It should have been a relief that most of his good humor and wit was gone, but I found it almost as unnerving as seeing Carter hanging on by a thread. “What happened tonight?”
He sighed, holding out his glass, and with a roll of my eyes, I poured him another measure while finishing the large one I’d poured myself earlier and adding to it as the warmth spread through my limbs. He took a sip, and he told me what happened. Their struggle to find the two girls with only a few clues to work with, the way they had figured it out. Of the state of the girls. And what they did to save one of them.
Then Colin had given an order, something I felt was second nature to him, and how Carter had balked. How Jake had backed Colin up, Reno had stayed quiet, and Carter had backed down. Then, after their finished rescue, one girl saved, the other drowned in the swell of rainwater that had sent a previouslypeaceful creek overflowing while she remained trapped, helpless to save herself.
They had returned, and according to Colin, he and Carter had…talked. It was an argument; harsh things were said, but they talked.
“And I’m supposed to believe that?” I demanded. “You just talked?”
“We talked; clearly you could see that when you came in. We weren’t fighting; we weren’t even yelling. We talked, and I think he understands what happened tonight a lot better than before. Now, I don’t know if that understanding is going to make him hate me less after everything, but he understands better, and I…I’m not sure I understand him, not completely, but I understand a few things.”
I thought of Carter, who’d been assigned to us as a good place for him to learn the ropes the real way, not just through training and practice runs. Carter, who was practically a kid as far as I was concerned, though he had been able to vote for a few years. Carter, who had once had a few too many beers and told me how he and his sister had got lost in the woods once. He had taken off on her while they’d been walking, trying to get on his big sister’s nerves as brothers were prone to doing, and she had chased after him because they’d both be in trouble if he got hurt.
Except it hadn’t been him that had been hurt, not badly at least. An ankle that had healed weeks after he had fallen into a ravine. The same ravine hadn’t been as kind to his sister, who had half caught him before he’d plummeted down. Not enough to stop the fall, but to stop him from dying. She hadn’t been so lucky, and he had been too young and hurt to crawl out of the ravine to find the help that might have saved her life. It took a full day before they were found, and by that time she was cold.
I wondered sometimes what it must have been like to spend hours with your sister’s body, too young and helpless to doanything but hold her close. I wondered if he still dreamed about that night, but I never asked. There were some things you didn’t ask, and some things you weren’t supposed to know. Even our nightmares could be too private for others to know, and I respected him enough not to ask…and not to tell his story.
“He had a loss,” was all I would say.
“I figured,” he said, surprising me slightly, when I expected more probing questions. “You don’t have that kind of desperation and anger about something like that without having been on the receiving end of how helpless it feels to need to be rescued, or you’re justthatnaïve and full of hope.”
“So, he was that pissed and upset, but he’s not the one who bloodied your lip,” I said wryly, almost amused at his casual, persistent stubbornness.
“I got hit by so many things on the way out there and back, who knows what happened,” he said with a shrug. “Probably the same thing with his eye, but he’d have to tell you about that.”
“I think he confronted you over your order,” I said, biting out the word. “And he swung at you. And either you got yours back, or more likely, Jake, who’s already shown a loyalty and protectiveness over you that’s deeply fascinating and almost concerning, stepped in and gave him that black eye. I don’t know how you brokethatup, but you did, and then you spoke to Carter and said…something that got through to him and made him think clearly by the time I showed up.”
He stared at me for a little too long, and I realized that if I wasn’t right on the money, I was damn close and had surprised him. He never betrayed that emotion, though, giving a soft sigh. “Or we simply got smacked around by Mother Nature and had a heated argument after a long night.”
I glared at him. “You know, I want to chew you out and punish you because I know you’re lying, and I know he’s going to back you up. Jake won’t sell either of you out, and Cait…well,she’ll tell me a few things. Not what happened, but what she thinks I should do. You though…well, you’ve barely known these men a week, and you’ve already taken charge of them without me around, and you’re standing by them even when one of them probably deserves a few metaphorical slaps.”
He raised a brow before downing the rest of his drink and setting it on the desk carefully. “I can’t tell if you want to give a few not so metaphorical slaps or if you’re giving me praise. Were you a drill instructor?”
I blinked. “No, I uh?—”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “You were considered, weren’t you? Because that sort of mixed message…works so well for one.”
I scowled. “Do you mind not running your mouth while I’m trying to do my job?”
He spread his hands. “I’ll do my best. But if you’re going to get to your point, I wish you’d get there. I’m sitting here in wet clothes, cold wet clothes I might point out that are only slightly warmer now I’m in a heated building, and I’m tired.”
Jesus, even when I was trying to do my damn job, he was still going to run his mouth only a second after I asked him to stop. Even if I forgot the awful, if memorable, way we had been introduced, he had been getting on my nerves from the moment I’d started dealing with him. It would be one thing if he were a barely competent idiot who just liked to run his mouth; I knew how to handle those. And it also would have been fine if he was a perfectly competent and tolerable person who didn’t make me want to rip my hair out. Except he was neither of those things, and he was both.
“Would you shut the fuck up?” I asked him, no,demanded.
Humor returned to his expression, but it lacked the good-natured, whimsical quality it normally had. Instead, it gave me the feeling that he enjoyed pissing me off. “Look, Xander, I keptmy mouth shut when it was necessary while I served, and I made myself a promise that turned out to be a bigger deal than I thought after I was out for a while, do you know what it was?”
“No,” I said, and then added for good measure. “And I don’t care.”
“I told myself that I behaved like a good boy and kept my mouth shut repeatedly because that’s what you do,” he continued as if I hadn’t said a goddamn thing. “But that part of my life was behind me; I would not do that anymore. So no, Xander, I will not shut the fuck up. You have a job to do, I get that, and I get that you’re pissed because things got messy between a few of us while you were off having a particularly bad day, which I also get. What I don’t get is what the fuck the point of this meeting is because I still can’t decide if you want to fight me, yell at me, compliment me, fire me, or any number of things because you’ve been so goddamn wishy-washy with me it doesn’t make any fucking sense and I’m telling you that whether you like it or not!”
I was on my feet before I could think about what I was doing, advancing on him as he was sprawled in my chair and leaned forward. “I said, shut the fuck up.”
He tilted his head back, and all the laughter and good-natured humor in his face was gone, replaced by a deadpan expression that told me he was unimpressed by my temper. “And I said no. Fight me. Yell at me. Fire me even. Hell, bend me over and make me your bitch for all I care, but pick a goddamn direction and stick to it.”
My hands, which had rested on the arms of the chair, spasmed in surprise, and it felt like my eyes were going to bug out of my head. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Pick how you’re going to handle things with me and do it, no more weird lukewarm, hot, chilly, back and forth, round and round we go again shit. It’s been over a week, and I’m alreadyexhausted. Especially because it’s obvious you’re not that way with anyone else around here and honestly, if this is preferential treatment, I’d rather be despised,” he said, holding my gaze and clearly not even remotely aware of what he’d just said.