Campbell (38 page)

That would never happen again.

“He loved you guys,” she said. “I hope you know that.”

Ness, one of the older cows, eyed her curiously and nudged her boot with her big pink nose.
 

“He’s…he’s not coming back. I tried to talk, and no one would talk, and now Andrew’s gone and killed a lot of people because he was angry, and I didn’t stop him.” She felt tears well up in her eyes. “And I miss him. I feel like I lost a limb. Maybe more than one. Maybe two. I’m not sure I know how to be myself without him.”

Claude, a calf from the summer before, lowed at her. He’d been small when he was born, and she and Cole had nursed him back to health. She looked at him and he blinked back at her, his dark eyes saying a lot.
 

Cole wouldn’t want her to lose herself. He’d want her to go on and live for both of them. He’d want her to have fun, and laugh, and be happy. The rest of it, all the politics, it was always secondary to Cole, because Lucy took care of that.
 
Lucy realized the opposite had always been true of her, but it had never necessarily been what she wanted.
 

***

Tal had just tugged his shirt off when he turned around to see Lucy standing in the door.
 

“I’m going to bed,” she said quietly as she leaned in the doorframe.
 

“If you’re trying to tell me something, you should probably just say it,” Tal mumbled, pulling his shirt back on. “I’m beat and not very intuitive, and you’re all over the fucking place.”
 

“I want you to come with me.”

“You want me to sleep in the bed in the room that you share with your very serious girlfriend, who—as you so kindly reminded me earlier—is who you prefer?” He raised his eyebrows. “No thanks.”

“Of course it’s my preference.” She crossed her arms. “It’s been my preference since I was twelve and decided I needed to have one. If we’re…it’s because you’re the exception, not the rule.”

Tal’s heart thudded deep in his chest as he processed her words and omissions. “I don’t want to sleep in your room.”

“I don’t want to sleep in my dead brother’s room.” She sighed. “We’re done. Zoey and me. Why wouldn’t she be here if we weren’t?”

“Because you’re not exactly a ray of sunshine right now.”

“Relationships aren’t sunshine dependent, or at least they shouldn’t be.” She nodded at her door. “She knew.”

“Knew what?”

“She knew that things weren’t as simple as they’d once been, after I came back. She knew.”

Tal flinched as she reached for his hand.

“Knew what?” he repeated, his tone softer.

“That what happened, it changed a lot.” Lucy tugged a little, and he followed her this time, into her room. “This is
my
room. She stayed here, but it was always mine first.” She dropped his hand and sat on the bed.
 

Tal shrugged and sat down beside her, looking around her space. She had a few frames on the walls, abstract things, landscape paintings and photographs of younger versions of Campbell’s cast of characters that he’d come to know. “I don’t know what you want,” he said bluntly. “You’re sending mixed messages.”

“Maybe I don’t know what I want,” she muttered. “So it’s hard to send a clear message.”

Tal reached for her hand. “I keep looking at you and seeing your brother for the briefest second, which is really weird.”

“It’s the hair.”

“It’s not that. You look softer. Kinder. It’s that, when you’re not telling me off for no reason.” He lay her hand palm down on his chest. “I can handle the hair.”

She took a minute to relax at his proximity before inching closer. “You remember him? Cole?”

“Of course I do,” Tal replied, his eyes memorizing her face. “I remember when you first walked in together and he would have given us the moon if we’d made a good enough case.”

“You should have known him. I…I made a lot more sense when contrasted against him.”

Cara had told Tal the same thing a few hours earlier. He buried his hands in Lucy’s dark hair and locked eyes with her. “I want to be important to you. It doesn’t have to be here,” he nodded at the bed. “It can be in friendship, or politics.
 
I feel like we have a lot of potential, but it’s the kind of potential that could go in any number of ways. Wherever we take it.”

She nodded at him and blinked back a tear, stopping it before it ran down her cheek and revealed how much he affected her.
 

“I don’t know how to do this,” Lucy admitted. “I don’t know how to do what I want and put everything that’s happened aside, and be here with you and just be here.”

“Is this what you want?” He enunciated every word carefully as he watched her face.
 

She nodded, slowly and deliberately.
 

“Okay,” he nodded back, taking a deep breath. “Okay.”

