Erika looked over at him. “I really want to tell you to fuck off right now.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“Strunk and White have no place in this garage.”
“Strunk and who?” He waved a hand. “Wait, I know that. From a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle last week.”
“Thursday.”
“Yeah, that’s the one.” He smiled a little. “Do you do it, too?”
“I usually crap out on Thursdays. It gets too hard for me past that.”
“I have to do it in pencil. My cousin does them all in pen and is a pain in the ass about it. We have twelve issues of the Times delivered every morning because it’s the only way no one gets hurt at First Meal.”
Her brows arched. “You live with a dozen of your family?”
“They’re not all blood relatives.”
“Are you in the mafia or something?”
“No.”
She focused on his throat. The line that was there was fading just as fast as the burns, and as she witnessed even more of the swelling disappear… she had a thought that he was different than her, and not just because he was a man.
Or… masculine.
And when she spoke, she surprised herself: “I haven’t been this scared since the night of June twenty-fourth, fourteen years ago.”
“Oh, God, Erika, I’m really sorry—”
When he reached for her hand, she moved it away. “You’ve got to stop apologizing. What you need to do instead is whatever it is up here…” She motioned around the top of her skull. “And then send me back home. I’ll clean up the pieces somehow, God knows I’ve done it before. Besides, if one of those shadows comes after me?” She shook her head. “I’m dead whether I know they exist or not.”
She could not believe she was being so calm. But what choice did she have.
“I want to protect you.”
Erika looked over at him—and did not mean to do a stem-to-stern on the guy. But for one, she was remembering him fighting with that shadow-whatever, and as someone who had been trained in self-defense, it was obvious he had skills. For another…
Well, the view was goddamn spectacular. From the pads of those pecs to the curls of his biceps to that eight-pack he was sporting like he did ten thousand sit-ups before he had a protein bar with his egg whites in the morning—
“I know you want to keep me safe,” she said in a low tone. “Thank you for that. Seriously. But the sad truth about life is that sometimes we can’t always get what we want. And hey, I’ve been fighting for a really long time with things that aren’t actually in front of me. Who knows… maybe I’ll win against a shadow.”
It was a stupid thing to say. Even more stupid to think it could be true. She had seen what that attack had done against a man like this one, and he had seventy-five pounds of muscle on her. At least.
“Just take my memories again,” she told him, “and let me go live my life, however it turns out.”
He was quiet for a very long time. Quiet for an eternity.
And she just sat there. Like a bump on a log, her father would have said.
“Learned helplessness,” she murmured.
Balthazar jerked to attention. “Sorry?”
“I was a psych major in college. Learned helplessness is a maladaptive behavior pattern where someone feels like there’s no cause and effect to their actions. It leads to a collapse in problem-solving strategies and generalized apathy.” She held up her forefinger. “What’s interesting in my case here is not that I can’t see the cause and effect, it’s more like I don’t know what behavior is actually mine or what kind of a world I live in. Anyway, that’s why I’m a zombie—and it’s too bad I can’t rewrite my final paper on this whole thing.”
“Rolling Stones,” he blurted.
“What?”
“The song. I couldn’t remember the song.”
Are we having the same conversation? she wondered.
“You can’t… always get… what you waaannnt.” He cleared his throat and sang a little more loudly. “You can’t always geeeeet what you wannnnt.”
When he stopped there, she said, “Wow. You…”
“Can’t sing at all.”
“Yeah, I mean really. It’s—”
“Bad. Real bad. Couldn’t-hold-a-tune-in-a-basket bad. Alley-cat bad. A step down from tone-deaf.”
Erika started to smile. Then she laughed. “I’m no opera singer, either.”
“I promise never to do it again.”
“No, you don’t have to.” She shrugged. “It’s kind of nice to think that not everything about your body is perfect.”
His eyes shot to hers, and she flushed as she looked away.
And that was when everything changed between them. Sure, they were both sitting where they had been, and he was still getting over—God, slitting his own throat—and she was in another kind of recovery. But suddenly there was a charge in the air.
That had nothing to do with fear.
Maybe she should have stuck with the cheese-eating, date side of things. Because this sexual charge right here? It had nuclear one-night stand written all over it, and given that she had clearly lost her mind… she couldn’t think why such a thing was a terrible idea.