18. Dash
DASH
The paper shakes in my hand.
Not from blood loss. Not from the venom creeping through the gash in my left arm. Not from the three cracked ribs or the dislocated shoulder or the chunk of flesh the crawler tore from my thigh.
From her handwriting.
She used the same looping script she pipes onto wedding cakes. The capital D in "Dash" has a little flourish at the top, a tiny curl that serves no functional purpose except to be beautiful. She dotted her i's with perfect circles. She wrote "in perpetuity" in paragraph two and underlined it twice.
She wrote this at her kitchen counter. At three in the morning. In calligraphy.
For me.
The combat knife falls first. It hits the slag with a dull thunk, blade sinking two inches into volcanic gravel.
The bandolier goes next, three incendiary charges and a smoke grenade clattering across the rocks like dropped marbles.
The short sword follows, the one I keep strapped to my back, the one my father gave me when I turned fourteen and said a mercenary who can't reach his blade deserves the death he gets.
It clangs against the dirt. I don't look at it.
The gauntlet on my good hand. The ankle knife.
The weighted chain wrapped around my belt.
The tiny derringer tucked into my boot, the one I've carried on every contract for eleven years, the one I've never once had to fire because the sight of an Orc pulling a gun confuses people long enough for me to close distance.
All of it. Every piece of metal and leather and death I've carried since I was old enough to swing a blade.
It falls into the dust at my feet and I stand in front of this five-foot-three woman in a ruined dress covered in crawler blood and powdered sugar and I have nothing in my hands except a piece of paper.
"Pen."
She blinks up at me. Her mouth opens.
"You said there's a pen. Other pocket."
Her left hand digs into her dress. Comes out with a ballpoint. Pink. Has a little cupcake on the cap. She holds it up and I take it from her and I flatten the contract against me because my other arm won't lift and I sign my name directly over my heart.
The ink smears with blood. Good. Let it.
"Paragraph three needs an amendment."
Her face crumbles. For one terrible second her chin drops and her eyes go glass-bright and I see her start to fold in on herself and I realize she thinks I'm negotiating.
"The previous contract is not voided."
"What?"
"It was the best contract I ever took." I fold the paper with my one working hand, tuck it carefully inside the remains of my vest, directly against my skin. "Every parameter. Every objective. Carrying the shield. The hellhounds. The suit. The boar. The cake."
I swallow hard.
"The cake. You stood in that destroyed kitchen and you commanded me like a general. You handed me a huge whisk and pointed at forty pounds of butter and said 'go.' No one has ever looked at me and seen something other than a weapon."
Her eyes are pouring. Tears cutting clean tracks through the dried ichor on her cheeks.
"You saw a stand mixer."
A laugh punches out of her. Wet and broken and perfect.
"So paragraph three gets an amendment. The previous contract remains in effect as a foundational document. Addendum A: all terms carry forward into the new agreement. I carried your shield. I will keep carrying it."
She sniffs hard. Wipes her nose on her wrist. Leaves a smear of green blood across her upper lip.
"That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me and you compared yourself to a kitchen appliance."
"A high-quality kitchen appliance."
"Oh my God."
I reach down.
My left arm screams. The cracked ribs grind against each other like millstones. The venom burn in my bicep lights up white-hot from shoulder to wrist. I hook my good arm under her knees and my bad arm behind her back and I lift her straight off the slag.
She weighs nothing. A sack of flour. A container of sugar. One of those enormous blocks of enchanted chocolate she orders from the dwarven importers.
She gasps and grabs my neck. Her fingers slide through the blood and grime and lock behind my head, pressing into the short-cropped hair at my skull, and her grip is fierce.
Baker's hands. Strong from years of kneading dough and wrestling industrial ovens and apparently beating rock crawlers with steel crowbars.
I pull her against me. She fits perfectly in the space between my chin and my collarbone, her head tucked under my jaw, her body curled into the curve of my arm. The contract paper crinkles between us. Her heartbeat drums against my ribs.
The wind picks up. Slag dust swirls across the wastes. The van ticks and groans behind us.
"You're bleeding on me."
"Yes."
"A lot."
"Yes."
"We should probably go to a hospital."
I tighten my grip. Press my face into her hair. Vanilla and sugar, even here, even under the blood and the dust and the monster ichor. Vanilla and sugar.
"Not yet."
