Page 56 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I put the USB drive on the table in front of me and look at it.

The kitchen is the best room in the farmhouse. Wide oak table that could seat ten. Windows that look out over the dark flat of the fields. A wood burner in the corner that someone has kept banked, throwing a low amber light across the flagstone floor.

I sit in the kitchen staring at nothing, I put both hands on my stomach and I stay like that for a while.

Just the two of us.

Not the war, not Xaden, not the cartel, not Fiona, not the choices I've made or the ones I still have to make.

Just this.

The quiet extraordinary fact of it.

I have been so busy surviving that I have not once allowed myself to simply be with it. To acknowledge that there is a life inside me that did not choose this and is growing regardless, that will arrive in a world I am still in the process of making safer, that will belong to me and to a man who does not yet know how to hold what he feels without breaking it.

We're going to figure it out,

I think. Not a promise. I'm too honest with myself for promises I can't guarantee. Just the intention of it. The direction.

I close my eyes.

To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.

Both of us.

Behind me, I hear Carn moving around the kitchen. The low sound of a cupboard. The soft percussion of something being set down on the counter. He does it with a deliberate quietness, the way he does everything when he thinks I need calm rather than noise, and I let the sounds wash over me and try to just be in the room.

To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.

I breathe.

“He gave you his hoodie,” Carnage says from behind me.

Not a question.

“He took my shirt,” I say. “He was checking me for a wire.”

A pause. The quiet sound of something being poured.

“And then he gave you his hoodie,” Carnage repeats.

I look at the USB drive.

“Don't make it something it isn't,” I say, because those were Xaden's words and they are the safest words I have right now, the most useful container for something I don't have the capacity to examine tonight.

Carn sets a mug down in front of me. Hot water, honey, a slice of lemon, the exact combination he's been making me since the first week we knew each other, when I was strung out from the aftermath of a panic attack and he appeared in the kitchen at two in the morning without being asked and made this without asking what I wanted.

I wrap both hands around it and watch as he places a piece of toast in front of me, I force myself to eat half because the nausea has given way to the specific hollow ache of not having eaten properly in two days.

“I'm not making it anything,” he says, pulling out the chair across from me and lowering himself into it in the careful, measured way he's been moving all night, the way that tells me exactly how much the parking lot cost him. “I'm just noting the facts.”

“The facts are that I'm going to that apartment in an hour to hand over Fiona's file and plan the next move in a war that I started. I need to be clear-headed.” I look at him across the table. “That's the only thing that matters tonight.”

His pale blue eyes hold mine.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” I echo.