She spread her fingers out on his chest and placed her palm over his heart. It beat away with the strength and confidence of something that didn’t know it could fail.
 

“What are you thinking?” she squeaked.
 

“I’d like to kiss you,” he whispered. “And I still don’t really know what you’re feeling, so if you could tell me, that would be good.”

She closed her eyes and inched a little closer, which Tal took as a green light, and, like he’d done with much more confidence that night in the woods, he pressed his mouth against hers. She responded in kind and within seconds, any uncertainty either of them had vanished as their unusual chemistry took over.
 

She smiled against his mouth. Tal kept his hands settled on her face, deciding to wait until he was invited to touch her the way he wanted to. He knew being with her would always be different from other girls, and his expectations couldn’t be the same. He decided he’d have to be patient, as her hands awkwardly traveled his torso, avoiding any obviously arousing areas. He wondered if she knew that avoiding those areas was possibly more of a turn on than her just getting right down to it. Maybe this was part of how women slept together, he thought fleetingly. Maybe everything was slower; less of a race to the finish. He knew there was also the possibility that he repulsed her, not because of anything he’d done, but simply because of what he was.
 

Her hands eased up his shirt and brushed against his back, causing him to shiver. When she kissed him back, he forgot all but the most basic and important of things. It was nice letting someone else lead for a while, especially in such an agreeable direction. Lucy’s face flushed as he stroked her cheeks with his thumbs.
 

“This, it’s very…I didn’t think this was how I’d spend my evening,” Tal chuckled.
 

“Right?” She squeezed her eyes shut and smiled. “I think we’re both treading in unexpected places.”

She initiated their next kiss, drawing his face to hers as their lips met once more.
 

“Lucy?” Cara said, knocking tentatively before walking in wide-eyed as Lucy pulled away and put inches between herself and Tal. “Sorry…I…” She shook her head. “I should have—”
 

“It’s fine,” Tal stammered, his fingers on his lips as he realized how strange what they were doing would seem to anyone else. “We were just—”

Lucy was a delicious shade of red, Tal noticed, and Cara’s stunned reaction matched hers exactly.
 

“What is it, Care?” Lucy finally said, her brow furrowed.
 

“Tal’s pilot, he’s out there fighting with some guy I don’t know.” She blinked at the two of them. “This is nice. I like this,” she said awkwardly. “It’s good.”

Tal adjusted his shirt and noticed shouting off in the distance. “Why are they fighting?”

“I like him, I think,” Lucy said, her eyes on Cara as if Tal wasn’t there. “I think I’m as surprised as you probably are.”

“I’m not that surprised,” she said with a little shrug. “But the fighting. We should probably go see about the fighting. No one’s breaking them up.”

Tal glanced at Lucy sadly before bounding down the stairs and out the front door.
 

“That asshole was putting sugar in my gas tank!” Otis shouted, shoving a kid Tal didn’t know a few feet from the house. “You know how hard that shit is to get out, motherfucker?”
 

Eyes were black and noses were bloodied. A few kids stood back and watched, but no one stepped in as Otis picked up the boy and threw him to the ground.
 

“That’s Craig. Angela’s boyfriend. He’s from East,” Lucy mumbled to Cara, who found herself awkwardly wedged between her and Tal. “I’m sure she’ll be barking over here in a minute.”

“She hasn’t come to send her regrets about Cole,” Cara tisked. “And he’s from East, pouring sugar in West’s gas tank?”

Lucy and Tal exchanged a look as Otis continued pummelling him.
 

“Otis,” Tal called. “Let it go.”

“Fuck that. Asshole tried to break my plane.” He threw him down once more.
 

“You’re dead,” Craig gasped. “All of you, and you don’t even know it.”

“Why were you doing that? Trying to keep them here?” Lucy asked. “Tell me, and I’ll keep him off you.”

Craig looked between Tal and Otis and chuckled as he spit out a tooth. “You think
he
doesn’t know you’re here?”

Tal’s gut dropped as things came into focus.
He
was Connor. “I’ve got to get back,” he said, glancing at Lucy. “I’ve already been here too long—”

Lucy nodded. “We need to go.”

