My stomach quivers oddly. How can I be nervous? But I am. I am a lot of things I never expected to be. I want the moment to be perfect. “We don’t have to do this now. Unless you’re ready?”
“I’ve been ready since the first time I kissed you, Jase Ballenger.” I smile. “I doubt that.”
“Almost the first time,” she concedes. “But I am ready now. We’ll take it slow.”
She reaches out and pulls my shirt free from my trousers. I help her lift it over my head.
Her fingertips brush along my chest as if she can feel the feathers of my tattoo.
I swallow, wondering how slow I can take this. She looks up at me, and I am lost in golden pools.
I remember the words she said to me just minutes ago. I want to grow old with you, Jase.
Every one of my tomorrows is yours. I bend forward, my lips meeting hers. Bound by the earth,
Bound by—
 |
“We’re ready for you.”
I startled awake. Caemus was staring down at me. “Still needing naps?” he asked.
It was his way of saying I wasn’t ready. “I wasn’t sleeping. Just thinking.”
He snorted. “Oh. Is that what that was?”
“I’ll be right up,” I said.
He turned and started back up the cellar steps. Maybe I wasn’t one hundred percent yet, and sometimes I was dragging by the afternoon, but if I spent one more day wondering where Kazi was, I would go insane. My dreams wouldn’t sustain me. I needed her. I needed to know she was safe.
I pulled off my shirt so it wouldn’t accidentally get stained with dye. The settlement had already worked hard enough to pull together clothes for me. I didn’t want to ruin a good shirt that had come off someone else’s back.
Caemus stopped halfway up the stairs and turned to look at me. “You talk in your sleep,” he said. “But I already knew. I figured it out when you were here building the settlement. You two seemed inevitable. That’s how it is with some folks.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the shirt in my hands. I couldn’t talk about this. “I told you, I’ll be up in a minute.” I snapped the shirt out and began folding it, carefully creasing the sleeves, pulling on the collar, making sure everything was even and perfect. I shook it out and folded it again.
Sometimes you have to remind yourself that you’re not powerless. That you have some measure of control. Maybe that’s what makes you brave enough to face another day.
“I know what you’re going through, boy,” Caemus said. “I had a wife once. It wasn’t quite the same. I’d had her for a lot of years, and then a water snake bit her. In a matter of hours, she was gone. It didn’t matter how hard I held her or how crazy I got with wanting her back. It didn’t change a thing. Sometimes people leave us forever and there’s no getting them back.” My neck flashed with heat. His words were too similar to something Kazi had once said about her mother. She’s dead, gone, Jase. She’s never coming back. But I still saw it in her eyes, the small sliver of hope she couldn’t extinguish. She was afraid to believe, but it was still there, like a
saved wish stalk tucked deep in her pocket.
I shook my head, rejecting Caemus’s insinuation.
His voice turned more sober than it already was. “No one saw or heard anything about her when we were there, and trust me, a Vendan stands out in Hell’s Mouth, especially a Vendan soldier.”
“She’s alive, Caemus. I know she is. She’s a survivor.”
His lips rolled over his teeth, like he was chewing on the thought. “All right,” he sighed. “If you believe it, I think it must be true. I just want you to remember there’s other people who need you. You have to keep your head on straight. Don’t go doing something crazy, something that’s going to get you killed. That won’t get her back.”
I nodded. “I don’t plan on getting killed.” “No one ever does.”
He turned and trudged up the rest of the stairs, and I stared at the folded shirt on my bed, at all the angles that didn’t line up. I knew other people needed me too. It gnawed at me every single day. The town, my family. Hundreds of people I had vowed to protect. Blessed gods, did I know. My father had drilled it into me since the day I was born. Duty. But if it took something crazy to save Kazi, that was exactly what I would do.
