Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) (24 page)

“Like at Kat’s party.”

Joss looked away from me, off into the
woods, into her own memories. “Dad and I’ve come here, usually once
a week, practically my whole life. We’ve put in hours of sparring
and it never prepared me for what it was like to take real punches
from Marco.”

“Well come on, Joss, Marco’s different.”

“We’ve worked my Talent for hours, testing
its limits, enhancing my control, building endurance, sometimes
until I threw up, and then we started again. We’ve run through all
kinds of scenarios, thinking on the fly about what-if this and
what-if that? How would I get away? What if I had to stand and
fight? How would I protect myself? And things came to me, you know.
The answers seemed clear and obvious. But that night, when there
were real NIAC agents right in front of me, I panicked.”

I reached over and pulled one of her hands
from its grip on the water bottle, squeezed, and tried not to let
my anger at her father spill into the grip. “But you didn’t freeze.
If you were panicked, no one knew it but you.”

“As much as I thought I was prepared, I just
wasn’t. NIAC’s already suspicious enough about Fairview to have
people planted here. Just because we found out about two of them
doesn’t mean that’s all there is. And even if they don’t suddenly
find out there’s a bunch of us living here, at the rate we’re being
picked off, it’s only a matter of time before they decide to send
more agents and take a closer look. Hell,
I
want to know why
there are so many of us here.”

“So you and your dad don’t have any thoughts
about that?”

“If Dad’s got ideas, he hasn’t let me in on
it.”

I just nodded. I was kind of overwhelmed.
This was a lot of talking for Joss, and more talking about herself,
what was in her head, than I ever expected. Still, there were
things she wasn’t saying, and whether she was keeping them from me,
or just keeping them to herself, I wasn’t sure.

“Are you rested up?” she asked suddenly.

“I’m afraid to ask why.”

“I packed lunch.”

“Oh, good. I like lunch.”

“I know this. See that cliff over there?”
She pointed to a wall of rock that bordered the clearing. There was
a ledge. I was afraid of what this meant.

“Yeah…” I answered cautiously.

“That’s where we’re eating. There’s a nice
view from up there.”

“I don’t need a view to eat. Or the climb,
frankly.”

“It’s where we eat,” she told me, as though
this were some kind of ancient rule of the mountain that was not to
be trifled with.

She packed the things back in the pack and
started to sling it onto her shoulders.

“I’ll get this,” I told her, catching it,
but she didn’t let it go.

“No offense, but I know the climb and I’ve
got the muscle memory for this,” she indicated the pack, “to be no
big deal. If you still want a turn at carrying it on the climb back
down, I’ll let you have it then. Deal?”

“Have it your way.” At least I held it up
while she strapped it on this time, and had to admit, at least to
myself, that she was in better shape to handle it than I was.

The climb wasn’t as hard as I thought it
would be, but it still wasn’t easy. I tried to watch Joss and take
the same path.

I’d wondered before, what went into the
making of Joss, but I didn’t really dwell on it, you know? I guess
it was kind of: strict, overprotective dad who probably talks a lot
of shit equals shy girl in combat boots. Then, later, hot shy girl
in combat boots I can’t stop thinking about with awesome, kick-ass
Talent. But I wouldn’t have guessed at the parts of her she was
sharing with me today: rock climbing for her lunch, having to spar
against a grown man who obviously wanted to toughen her up, using
her Talent—and I’d seen what overdoing it could put her
through—until it made her sick. The more I thought about it, the
more it pissed me off, and the more I imagined shoving her father
right off this cliff.

“I’m sorry,” she told me when I climbed onto
the ledge with her. She already had the canvas out and was pulling
things out of the pack. “I’m doing this all wrong.”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have made you come. I just…I
don’t know what I was thinking. You look like you want to push me
off the ledge.” She tucked her hair behind her ear as she said it.
Her tell.

