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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

utah

M emphis was still squirming around in her seat when Indy finally said that the police were only a couple minutes out.

“Seatbelt,” I said when I dropped back down behind the wheel. “Which way are they coming from, Indy?”

“When you leave, go West,” Indy said in my ear.

Tennessee hightailed it to his own truck as soon as we were moving. He didn’t make it very far. A police Charger parked right behind his back bumper as we left that parking lot.

“One problem down,” I said. “Taking you out, Indy. We’ve both got our phones.”

Memphis didn’t even wait until I had the radio all the way out of my ear before she had her phone in her hand to call Indy herself.

“I don’t feel like I know enough about U.S. Marshalls to be able to tell you where to start,” she said into her phone. “Aside from looking into missing children from Tennessee, that is. It’s hard to imagine that we’d be looking at the Marshalls who are actually assigned to those investigations.”

“Maybe,” I interrupted. “Or maybe they’re like the cops with a god complex too. Can’t get caught if everyone looking at it from the outside thinks they’re doing their part to end trafficking from the inside. People tell them anything and everything assuming they’re the good guys in the situation.”

“That’s disgusting,” Memphis said quietly with the most heartbreaking look I’d ever seen in those green eyes.

She wasn’t wrong. It was absolutely disgusting.

But so were people.

She spent a good portion of the drive back to Indiana on the phone with Indy, discussing what the Marshalls Service really did, while she tapped away on her computer.

This probably wasn’t the time to remind her that if things had gotten out of my control in that diner, she would’ve had no way out because she gave up learning to drive so fucking quickly. But it was all I could think about.

Very light knocking at my door woke me up the next morning. Or maybe it was still in the middle of the night. It was still dark, and I was usually the first one awake inside this house.

The half-naked siren and her visibly pierced nipples waiting on the other side of that door had me wondering if this was really happening or if I was dreaming.

“What’s wrong, angel?”

“I want to go to Nevada today,” Memphis said and walked right by me into my room. “Well, not to Nevada. I want to find Nevada today. Some weird stroke of luck has her in southern Indiana. At least, I think so. I have this fucking awful feeling that having quick access to a nurse would just be a good idea. And if they’re all going to take forever to decide to jump ship to our side, we should start on her as soon as we can.”

“This couldn’t wait until the sun came up?”

She looked behind her toward my window.

“Oh. Sorry, I didn’t realize?—”

“Have you not actually been to sleep yet, Memphis?”

“Uh, no. Unfortunately, computer people don’t spend much time computering in the dark web world during the day. We don’t differentiate between day and night well because we don’t really have outside lives. The sunlight hours don’t matter so much. Being able to see things happen in real time requires just staying awake for it.”

“Did you find something?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Maybe? I don’t actually know yet. I guess time will tell.”

“Well, we can go wherever you want today, but you might want to sleep a little first.”

She nodded her head and walked back toward me. I stepped off to the side of the door to let her back through, but she stopped right beside me instead.

“It was nice of you to try to teach me to drive,” she whispered. “I still don’t want to learn to do it, but I know why you’re trying to get me to do these things. I think we just see the world in very different ways.”

The way my own heartbeat about deafened me when I felt those little fingers slide into my hand.

“And I think maybe the way you see it comes with a much better perspective than the one I have. I don’t know how to change that, but I’ll try not to freak out if you keep finding ways to help me with it.”

I twisted my hand until I was able to grab hers firmly and I used it to pull her the rest of the way to me, until those piercings were against my stomach. I put my other hand under her chin to force her to look up at me.

“Why can’t you do this when you can see me, angel?”

“What?”

“These conversations. Why do you need to be facing away from me or in the dark or over the phone? Why don’t I get to see the look in your eyes when you give me the tiniest glimpse behind this motherfucking seven-hundred-foot-tall, forty-nine-foot-thick concrete wall that’s around you?”

She swallowed so hard I could hear it.

