Chapter 20 - Luna
By the time the last of Julian's supplies are packed away, I'm ready to leave this neighborhood and never see another mansion again.
Briar spends most of the loading standing off to one side with a pinched expression.
The rest of us haul boxes, bags, and enough expensive luggage to make Kara's collection look modest. Jules finally tells her that if she wants every suitcase to come with us, she can carry them herself.
The argument that follows lasts long enough for Gage to quietly pick up two of the bags and load them just to make it stop. I catch him doing it and grin.
He points a thick finger at me. "Not one word."
"I didn't say anything."
"Didn’t have to."
"That is a completely unfair reading of my face."
"Sweetheart, your face has never once kept a secret in its life."
We finally sort ourselves into the vehicles, and I hesitate beside Torrin's truck when I see Kara heading toward the motorhome with Penny trotting happily beside her.
Gage is already behind the wheel, checking mirrors and adjusting something on the dash.
Torrin looks over at me from the driver's side of his truck, and for one brief second I almost climb in with him anyway.
Then I look back at Gage. He hasn't had a single minute alone with me since Mars told everyone about us.
I saw his face after Mars said it. There was shock first, then something much harder to read, before he shoved all of it aside and took control of the situation, because that's what Gage always does.
He takes whatever he's feeling, locks it down somewhere private, and gets everyone moving in the right direction.
Which means if I don't give him an opening, he may decide we have more important things to deal with and never say anything at all.
"Kara?"
She pauses with one foot on the motorhome step. "What?"
"Want to switch?"
Her gaze moves from me to Gage through the windshield, then back to me. One corner of her mouth curls, and she doesn't say a single word, which is somehow worse.
"Don't."
"I would never." She turns on one heel and heads toward Torrin's truck. Penny looks between us, confused about the change in plans. "Come on, Penn."
Her ears perk, and she bolts up the motorhome steps ahead of me.
Gage watches me slide into the passenger seat. His eyes shift past me toward Kara climbing into Torrin's truck, then return to mine. "Change of plans?"
"Looks like it."
One side of his mouth moves. "Uh huh."
"Drive the bus, Strickland."
"Motorhome."
"It's the size of a bus."
"It's actually slightly smaller than a standard forty-five-foot coach."
I slowly turn my head toward him. He glances at me and shrugs. "Your dad made sure I knew everything about this thing before he let me drive it."
That quiets me for a second. Dad had loved this motorhome. He and Mom spent months choosing it, arguing about floorplans and storage, planning all the places they were going to visit once he retired. They barely got to use it.
Gage reaches over and closes his hand around mine before I can get too far into those thoughts. "Hey."
"I'm good."
"So damn good." He teases with a wink.
His thumb moves across my knuckles once before he lets go to shift the motorhome into drive.
I smile despite myself. "Smart ass."
"Yep."
Penny settles on the floor between us. She's sitting, but her entire body vibrates with excitement as the convoy pulls away from the Stillwell house, her head swinging back and forth to look out the huge windshield.
The neighborhood disappears behind us, and within a few minutes the large homes give way to smaller properties, then open land.
Out here the roads are quieter than in town.
There are abandoned vehicles here and there, but nothing blocking us, and the farther we get from Prairie Gap, the easier it becomes t drive the speed limit.
For almost five full minutes, Gage says nothing and neither do I. Five minutes becomes seven. At eight, I can't take it anymore.
"If you keep squeezing the steering wheel that hard, you're going to break it."
His hands loosen immediately. "I wasn't."
"You were."
"I was driving."
"You were strangling the motorhome."
"It likes a firm hand on it."
I laugh at that, and his mouth finally lifts. The smile doesn't last, though.
His eyes stay on the road when he asks, "Are you getting back together with Mars?"
No lead in and no careful approach to the topic, just a flat out ask that surprises me with its bluntness.
I turn toward him. "Wow."
"What?"
"You couldn't start with how about this weather?"
"We've got a broken moon and volcanoes going off. Weather talk seems risky."
"How about, did you sleep okay?"
"I already know you did. You drooled on me."
My mouth falls open. "I did not."
"You absolutely did."
"I was asleep between four grown men. Statistically, it could have been any one of you."
"Sweetheart, it was you."
I cross my arms. "Prove it."
He hums a laugh, but then his expression goes serious again. "Mars."
Right, so he isn't letting that one go. Penny looks up at the change in his voice, then lays her chin across my boot.
I turn my attention toward the windshield as fields pass on both sides of us, green and lush with the start of summer.
Above them the sky still looks wrong, no matter how many times I see it.
"No," I say. He doesn't answer, so I look over. "No, I'm not getting back together with him."
His shoulders drop slightly. It's tiny, and if I hadn't spent years watching him, I probably wouldn't notice it at all.
"Oh my God."
His brows pull together. "What?"
"You're relieved."
"No, I'm not."
"Gage."
"I'm not happy he's hurting."
"That wasn't what I said."
His jaw shifts, and I drill into the side of his face with my eyes until he finally releases a long breath. "Fine."
"Fine what?"
