Page 79 of The Triangle

“I believe you.”

That hangs in the room as I sip my tea and he picks at the label on his beer bottle. Then, quite unexpectedly if I’m being honest, he says, “You know why, right?”

“Why what?”

“Why I don’t. Why I can’t. Why I couldn’t. Before.”

While I don’t think he’s being rhetorical, I don’t prompt a response. I just sit and wait for him to decide if he feels like baring himself further.

He does.

“It’s because of the cost,” he says.

I cock my head to the side. “Which cost? Sorry, man. You’ll have to explain. You know I rarely take cost into consideration.”

He rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Couple things, I guess.” He takes another drink before putting the bottle down and saying, “With Christine… well, I mean, shit. With her. She was a kid. Y’know. Seen her grow up. Watched every fucking minute. Just felt. I dunno.”

I nod. I do understand him. Were I saddled with a conscience, I likely would have felt the same.

“But then add you… you and her…” He breathes in deeply, letting it out in a long sigh through his nose. “The way I survive… the way I’ve always survived and been able to keep going… is by never letting myself believe that I care about or… love… anything enough to be beholden to it. You know what I’m saying?”

I take a moment and nod. “I believe I do.”

“If you don’t love anything… if you can walk away from anything at any time… they can’t hurt you. They can’t get to you. You know that shit you said earlier about us being stronger together than apart or whatever?”

I nod again.

“Yeah. I don’t see it that way. I felt like if I ever gave over… if I let myself really fuckin’ give in to my feelings and shit… that’d be like fuckin’ kryptonite to me. Because then I’d have something in my life that would be too precious to lose. And if I did lose it, I wouldn’t be able to bounce back.”

He tips his head back and says, “You two always saw me as the conscience or the fuckin’ cautious one or whatever.”

He looks down at the island in front of where he sits. Shakes his head a tiny bit. Scrunches the corners of his eyes like he’s deciding how to say what it is that he wants to say and then starts with, “Shit isn’t morals, man.”

Then he pauses. Picks at the label on the beer bottle once again. He pushes the bottle away, sits back, and says…

“It’s self-preservation.”

That hangs in the air as we keep eye contact. It takes a long, long while before whatever this odd lump is that has formed in my throat diminishes enough that I can try to speak.

I’m just about to respond when I hear a sound from across the room. A yawning sound. A tiny squeaking yawn that makes my heart fill with yearning.

Christine stretches out like a cat, blinks her eyes open, and says, “Did I fall asleep?”

CHAPTER THIRTY - CHRISTINE

“You could fall asleep in the middle of a goddamned hurricane,” Danny says, answering my fake question.

“She did that once,” Alec says. And then he sorta laughs. “Typhoon Hopea.”

“In my defense,” I say, getting up from the chair and walking into the kitchen to search for food, “we weren’t anywhere near that thing.” We were lying low in the Shengsi Islands, which wasn’t in the direct path of the storm, but it was still intense enough to shut the local villages down for a day.

Danny grins at me as he takes a draw of his beer.

“What? I can’t help it. Storms relax me.”

I was sleeping. To answer my own question. At first, anyway. I can sleep anywhere, pretty much any time, through everything you can imagine. I mean, I’m not narcoleptic. I don’t nod off during a fight. And when I’m in assassin mode I’m all in. But after, when shit calms down, I shut down. It’s almost like I have an off button.

Comes in handy in lots of ways. Means I’m always fresh when the next bit of bullshit comes up. Also means I hear things that aren’t always meant for me.