous, as I hadn’t seen her in years before Friday night, but I couldn’t deny it. Maybe she’dalwaysbeen part of me. Maybe everything between us had been part of some big cosmic plan Demi had been the only one able to see.
You’ll have to fight for the joy, she’d told me.
This felt bigger than a fight. It felt like a war. Battles I didn’t know how to wage and were likely to end in someone getting hurt. Killed.
I slid my thumb over the top of her hand, and she watched the movement before looking up at me with pain in her eyes.
“I won’t let anyone get away with hurting my mom,” she said quietly. “I’m not going to let them get away with hurting yours either. If they’re involved, I’m taking them down.”
“You’re one person without any?—”
“Don’t say it, Gage. Please. I’m not just a little girl playing games. I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t believe in me either. I need someone.” Her voice cracked. “I’ve made mistakes. But I’m not making any more. I promise you can trust me.”
I felt the wounds she carried around in her words. They layered over my own cracks and scars, digging in deeper.
“This isn’t about not believing in you,” I told her. “This isn’t about you being female or twenty-two or five foot whatever. This is about you being one person on her own without a team to help her. Even an FBI agent has backup. Someone looking over their shoulder when they can’t.”
Her eyes turned even more tortured, and I couldn’t stand it. My palm went to the back of her head, pushing her toward me until our mouths met. Until the softness of her lips was pressed against the hardness of mine. I wasn’t sure who I was trying to soothe—her or me or both of us. But this, my lips on hers, was the only way I knew how to show her exactly what I meant.
And just like both times we’d kissed, the soft press of lips became not nearly enough in a nanosecond as shockwaves rolled through my body. I invaded her mouth with my tongue, and she responded with a little moan that made me instantly hard.
The embrace became a hungry feast where we took turns devouring each other. Lapping and licking and tasting as the world came to a blurry halt around us. Until there was nothing but us, the sounds of our heavy breathing, the pounding of our hearts, and the ache of souls that had gone far too long without connecting to another human in just this way. The absence of love that had existed for too many years being filled with touch.
That thought, along with the console biting into me, had me slowing the kiss. I knew nothing about Rory’s love life. It had been years since I’d held someone, but she could have been with someone last week.
Except, somehow, I knew it wasn’t true. Maybe because this was another way in which Rory and I were alike. We’d given up our own pleasure to focus on caring for the ones we loved.
