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“You too, hotshot. I trust you both.”
Jesus fuck, if she knew the thoughts running through my mind, she wouldn’t. Oz climbs from the bed, knocking me with his shoulder as he stands and lowers his zipper. Fuck it. I climb back to my feet and work on getting my own pants off. All the while, I watch Salem, whose breathing has picked up as she takes us in. She doesn’t look scared, though. Far from it. If the squirming is anything to go by, I’d say she looks turned on.
“She’s trying to kill me,” I mutter to myself. Salem is in a world of her own and doesn’t hear me, but Oz looks at me and grins before moving back to his spot beside her.
I straighten the netting, making sure it covers us all, before crawling into the spot on the other side of Salem. We lie there for a minute, none of us saying anything as the sound of our collective breathing fills the air.
“I’m thirsty.” Salem sighs eventually before turning onto her side to face me, her hands tucked under the side of her head in a prayer pose.
I roll over to face her. “I know. We need to ration what little we have left, though. Tomorrow, God willing, you can have a mango, which will help.”
“All those days I craved doughnuts and soda, and now all I can think about is fruit and water. It seems like the jungle diet might be the one to stick,” she jokes.
“Fuck that. You don’t need to diet. There isn’t a thing wrong with your body, pretty girl,” Oz growls before rolling up close behind her and trailing his fingers down her arm, leaving a path of goosebumps in their wake.
“I’m not saying there is. Heck, if anything, I could do with putting on a few extra pounds. I’m just saying, I’ve always struggled to find a healthy balance. Like I want to be fit and healthy, but I also want to see how many M&Ms I can stuff into my mouth at once.”
I can’t help but laugh at her. “Life’s too short to worry about shit like that. That’s what I hate about social media. It’s in your face all the time, telling girls how they need to look to fit in. Who the fuck wants to fit in when standing out is what makes you better? I wish I could take a bunch of these celebrities and their fad diets and dump them in the jungle,” I huff.
She cocks an eyebrow at me, her lips twitching with the need to laugh. “You seem very, um…passionate about it,” she says lightly.
“He worries about our niece Ruby. He thinks she’s going to grow up and be exposed to all this shit, and it stresses him out. She’s still a baby, Zig. Chill the fuck out. By the time she’s a teenager, we’ll probably have been killed by an asteroid or overrun by zombies.”
I blink and look at Oz as Salem slowly rolls to look at him too. We stare at him in silence.
“What?”
“Did you hit your head when the plane crashed?”
“Huh?”
Salem starts giggling, and before I know it, I’m laughing with her. The whole thing is ridiculous, and yet the lightness of the moment is exactly what we all need right now. I ignore the clawing thirst in my throat and the hollow feeling in my gut and focus on the here and now.
“It’s hard to imagine you guys have a sister and niece. Though I guess, in a way, that’s not true. You’ve been nothing but understanding with me. I suppose that comes from—”
Oz’s sudden laughter has her looking back at me with a frown.
“You might be right about the head injury thing. Should I check?” She reaches out her hand to touch him, but I grab it and twist my fingers through hers.
“He’s laughing because we didn’t treat Luna softly growing up. Don’t get me wrong, we did her hair, made sure she had clean clothes and was fed, but we didn’t know what to do with a girl. And we sure as hell weren’t going to treat her like the girls we were banging at the time.”
“Who—” She starts but shakes her head. “Never mind.”
“Guys are assholes, Salem. Especially teenagers with more hormones than brain cells racing around their bodies. We treated Luna like one of the guys, and if she didn’t look like a fairy princess most of the time, you’d think she was one. The girl fights, shoots, and is almost as good with a knife as me. She’s the one who runs Apex Tactical, or she did until recently.” I sigh, not wanting to get into that, but when she looks at me, I give in.
“She’s an old lady to a bunch of bikers now. She has a whole club of men behind her, which is why I’m not too worried about any blowback from this. She has a life now, away from us—as she should—but she hasn’t quite cut the strings. I think we’ve become…” I trail off as I try to think of the right words.
“Her safety net,” Salem says gently.
“Yeah, that.”
“It’s scary, you know, putting your heart in the hands of others, hoping they won’t hurt you. Having you guys, loving her unconditionally… I can’t imagine it’s easy to pull free from that. She might have a good man, but she has set the bar super high because of having brothers like you.”
Oz coughs and looks at me, a shocked look on his face that I’m not used to seeing on Mr. Cocky. “Men,” he says, tearing his eyes from mine to focus on Salem.
“Huh?” she asks, confused.
“Luna has three men. Orion, Gage, and Halo. It’s just as well. My sister can be a handful. She’s a menace, really,” he jokes, waiting for her reaction.