Her mouth finds mine first.
She climbs me like I'm a ladder, both hands fisting the torn collar of my vest, hauling herself up me with that ridiculous baker's strength.
Her legs wrap around my waist and the cracked ribs scream and I swallow the sound whole because her tongue is in my mouth and she tastes like adrenaline and cinnamon and I will die before I stop this.
I stagger backward. My boot catches a chunk of slag and I correct hard, one arm locked under her, and she doesn't flinch. Doesn't loosen her grip. Just bites my lower lip and pulls.
"Van."
She breathes the word into my mouth. I'm already moving.
Three steps to the rear doors. I yank the handle with my bad hand and white light explodes behind my eyes from the shoulder but the door swings wide and the cargo bay opens up, dark and warm and smelling like flour and diesel.
Scattered baking supplies cover the ridged metal floor.
A fifty-pound bag of bread flour. Stacked sheet pans.
A heavy canvas tarp she uses for farmer's market setup.
I set her on the bumper. Pull the tarp down flat with one sweep of my arm, scattering aluminum pans across the van floor with a tremendous clatter.
"Your arm."
"Don't care."
"Your ribs."
"Don't care."
"Your—"
I drop to my knees on the hot gravel. The movement puts my face level with her stomach and she stops talking. Her hands sink into my hair. Her fingers curl. Grip.
The dress is already destroyed. Crawler blood, fountain water, powdered sugar, slag dust. I push the hem up over her thighs and she arches her back against the van floor and lifts her hips and the fabric bunches at her waist.
Simple cotton underneath. White with tiny blue flowers.
I press my mouth to her hip bone. She gasps.
Her thigh twitches against my cheek and the muscle is warm and impossibly soft and the size difference hits me like a fist to the sternum.
My hand spans her entire thigh. My palm covers her hip to her navel.
She is small and breakable and fierce and she drove a delivery van into a rock crawler for me.
I hook my fingers into the cotton and pull.
"Dash—"
My name. Just my name. But the way she says it strips the calluses right off my soul.
I drag her to the bumper. She yelps, fingers scrabbling against the tarp, finding nothing to hold, settling on the back of my head again. Pressing down. Directing. Commanding. Baker hands. General's hands.
I follow orders.
The desert wind snaps against the open van doors.
Sand hisses across the slag. She arches off the tarp and the van rocks on its shot suspension and in the distance the stunned crawler lets out a low moan of confusion and I do not stop.
I grip her hip with my good hand, pinning her in place, and she bucks against the pressure and the sound that tears out of her throat echoes off the canyon walls.
"Inside. Get inside. Now."
She's pulling at my vest. I shrug out of it and the tactical harness drops and I crawl into the van after her, and the entire chassis groans and sinks three inches on the left side. She laughs. Wild. Breathless. Scoots backward over the flour bag, dragging me by my belt.
The van is too small. Every van is too small. I bang my head on the roof and she laughs harder and yanks the belt free and I brace one hand on the ceiling and the other beside her head and lower myself over her, blocking out the desert sun that streams through the open doors.
She runs her palm down me. Over the scars. Over the fresh wounds. Over the cracked ribs. Her touch is light where it needs to be light and firm where it needs to be firm, reading my body the way she reads dough, knowing exactly how much pressure before something tears.
"Careful."
"Shut up."
She wraps both hands around my neck and pulls me down and I sink into her and the van lurches sideways and a sheet pan slides off a stack and crashes to the floor.
Slow. I start slow because my body is wrecked and she is small and the angle is steep and the fifty-pound bag of bread flour keeps sliding under us. She digs her heels into my lower back. Pulls me closer. The flour bag splits.
White powder erupts across the tarp like a smoke bomb. It coats her hair, her eyelashes, the sweat on her collarbone. She coughs. Laughs. Tightens around me.
"That was—oh—that was a twenty-dollar bag of—"
I roll my hips. She stops counting dollars.
The van rocks in a steady, creaking rhythm that any passing traveler could identify from half a mile away.
Sand pings against the dented panels. Her nails score tracks down my back, cutting through dried blood and flour paste, and each bright line of pain grounds me in this moment, in this body, in this ridiculous vehicle.
She breaks first. Her spine curves like a drawn bow, shoulders pressed flat, chin thrown back, and she says my name again. Not a command this time.
A surrender.
I follow her over.