“Not you,” I told her, feeling like a
complete asshole. She had spent the night in my bed, and now I was
one of those people she was uncomfortable talking to. And why?
Because she’d saved my life when I got my skull broken, and then
she had the nerve to call me breakable? Because I was mad that
she’d met my mom and seen how we lived and I was embarrassed by it?
So I’d fucked this shit up—like I knew I would—because it was
easier to be mad at her that to just deal with the truth about
myself. Nice.

“You could if it would make you feel better.
I’d catch myself.” She turned from me to fiddle with a container
that should have opened easily, and I saw her take a quick, nervous
glance at me from under her lashes. “My—my dad shoves me off this
ledge every time we come up here.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I didn’t even try to keep
the edge out of my voice.

“When we come up here,” she said softly, no
longer fiddling but still not looking at me, “at some random point
during lunch, my dad shoves me off the ledge. So that I can catch
myself without knowing it’s coming, you know? Like, to practice
being surpri—”

“What. The.
Fuck?
”

It was like there was nothing else in my
head but rage focused on that one question. If that man had been
there with us, I would have lost my shit and
found
a way to
kill him.

“It’s not—”

“Don’t. Don’t fucking tell me it’s not as
bad as it sounds. Just…don’t.”

She did that sidewise glance at me again,
and a tear slipped down her cheek that punched through the rage,
right into my gut. “It’s bad, right?”

“Is that a
question
?”

Her mouth opened, closed again. Then she
swiped at her cheek in a way that showed me she hoped I hadn’t seen
the tear, and started over. “We’re not like other kids. And maybe
that means that the regular rules don’t apply to us.”

“No. There is no set of rules in which it is
okay for him to shove you off a cliff!”

“Like there’s no rules that would say you
have to steal things to be a good kid.”

“Don’t even try to make this about me,
because it is
not
the same thing.”

“I’m just saying that sometimes people you
care about screw up and treat you bad. You want things to change,
but sometimes they just can’t. And you love them anyway.” She
looked up at me with deep, dark, defenseless eyes. “Because that’s
all you can do.”

There was a beat of silence as we stared at
each other, and then I was reaching for her, dragging her into my
lap, making chaos of the plastic containers. I buried my face in
her neck as I crushed her against me, wishing I could crawl inside
and erase all my stupidity.

And I was. So stupid. She wasn’t trying to
show me up or prove her point about why we shouldn’t patrol
together. She hadn’t brought me up here to show me how bad-ass she
was, she was showing me how she got that way. She brought me up
here because she knew my stupid pride was hurt and she wanted to
show me what we had in common. She was showing me things that were
too hard to just come out and say. Things she probably wouldn’t
come out and say to anyone.

Even though I’d been acting like a jerk, she
trusted me. That much.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered against her
throat.

“Me too,” she whispered back. “I just keep
messing stuff up because I don’t know how to—”

“No. Just…no, okay? You’re not the one who’s
wrong.” She kept trying to operate on things like logic and
honesty, and every time she turned around, one of us was slamming
her for it.

She pulled away from me and stood up,
shaking her head. “You don’t have to be nice about it.”

“I’m not.” Couldn’t she tell? I stood up
too, tried to grab for her hand, but she was moving away, skirting
between the upset dishes and the edge of the cliff, and I was
afraid to make any sudden moves. “Hang on a minute.”

She dropped down in her place across from me
and started messing with the food. “It’s okay, Dylan. I told you
what I brought you here to tell you and you forgive me, right? So
let’s see what we can salvage of lunch.”

If she was really okay, she’d look at me
when she talked to me. “Forget the lunch,” I snapped, skirting the
edge to kneel down beside her. I was so close to the ledge that I
could feel dirt crumble and give way under my toes. I reached out
and tucked her hair behind her ear. She turned her face up to me,
but I didn’t know what to say.

How could I explain why I’d acted that way?
How could I explain how scary it was, to find out that I needed her
so much? Was I supposed to tell her how she’d changed everything?
Like how I hadn’t even realized how bad I’d felt until she’d made
it better, just by looking at me. Like how I thought she was an
awesome, bad-ass ninja, and what I hated was the fact that I knew I
couldn’t protect her, when that’s all I wanted to do. How could I
explain, without sounding like a complete asshole, that I was so
afraid of losing her I pushed her away?