“Do you hear yourself when you say things like that?” she asked with a nervous giggle. “How can you expect anyone to know how to respond to that face-to-face? No one says shit like that in real life.”

She tried to step back just ever so slightly. So, I let go of her wrist and slid that arm around her waist to keep her pinned against me.

“It’s still dark in here, Memphis. I know you can’t see me any better than I can you right now. Tell me.”

“Utah—”

“No one else is here. No one else will hear the reason. No one else gets to know. Tell me something. Anything. Something that lets me know a little more of the real Memphis than anyone else gets to know.”

“Everything about the real Memphis is awful, Utah. I don’t know how to do…whatever this is. If you find out what’s behind that concrete wall—which is ridiculous, by the way—what happens if you hate it? If you hate me ? Do you leave? Will you stop helping? Will you take Indy and run? If I can’t see your face, I don’t have to wonder what your reactions to my words mean. If I see them, I’ll spend the next thirty years of my life wondering why you smiled the way you did or wondering why the look in your eyes changed over something I said. It’s easier to just?—”

“You don’t have to break yourself open for me,” I interrupted. “I don’t want you to change or rearrange who you are just because I showed up in your world. The best thing about you is that you’re perfectly comfortable being unapologetically yourself. Even when you’re hilariously out of place and don’t fit in anywhere, it’s because you were never meant to. It’s like seeing the moon during the day. She doesn’t belong there. It’s not her time to shine, but there she is anyway, putting the sun to shame in the middle of the day because nothing else gets to define her. She decides what she does, who she is. You’re flawless just like this, sugar.”

“Then—” she said and paused. And I fucking wished I could see her face to tell me how I was supposed to be handling this situation, regardless of how little she wanted to see mine.

“Then…what do you want?” she asked.

I laughed and her whole body tensed against me.

“You, you stubborn little shit. Just you. I’ll take it all as is. I already know you’re tough as nails. Everybody does. But you don’t have to keep that wall up when I’m around. You can crash, collapse, stumble, whatever you need to do with me here. I’ll be ready to catch you every time, whether you actually need to be caught or not, until you believe me that you don’t have to do it all yourself.”

She was quiet again for another several seconds.

“It’s not really that eas?—”

“It is that easy,” I interrupted and laughed again. “If I can be ready to catch you at any moment so that you never legitimately fall again, you can figure out how to let me in. Just a little. You don’t have to make everything difficult and complicated. We aren’t Jersey and Trista. I’m not here to fight you just for the fuck of it. When your world starts to cave in, all you ever have to do is say my name. I’ll carry whatever weight you can’t.”

She couldn’t even see me, and I was still making her uncomfortable. She pressed her forehead against my chest rather than even risk seeing the outline of me in the dark any longer.

Or maybe she was afraid that I was going to kiss her.

Because I absolutely was going to, before her face disappeared.

Turtle pace , I reminded my ogre brain.

Memphis required turtle pace.

Maybe Memphis required the ability to make all the decisions herself when it came to intimacy for it to be able to progress. She’d gotten noticeably more comfortable with me holding her, but even that had taken me trapping her into it repeatedly before she realized physical comfort could be pleasant.

Women were exhausting.

I moved my arm from her waist up around her shoulders and added the other arm to squeeze her harder. If holding her was all I was allowed to do for the time being, I was going to take every opportunity that she’d give me.

She didn’t know how to do this . That was what she kept telling me. She didn’t know how to rely on other people. She didn’t know how to trust someone else. After whatever had gone down with her parents and her sister, her only connection to another person in any recent period of time was New Jersey.

Fucking New Jersey.

The least stable of any human I’d ever encountered in real life.

That was an exaggeration.

But only slightly.

Because he still sure as fuck wasn’t a prime example for the way people were supposed to treat one another.

“I’ll be ready to leave whenever you are, angel,” I said and kissed the top of her head.

She was back out that door in the blink of an eye when I released her body.