Chapter 25
I barely sleep that night.
After years in this life, I know how to snatch sleep from nothing, how to make my body unwind even when my mind continues spinning.
But I can’t do it this time. Even brutally aware that the day we’ve been working toward for almost a year is only hours away, I can’t do anything but toss and turn in the dark, brooding about Ben and what happened between us and how everything remains heartbreakingly unresolved.
Nothing about my life has been easy from the day I was born, but I can’t remember a worse night since I walked out on Chad.
I get up at dawn like normal, sitting up from the sofa in the command station where I’ve been sleeping most nights. Stretching out my back, I glance down and see that Ben is in his normal spot on the floor beside me.
He’s still stretched out on his mat, but he’s not asleep either. We stare at each other in silence until the air between us aches.
Finally I give my head a little shake and break the gaze.
My head hurts. My eyes hurt. Every muscle in my body hurts. And my heart hurts the most.
But today is the long-awaited time for action, so my feelings simply can’t matter.
The morning passes slowly. Everyone at the outpost is tense and restless, waiting for the hour we finally make a move.
Attacking at dawn would be the obvious choice, but that’s also when they’re most likely to expect an assault. So instead, we will do what no one ever does.
Attack as the sun goes down.
Our entire company is primed and ready. By midmorning, our weaponry and supplies are packed and loaded. After that, there’s nothing to do but keep watch and hang around waiting.
It’s not fun for me or anyone else.
I’ve felt sick to my stomach since the moment I got up, so I eat nothing more than a few bites of bread. Ben was bristly over breakfast as he watched me not eat, but he didn’t say anything.
Good thing.
I have no idea what I might have done if he’d tried to boss me right now—even over something as minor as eating.
We finally make it to lunch, but the time moves even slower after that.
Ben decides to hang out with Ryan in the command station, and I sit around in the courtyard with Vella, Jim, and Carlos. They chat now and then, but no one is cheerful or talkative. Everyone wants to get moving.
Especially me.
Jim and Carlos are trying to grab a few minutes of a rest, reclined with their heads on their packs, when Vella turns to me and says softly, “What’s going on with Ben?”
“What do you mean?” I keep my tone casual, but my spine has stiffened.
“You know what I mean. Did you dump the poor guy and break his big heart?”
“What?” This time my hushed voice squeaks slightly.
Vella rolls her eyes. “I know. Everyone knows. Did you really think you were keeping it secret?”
My mouth grows dry. I can’t get a word out or even take a full breath.
“Either you two finally broke the tension brewing between you for years or you both got obsessed with reorganizing the storage room every single night. Which do you think we’re more likely to believe?”
I make a choked sound. “I—”
“Keep it secret. Keep it private. I don’t give a damn, and neither does anyone else. But how could you dump him right before we make our move?”
“I didn’t… I didn’t dump him.”
“Well, something happened. The guy is crushed—devastated—and nothing could do that to him but you.”
I swallow hard. Then again. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“I believe you. Being who you two are, it’d be a miracle if you could make it work long term. But it looked like you were managing it, and you were both…” Vella gives a wry shrug. “Shit, you were both happy.”
It takes me a minute to settle my mind enough to answer coherently. “I understand why you assume whatever happened is all my fault. I’m usually the difficult one. But this time…” A swell of pain rises in my chest, into my throat and then into my eyes. I shake slightly as I suppress it.
“He screwed up? I believe it. Everyone screws up eventually. But listen.” She clears her throat, looking slightly embarrassed to say something so earnest and unlike her.
“No one is promised a long life, and doing what we do, our lives are even shorter than average. We have no idea what’s going to happen tonight, but not all of us are going to come out of it alive.
Whatever he did, whatever you need to work out, can’t that wait until afterward? ”
One thing has been true of me since childhood, and that’s the fact that I’m not a crier. So I don’t know what’s happening to me right now when my eyes burn with tears again.
Because she’s right. Vella is right.
Ben might not be alive tomorrow, and this can’t be our last word.
I scramble up with Vella’s nod of approval and stride toward the building. I don’t know what’s on my face right now, but it causes everyone I pass to hurry out of my way.
Inside, I step into the command station where Ryan is sitting with the radio handset to his ear and Ben is hovering and pacing and fidgeting.
A quick jerk of my head toward the door leads Ryan to set down his radio and jump to his feet, muttering as he exits the room, “Thank you, ma’am. I was about to strangle him.”
He closes the door behind him so I don’t have to.
Ben and I stare at each other.
“Do you—” He breaks off his words with a twist of his mouth. “Is everything okay?”
I shake my head. “It’s not okay. And I honestly don’t know if it can be. But I also don’t know if we’re going to make it through to tomorrow, and that matters more to me right now.”
He makes a low guttural sound and moves closer to me, so tense he’s trembling with it, like he’s having to hold himself back from grabbing me.
I continue, the words coming out before I fully think them through. “Because, no matter what else is also true about us and our situation, I love you too.”
A helpless burst of sound escapes his throat as he surges forward to pull me into his arms. I wrap both mine around him and squeeze, holding him almost as tightly as he’s holding me.
We hug like that for a long time, clinging to each other like it’s the only thing keeping us alive.
That’s how it feels to me. Like we live out our days in a storm at sea, and this man—this big, warm, devoted, human man—is my only anchor.
“I love you, Annabelle,” he finally murmurs thickly against my ear.
“I love you with everything I am. I know I fucked up. I know I might have destroyed what we were starting to build. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.
The person you are. Strong and fearless.
Blazing like the sun. Determined to make the world better no matter what you have to sacrifice to do it.
I love all of that about you, and it’s wrong for me to ever try to dim your light even to keep you safe. I’m not going to do it again.”
“Thank you,” I mumble against his neck. “I know it goes against all your protective instincts. I understand how hard it is for you. You’ve always been that strong tree on your ring for me—with your sheltering branches and your deep roots. So thank you, Ben. I really do love you.”
He squeezes me again, shaking more violently now, and several more minutes pass before he stops. I lift my head to check his face, and his eyes are soft and warm.
Hungry.
He kisses me, and all of me—everything inside me—kisses him back.
The embrace deepens quickly, and soon he has me propped on the high desk with my legs wrapped around him.
He braces himself with one arm on the desktop while he holds on to me with the other.
Hot arousal mingles with deep feeling, and it’s all tangled up together inside me, causing me to grind myself against him and desperately suck his tongue into my mouth.
Eventually we can’t hold back, so we fumble out of enough of our clothes for him to get his cock into my pussy. We fuck like that against the high desktop, still holding on to each other as frantically as we were when we were hugging.
My emotions are far too out of control for me to focus on an orgasm. The friction of his cock moving inside me triggers little flutters of my pussy that feel so good I moan and gasp, but they never mount to a full climax, and I don’t even care.
I love this. All of it. And I need it more than anything else.
So does Ben. I know it for sure as he grunts and pushes into me until he pulls out at the last second to come in messy spurts between our bodies.
Afterward, we keep clinging to each other. Hot and breathless and shamelessly needy.
Maybe nothing significant has changed afterward, but it feels like it has.
It feels like the world might have reshaped itself.
Maybe it’s sappy romanticizing of a universe that’s forever been bleak and brutal at its core.
But maybe it’s real.
Maybe this has always been what love does.