“And you are hungry now, yes?”
Apparently so. I retreated to the bathroom for the briefest of showers.
I came back to find Ranger on the mattress we called our bed. I retrieved the only other thing I’d brought from the island with Lida and took it to him.
Ranger did not notice, too busy sifting through a box of crisps and finding the playlist he wanted.
Heady beats seeping from the speaker he’d installed in the corner of the room, I pulled his shirt over his head to get his attention.
He gave it to me, music and Monster Munch instantly forgotten. “Did you get a dodgy phone call earlier?”
“Dodgy?”
“Rubi said you looked squirrelly.”
“You trust a man who agrees with you about my eyeballs being coloured gelatine?”
“You got eyes like Jelly Tots, luv. Accept it and move on.”
I needed to tell him what Jake had told me. What I had told Cam. But like Rubi, Ranger had a way of making every conversation too ridiculous to weigh me down, and I loved him for that, perhaps more than anything. “It was Jake. He made the deal. He is free—we both are.”
It was so much more than that. But for now, for tonight, it was all Ranger needed to hear. “Fuck.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t mean literally.”
I laughed, flopping back on the mattress as Lida trotted past, casing the space to find a favourite spot. “Neither did I, but when you play this album, it makes me feel a certain way.”
Ranger covered me with his body, bearing down on me with the perfect pressure. “I always feel a certain way about you. You know how hard it is to be around people all day when I’m used to having you all to myself?”
“You speak as if these things do not afflict me too.”
“You’re not an affliction, Vik. You’re everything.”
And this was the other thing about Ranger—about Asher. That he could stop time with a sentence that rooted me to the world, when there had been so many moments in my life I’d wanted it to swallow me whole.
“Can I ask you something?”
Brain shunting, I blinked. “Of course.”
“Embry got in my face about how you’re doing with the junk shit. I told him to do one, then I got to thinking that it had been a while since we talked about it.”
Embry. The man the Rebel Kings calledchaplain, a title that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with all the things I had lacked most of my life. “What did Embry want to know?”
“Nothing specific. It’s his job to be a nosy cunt.”
“Is not nosy to wonder about a drug-addicted criminal moving among your family.”
Ranger bristled, already locked in to defend me from myself.
I quieted him with the kind of kiss he gifted me whenever I found myself needing the most. “It would be a lie to say I neverthink about it. I do, almost every day, but it is easier here than it is on the island. I see Locke, and...”
Emotion choked me.
Ranger waited.
“I see Locke and how strong he is, and it reminds me what men can do when they are loved enough to choose life.”
