And if she doesn’t take him back, am I prepared to deal with his state of mind? I already know what it’s like inside of him. It’s Hell. I brought him out of Hell, but he brought Hell along with him. It lives inside him. Will Rose push him over the edge, or unleash something that neither of us want to see?
“Ada,” he says to me gently, his voice breaking through my thoughts. He reaches out and grabs my hand, giving it a tight squeeze. “I’m going to be okay. This is something that needs to happen.”
The energy goes from my palm to his and back again. “You’re reading my mind.”
He shakes his head slightly, a ghost of a smile. “No. I just know you better than I know myself.” Then he finishes the rest of his drink. “Come on. Let’s get you a hand grenade.”
He keeps hold of my hand as we get off the stools and he leads me outside, the bartender wishing us a nice day as we leave.
Outside, he readjusts his grip on my hand, holding it tighter still, and we walk down the street a couple of blocks until we hit Bourbon Street.
And oh boy, I needed a distraction, and this place is that distraction.
It’s pretty early, around dinner time, and yet the place is crawling with drunk people like it’s the middle of the night. There are old people, young people, couples, and an obscene amount of frat boys running around shirtless with beads around their neck, neon green drinks in their hands.
“Oh my god,” I exclaim at the anarchy.
“Told you. It’s trash. But maybe we need a bit of trash. Just a taste.”
“Taste of trash,” I say. “I like that.”
So we head into the crowd and he brings me to the first walk-up bar we see. It’s so loud and chaotic in the line that he ends up paying for two giant things of hand grenades, the voodoo Jedi stuff not working at the moment.
“Here’s to us,” he says to me, voice raised above the din as he hands me my drink. “And here’s to you. For getting us both here. You didn’t have to come with me, but you did. And I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you, Ada.”
God, he looks so damn serious right now.
I try to shake it off, shrugging, smiling. “It was nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” he says, his voice cracking just a little, the kind of crack that makes my chest feel open wide. “It’s everything.”
Okay, I don’t like this.
I don’t like how grave he sounds. This is the kind of thing you say when you say goodbye.
But if I play it off, he’s going to get annoyed.
“I’d do anything for you, big guy,” I admit, just as some drunken idiot, shoves me right into him.
My drink spills, partly on my shirt, the rest onto the ground, and Max immediately puts his arm around me, pulling me into him, and I am so sure that whoever pushed me is about to get his ass fucking beat, if not by Max then by me.
The guy just stands there gawking at us and I look up to see that Max is staring at him, staring at him so hard that I swear his eyes are going dark. There aren’t any flames, so it’s not a demon he’s having a face off with, but even so, this is odd. And a little scary.
Because the douchebag that Max is mad-dogging is blinking hard, his eyeballs going wide, his face going red, like he’s choking in front of us. It’s enough that a few people have stopped their revelry and are gathered around the guy, asking if he’s okay.
Then the guy collapses to his knees and sucks in a deep breath, to the relief of people around him.
Max finally takes his eyes off the guy and then turns, keeping his arm around me, leading me out of the crowd and down the next street.
“What the fuck just happened?” I ask him, but he doesn’t answer, just keeps me pressed against him. “Did you…did you do that?”
We’re still walking, and I suddenly stop, pulling myself out of his arm.
“Stop,” I tell him. “Max…”
He’s breathing hard, giving me a harried look. “I don’t know what happened.”
“You don’t? Your fucking Jedi shit went to the dark side, that’s what. You officially went from Skywalker to Vader.”
“Vader was a Skywalker.”
“Max!” I hiss. “Next time you want to hurt someone, just fucking beat them up the old-fashioned way. Fist to face.”
His nostrils flare as he breathes in sharply through his nose. Then he nods quickly. “You’re right. That wasn’t like me.”
“No. It really wasn’t. Did you even know you could do that?”
He shakes his head. “No. I just…thought about it and it happened. That’s never happened before.”
“You’ve thought about something like that?”