“Why do I track them?” I felt him shift, and nodded. He returned his attention to the heavens with a sigh, but not before I smelled myself on his breath. I warmed again like he was still in me. “The irony, I suppose. The idea that something so enormous, that once gave off such heat and light, can collapse in an instant, with such force and density even light can’t escape…”
I sat up on my elbow, and did study him now.
His eyes flicked to me, then away again, and he brought his bottled water up to his lips self-consciously. “It fascinates me.”
“It should frighten you,” I said sharply, because we obviously weren’t speaking of frozen stars anymore. Hunter, sensing my mood shift as clearly as if it was his own-and, who knew, it probably was-inched away and didn’t answer.
“I don’t understand,” I finally said, shaking my head as I sank back down, resting as my eye traced the pattern of the black holes. I didn’t explain what I meant, but I didn’t need to. He’d been so deep inside me he could probably explain me to myself.
“It’s simple,” he said after a time. “The Light in you is magnified because of your darkness. I’m like a child pressing my nose against a windowpane, seeing the source of the light and wanting to warm myself with it.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Because for you it’s like the sun. You’re blinded when looking directly at it.”
“But for you?”
Warm breath passed again over my skin, then the cool slide of one fingertip tracing my hips. Bumps shot along my thigh, tightened my nipples, raised hairs on my arms. Hunter’s whisper was steady as always. “It’s like the touch of twilight, a fleeting and beautiful thing. Even now, in the dark, it feels like waves rolling over my ankles. It makes me think a peaceful balance between the two really can exist.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t feel beautiful or rare. But I couldn’t deny the peace slipping over me, coaxing me to release my questions and sorrows for now, and steal this sliver of time while I could. If I let my vision blur, it even felt like I was floating in that wrongly marked sky, weightless and buoyant amid the remains of dead stars. The power I’d felt before, the aureole obliterating the skin that separated us, was fading. And now, I thought dizzily, I was just tired. So I curled up and finally closed my eyes, drifting off at some point before sunrise, still blind to whatever it was Hunter saw as he continued to stare down at me.
Chandra had been the one to tell Hunter where I was. She’d awoken in the cave at Cathedral Canyon, untied herself in short order-as I knew she would-then hiked back to town, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. She wasn’t a star sign, but she could still move four times as fast as any mortal on foot. Once there she’d contacted the one person she knew could save me from myself. I suppose I should’ve been grateful. If she’d contacted Warren instead of Hunter, I’d be in a secret hospital, unconscious, and wearing someone else’s skin by now.
However, I doubt Chandra had predicted this turn of events, I thought, rising to dress at some point the next afternoon. It was Sunday-the day of Kimber’s metamorphosis and the doppelgänger’s deadline-and I knew I wasn’t the only one in Vegas waking with the distressed realization of what they’d done the night before. Despite the aureole we’d shared, and the solace I’d taken in Hunter’s bed and body, the morning after any ill-considered knee-jerk response was bound to appear sordid in the light of day. It seemed sadly appropriate that Hunter’s makeshift sky had been whitewashed into oblivion in the day’s light.
Hunter wasn’t stupid; he had to suspect I wasn’t making love to him as much as I’d been escaping the haunting image of Ben and Regan together. At least, not at first. Worse, he’d been willing to settle for it, which meant it was less a matter of him taking advantage of me than my exploitation of the perpetual state of hope I knew he lived in. I had exposed that hope. He had let me.
Of course, he also knew the moment I rose from his bed. He didn’t try to stop me, though I felt his gaze on my back and heard the bedcovers rustling as he shifted. I didn’t want to turn around and risk seeing anger-or worse, foolishness-stamped across those stoic features, but I owed him enough to at least look at him. So steeling myself to the expected hostility, I masked my own features and whirled.
He was sitting up, propped where the two walls met, the white sheet draped over him from navel down, though one leg was bent, exposed from thigh to ankle, his foot disappearing again under the covers. He watched me without blinking, everything he’d done and said the night before naked in those dark eyes. He didn’t look ashamed or foolish or apologetic, or anything you’d expect of a man who’d caught a woman sneaking from his bed. And with one short word, he opened to me again.
“Stay.”
My knees almost buckled.
“No,” I said quietly. I laced up the boots to my ridiculous costume, fingers trembling slightly. “I have to make sure he’s okay.”
But we both knew I was lying. If there’d even been a chance of Ben being killed or mortally wounded the night before, we would have both worked to save him then. But Regan hadn’t been killing him. That wasn’t what she’d wanted me to see.
“Why?”
I skipped past the stock replies and straightened to give him the real answer. “He makes me feel soft.”
The dark eyes narrowed. “I thought you didn’t like that.”
But I wanted it all the same, I thought, wincing. How fucked up was that? “There’s a strength in being vulnerable.”
“I know,” he said sharply.
I swallowed hard. He did. He was doing just that by showing me into his workshop via his secret passageway. By lying naked-literally and figuratively-in a bed he’d allowed me to share. By opening his body and mind to me so completely I’d momentarily forgotten myself. But…I sighed.
But Ben.
“I know what you’re thinking, Jo,” Hunter said, his voice so reasonable I was sure he’d rehearsed this during the night. “Peace and quiet sounds good. Some harmless little mortal sounds safe. But it won’t satisfy you for long.”
I wanted to tell him he didn’t know what would satisfy me, but after last night I couldn’t even think it. “Don’t push me, Hunter. I’m being pushed from too many sides right now, and I don’t need it from you.”
“No,” he said evenly. “It’s exactly what you need.”
I covered my face with my hands, slumping slightly, just for a moment. “Please. Just stop.”
He paused…but he didn’t stop. “So what do I make you feel, then? Because it’s something.”
Guilt. Chaos. Divided.
I looked him in the eye, needing to prove I too could be strong and vulnerable at the same time, and thinking the truth would settle things between us once and for all. “Whenever I look at you I feel at war with myself. You make me think of need, like there’s something lacking in myself. That, and violence.”
He winced before he could help himself, looking sad, like he’d trusted me with something fragile and I’d responded by smashing it at his feet.
“Look, Hunter-” I was reaching toward him, but he squeezed his eyes shut and jerked his head.
“You’ll make it worse.”
My frozen silence was making it worse anyway. I glanced down at the workshop floor, the organized clutter of tools and chests and tablets and books. Foam templates spilled from his waste bin, crumpled papers drooping over the drawing table and onto the floor. Chandra’s arrival had obviously interrupted his work. And he’d dropped everything to come to me.
“You know it’s not out there, right?” He huffed humorlessly at my returned look of incomprehension. “The lack you’re talking about. It just goes on and on. And one day you’ll be cruising along, doing the work you’ve championed for years, and suddenly it’ll rear its head, and your conviction fails. All this time, you’ll find yourself thinking, I’ve been a fool.” I swallowed hard as his gaze skittered past me, unseeing before he blinked. “But when it happens? It’s actually a relief. You’ll recognize yourself in the mirror again. It’s the epiphany you’ve been seeking laid out right under your nose.”