Strike (26 page)

“How did you get through it?” he finally asks, although he won't look at me.

The pause draws out long as I wait for him to elaborate. He doesn't.

“Do you mean . . . last week?”

He nods.

“I cried a lot and hugged my dog.”

He shakes his head and looks at me, really looks at me. “No, I mean . . . how did you live with yourself? I can't stop seeing that old man's face, his surprise and confusion and shock as he fell over. I did that. And I don't want to be the kind of person who does that.”

A few tears slip out, and his hands are shaking, so I sit on the bed, against the headboard, and pull him back into the cage of my legs so that he's leaning against me like I'm a pillow. It's strangely intimate, but I want to be able to answer him honestly without him looking into my eyes.

“Okay, so first of all? I'm not over it. You know about the nightmares. I relive it, all of it, while I'm asleep. Every night, every person, every bullet. And then my brain shows me all the other things that could've happened, in the truck and in Sherry's house and every time I rang a doorbell. I've seen myself shot full of holes and burned alive and left for dead on a lawn covered in frost. I don't know how long it's going to take before I go back to normal, or if I'll ever be normal again. I never had panic attacks before, and now it's like I have one ten times a day. My heart never slows down. I'm scared of doorknobs and shirt buttons. I think this is PTSD, but I don't have Internet, so I'm not sure. So don't think that I'm okay, because I'm nowhere close to okay. Okay?”

He nods against my chest. “Okay.”

“Okay. So here's how I think it happens. At each moment that goes wrong, you have two choices: You die or they die. Right?”

“I guess.”

“No!” It comes out as a shout, so I focus on making my voice calm again. “No. You don't get to say that. When I was standing on your front lawn and the red clock in the truck dash started counting down, you have to understand that it was me or your dad. Actually, me and my mom or your dad. There was no in-between. Valor didn't give a third choice. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“So from that moment, when I chose to shoot your dad, every moment after that meant that if I let someone else go, then I was wrong about your dad. With each person I shot, I had to shoot the next, or the previous marks meant nothing and my mom and I had to die anyway. It's like I had to carry them with me.” I put my cheek against his hair. “They're always with me. Weighing on me. Drowning me. So the best thing I can do is keep swimming and not sink. I want to forget them so it won't hurt anymore, but if I forget them . . .” I can barely swallow. I shake my head and whisper, “If I forget them, then I'm a monster. I let Valor make me a monster. I don't deserve to forget them. It can't get easy. The killing.”

“One of my therapists taught me a trick,” he says, and his voice creaks and cracks. “Have you ever heard of a memory palace?”

“Is it anything like Château Tuscano?”

He chuckles and resettles against me, relaxing just a little. “No. It's a way to remember things. Like, you build this palace in your
mind, or maybe it just looks like your house, and when you want to remember things, you associate them with physical parts of the house. Like, you always put your keys by the front door of your memory palace, so if you need to remember to take your homework to school, you mentally put your homework and your keys right by the front door. He was trying to help me catch up on schoolwork and remember all the shit I had to do for Max and community service, because I kept messing up. But I sort of used it for the opposite purpose.”

“You made an un-memory palace?”

“Kind of. I built this broken-down Victorian haunted house to keep my bad memories locked up. I didn't want to remember all the horrible things I said to my mom, all the bad shit I did with Mikey. I didn't want to remember him anymore, didn't want to think about the past. So every time I had one of those thoughts, I imagined using a skeleton key to unlock the front door of this old green house, I walked up the creaking stairs, and I went into this locked room in the attic that had a huge pigeonhole desk. And I put the memory in one of those drawers and closed and locked it. And then I could forget about it.”

Without realizing it, I've started stroking his hair, running my fingers through it. I try to imagine this place he's built, the drawers full of locked, quiet memories.

“Did it work?” I ask.

He nods, leans into my touch. “I'm going to put the memory of that old man away now. But before I did it, I wanted to know if that was wrong. It feels good to lock up stupid, childish things I did a long time ago. I locked up taking out that Valor card in my brother's name, and I locked up watching Mikey OD, and . . . all this other stuff. But am I allowed to forget choices I made that . . . I'm still not sure were right? That's why I wanted to know. How you do it.”

