Page 25 of Rarely Pure and Never Simple
"The doctors released me, genius. Why wouldn't I be ready?"
"You just…" Damien's stare might have had a softer edge to it or it might have been Blaze's vision blurring. "You look like you still hurt."
"There's a shock. I get a lung all shot to hell, and two days later look like I still hurt. So damn perceptive."
"I could drive."
"The hell you will."
Blaze stuck his head through the neck of his T-shirt, irritated at the world in general. He snarled, the shirt in danger of ripping when he struggled to get the arm on his injured side to cooperate. Gentle hands touched him, stopping his struggles, sliding the uncooperative fabric where it was supposed to go. Damien's serious face was an inch away from his. Breath and heartbeat took a momentary vacation when Damien glanced up, a power surge of need arcing between them.
And isn't that just all kinds of screwed up that you're thinking with your dick about the guy you're supposed to be protecting. Yep. Real professional.
"Hey." Blaze cleared his throat, embarrassed by the strange, unexpected moment, so much more intimate than flashing his fine, naked ass.
"Hey." Damien's gaze twitched away, the moment lost. "It's not a big deal if you need to take it easy for a day. I do know how to drive."
"Yeah. But I'm a terrible passenger. For both our sakes, I'll drive. So we don't kill each other."
Blaze thought he caught a hint of disapproval in Damien's expression. He decided he wanted that censure to be worry for him.Yeah. Maybe Damien's having unprofessional dick thoughts, too.
Back in the car, Damien directed them east again along the old Interstate 80, now an inconsistently maintained two-lane road. Where it neared the few remaining, isolated towns in Nevada, the road improved. In between, it was a pockmarked mess of sinkholes and uneven ruts where Blaze refused to set the wheels down. Maglev driving was a lot less taxing than wrestling a car along the surface of a bad road, though he had to watch the gauges since it ate through the power cell supply so much faster.
Not that he would ever admit it, but his own power cells were running precariously low when they reached the outskirts of the ruins of Elko.
"Blaze?"
Concentrating hard on avoiding a monstrous sinkhole, the soft query startled him. "What?"
"We should pull off. Find a place out of sight to stop."
"Are we close to something?"
"No. Not yet."
"Then what the hell for? Won't be dark for at least two hours."
Damien took a moment to answer. He stared out the windshield, his fingers picking at a thread on his coat as he flushed bright red. "It's… I'm getting tired. The trails. They take a lot out of me."
Blaze couldn't help a soft snort.Aren't you just the worst liar ever? "All right. There's a hill over there. We'll go to ground for the night."
Sleeping within sight of the road just invited trouble. Roving packs of wildings, bandits, and the criminally insane haunted the old roads at night out this way, looking for easy prey. Blaze pulled around a rise to hide them from the interstate. Once he was satisfied with the spot, he let the car settle on its wheels again and went to check their back trail. Wouldn't do to leave telltale maglev whorls in the dirt to advertise where they had gone to ground.
The ground was hard packed here, though, much of it frozen. He didn't have much to do, thank all the holies. By the time he got back to the car, his chest ached and his head felt fuzzed with exhaustion.
Damien had already folded the seats down into bunks and had them made up with the sleeping bags, one unzipped and laid flat as a sort of mattress, the other on top as the blanket, all nice and straight and wrinkle free. He knelt in the back of the Raptor, pulling out pop-meals from their little cache.
Something scathing and sarcastic about domesticated weirdoes was on the tip of his tongue, but it fell flat into the dust at Blaze's boots when Damien glanced up. Those dark eyes, so often devoid of emotion, looked at him with such concern that he forgot how to say anything.
"Sit down." Damien reached for his arm and pulled him onto the lowered tailgate. "You look terrible."
"Oh, gosh. Thanks."
Damien shook his head as he turned back to his dinner preparations. He tugged off the tab on one of the pop-meal tubes, and the packet expanded with a hiss of steam, unfolding into a bowl of beef stew with carrots and onions. It didn't smell half bad.
"Here. You need to eat and then sleep. We should have waited another day. I'm sorry."
Grumpy when he gets worried. "I'm fine, Mama Duck. Don't go all touchy-feely on me."
