I’m sure there was a moment, while I realized she was right, where she could have busted my nose. But she didn’t.
“How fast can you do it? How much concentration does it take? I mean, can you do it and still pay attention to other stuff? Does it make you tired? What’s harder, going in and out, or just staying out? Can you do just part of you, or does it have to be all of you?”
“Slow down! What’s with all the questions all of a sudden?”
“I’ve been curious, I just haven’t asked yet. I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot, about how I look at things. About how I’ve been taught to look at things and how different it seems from everyone else. And what are we going to do when NIAC comes for us and here we are, too well-mannered to fight back?”
“Can we sit down to talk about this?”
She smiled. “Sure.”
We took off the gloves and Joss stuffed them back in the pack. She pulled out a piece of canvas and tossed me another bottle of water before spreading it on the ground. I collapsed on it, and was kind of surprised that she kept her distance when she joined me.
I’d already forgotten we were in a fight. Which made it seem even more stupid.
“You think they’re coming for us?”
She shivered a little and took a drink from her bottle to cover it. “If they had any idea how many of us are here, yeah. They’re picking us off, one by one, because that’s how they’re getting the information. But if they knew there were more of us, they’d just come and round us up because they’ve really got no reason to fear facing us en masse. They’ve got the power of the federal government behind them, and we’re just a bunch of small town kids.”
“Who don’t hit girls and always fight fair.”
“Well…yeah.”
“Don’t you think that, if it was NIAC, if it was life and death, or at least freedom or imprisonment, don’t you think that would change things?”
“I don’t know. And I’m not saying this to rub your nose in it or something, but…when it was Marco, when I believed it could have been life and death, it still didn’t occur to you to fight dirty.”
She had me there, and I didn’t have an answer.
“I know that you never know what you’ll do, what you can do,” she continued, “until it really is life and death. I know that some people would just panic and run, and then get caught, and others would step up, stand and fight, with varying degrees of success.”
“Like at Kat’s party.”
Joss looked away from me, off into the woods, into her own memories. “Dad and I’ve come here, usually once a week, practically my whole life. We’ve put in hours of sparring and it never prepared me for what it was like to take real punches from Marco.”
“Well come on, Joss, Marco’s different.”
“We’ve worked my Talent for hours, testing its limits, enhancing my control, building endurance, sometimes until I threw up, and then we started again. We’ve run through all kinds of scenarios, thinking on the fly about what-if this and what-if that? How would I get away? What if I had to stand and fight? How would I protect myself? And things came to me, you know. The answers seemed clear and obvious. But that night, when there were real NIAC agents right in front of me, I panicked.”
I reached over and pulled one of her hands from its grip on the water bottle, squeezed, and tried not to let my anger at her father spill into the grip. “But you didn’t freeze. If you were panicked, no one knew it but you.”
“As much as I thought I was prepared, I just wasn’t. NIAC’s already suspicious enough about Fairview to have people planted here. Just because we found out about two of them doesn’t mean that’s all there is. And even if they don’t suddenly find out there’s a bunch of us living here, at the rate we’re being picked off, it’s only a matter of time before they decide to send more agents and take a closer look. Hell, I want to know why there are so many of us here.”
“So you and your dad don’t have any thoughts about that?”
“If Dad’s got ideas, he hasn’t let me in on it.”
I just nodded. I was kind of overwhelmed. This was a lot of talking for Joss, and more talking about herself, what was in her head, than I ever expected. Still, there were things she wasn’t saying, and whether she was keeping them from me, or just keeping them to herself, I wasn’t sure.
“Are you rested up?” she asked suddenly.
“I’m afraid to ask why.”
“I packed lunch.”
“Oh, good. I like lunch.”
“I know this. See that cliff over there?” She pointed to a wall of rock that bordered the clearing. There was a ledge. I was afraid of what this meant.
“Yeah…” I answered cautiously.
“That’s where we’re eating. There’s a nice view from up there.”
“I don’t need a view to eat. Or the climb, frankly.”
“It’s where we eat,” she told me, as though this were some kind of ancient rule of the mountain that was not to be trifled with.
She packed the things back in the pack and started to sling it onto her shoulders.
“I’ll get this,” I told her, catching it, but she didn’t let it go.
“No offense, but I know the climb and I’ve got the muscle memory for this,” she indicated the pack, “to be no big deal. If you still want a turn at carrying it on the climb back down, I’ll let you have it then. Deal?”
“Have it your way.” At least I held it up while she strapped it on this time, and had to admit, at least to myself, that she was in better shape to handle it than I was.
The climb wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but it still wasn’t easy. I tried to watch Joss and take the same path.
I’d wondered before, what went into the making of Joss, but I didn’t really dwell on it, you know? I guess it was kind of: strict, overprotective dad who probably talks a lot of shit equals shy girl in combat boots. Then, later, hot shy girl in combat boots I can’t stop thinking about with awesome, kick-ass Talent. But I wouldn’t have guessed at the parts of her she was sharing with me today: rock climbing for her lunch, having to spar against a grown man who obviously wanted to toughen her up, using her Talent—and I’d seen what overdoing it could put her through—until it made her sick. The more I thought about it, the more it pissed me off, and the more I imagined shoving her father right off this cliff.
