I drew back, breathless. “You are afraid of this. I am afraid of you.”
Ranger gripped my chin. “Why are you scared of me?”
“Because loving you might be something else I cannot live without.”
“You love me, Vik?”
Yes. But the word caught in my throat. As if the sky would fall the second I spoke it aloud. The very moment I admitted to myself and to him that of course I loved him. Ranger.Asher. He was so strong, so vibrant, so wonderfully and brutally real. He was so beautiful as he simmered that dark stare at me that he took my breath away. “I would like to make a deal with you.”
Ranger’s kiss-reddened lips twisted into a shadowed smirk. “Let me guess, you packed a pineapple or some shit and you want me to eat it while you fly us to the fucking moon.”
“You are ridiculous.”
“So?”
“So. . . you are scared of heights?”
“No.”
“Of flying then?”
Not denying it, Ranger dropped his face to my shoulder and heaved a low sigh.
It was the easiest thing in the world to rub his back and tangle my fingers in the messy hair at the nape of his neck.
To kiss him again.
It was the hardest thing to stop. “I need to fly,” I whispered. “It might be the only thing that saves us. But... I need to be with you. Because you are the only soul who has ever truly savedme.”
Ranger dug his fingers into my shoulders. “Your employer saved you—Lockefucking saved you.”
“I do not want to do the things with Locke that I want to do with you.”
Comprehension and compassion warmed his face. “I know you want me, Vik. I want you too. But even if you somehow talk me onto this death shed, you don’t owe me anything. Not like that, anyway.”
“What would I owe you?”
He shrugged. “What you’re already doing, but I’d expect it forever and a few more days for luck.”
“You are talking about sobriety?”
“I’m talking about junk.” Ranger eased back from me. I braced for the distance I expected him to put between us, but he gripped the chopper’s frame and steppedoverme instead, levering himself into the aircraft, the luxury interior as lost on him as it had been on me when I’d bought it. “I was psyching myself up to bang some brown with you—cos that’s the only way you’re getting to do it while I’m around. But I guess there’s more than one way of getting high, and I’m less scared I’ll like this one enough to keep doing it.”
He was comparing the filthy rush of heroin to the freedom of being in the air. Because he knew which one I would choose. Because he knew I was weak.
But watching him peer around the chopper as if he expected it to combust at any moment, I did not feel weak. Instead, I felt that if I could share this one thing with him, I could do anything. “To be clear.” I hauled myself into the aircraft. “You are saying that you will fly with me if I do not smoke heroin again?”
“Stay cleanforever.” Ranger reached where Lida sat and scratched her ears. “Otherwise, what’s to stop you getting fucked up the second this death ride is over?”
“Forever is a long time.”
“Then you have to decide how much you want this.”
I could not tell if we were still talking about flying. Or if the distinction mattered. Just that I would sooner die than lie to him. “I cannot promise you forever. I tried once, with Jake, and I betrayed him.”
Ranger folded his long body into a seat. His gaze bored into me, testing the truth of my words. My intent. “You didn’t betray him. Addiction did.”
“The semantics aren’t important. I still told him I would not do something, and then I did it, and he could not look at me for so long—” I pursed my lips. I was used to being without Jake, but those long weeks when we had breathed the same air while living like strangers still hurt.
