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“Together, absolutely. I’m totally together. Though it did just occur to me that a giant bomb, or whatever that was, right there in my apartment, isn’t something they can clean up before the police get there. So I guess that’s progress?”
“They firebombed us,” Blue said tightly. He should have saidyou. But he didn’t correct himself. “They threw it through your bedroom window, and let’s be clear. That was deliberate. They expected you to be in that bed. They knew you had someone watching out for you in the living room, so they targeted you directly instead of worrying about where I was.”
For a long moment she didn’t say anything. A quick glance told him she was still sitting there, staring out at the road ahead of them.
“I get it,” he said roughly. “I remember the first time I was in a situation that wasn’t a drill or an exercise, when it was suddenly clear to me that someone was trying to kill me. Me, specifically.”
And then he had to sit there wondering why the hell he’d brought up something like that.
“Did it make you feel sick to your stomach?”
“Yes.”
“A little dizzy?”
“Yes.” He stopped at a red light and kept his eyes on the dark street behind them. “That’s normal.”
“I’m betting you didn’t curl into a ball and cry until the weird, targeted feeling went away.”
He couldn’t help himself. That made him grin. “Not exactly. I did my job.”
She sighed, shuddery and long, and he spent more than a few moments lecturing himself about why it wasn’t smart to reach over and put his hand on her. Because it sent the wrong message. Because despite the game he appeared to be playing here, he wasn’t that guy.
Then he did it anyway. Just a hand on her leg, to let her know she wasn’t alone.
The next breath she took sounded different. More... wistful.
“I’m sure that at some point it’s going to hit me that I probably just lost everything,” she said after a moment.
She slid her hand over his and held it there, and Blue started telling himself a whole lot of lies about it. Like that he’d have reached out to anyone in the same situation. Like that he couldn’t feel the heat of her skin through her jeans. Like that he couldn’t remember that slick, perfect slide deep inside her.
“Things are replaceable,” he said. “You’re not.”
She settled back in her seat and he took his hand back, because it was that or do something even more stupid.
“Right now the only thing I can think about is how happy I am that no one can accuse me of lying,” she said. “About this, anyway. Is that crazy?”
“I don’t think there’s any set behavior for how to act when someone blows up your life.”
Everly rubbed her hands over her face. “I hope no oneelse gets hurt. I don’t know how I forgot that the whole building could burn down. I don’t think I could live with that.”
“You can live with anything,” Blue told her, his voice curt. Harsher than it should have been. “That’s the price of surviving sometimes. You don’t honor anybody’s memory by wasting the life you get to live when they lost theirs. Remember that.”
Sixteen
But if Blue was expecting Everly to react badly or crumple or finally collapse into jagged, emotional pieces, she didn’t.
Instead, she let out a laugh.
“That’s what I love about you,” she said.
She laughed again, but with a sharp edge to it that he knew was the kind of shock that could tip over into tears or hysteria if she let it. He figured that was why she didn’t mind throwing around the wordlovelike that.
And more, why he didn’t drive the car off the road at the sound of it.
“You’re always there with exactly the right thing to say to make everything better,” she was saying, with that same edge but without any apparent collapsing. “Good job, Blue. I feel much better.”
He found himself smirking against his will. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d lost it back in her apartment. Ifshe’d been useless and sobbing and he’d had to cart her out of there on his back. But Everly didn’t break. She’d handled this whole situation on her own for weeks. She’d driven all the way to Alaska and then over a treacherous mountain pass that made locals shake and grown men cry. Regularly.