23. Just Because I’m Laughing Doesn’t Mean I’m Joking
Chapter 23
Just Because I’m Laughing Doesn’t Mean I’m Joking
Griff
I chuckled as I fell back onto the earth. Twigs and dead leaves crumbled beneath my weight.
“Didn’t even get to the cigarette, and you’re already scheming to kick me to the curb.” I reached my arm out to the side to find her jacket.
I felt around until the soft leather was in my hand, then found the inner pocket of the pack of Marlboros. I pulled out a cigarette and then found the lighter. I lit it, and took a pull, before offering it to her.
It was a damn game we had played for years.
I had quit smoking - Kristin made me - but I had never truly quit. I bummed cigarettes from Taz. She went on a smoke break, and I followed, just to keep her company… though I took the cigarette from her fingers and chipped at it. I like to think that stealing her breath made her reduce her otherwise staggering nicotine intake.
It was practically a community service.
“That’s not… what I’m doing,” she said, quietly, but we both knew it was a lie.
“I’m still inside you, baby, and you’re already looking for your exit.”
I placed a kiss on her forehead - a gesture that I had never thought of as intimate until I did it to her. I was a lip-kisser. Pecks on the mouth, or cheek. But with Taz, I felt the overwhelming urge to kiss her forehead, her palm, the delicate part of her inner wrist.
To give a kiss, rather than to receive or reciprocate one.
It was the small things that made her special.
The way she didn’t question sharing a cigarette. That we still exchanged keys to each other’s houses after she snuck out on me. The way she drove my truck while I was overseas.
A truck I had long considered hers.
Hell, I had bought it for her. She was going to get an RV, but I really, really wanted her to have a mode of daily transportation that didn’t involve that death on two wheels she called Daisy. So, I bought a truck, asked her to take care of it, and suggested she get the trailer instead.
She took a drag of the cigarette, her breasts lifting with her breath. She extended her arm to the side to ash away from me.
“I’d be insulted, if I didn’t know you so well.” I couldn’t help smiling up at her. “So, what do you say, Firefly?”
This was the best time to ask. Her defenses were down, we were still physically connected. There was something unglamorous and perfect about how she was naked, and I was half dressed, keeping her off the dirty ground.
“Say to what?” She placed the butt of the cigarette to my lips, and I inhaled before she pulled it away.
“Don’t be dumb, Taz. You can’t pull it off.” I took a deep breath, steadying my nerves.
This was the most important conversation I would ever have in my life. I had stacked the deck in my favor, and now, I needed her to say it.
“Do you belong to me?”
“Slavery’s illegal in the United States.” She brought the cigarette to her lips and casually smoked. She released it through her narrowed lips, looking away again, her eyes scanning somewhere in the woods.
Avoidance was her fucking superpower.
“Don’t do that.” I reached up and turned her chin towards me.
“Do what?”
“Be a fucking child!” I wanted to throttle her. “Tell me that we’re together in this. Tell me that we’re…”
“Going steady?” She lifted a brow, and smirked.
Was this psycho playing with me right now?
“Something like that,” I grumbled. Because it was hard to tell with her, even knowing her as intimately as I did.
“You sure that’s what you want?” her smirk melted away, her eyes darted down to the scars and marks that asshole had left on her. “Flaws, baggage and all? A big scary super-secret organization, whisking me away to a safe house. And everything else you just learned…”
Heath Carlin.
“Flaws, baggage, pyromania, irritating talent for avoidance, peak ability to irritate the fuck out of me–”
“Way to make a girl swoon.”
“Brave, strong, beautiful, intelligent, caring and…” I leaned up, planting my hand into the dirt so that I could see her eye to eye, “Completely perfect.”
“Screwed up mom, abusive ex-husband, absent dad, insecurities…”
“Mom, ex, absent dad, and especially those insecurities.” I kissed her lips. A peck. Then her cheek. Then the brow above her left eye – the one that could lift when she was perplexed. Then her right. “Tell me you’re mine, baby, and I’ll never ask you to say it again. I swear.”
How did a small kiss feel a thousand times more intimate than fucking? I wasn’t sure.
I took her wrist - the one with my bracelet - and looked down at it, fiddling with the links.
Please tell me you’re mine, Taz. Say it, so I can do what I really came out here to do.
“Please?” I added for good measure.
“I never heard you say that word, outside of this visit.”
“You’re not likely to again if you don’t fucking say that you’re mine!”
She was grating on my last nerve.
“Well, since you asked so nicely…”
She let her words linger in the air as I stared at the bracelet, watching how the sparse light from the darkening sky reflected on the chains.
I looked up at her, and she was smiling, staring at me with complete amusement.
“Is this funny to you?” I asked, ready to poke her in the gut if I had to. “Is all of this just a big joke?”
“Just because I’m laughing doesn’t mean I'm joking,” she mocked.
“ Har-har-har,” I said bitterly as she threw my words back at me. “Tell me, Trinity Blaze Guerro, that you’re mine.”
“Okay, Kai Winchester Griffith,” she finally said. “We can go steady, or whatever it is the kids say these days.”
She was the only woman in the world who could give me the answer I wanted, and make me want to tackle and hock a lougie into her mouth at the same time. I poked her in the ribs, and she giggled, flinching away, before I got to work. I pulled a pin out on the bracelet, letting the clasp fall off, before relinking the band together.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.
“Tagging you.” I internally cringed, because if she ever found out there was a tracker on this thing, she would break my face. But I already knew that I wasn’t a good guy, so… might as well embrace my evil inner self. “This bracelet is permanent now.”
“The fuck–”
Before she could freak out, I placed my hand gently on her throat, keeping her eyes on me.
“As long as you want me, you’ll keep it on. I designed it to look good with what you normally wear. But it’ll also go well with something formal.” Like a wedding dress. “And if anything ever happens… if I ever fuck up so irreparably that you… that you want me to stop chasing you…” I swallowed, feeling the lump creep up my chest and into my throat. “Then break it off, and I’ll know. I’ll know that you’re done with me.”
I didn’t want to start a relationship by talking about how to end it, but I also wanted things to be clear. I was in this.
“But until that day, I will come after you. I’ll keep chasing you, and you’ll keep running away, because that’s what you do. But if you still love me…”
“Who says I love you?”
I lifted a brow and looked at her in irritation, not bothering to answer that stupid question. “If you still love me, then you’ll keep it on, and I know it’s not over between us.”
I brought her palm to my lips and kissed it.
“You’re a flight risk, baby,” I said. “But wherever you’ll fly, I’ll follow.”
Her multicolored eyes were misty, as she stared at the bracelet, then me, then back down.
“Do you like it?” I asked.
She nodded. No smart ass remarks this time… she was stunned into silence.
“I love it,” she says, her fingers tracing the little firefly engraving on the platinum jewel.
“And you love me.”
“And I love you.”
I leaned forward, putting my lips on the divot in the middle of her clavicle.
“I should get you more jewelry, if it helps me get some honesty out of you,” I chuckled against her skin, and she playfully slapped my chest.
The moon drifted high over the Catskill mountains. The peach sky of sunset was giving way to the black night stars. A part of me wanted to take her to bed, but I knew that wouldn’t work. She was a night owl, that came awake beneath the stars.
After everything that happened, we’d be in for a long night.
“I didn’t know you had a tattoo.”
“I didn’t know you had scars.”
In the end, which one of us was more in the dark?