I sighed.Couldn’t you just focus on resting?
“No, I care, Zack, I really do,” I said. “I care about you a lot. More than I thought I would. I’m not supposed to fall for a younger guy who’s a biker. But here I am, and I’m here because you’re so much more than those things. But…”
“But you know now there’s no separating parts of me,” he said. “I’m not sure that there ever was, but now it’s definitive.”
And even if I accept that and try and walk away by saying I’m not a part of you, the Bandits may not allow that to happen.
“And what’s odd for me, too, is that I find myself liking that part of you more. You know? Like that part of you is what allowed you to rescue me.”
I sighed.
“But is it ever going to end? I know we brought it up, but we never did get a definitive answer. Is the fighting ever going to end?”
Zack grimaced.
“I’d like to believe it will,” he said. “I’d like to believe that we finish the Bandits and then we all live happily ever after. But…”
He looked like he was struggling with whether or not to tell me what was on his tongue. I had to remind myself to do the same.
“There’s a guy named King—”
“The guy that got me involved.”
He looked at me askance.
“He’s the guy that sent the runner to me that got me to the Bandits’ location in the first place,” Justine said. “I’m sure he’s got his hands deep in a lot of places.”
“And two of those places are Arizona and Las Vegas, where he’s located,” Zack said. “We’ve had long conversations with the original chapter of the Black Reapers to take care of this shit once and for all. Steele and I didn’t have any luck, but when Cole woke up, he said he was going to have some long talks with his brother. So maybe that will work. But the point is, they have expressed serious concern about getting involved. They won their fight; they don’t want another.”
He sighed like a man who knew that he was exposing some hypocrisy of himself.
“And now, when we learned that King is elsewhere, we also don’t want to fight, even though we know we may wind up doing so.”
He reached out and squeezed my hand gently. I took it back, interlacing my fingers with his. It was a small gesture, but it told me that regardless of how this conversation went, we’d still care for each other.
“So I don’t know. If you want my honest opinion, once we do beat these assholes to the ground, we’ll probably want a hiatus of some sort. A few months to kick back and relax. But as long as King is pulling strings, we’re probably going to get drawn back in to fight at some point.”
As much as I liked…maybe even more…Zack, as much as I cared for him, hearing that terrified me.
I saw the stress that Tara, Elizabeth, and Katie lived with. I couldn’t say with scientific precision what it was doing to their long-term health, but I could certainly say it wasn’t helping it. I knew that the closer I got to Zack, the more I’d put myself at risk.
But could I really separate myself? Really? Even if I stopped seeing Zack, there were still security risks. I’d need help from the Reapers one way or another.
“Maybe we just need to take some time to ourselves to figure things out,” I said, though I was finding the words bitter to say. “Maybe the timing isn’t right.”
“I can tell you this much: I’d at least like to be on my own two feet before making a decision.”
We shared a gentle laugh at that as he squeezed my hand once more. It felt so odd to be holding hands and laughing together while talking about how it might not work out.
“Let’s wait a bit,” he said. “Let me recover, we’ll spend some time, and then we’ll figure it out.”
Only then, when I saw his smile, did I realize how we were coming at this from two very different viewpoints despite largely saying the same thing.
I looked to the future and saw pessimism. I worried about what I could lose. I worried that the Bandits would come after me more, and we’d never have peace.
Zack looked to the future and saw optimism. He saw that we’d each done so much for each other, and we just needed a chance to breathe. Once that happened, then we could be happily ever after.
It tore at me. Was I making the wrong decision? Was I making it harder on myself to delay this?Yes and yes.
