Page 112 of Red Rooster

Damn, he was stupid.

He was just soscared. That he’d lose her, that he’d fail.

That she wanted the same thing it was getting harder and harder to deny.

“Shit,” he muttered, and caught up to her in three long strides.

She walked with her arms banded tight around her midsection, head down, hair shielding her face from view.

“I’m trying to protect you,” he said, feeling helpless.

“I know,” she whispered.

“That’s all I ever want to do.”

She jerked a nod, hair swinging.

“Red–”

“It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t, and because he was an idiot he didn’t know how to get them back to where they’d been only minutes before. Peace never lasted, no; that was one of the few things in life about which he was absolutely certain. They’d walked down Jack and Vicki’s front sidewalk with full bellies and something almost like contentment brewing between them.

And now it was nothing but anxiety and air as brittle as cheap glass.

They walked all the way back to the hotel in silence, the quivering, loaded kind that made him trigger-happy. By the time he’d let them back in their room, cleared it, and triple-checked that the door was locked and the drapes drawn, he’d worked himself up to saying something. He didn’t know what, and it probably wouldn’t help, but he had to try.

Red beat him to it.

When he turned around to face her, she looked up at him with huge, haunted green eyes, face starkly pale between two curtains of black hair. “You don’t have to do it. Protect me. You could stop.” She didn’t do artifice, his girl, and she wasn’t calling on it now. The steadiness of her gaze, the trembling of the rest of her body: she was serious.

His chest squeezed. “What?”

“You don’t have a life,” she went on, flat, already pulling herself back from him emotionally. “You said it yourself – you only have one job. That’s not fair to you. You deserve–”

He moved. Quick, sudden. Stepped in close until she had to tip her head back to maintain eye contact. She swallowed a sound that might have been a gasp.

“Stop it,” he said, aiming for stern, but he heard the way his voice shook and cracked at the edges. He was terrified, and knew he sounded it. He didn’t care. “That’s not true – I don’t – you can’t–”

“It’s okay.”

“Don’t say that!” he snapped, hating that she flinched back from him, but not able to rein himself in. “How could you think that I–”

“You gave up everything for me,” she said, voice strained. “Your home, and your friends, and yourwhole life–”

“What life? Huh? I could barely walk; I couldn’t be awake unless I was drunk off my ass because my whole damn body hurt so much. I was leeching off my friends ‘cause they were too decent to kick me out on my ass where I belonged–”

“You didn’t ask for this–”

“Neither did you! What they did to you at that place, the things that – fuck them.Fuck themto hell and back, I can’t wait until the day I get my hands onthem, instead of their flying monkeys. It is not okay what they did to you, Red. You didn’t even have a goddamnnamewhen I met you.”

“I shouldn’t have followed you home. I had no right to ask you–”

“You didn’t ask me for shit. Understand? That was my choice–”

“But if I’m a burden–”

“You’renota burden! You’re my job, yeah, but you know what that means? It means I take it seriously. Keeping you safe is the most serious goddamn thing on this planet to me, because you’remine. You don’t belong to that place, you never did. You belong to me. Damn it, Red, I do all of this because I love you, not because I have to.”