I hadn’t. Viktor had, manoeuvring that bitch like a boss, or some pretty thing with a pilot’s brain. But I didn’t tell Rubi that. I just smirked and lit a smoke, snorting as he growled and stomped to the driver door of his own truck, jabbing a tattooed thumb in Viktor’s general direction, which was stillup.
“Get down then, you cretin.”
Viktor obliged, leaping back to the Rattler before he hopped to the ground, no hint of discomfort on his face as he landed beside me with enough leonine grace to make my dick hard.
“Mind that fucking hip.”
Viktor stole my smoke. My heart. My faculties as he bit my neck, before stepping off to show Rubi exactly how he thought our brace of HGVs should be parked.
“You’re off your head,” Rubi complained, finally killing the engine of the humungous HGV. “Did Teddy put you up to this?”
Viktor shrugged, as easy as he always was until he wasn’t. “Is common sense to use each other to block access to the rear of your vehicles.”
“Coulda told me that before I went to bed.”
“You can go back to bednow. No one is stopping you.”
Rubi shifted a pointed stare to where River had already wandered off, as interested in lorry parking as I was, texting on his phone while he ate a bag of Squashies.
Viktor smirked. “So go for a walk.”
Rubi gave him the finger. “I liked you better when you were somewhere else.”
He strode away to join River.
I laughed, and it felt almost as good as Viktor did, but I had to ask, “What are you mithering him for?”
“He will find out soon enough.”
Colour me intrigued, but I was still all about being as close to Viktor as possible. I tugged him further into the new shadows his parking arrangement had created, pressing him against one of Bertha’s giant wheels, fire in my blood before I’d even kissed him, smouldering flames that fast became an inferno the second our lips touched.
And yeah, okay. Maybe Rubi had been right about me missingthisas much as I’d missed everything else about Viktor. Kissing him set me aflame, but I found so much peace in that fire. My headache faded, my eyes stopped itching, and I no longer wanted to murder every other driver on the road. More than that, I wanted to fuck Vik against the wheel of a truck, which was definitely not going to happen.
He laughed and pulled away, putting some much-needed distance between us. “You looked so tired when I first saw you, but you have some energy left, I think.”
“I’m never tired around you.”
Lies, especially these past few months, but it was true that I sometimes found it hard to sleep around him, as if my cynical heart was scared I’d wake up to find him nothing but a concussion-induced illusion. On my better days, I knew it was because I didn’t want to miss a moment with him. Rightnow, I couldn’t look away from him to even think about it. “Why are you so fucking hot?”
Viktor leaned in and licked the seam of my mouth. “Because you know what it’s like to be cold. Now come inside. I brought you something.”
Insidemeant the depressing interior of the Rattler, but thanks to a loneliness-fuelled tidy up at our last rest stop, it no longer resembled a skip. Just two narrow bunks with a foot of space between them and a taped-up porta-loo.
My bag lay on the bunk I’d slept on the most. Viktor picked it up with one hand, and unhooked the other bunk from the cab wall with the other, dragging it across to make a double bed—atinydouble bed with a death drop in the middle, but it was still cute.
“Asher, come here.”
My body moved of its own accord to where Viktor had stretched out on the makeshift bed. He flicked the switch on the low lamp built into the wall, the treacherous cunt that only worked for me if I punched it. “Is like an airplane.”
“Wouldn’t know.”
“We should maybe change that one day.”
“Why?”
“So I can see you with the sun in your face again. Is selfish, but I think about it a lot.”
Of course he did. My empty stomach contracted. Viktor had left his whole life behind to be with me, sacrificing the family who had kept him alive before I’d found him again so I could be with mine. Jean. Folk. Locke. And yeah, okay, even dickheads like Rubi. Cos Vik had known how much I needed them. But what about him? He had Lida, but he hadn’t seen Jake in months. Had only seen his sister and her kids one fucking time.It’s not enough.I knew that. But I didn’t know how to fix it either.