I take a deep breath. In my mind, I'm walking past Wyatt's old Victorian and taking a rusted key from under the mat of the house next door. This one is lavender going gray, with a tower and garrets and little curlicues on the corners. I unlock it and walk up the stairs, which creak, just like Wyatt's. I find the attic room, and instead of a desk, I have a card catalog. One by one, I open drawers and put away the people I've killed, almost like a mortician sliding bodies into the freezer at the morgue. A drawer for Robert Beard. One for Eloise Framingham. A nameless, rapist thug I left to die in the dirt, gut shot. Ken Belcher. Alistair Meade. Sherry. Two more thugs. My ex–best friend, Amber. My uncle Ashley. Crane goons who dared to steal my dog. A Valor suit. And now, even if I didn't actually kill her, Mrs. Hester and her cat Keith. I lock the door behind me and open my eyes. Wyatt's sitting up now, looking at me carefully, hungrily. I put a hand on his stubbled cheek and look directly into his brownie-batter eyes.

“I think you did the right thing today. Accidents happen, and you can't blame yourself. If you hadn't shot that guy, I might be
dead. You might be dead. There's no way to know. But I do know that every time we strike back at Valor, we're doing honor to their memories. All these people, dead, are not our fault. You can't blame the gun for shooting someone. Valor turned us into weapons, and it's not our fault.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod. “I have to be. I like the Forgetting House. It's a way to forget them . . . the victims . . . while doing honor to them. Putting them to rest.” And I feel lighter. I do. I just hope I can keep that attic room locked for a long time. I don't want to fill any more drawers.

He goes quiet, idly stroking his flat fingers up and down my arm. After a few moments, he takes a deep, sighing breath and turns around to sit cross-legged in front of me.

“Did you lock up the old man in your Forgetting House?”

He grins and nods.

“Do you feel better?”

Wyatt licks his lips and leans in to kiss me, so gently, just a peck. “I'm working on that part. All that adrenaline today—it's still in me. It's crazy. I feel so alive.”

“Almost dying will do that to you.”

I go warm all over, and something rises up in me, like an animal, making me want to grab him and pull him down over me on the bed. We've never kissed with any freedom, with any time. An entire
bed and all night? No one to kill on the other side? I'm starving for him. But he's going slow, so I'll go slow.

The peck turns into a long, lapping kiss that leaves me breathless, and I slide farther down against the pillows. Wyatt goes with me, his legs tangling with mine and his fingertips tracing my cheeks, my nose, my jaw. I slip a hand under his tee and stroke up his back, rubbing a thumb over the knobs of his spine and the wide wings of his shoulder blades. A groan rumbles against my lips, almost a purr.

He pulls away and looks down at me, fond and sweetly smiling. “I need you to know three things,” he says. I nod, my lips parting. “For one, I'm sorry I snapped at you last week for saying you just wanted to not be alone. I get that now. You weren't trying to use my body. . . .” I blush. “You were trying to feel human again, weren't you? Trying to feel . . . real. Alive.” I nod and bloom with affection for him. I didn't know how badly he'd wounded me with that one, nor how much his apology would mean to me.

“Thank you,” I say, and it comes out all breathy.

“Second, I'm not a virgin. You said you were, but I'm not, and I thought you should know that.”

When he says the word “virgin,” I blush redder . . . and go warm all over. Does he want the same thing I want? Does he know about the condoms? All I can do is say, “Hey, at least one of us knows what they're doing, right?”

His eyes go dark, his lashes lower, and he kisses me again, slow
and deep, before pulling away to say, “Right. And the third thing is that I think I'm falling in love with you.”

Outside the realm of Valor, this is possibly the most unexpected thing anyone has ever said to me, and it's like what happens when you hold a piece of paper up to a match. I am the paper, and I want to be consumed by this boy. He must be thinking the same thing, because before I can answer him, he's stretched out on top of me, his weight on his elbows and his mouth on mine.

