“I hate fucking reading. Tell me about it instead?”
Embry stared at me a moment. Then shrugged. “It’s about the insanity of war. Ridiculous chaos.”
“Autobiography then?”
“Maybe.” Embry sat up and his messy black hair fell into his face.
God, I wanted to tuck it back so bad my fingers spasmed. I settled for digging the bocadillo from my jacket pocket. “Present from my ma. She put manchego in yours. Reckon she prefers you to me.”
“I’m nicer to her.” Embry reached for the sandwich, swapping it for the blunt in his fingers. “And I answer her texts. Last time I spoke to Irina, she told me you hadn’t answered her calls for three weeks.”
It was simple truth, not an accusation. “If she’s calling, she ain’t dead.”
Embry unwrapped the bocadillo and took a bite. Then he levelled me with the kind of look he’d been flooring me with from the start. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Your mum loves you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t love her?”
This was not what I’d come up here for. I sank back on my heels, then let my body roll out flat, enjoying the sun-baked roof against my sore spine, the burn of sweet weed smoke in my lungs. “We have a fucked-up relationship. You know this already.”
“The bare facts of a situation don’t make it understandable. Feels like you’re punishing her for something.”
“Maybe I am.” The words slipped out unbidden.
Embry lowered the sandwich, aware before I was that I’d let something go I never had before. “Okay. But if what she did was so bad, why maintain a relationship with her at all?”
I took another deeper pull on the joint. The urge to close my eyes and shut him out was there, like it always was when we danced this line, but I was knackered. Depleted. I just wanted to be with him and soak him up. I didn’t have the willpower to do anything else. “It wasn’t her fault. She did it for the right reasons, but it fucked my whole life up, and every time I think I’m over it, the pain comes back and I wish she was dead.”
This time, my eyes closed of their own accord. But I didn’t lose Embry. I heard him wrap the sandwich up and set it aside. Then I felt him next to me, stretched out on the roof, his shoulder touching mine, and a glowing ember of heat that spread through my entire body.
My lips tingled, remembering the last time we’d been alone together. If we were different people, whole and unscarred by this fucked up world, I might’ve rolled over. Faced him. Leaned forward and pressed my lips to his again. I might’ve eased myself on top of him, pinned him down with my heavier weight and felt every part of him moulded to me.
But that world was a fantasy. We were what we were.
We wereus.
Embry sighed. He shifted again and the fantasy in my head reversed and became reality.
He rolled over and cupped my jaw, thumb stroking my scar. He buried his face in my neck for a fleeting, beautiful moment. “You smell of my favourite things.”
“Sweat and weed?”
He snorted a quiet laugh. “My other favourite things.”
I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. Embry was on his side, head pillowed on one hand while the other remained on my face. He was funny about scents and smells, a quirk that had been more pronounced since he’d got hurt. No one else took much notice, but I did, and his favourites had become mine.
Under his watchful gaze, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a tube of Polo mints, peeling back the foil and sliding one into my mouth. In my head, I kept it on my tongue and offered it to him, sohistongue was on mine instead of licking his bottom lip as if he hadno fucking ideawhat that did to me.
In reality, I popped another sweet free of the foil and held the packet out to him.
Embry took the mint and slipped it between his lips. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” But I wasn’t done. In my other pocket, I found the only reason I’d stopped on my way home. I closed my fingers around the small brown bottle and fished it from my pocket. “Lemon oil. You ran out, right?”
Embry’s sharp gaze softened. “How do you notice these things before I do?”
“You’re a scatty motherfucker, chaplain.”