"I'm relieved."
"Thank you."
"I didn't know if..." He stops, adjusts his hands on the wheel, then starts again. "After everything came out last night, I didn't know if hearing the truth changed things for you."
"It did."
His gaze cuts toward me.
"Not that way," I tell him quickly. "It changed how I feel about why he left. I thought he just left, and that everything he'd said to me was bullshit the second life got hard."
My fingers pick at a loose thread on the hem of my dress while the conversation from my bedroom runs through my head again. Mars's face when he heard Atlas's voicemail. The relief and the pain in him when I told him the truth about the accident. The apology he gave me afterward.
"I believe him now. I believe he thought they died because of their fight, and I understand why that broke something in him. Forgiving him for believing a thing that was never true is easy enough."
Gage nods slowly.
"But he still left me. He still decided for me that I would be better off without him, and he never gave me a choice in it.
Not once did he let me know he was alive.
" I look down at my hands. "I needed everyone so badly after the accident, and he should have known that.
He made promises to me, then disappeared when I needed him most. I told him I forgive him, but I can't trust him. Not like that."
The silence inside the motorhome doesn't feel uncomfortable. Gage gives me room to finish without interrupting.
"I don't hate him anymore," I add. "I don't want him gone. I want him with us, because he's part of this too, even if everything about it is a mess now. But getting back together with him? No."
"Okay."
I look at him again, waiting, and that really is all he has to say.
"Okay?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know. You asked."
"And you answered."
"Very deeply and thoughtfully, I might add."
"Want a sticker?"
I smack his arm. He laughs, and Penny's head pops up between us, because someone made a happy noise and therefore she needs to participate.
"You're a dick."
He glances over at me with a raised brow. "The no swearing thing is over?"
I shrug, "Apocalypse rules says it is."
He sends me an exaggerated pout. Penny puts one paw on my leg.
"No, don't support him."
Her tail thumps against the floor.
"Traitor."
Gage's laugh gets deeper, and the sound moves through me in a way I don't want to examine too closely right now.
He's wearing a plain dark T shirt with the sleeves pulled tight around his biceps.
His forearms flex with ropes of muscle as he guides the huge vehicle around a turn.
Big, rough hands grip that wheel, and heat slides up my chest onto my neck when my brain supplies exactly how those hands would feel lifting me up against him.
I look away before he catches me staring. These thoughts are coming more often since they’ve been home, and I have no idea what to do with them. Every one of those men has been part of my life for years, and whatever is happening inside me now could tear all of it apart.
Gage stays quiet for another minute before speaking again. "I fought hard to get back to you."
My head turns, but he's looking straight ahead.
"From the second I crawled out of that plane, there wasn't one point where I thought about giving up."
The muscles in my throat tighten. "Gage..."
"I don't mean that in some dramatic way.
I mean I had one job and it was to get home.
I didn't know what was happening here. Didn't know if you were safe.
Didn't know if the house was still standing or if the rest of them had made it back.
" His fingers flex once around the wheel.
"Every time something happened out there, every time I got knocked down or something tried to stop me, I got back up because I needed to get to you. "
My chest feels too tight.
He finally looks over at me. "All of you," he adds.
The correction comes a fraction too late. We both hear it, and neither of us says anything for several seconds. Penny's head rests against my shin again while I stare at Gage's profile until I can't stand it anymore, because I need to hear him say it.
"You came back to me," I whisper.
He pulls in a slow breath and nods, and then his eyes come to mine. "I always will."
It sounds like a promise much bigger than the words holding it.
My body reacts before my mind can sort out any of it. Heat gathers low in my stomach, and I shift in the passenger seat, suddenly very aware of how close he is. This is exactly the problem.
Mars loved me. Reid has held pieces of me together more times than I can count.
Jules kissed me years ago, and my body still remembers exactly how that felt every time he calls me Cin in that particular voice.
Torrin held my hand all morning, teased me about sleeping with him that sounded a lot like flirting, and I liked it far too much.
Now Gage is sitting beside me, telling me he fought his way home because he needed to get back to me.
Every part of me wants to lean across the space between us.
What the hell is wrong with me? One man would be a complication. Five is a psychiatric referral, even if Gigi would probably call it efficient. Life isn't like the smutty romance books I read. None of this would work in the real world, would it?
The worst part is that I don't want any of these feelings to stop. That realization makes me sit very still.
Gage glances at me. "You okay?"
"Yep."
"That sounded convincing."
"I'm having a private crisis."
"Need help?"
"No."
"Want help?"
"Definitely no."
His mouth starts to curve.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"I know exactly what you were about to say."
He laughs again, and I stare hard out the windshield because my cheeks are getting hot.
Then his hand leaves the wheel long enough to reach over and squeeze my knee.
It's brief and familiar, something he's done a hundred times, but my body does not react in a familiar way at all.
His hand is gone before I manage a coherent thought.
A large farmhouse appears in the distance, and relief rushes through me hard enough that I almost laugh. The conversation is over, at least until I have enough emotional stability to deal with whatever just happened inside me.