It gets awkward only once, when I tell him where the condoms are.

I see now why they call it “the afterglow.” Because what we just did? Was like being on fire. By which I mean it was very hot and hurt a bit, but it was beautiful, and now I feel glowy.

“Told you I was just using you,” I say, stretching luxuriously, completely naked and comfortable for the first time in a long time.

“Yeah. I'm really suffering.” Wyatt stretches out beside me under the covers. He's asked me several times if I'm all right, if he hurt me, if it was okay. It's weird to see him so insecure and confident at the same time. “But you never said anything. About what I said.”

My mouth drops open. Am I ready to say it? Do I even know what it is?

“I think I might be feeling the same way,” I say, and I nudge him with my forehead. It's easier to be physical than to match words to feelings. There was an eloquence to what we just did that I'd like to think showed him how I feel. But words help too.

He wraps his arm around me, and I settle myself in the crook of his shoulder. Even yesterday, it would've felt very, very strange to be in a guy's bare armpit, but now it feels . . . mature? Natural? At least animalistic. I belong here, up against him.

After kissing my forehead, he takes a full-body breath, relaxing against my side. “My dad once got really drunk on my parents' anniversary and told me that I should only marry someone who lights up every time I walk into a room. He said that was more important than anything else. That he knew their marriage was over when he would walk into a room and my mom would look away or sigh or look down with a little V between her eyebrows, like she was disappointed in him before he'd even said anything.”

“That's so sad.”

“Right? I don't even remember noticing them, how they interacted. I don't think I ever saw her light up.” He pauses, and I hold my breath. “But you do.”

“I do?”

His lips brush over my forehead, and I close my eyes and hum a sigh.

“Yeah. Every time you see me, no matter how horrible I look, no matter how covered in blood I am, no matter what sort of horrible things we've had to do, you light up. Like a lightbulb. Like Matty when I give her half a burger.”

“I light up like a fat dog, huh?”

He laughs like a little kid and snuggles me closer.

And that's when some absolute asshole decides to bang on our door.

It's not a friendly knock, not an, “Anybody home?” knock.

It's a “You'd better be wearing a shirt and holding a gun, sucker” knock.

Matty barks at the door. When it opens, her barks turn to growls. I'm already shimmying back into my clothes, commando and braless in my desperation to be covered.

“Didn't we lock the door?” I hiss.

“We did,” Wyatt says. He's barefoot and shirtless in his jeans, gun already in hand, and no wonder I light up whenever he walks in the door. He's a damn good-looking guy when he's acting lethal. And he's the kind of guy who goes first when scary knocks are at the door.

I tuck my gun into the back of my waistband and follow him as he peeks out the bedroom door and into the hall.

“Can we help you?” he shouts in his tough-guy voice.

“I'm here to speak to Patsy.” The guy's voice is gruff and familiar.

“Maybe you could wait outside?” Wyatt says, opening the door just enough to show his gun, probably. “We need a minute.”

I peek around Wyatt and see a bearish guy in his forties with a big beard and a beanie cap—the guy who took the laptops away from Wyatt in the high school gym the night we met the CFF. He sees me looking, and his eyes lock on mine and narrow.

“I'm not here to hurt you,” he says. “I'm not a Crane. You can come on out.”

But I don't see a gun. And I do not, in fact, wish to come on out.

Wyatt opens the door and reaches up with one arm to hold the jamb, his other arm dangling the Glock. I recognize the posture of a pissed-off ape showing muscles and confidence as he hides his prize from a challenger.

“You're not her boss. So who are you, and why did you break into our trailer?”

The guy smirks, blue eyes twinkling. “I'm the guy who helped her debug the Valor car today. I heard she did a good job. And I didn't break in. I've got a key.” He holds it up, dangling from a carabiner. “Figured she could use one.” He looks around, sniffs the air, and frowns. “Didn't know there were two of you shacked up in here. Nice dog, though.”

“Not much of a guard dog,” I say, feeling testy.