Like I'm already dead or disappeared.
"What's wrong?" she asks again, softer now. Her palm presses against my chest, right over the ruined brand. "Legion, talk to me."
I can't. So I deflect.
"You remember that summer I got the dirt bike?"
She goes still in my arms. "What?"
"The dirt bike. When I was fifteen. You were thirteen."
"Well... yes. Of course I remember."
"You had that big fancy thoroughbred your mother bought you. You'd ride her out to Makoshika, and I'd take the bike. Meetin’ up at the trailheads."
Savannah pulls back enough to look at my face. Her eyes search mine, trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing, bringing up ancient history while her ass is still burning from what I just did to her.
"You took me to see the dinosaur fossils," she says slowly. "It was a hundred degrees. I got so sunburned my shoulders blistered."
"I gave you my shirt."
"You did." Her hand moves from my chest to my face, thumb brushing my cheekbone. "You wrapped it around my shoulders and made me wear your stupid baseball cap even though it was way too big for me."
I remember the way she looked—this tiny blonde thing drowning in my clothes, her nose pink from the sun. We hiked three miles into the badlands to see some formation she'd read about in a library book. Fossil beds, or some shit. I didn't care about dinosaurs. I cared about the way her eyes lit up when she talked about things that mattered to her.
"Best summer of my life," I tell her. It comes out rough.
"Mine too." She traces the line of my jaw. "Before everything got complicated."
Before I joined the club. Before she left for boarding school. Before Eleanor started paying me to sit in her studio while she photographed me like I was art instead of a person. Before prison, before Marcus, before I learned how to break things, instead of protect them.
"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it for more than just tonight. For all of it. For being too rough just now, for fucking her ass like I was trying to punish something—her, me, the world. "I shouldn't have?—"
"Don't." She presses her fingers to my lips. "Don't apologize for that. I wanted it. You didn't hurt me. I'm not made of glass, Legion."
But she is. She's made of light, and air, and everything good I've ever touched, and I keep putting my filthy hands on her anyway.
"You're everything clean," I tell her. My voice cracks on the words. "Everything good. And I just keep?—"
"Stop." She kisses me before I can finish the thought. Slow and deep, her mouth soft against mine. When she pulls back, her eyes are wet. "I'm not clean. I'm not good. I'm just... yours. That's all I've ever been."
I kiss her again because I can't fucking help myself. Pour everything I can't say into it—the goodbye I won't speak out loud, the thank you that doesn't go far enough, the love that's going to outlive both of us, and probably burn the world down in the process.
When we break apart, I rest my forehead against hers.
"Thank you," I whisper. "For taking care of me when I was dying. For loving Mercy. For?—"
"You don't need to thank me for loving you." Her voice is fierce. "That's not... it's not something you earn or pay back. It just is."
I think about that. About how people like me don't get loved. We get used. We get feared. We get forgotten in prison cells and buried in unmarked graves when the club decides we're more valuable dead ,than breathing.
Except by her.
She's loved me since she was twelve years old and I was fourteen and neither of us knew what the fuck love even meant.
"You had that pink helmet," I say, because I need to stay in the memory a little longer. Need to live there instead of here. "With the flowers on it."
Savannah laughs, the sound breaking through the heavy air between us. "Oh my god, I forgot about that helmet."
