“Then you should know better.”
“Like you?” Mal tips his head sideways, goading me with his words, the arch of his neck, and the cedar-wood scent that follows me around these days. “Nah…it’s something else, isn’t it? Something you don’t want anyone else to see.”
“Just you, eh?” I push him away, like I can shove us both clear of the truth he’s reaching for. The quiet, and yet still breathing part of me that knows how I’ll feel when he tells me what he did last night. To who andwhy. “A flare gun can kill.”
“So?”
“So…be more fucking careful.”
“I was as careful as they deserved.”
“Who?”
“I’m not telling you that.”
“Why not?”
Mal spins in the water again. “Because you’re fucking dangerous. You think I can’t see it in you?”
“You don’t know me.”
“I don’t need to.”
This time, there’s no challenge in his tone, playful or otherwise, and he swims away from me to the other side of the lagoon.
I don’t chase him. I just watch as he levers his strong body out of the water and die a little as I realise he’s as naked as the day he was born.
The rear view is lethal. Long legs, tanned skin. A tattoo of a haloed parachute on the firm swell of muscle that’s covered by his discarded shorts way too soon.
Damn.So he does have ink, and thinking about it almost reroutes my thoughts from the flayed sensation in my chest. Theone that makes me want to rip my heart out and stamp on it with boots I burned years ago.
I wonder if he might leave. Grit my teeth to how the prospect makes me feel and heave myself out of the water, fury still simmering in my veins, but not for Mal. No, it’s older than that.
Too old. Kill it.
But some things never die, do they?
I sit on the rocks, watching Mal as he buttons his shorts and steps into the running shoes I’m as unsurprised to see as I am to know he had something—maybe everything—to do with the hole blasted in that man’s arm.
And he doesn’t leave. He tosses his favourite tee over his shoulder and comes to where I still sit at the edge of the lagoon, my feet in the water. He crouches and gives me a long appraisal, one that irritates and grounds me at the same time. I shouldn’t like that he sees me. I shouldn’t find comfort in anything about him, save the heat of the kisses he’s ripped from my mouth too many times now for me to count.
But I do like it. So I let him look. And I get my reward in the hypnotic slide of his hand as he grasps my jaw.
“I don’t want to lie to you. Not today, not ever. But every moment I’ve ever spent with you tells me what you’d do if you knew what fuelled me last night.”
“So it was you?”
“Of course it fucking was. And nothing about it was an accident. In case you’re sitting there thinking my aim is shite.”
“I’m not thinking that.” The water is so still it’s almost a photograph. I feel like I am too, so I kick my feet, rippling the surface. “I’m wondering why you think you know me so well.”
And I can keep wondering, apparently. Mal doesn’t give it up. Instead, he lets his thumb pass over my cheekbone before he rises and the evening sun drowns him in gold.
Before he leaves me with the realisation that he’s left his underwear behind.
19MAL
I don’t mean to run into Skylar at the lagoon. Or to invade a space he clearly uses to unwind away from the carnage of the Joker. It just kinda happens, and even as I retreat from him without mauling his mouth, I have no regrets.