Norah shrugged. “I know.”
“Have you two…”
Norah felt the heat prickling her cheeks, and she giggled nervously. “You mean, now? Like, here? In Louisiana?”
“Yeah! You can’t tell me nothing’s happened since you’ve been here. A month together with all this built-up tension and angst, and then the fact that it’s the damn apocalypse! This is the stuff romance novels are made of.”
“Not one I’d want to read,” Norah said, laughing again.
“You have to admit, there’s something kind of romantic about all of it. Being stuck out here, in the swamp, saving the world. Come on.”
Norah sneered at her, but Jamie was right. It wasn’t the rose petals and candlelight society always associates with romance, but something about finding Chase again, in the most unpredictable of places, at the worst of times, was…sexy. It was invigorating. There was that word again. Norah had long since accepted herself as an adrenaline junkie. Before the army, it was diving off dangerous cliffs and hang gliding into the jungle. Then it was AK47s and IEDs and grabbing injured soldiers from the battlefield with their limbs hanging half off. Now, apparently, it was reuniting with what had surely turned into her most toxic love affair, in the middle of Armageddon, where they were expected to be superheroes. Wow. Norah knew she was an adrenaline junkie, but when she thought about it, she might be a little sick too.
“If I tell you—”
“It’s just between us,” Jamie said, reassuringly. “Once the sun comes up, this conversation never happened.”
It was almost poetic, the way the early morning sun was just now starting to poke through the tree line. Norah was sad their friendship had to disappear with the night. But boundaries felt more important than ever that day.
“We’ve kissed. Once. It was a horrible mistake.” Norah’s words came out in one jumbled heap.
“Was it though?” Jamie cocked her head, teasing her.
“Of course it was! We’re working together. We’re here to stop this virus, not make out in army jeeps.”
“Was itreallya mistake though?” Jamie let her tongue linger on the word “really,” drawing it out as excruciatingly long as possible.
“Yes.” Norah refused to look at her. “Okay. No. I mean, it didn’tfeellike a mistake. But I know it was.”
Jamie lifted an eyebrow doubtfully at her. “You mean your brain says it was a mistake. Because you’re coworkers. And you’re on the job.”
“And she hurt me. Were you listening to the part where I told you how she abandoned me when my brother died?”
“I was listening. But is it possible that, maybe, just maybe, that was a long time ago? And she really has spent the last fifteen years regretting that mistake?”
Norah wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe that more than anything. But the idea felt naive and dangerous. Danger was fine when it came to jumping off the edge of a ravaged cliff. But not when it came to her heart.
“Unlikely.”
“So your head told you kissing Chase was bad. But what about the rest of you?”
“What do you mean, the rest of me?” Norah asked innocently.
Jamie laughed slightly patronizingly.
“You know, there are other parts of you besides your brain, Norah. Like your heart? Or your body? What did those parts have to say about the kiss?”
Norah went silent. She hadn’t really considered that other things were in play besides just what her head was telling her. Not when she’d always relied so heavily on it to steer her right.
“My heart? Well, shit.” Norah didn’t swear often, but the moment felt pointed. “I try not to make a habit of listening to it too often. But I think it was, I don’t know, intrigued by the kiss.”
“Intrigued?”
“Yes. Intrigued. I’ll put it like this. It remembered. My heart remembered everything. All the good. All the bad. All of Chase. It remembered everything.”
Jamie nodded, seeming to like this answer. “And the rest of you?”
Norah tittered self-consciously. She wasn’t used to talking about sex. Especially not lately, with her only friends being the elderly Mrs. Brooks and a group of guys from the base who still used terms like “going to Pound Town.”
