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“Why did you guys never go South, then? Why not just live out in the free spots and have normal lives?”
He frowned. “Then I’d be leaving all the people up here to die.” That had never even been an option for him. Not after what he’d done. He knew it had never been an option for his brothers, either. Fighting was the only way they knew, and they would not stop until the UNR was a distant memory.
“Yeah, but you’d be safe. You’d be free.”
Hayden turned to look at her, taking in the way she stared distantly into the trees as they flew by. This time of year, they were all bare and gray. If they’d left just a few months earlier, this would’ve been a beautiful drive. “Nobody will truly be free until we all are.” He turned back toward the road. “My personal comforts are not worth more than human life.”
“So what about all the people hiding out in Free America or whatever you call it? What about them? Why aren’t they up here fighting?”
“We all have a role to play, Anna.”
“Well I think that’s bullshit.” She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back into her seat, turning away from him.
He laughed. Again. It felt weird to laugh. “Well, at least I know you’re not uncomfortable around me.” That… was not supposed to be shared out loud.
“Uncomfortable? What?”
“You’ve been so docile lately. I was worried I may have overstepped some unknown boundary or something, and—”
“Ohmygosh.” She sat up straight, staring at him with fury in her eyes even as he stared ahead at the road. Curse his oversharing; Hayden was not used to talking so much. At all. Dammit. The jeep jerked, but continued forward. “I was being docile because I thought for a moment I might actually like you.” She glared. “As a friend,” she quickly tacked on.
He grinned, unable to help himself, no longer angry about his oversharing. “I knew you secretly liked me.”
“I don’t like you. I almost did but now I don’t, and—” her voice cut off as the jeep jerked again, slowing down. Anna braced her hands against the dashboard. “What the hell is going on?”
Hayden pulled over toward the side of the road, scratching the back of his head. “It seems we’ve finally run out of gas.”
The groan that came from Anna’s mouth was almost comical. “For fuck’s sake.”
? ♥ ?
She’d planned to walk the entire way. She’d planned to walk the entire way.
That’s what Anna kept telling herself as she and Hayden walked along the endless freeway. He’d slung a bag over each shoulder, with one more in his hand. She wore a backpack that contained a couple weapons and some dehydrated meals.
Back at the jeep, he’d pushed her about her plans for the bomb. With no real plan, she’d relented and they left her supplies with the jeep.
An hour had passed since they left the vehicle, and Anna had definitely been spoiled by it. Still, she enjoyed being out and moving her body again. This wasn’t too bad.
As they walked, Anna thought about the man beside her. The way he’d worried she might be uncomfortable around him, and that was why she hadn’t been as prickly. Was she really that bad? Was a slight decrease in arguing really so out of character that he’d assumed something was wrong with her?
Lucky for him, that thought made her prickly again.
She wasn’t sure why him was expecting her to be argumentative came as a surprise. As a woman in the UNR, she had to use every tool she could get to protect herself. Her attitude was her armor, in a way… nobody wanted to push past her thorns. She’d been using it as a defense for so long, she wasn’t even sure if it was a part of her personality or a façade that she’d fabricated for her own safety.
His awareness of it also made her stomach flip around a little bit inside of her. Had she ever met a man who not only tolerated her snarky attitude, but worried when it was gone? No, definitely not. She’d expected this entire trip to be torture from start to end, but as it turned out, the more time she spent with Hayden, the less inclined she was to roll her eyes at the thought of him being one of the good ones.
She actually thought he was. Not in name, not in words, not even in actions… in who he was at his core.
“I had a plan. A really good one.”
He turned to her and raised a brow, saying nothing in typical Hayden fashion.
She sighed. “I spent nearly a decade preparing to take out Greene. I’d committed to my training, kissed the ass of every official I was given the chance to work with, didn’t play around like the other officers. I took my job seriously, and everyone could see it.
“More than that, I was one of the boys. I talked like them, acted like them.” She licked her lips, shivering at the memories of some of the awful things she’d said and done to stay safe. “They shaved my head to shame me. I had long, beautiful hair… they’d expected me to cry. To break the character I’d created. But I didn’t. I said nothing, did nothing, and when my hair started growing back in, I cut it short myself, because fuck them.”
Her hand lifted to the choppy hair on her head, fingering one of the longer strands that fell over her forehead. This was the longest it had gotten in years. She’d cut it again, soon, because the person she was had died long ago. It wasn’t a character anymore, it was her.