“I’m sorry,” she told me when I climbed onto the ledge with her. She already had the canvas out and was pulling things out of the pack. “I’m doing this all wrong.”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have made you come. I just…I don’t know what I was thinking. You look like you want to push me off the ledge.” She tucked her hair behind her ear as she said it. Her tell.
“Not you,” I told her, feeling like a complete asshole. She had spent the night in my bed, and now I was one of those people she was uncomfortable talking to. And why? Because she’d saved my life when I got my skull broken, and then she had the nerve to call me breakable? Because I was mad that she’d met my mom and seen how we lived and I was embarrassed by it? So I’d fucked this shit up—like I knew I would—because it was easier to be mad at her that to just deal with the truth about myself. Nice.
“You could if it would make you feel better. I’d catch myself.” She turned from me to fiddle with a container that should have opened easily, and I saw her take a quick, nervous glance at me from under her lashes. “My—my dad shoves me off this ledge every time we come up here.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I didn’t even try to keep the edge out of my voice.
“When we come up here,” she said softly, no longer fiddling but still not looking at me, “at some random point during lunch, my dad shoves me off the ledge. So that I can catch myself without knowing it’s coming, you know? Like, to practice being surpri—”
“What. The. Fuck?”
It was like there was nothing else in my head but rage focused on that one question. If that ma
n had been there with us, I would have lost my shit and found a way to kill him.
“It’s not—”
“Don’t. Don’t fucking tell me it’s not as bad as it sounds. Just…don’t.”
She did that sidewise glance at me again, and a tear slipped down her cheek that punched through the rage, right into my gut. “It’s bad, right?”
“Is that a question?”
Her mouth opened, closed again. Then she swiped at her cheek in a way that showed me she hoped I hadn’t seen the tear, and started over. “We’re not like other kids. And maybe that means that the regular rules don’t apply to us.”
“No. There is no set of rules in which it is okay for him to shove you off a cliff!”
“Like there’s no rules that would say you have to steal things to be a good kid.”
“Don’t even try to make this about me, because it is not the same thing.”
“I’m just saying that sometimes people you care about screw up and treat you bad. You want things to change, but sometimes they just can’t. And you love them anyway.” She looked up at me with deep, dark, defenseless eyes. “Because that’s all you can do.”
There was a beat of silence as we stared at each other, and then I was reaching for her, dragging her into my lap, making chaos of the plastic containers. I buried my face in her neck as I crushed her against me, wishing I could crawl inside and erase all my stupidity.
And I was. So stupid. She wasn’t trying to show me up or prove her point about why we shouldn’t patrol together. She hadn’t brought me up here to show me how bad-ass she was, she was showing me how she got that way. She brought me up here because she knew my stupid pride was hurt and she wanted to show me what we had in common. She was showing me things that were too hard to just come out and say. Things she probably wouldn’t come out and say to anyone.
Even though I’d been acting like a jerk, she trusted me. That much.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered against her throat.
“Me too,” she whispered back. “I just keep messing stuff up because I don’t know how to—”
“No. Just…no, okay? You’re not the one who’s wrong.” She kept trying to operate on things like logic and honesty, and every time she turned around, one of us was slamming her for it.
She pulled away from me and stood up, shaking her head. “You don’t have to be nice about it.”
“I’m not.” Couldn’t she tell? I stood up too, tried to grab for her hand, but she was moving away, skirting between the upset dishes and the edge of the cliff, and I was afraid to make any sudden moves. “Hang on a minute.”
She dropped down in her place across from me and started messing with the food. “It’s okay, Dylan. I told you what I brought you here to tell you and you forgive me, right? So let’s see what we can salvage of lunch.”
If she was really okay, she’d look at me when she talked to me. “Forget the lunch,” I snapped, skirting the edge to kneel down beside her. I was so close to the ledge that I could feel dirt crumble and give way under my toes. I reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear. She turned her face up to me, but I didn’t know what to say.
How could I explain why I’d acted that way? How could I explain how scary it was, to find out that I needed her so much? Was I supposed to tell her how she’d changed everything? Like how I hadn’t even realized how bad I’d felt until she’d made it better, just by looking at me. Like how I thought she was an awesome, bad-ass ninja, and what I hated was the fact that I knew I couldn’t protect her, when that’s all I wanted to do. How could I explain, without sounding like a complete asshole, that I was so afraid of losing her I pushed her away?
I couldn’t. There was no way I could say that shit to her. But she was still looking up at me, waiting, and I had to say something. Somehow I had to make her understand that everything was okay between us, that I needed everything to be okay as much as she seemed to.
I stroked my thumb across her cheek, loving the way it felt, the way her eyes closed and opened to me again, and gathered myself for what I was about to do. Before I could chicken out. “Break my fall, Joss.”
