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“Siren…stop.”
She looks over her shoulder, wide-eyed, like I’ve just caught her doing something naughty.
I wipe my forehead, where my hair is dripping into my eyes. “You can’t even lift your arm up straight.”
“I can.” She holds her chipping stone up, and my own shoulder aches with sympathetic pain.
“Go lie down. And in a few hours,” I lie, “we can swap shifts.”
She turns away from me, and then back toward me, lips pursed and her eyebrows drawn down. “Promise?” She looks sulky.
“That we’ll switch shifts?” I nod. “We both need to get some rest so we can keep at this until we get it.”
She exhales and nods once. Her hair’s falling into her eyes, and her face sags with exhaustion.
“I’ll wake you in five hours. Or six if that works better.”
“Absolutely not. Three and a half at most.” She gives me a pointed look I’ve come to recognize. I put one toe out of line, and those slightly scrunched eyebrows go full-on pissed off and her pert mouth pulls into a disapproving frown.
“Yes ma’am.” I salute her. “Three and a half it is.”
“And then it’s your turn. I’m enforcing that,” she says as she stalks past me.
“Do it.”
I sift through the rubble quietly as she goes to sleep. When I’m sure she’s out, I walk around what remains of the rock pile and sit on one of the larger stones with my back to her. I take a few deep breaths until the anxious hum that’s buzzing through me eases just a little. Then I rub my head and eyes and knead the inside of my wrist—a pressure point that’s supposed to help you keep from puking.
Fuck.
I run my hands back through my hair a few more times before I stand up, grab the hammer, and go at the cave’s mouth like my life depends on it. Over the course of a few hours, I bring another three or four inches of stone crumbling down before my hands are shaking too bad to keep going and I’m seeing bursts of light behind my eyes.
Fuck this.
I wedge my palms against the boulder, bend my knees, and shove as hard as I can. I push until I feel my heartbeat in my eyebrow
s and I’m groaning at the pain from my shoulder. When Finley stirs, I drop into a crouch. I hold my head and feel my eyes sting.
Jesus.
I just need to lay down for a second. I walk to the sleeping bags, feeling my knees shake. They’ve been hurting kind of bad for the last few hours. The joints in my arms, too. I stop beside Finley, looking down at her as lantern light plays on her face.
When I ducked behind the slab of rock that hung over the cave’s mouth, I didn’t realize that there was a fucking cave. I just had to put us behind something, somewhere out of the rocks’ way. About the time I realized we were fucked—I had wrapped myself around Finley and was getting smacked to shit by big rocks—one of my legs went into the hole. I tried to get my balance, and instead we fell through. While I was checking Finley over—she still wasn’t moving, and I was scared she’d gotten hurt bad in the fall—rocks came pouring in. A few seconds later, it was a done deal.
I blow out a long, quiet breath. When I’m in my bag beside hers, I shut my eyes and let my chest pump, let my jaw clench, let my fingers knead my shoulder till my nails break the skin. I press my lips shut so I don’t groan.
I just need to get some sleep. I scoot a little closer to her, close enough so I can smell that nice, flowery smell.
My heart’s beating fast. I can do my meditative breathing till it isn’t. I know how to do this shit. At some point I think I nod off. It’s hard to tell for sure because I almost never sleep since starting the tapers, but I think this time it actually happens. Next time I check the watch that’s lying between Finley and me on the cave’s floor, it’s almost an hour later, and almost two hours past the time I promised I’d wake her.
I get up quietly and move around in front of her. She’s tossed her way out of the top half of the sleeping bag, and her T-shirt is jacked up over her breasts, giving me a view of her belly. For a long second, I can’t tear my eyes away from it. Unlike most bellies I’ve seen these past few years, Finley’s is soft and slightly rounded, protruding just a little bit over the top of her pajama shorts. I find myself smirking down at it. Nonconforming—that’s what it is.
Fuck toned and tan, Finley’s stomach is whiter than the moon, and it looks soft like women’s thighs and asses can be when they’re nice and thick. I have the strange impulse to run the back of my hand over it, see how soft she really is for someone so damn prickly.
I look up and down the sleeping bag a time or two, and then back at that belly and her full breasts, hidden by the rumpled tee shirt, before I reach out and touch her shoulder.
“Siren?” I whisper it a time or two, smirking as I watch her face twitch and her balled-up hand lift up to rub her cheek. She cracks her brown eyes open, then gives me her signature glare.
“Good morning, darlin’.”
