AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I zoned out for what seemed like just a moment and then there he was, sauntering across the bridge.
“Is this your way of letting me know you need to speak to me?” he asked, and I sat up a little taller, swallowing the pesky nervous butterflies he’d set off.
“It’s not as if you’ve offered me another option.”
He stopped in front of me, giving me that ridiculous, sexy smile. “Would you have taken my number, if I tried to give it to you?”
“Probably not,” I admitted.
“Right.” He took a few more steps forward, enough to sit down beside me. “Good thing I put it in when you weren’t looking.”
“What?”
Instead of offering any sort of apology, he shrugged. “So you’d know who it was, if I called.”
“You say that as if it’s some normal thing.”
“It’s incredibly normal, Dee. Depending on how you look at it.”
“Notas a trained assassin is how I’m looking at it.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you should reconsider.”
“Maybeyoushould.”
That made him pin me with a look that wasn’t exactly a glare, but was no less intense. “Why does it feel like you’re trying to pick a fight with me?” he asked. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is – what reaction, whatever – you’re looking for, and we can skip the extra?”
“I’m not looking for anything from you,” I defended, not sure those words were true even as they left my lips. “I just figured we could… talk?”
A smirk spread over his lips as he sat back, stretching his arms across the bench to get comfortable. “Okay. What is it you want to know?”
“I want to know… what happened to you?” I said, meeting his gaze. “Like… after they separated us. Where did you go? What did you see? What did they make you do? How did you get… this,” I murmured, boldly reaching forward to touch his face.
He tensed, but didn’t stop me, letting me just barely skim the pads of my fingers over the raised abrasion.
“You sure you want to know?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
He grabbed my wrist, very suddenly, but not roughly, moving my hand from his face. “This is because I asked too many questions about what would happen to you when I was gone,” he admitted, and well… now I knew why he’d asked if I was sure I wanted to know. “As you know… we weren’t supposed to have any real attachments. Sex was fine, homies were fine… but anything more than that, especially before you’d really been outside the Garden, was a no. So… I paid for it.”
“I’msosorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” he said, squeezing my hand, which made me realize he was still holding it. “It’s not your fault. Not your shame, Dee. To answer your other questions though… I’ve been everywhere. Seen a lot. Done some unspeakable shit.” He shrugged. “And now… I’ve been trying to find some normalcy with this “private contractor” shit, but honestly… I don’t even know what the fuck that is anymore. I don’t know whatIam anymore.”
My eyes lifted, surprised in a way that he’d divulged something like that to me. But in other ways… maybe it wasn’t remarkable at all.
This had been our dynamic anyway, before the forced rift between us.
“Normalfor a Thorn… that’s not what you want to do anymore, is it?” I asked. “Surely that’s not who you want to be?”
He shrugged. “It’s what I know how to be.”
“That’s doesn’t mean that’s how it has to be though,” I countered. “You neverwantedthis… none of us did, not really. So… just do something different. That’s within your power.”
“Is that what you’ve done?”
I scoffed. “Me? Nah,” I shook my head. “I can’t say I’ve managed that yet, but… I’m trying.”