Everything went into slow motion. Her brows drew down, confused. And she started to ask “What?” as I rocked back on my heels. Her look turned to panic as I felt my balance shift and she realized what I was doing. As my eyes found the sky, and I was pushing off with my feet against the ledge, I heard her scream my name.
And then I was falling.
A moment later, my back hit her cushion of air. It was like falling into a pool from a high dive, that smack against the surface that knocks the air from your lungs before the water gives way and you sink. Except that instead of sinking, it was another smack, a harder one this time, especially on the back of my head, that made me see stars.
My vision had almost cleared when Joss straddled me and took my head in her hands, her fingers moving through my hair, checking for injury. “Dylan? Dylan, talk to me.”
Beyond her, the ledge towered over us. I tried to remember seeing it as I fell, but there was nothing between pushing off and hitting the ground. Maybe I’d had my eyes closed. “Wow.”
She dropped my head to the ground, grabbed me up by the front of my hoodie and then dropped me hard. “You IDIOT!”
“Um, ow!”
“Don’t you ever, ever, pull a stunt like that again! What the f—”
She started to scramble off me, but I grabbed her hips, pulled myself into a sitting position and kissed her. Which was pretty effective at stopping her from yelling at me. We were both stoked on adrenaline and it was a hot, intense kiss that took a while to wind down. When it did…
“I love you.” I heard my voice, felt my lips form the words, a breath away from hers. She went still in my arms and her heavy breathing just stopped. I guess I could have been worried, but it felt really good to say it, so I said it again. “I love you. Maybe that’s what I was trying to tell you.” I brushed my lips across hers again, because kissing her was easier than looking her in the eye.
“By throwing yourself off a cliff?” she asked in a voice that was no longer angry, but breathless and somehow more Joss-like than it had been before.
“It was a dramatic gesture.”
“Next time, try flowers,” she said, dryly, and I hugged her to me as we laughed out some of the tension.
“I don’t think I’ve ever thought of you as the flowers type. Would you like it if I brought you flowers?”
“All girls like flowers. But I’ve got a little sister who grows them in her hand. I don’t need them, I just need you.”
No one else in the world could just talk and make it feel like she’d punched into my chest. I tried to pull back to look at her, but she gripped me harder and I got it: she didn’t want to look me in the eye either.
“So no more dramatic gestures, okay?” she asked. “And no more scaring the crap of me with life-threatening injuries of any kind.”
“How did it feel when you watched me go over the edge just now?”
“What kind of question is that? How do you think it felt?”
“I think it probably felt a lot like how it felt for me when Kat told us Marco was trying to kill you and I was trying to get to you, not knowing if I’d get there in time, and then I found you with his hands around your throat. Or when Heather called us and told us Marco had you, scared and blind-folded, and Eric and I were racing to get to you, not knowing what was going to happen. Or when—”
“Okay, okay, I think I’m seeing your point,” she groaned.
I was smiling pretty hard. It was more than just I’d told her that I loved her and she hadn’t run away. More than she’d said she needed me too. I felt like we were really starting to understand each other, and that somehow that made things even better. “I’m not asking you to quit the heroics, okay? Because I think you’re just starting to become who you’re going to be, and I don’t ever want to ask you to be less than what you are. But it scares me, and I love you, so don??
?t ask me to stop looking out for you or wanting you to be safe. Deal?”
She was silent for a minute and I started to wonder if I was overdoing it. Had I said too much? Then, “Um…wow. If I could, like, ditto on all that, and we could just say ‘goes both ways,’ I’d say that’s a deal. But you also promise never to jump off a ledge again—unless it’s really, really important. And then feet first.”
“All right, Marshall. Deal.”
Chapter 12
Marco
“Hey, jailbird, how was your time in the slammer?” My laugh echoed off the walls of the industrial plant that housed my new lair. Way better than the last one, I might add.
My cousin just glared at me, which somehow made it funnier. I think he was afraid to talk, though. Vivian probably gave him an earful in the car on the way back from the lock-up. I know she really let me have it already, and she probably wasn’t done yet.
She shoved Tony from behind, taking him by surprise so that he stumbled forward and almost fell into me. Which wasn’t cool because I was leaning on the railing overlooking the huge, concrete tank. I figured the tank was probably used to collect some kind of toxic run-off from whatever they used to make here, and then they let it drain into the river. Before some bleeding-heart environmentalist started crying about the poor widdle fishies and shut them down. Whatever. Their loss, my gain.
“Do you boys have any idea the trouble you’ve put me through? And, more importantly, the trouble you’ve put my bosses through? They are not pleased.”
I thought about slamming her back against the wall and giving her something to be pleased about. I wondered what was under that trench coat besides the stripper-special boots.
“The Syndicate’s not going to tolerate another screw-up like this. This idiot went and got caught,” she looked at Tony like she wanted to spit on him, “and you did a lot of damage to a store that was supposed to be under your protection.”