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An hour later, I was dragging my own patio chair out to Kyle’s fire pit to sit with him and Dandy.
“I really do want him back,” I said as I plopped down beside Kyle. “I just strongly dislike the idea of involving more people. Especially people I don’t know.”
“I didn’t ask, honey.”
“Right. Just feels like Memphis thinks I’m not willing to do whatever we have to do to get him back. I am. And I will. I feel — I don’t know. Things. I feel things for that asshole that I really don’t know how to explain.”
He smirked, but still said nothing and picked up a stick to poke at the logs that made up his fire.
“You don’t say much either, huh?” I asked.
“Never really had anyone out here with me to do much talking,” he said and laughed. “Dandy doesn’t say much back, and sometimes words just kind of ruin the calm that this place can bring, if you let it.”
“Oh,” I sighed. “Sorry. I can just go back in.”
I stood to start back toward the house, intensely annoyed that he’d invited me out here just to call me annoying and essentially tell me to leave. He grabbed my wrist before I even made it a step away.
“I wasn’t telling you to go anywhere,” he said. “Sit back down. I just don’t get visitors. Come on, tell me about him.”
“I would think you know him better than I do?” I asked, sitting again.
“I doubt it. You bond in very different ways when your life depends on someone else’s ability to use a weapon versus wanting to fuck them.”
My mouth fell right the fuck open, before I laughed.
“Sorry. That was rude. Like I said, not many visitors out here.”
“I really don’t know much about him. He left me in the trunk of his car for like the first two days of knowing me,” I said. “Crazy sexual tension aside, we didn’t do much getting to know each other on that trip.”
“What was the purpose of this trip? Why the trunk? I don’t even know what he does these days.”
“He’s a bounty hunter for a psychopath,” I said, imagining the kind of organization my stepfather would run. “They take contracts from people with way too much money to find other people who they think have wronged them in some way.”
“Who thinks you wronged them?”
“My stepdad.”
“And Van changed his mind about keeping the contract? Decided he’d rather have you?”
“I guess it was something like that.”
I couldn’t even begin to grasp why he hadn’t asked what the bounty on me was for. He seemed so uninterested in the details of all of it.
“Will you tell me something about him?” I asked.
“Everything I know about him is probably a little messed up for normal people,” he said and chuckled.
“I don’t think I really count as normal.”
He sighed and rubbed the top of Dandy’s head before he spoke again.
“The kinds of things we had to do turn men into weird animals. It wasn’t always terrible or bad. We did do a lot of good things overall, but it changed all of us in more ways than one. Van sort of did that in reverse at one point.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Usually when you say a Marine has changed, you’re telling everybody that he’s not really stable after he’s back home from doing whatever he had to do.”