I couldn’t. There was no way I could say
that shit to her. But she was still looking up at me, waiting, and
I had to say something. Somehow I had to make her understand that
everything was okay between us, that I needed everything to be okay
as much as she seemed to.

I stroked my thumb across her cheek, loving
the way it felt, the way her eyes closed and opened to me again,
and gathered myself for what I was about to do. Before I could
chicken out. “Break my fall, Joss.”

Everything went into slow motion. Her brows
drew down, confused. And she started to ask “What?” as I rocked
back on my heels. Her look turned to panic as I felt my balance
shift and she realized what I was doing. As my eyes found the sky,
and I was pushing off with my feet against the ledge, I heard her
scream my name.

And then I was falling.

A moment later, my back hit her cushion of
air. It was like falling into a pool from a high dive, that smack
against the surface that knocks the air from your lungs before the
water gives way and you sink. Except that instead of sinking, it
was another smack, a harder one this time, especially on the back
of my head, that made me see stars.

My vision had almost cleared when Joss
straddled me and took my head in her hands, her fingers moving
through my hair, checking for injury. “Dylan? Dylan, talk to
me.”

Beyond her, the ledge towered over us. I
tried to remember seeing it as I fell, but there was nothing
between pushing off and hitting the ground. Maybe I’d had my eyes
closed. “Wow.”

She dropped my head to the ground, grabbed
me up by the front of my hoodie and then dropped me hard. “You
IDIOT!”

“Um, ow!”

“Don’t you ever,
ever
, pull a stunt
like that again! What the f—”

She started to scramble off me, but I
grabbed her hips, pulled myself into a sitting position and kissed
her. Which was pretty effective at stopping her from yelling at me.
We were both stoked on adrenaline and it was a hot, intense kiss
that took a while to wind down. When it did…

“I love you.” I heard my voice, felt my lips
form the words, a breath away from hers. She went still in my arms
and her heavy breathing just stopped. I guess I could have been
worried, but it felt really good to say it, so I said it again. “I
love you. Maybe that’s what I was trying to tell you.” I brushed my
lips across hers again, because kissing her was easier than looking
her in the eye.

“By throwing yourself off a cliff?” she
asked in a voice that was no longer angry, but breathless and
somehow more Joss-like than it had been before.

“It was a dramatic gesture.”

“Next time, try flowers,” she said, dryly,
and I hugged her to me as we laughed out some of the tension.

“I don’t think I’ve ever thought of you as
the flowers type. Would you like it if I brought you flowers?”

“All girls like flowers. But I’ve got a
little sister who grows them in her hand. I don’t need them, I just
need you.”

No one else in the world could just talk and
make it feel like she’d punched into my chest. I tried to pull back
to look at her, but she gripped me harder and I got it: she didn’t
want to look me in the eye either.

“So no more dramatic gestures, okay?” she
asked. “And no more scaring the crap of me with life-threatening
injuries of any kind.”

“How did it feel when you watched me go over
the edge just now?”

“What kind of question is that? How do you
think it felt?”

“I think it probably felt a lot like how it
felt for me when Kat told us Marco was trying to kill you and I was
trying to get to you, not knowing if I’d get there in time, and
then I found you with his hands around your throat. Or when Heather
called us and told us Marco had you, scared and blind-folded, and
Eric and I were racing to get to you, not knowing what was going to
happen. Or when—”

“Okay, okay, I think I’m seeing your point,”
she groaned.

I was smiling pretty hard. It was more than
just I’d told her that I loved her and she hadn’t run away. More
than she’d said she needed me too. I felt like we were really
starting to understand each other, and that somehow that made
things even better. “I’m not asking you to quit the heroics, okay?
Because I think you’re just starting to become who you’re going to
be, and I don’t ever want to ask you to be less than what you are.
But it scares me, and I love you, so don’t ask me to stop looking
out for you or wanting you to be safe. Deal?”