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“Thank you.” It was heartfelt.
“One learns coping mechanisms over time—”
“Or one goes insane?”
“Some would say I already am.”
“They’d be wrong.”
We slid to a stop at a crossroads, and Pritkin turned slightly in his seat to look at me. “And how would you know?”
We were close enough that I could see his long, sandy eyelashes, almost close enough to count the whiskers of the end-of-day beard shading his jaw. He hadn’t had a chance to torture his hair yet, and it was looking soft and oddly flat, and was blowing slightly in the breeze coming across the windshield. It made him look younger somehow, gentler, sweeter....
I mentally rolled my eyes at myself. Yeah, sure.
Pritkin was annoying, stubborn, secretive, impatient and rude. He had the tact of a Parris Island drill sergeant and the charm of a barbed-wire fence. He regularly made me want to slap him and other people want to shoot him, and that was without even trying. I’d probably yelled at him more than anybody else in my entire life, and I’d known him less than two months.
And yet he was also loyal and honest and brave and weirdly kind. Most of the time, I didn’t understand him at all. But I knew one thing.
“I grew up with some genuinely crazy men,” I told him harshly. “You’re not one.”
“Then what am I?”
I pushed a strand of wildly waving hair out of his eyes. It just wouldn’t behave for shit, would it? Kind of reminded me of the man.
“Pritkin,” I said simply. It sort of summed up the whole, crazy package.
His lips twitched. “Do you know, no one else calls me that?”
“What about the guys in the Corps?”
“They usually call me by my given name if they know me, or by my rank if they do not.”
I thought about that. For some reason, it made me happy. “Good.”
He shook his head, refusing to let the smile out. I don’t know why. Like it might damage something.
“Where do you want to go?”
I sighed. “Back to the suite.”
“Are you sure? We can make other arrangements, and there’s the fact that . . .”
“That what?”
“That Jonas won’t like it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Does it matter?”
He did smile slightly then, and put the car in gear. “Now you sound like a Pythia.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I guess I fell asleep in the car, because I didn’t remember getting back. Or getting into pink-striped shorty pj’s. Or falling headfirst into bed. But I must have. Because I woke up tangled in my own sheets, the pillow half over my head and sunlight leaking in through a crack in the drapes.
I rolled over, feeling groggy and thickheaded and gritty-eyed and yucky. It was so much like yesterday that, for a minute, I thought it had all been a dream. But even my dreams weren’t that bizarre. And then I tried
to move, and immediately knew it had been real enough.