“You don’t—”
 

“Bull and Zoey are heading there. I’m going,” she said with finality. “We’ll leave tonight?” she asked Otis.

“I need to drain my gas tank first,” he grumbled.

“Chubs, lock Craig and Angela up in the jail.” She reached for Cara’s hand and stared into her eyes. “I need you to take care of things while I’m away. I’ll call. Tell Andrew to work defensively instead of offensively until I know more. Please…make him understand.”

Cara nodded. “I’ll be okay.”

Lucy leaned in and kissed her forehead. “I’ll call.”

She packed light, Tal noted in the rush that ensued. It wasn’t until they were up in the air that they both took a deep breath.

“What if we didn’t have to go to war with East?” Lucy said, burying her face in her hands. “What if it was all unnecessary, and we should have been going to war with you? He could have taken…” She blinked back tears. “West could have orchestrated everything.”

“I would have known,” Tal said, with a large degree of uncertainty. “I would have known if he had your brother.”

“Just like you knew he had us both kidnapped?” Lucy raised her eyebrows critically. “You didn’t know what was going on under your nose any more than I did.”

“Leah knew I was here. Leah and Rika. That’s it.”

“Well, and Craig. Campbell’s small.”

***

It was well after two in the morning when they arrived at Rika’s house, after careful deliberation on Tal’s part in terms of who he could trust. She ushered them in and locked the door behind them. It took a second for Tal to realize she wasn’t alone either.

“Someone broke four of my windows last night,” she said, nodding at three of Juan’s largest cousins. “I think we’re busted. I’m going north to San Fran in the morning and we’ll work from there.” She sat on the couch. “I’ve got my kids to think about.”

“If we go to San Fran, we may never get LA back.” Tal glanced at Juan’s cousins. “And what about Mexico?”

“Send them to Montana. The kids,” Lucy said. “I have friends there that will take them in until it’s safe.”

“Who are you?” Rika clipped, taking in Lucy’s disheveled appearance.
 

“Rika, this is Lucy Campbell,” Tal said, reaching for her hand. “Lucy, Rika.”

The two women regarded each other with detached interest.
 

“We’ll decide in the morning,” Rika replied. “Otis, will you—”
 

“I need to fuel up, but yeah. Sure,” he muttered, pulling off his glasses and rubbing his forehead. “I’d love to fly everyone to San Fran. I don’t have anything else to do.”

“We can find someone else—”
 

“I mean it. I don’t have anything else to do,” he replied. “But I need to sleep.”

“Everyone go to bed,” Rika ordered. “Tal, Lucy, you’re in the den. There’s a murphy bed. Otis, you take the couch in the games room.”

What seemed like a lifetime after the last time they’d been alone, Lucy and Tal worked together to set up the Murphy bed and locked themselves in, bracing a chair against the door.

“She just assumed we were sleeping together,” Tal said thoughtfully.

“You had your hand on my lower back,” Lucy replied, somewhat tersely. “I’ll kill him, if he did…to Cole.”

“You’ll have to get in line. Rika’s got first dibs, and he did kill her children’s father.”

“Maybe we can flip a coin,” she said bitterly, stripping down to her tank top and underwear before quickly crawling into bed.

Tal realized that Lucy undressing should have been considered anything but sexy after the night they’d had, but perhaps because of the great deal of uncertainty surrounding the next day and every one after it, the part of his brain that gave a fuck about etiquette shut down and he tilted her chin up towards his. “I want to look at you,” he murmured.
 

“Tal, it’s not the time,” she whispered unconvincingly as she rolled onto her side. “It’s…it’s been a long day.”

The mood in the room darkened with the change in her expression. “What’s wrong?”

“She knows there’s something between us. Your friend. It’s…not what I wanted.” She pulled away. “Now, to her, we’re a thing, and that…it’s not good for either of us right now. This, it was a nice idea, maybe…it’s better if I stick with what I know.”

Tal took a minute to carefully draft his response. “You’re taking the easy way out if you think that.”

“Maybe I am,” Lucy said, her tone wounded. “Or maybe I’m protecting myself the best way I know how.”

She was shutting down. Tal saw it clear as day. He knew she was right; that the position she’d created for herself was easier than the one they were exploring. Being together was a liability for both of them in a lot of ways.