Page 2 of Lessons In Grey
But before I could get another word out, she said, “Tell me something brilliant.”
I closed my mouth, studying her before turning back to my cigarette, inspecting the little lines across the white paper. Something the companies did to prevent it from setting things on fire. It was meant to stop the flame if you stopped dragging. I never tested the theory.
“The universe is filled with echoes,” I finally began, turning back to her. “Echoes upon echoes. Echoes of stories once told, will be told, and some that will never be told. All around us are these echoes. Universes breathing and dying, stars exploding, everything we ever were or could ever be in the infinite forever and yet, here we stand. Two perfect strangers outside a gas station speaking of such insignificant things.”
She finally looked over, her eyes sparking in something that was there and gone before I could truly understand what it had been. “Nothing spoken is insignificant. Words tell a lot about a person. Which ones they choose to speak, how they say it. You spoke of stories; some are written in the space between the letters.”
I was enraptured by her. “What story do my words tell?”
She studied me, my lips, I suppose, my neck. “Do you ever wonder why people have such faith in certain things?” she asked instead. “For instance, one mistake in filling those gas pumps and they could blow up. Boom. The guys who made your car could have missed tightening a certain bolt. It could rattle free while you’re breaking every speed law there is to break, a tire falls off, you hit a berm. Boom.”
Boom.
The only thing I had faith in was my family. My brothers, I would die for them. They would die for me. Malachi, my father, he would burn down the world for us without hesitation, but having a belief like that was hard to find and even harder to hang onto. One word of broken trust and that faith would shatter faster than a glass doll. “Do you have faith in something?”
“Faith is a construct of a mind convinced that it needs people to survive,” she said evenly. “I have no such need.”
Fuck, she sounded just as broken as I felt. “Everyone needs people,” I said, shoving away from the wall, dragging on my cigarette. “Even the loneliest of us need socialization.” Something about her was electric. Sensual. Mysterious. A woman cloaked in darkness, talking to a stranger in the middle of the night, completely alone.
She didn’t care about herself in the slightest. Either that or she had horrifically high confidence in her ability to deflect bullets. This wasn’t a nice gas station. In fact, a lot of drug deals went on at this place in the back parking lot where there were no cameras.
Not to mention that I also had a gun, tucked away out of sight. Without my jacket, it was a little harder to get too, but Hell, I didn’t expect to need it here.
Her destructive mystery only drew me in, my curiosity growing.
She looked over as I stepped up to the curb, taking a few steps in her direction. “I never said we didn’t need socialization, I said I don’t need people. Keep up, Rags.”
My eyes furrowed as they fell down to my clothes. A suit, form-fitted, jacket in my car, tie tucked into the dark red vest. I looked up, ready to make my case only to find her smiling softly, her hopeless eyes taking me in as if I were some poem she wanted so desperately to never understand.
“It’s a metaphor,” she said, sliding another worm over her tongue.
“A metaphor for what?” I would give anything in the world tokeep those eyes on me. Anything. I’d give up my gun, my job, the very breath in my lungs.
Fuck, I wanted her to be my new cigarette. I needed her to be my new cigarette.
She shrugged, something dangerous in her smile. “It just is.”
I had known danger my entire life. Even before Beckett had found me on the side of the road, half-dead, running from a place I would never speak of, I had been intimate with danger, but this…this creature of depth and solitude. She was something else. Her danger was venom, and fuck if I didn’t want to be injected with every ounce of it.
I took a long drag off my cigarette and exhaled into the night. “You speak like you’ve seen some things.”
She inhaled deeply. “Don’t look too long there, Rags, you won’t like what you see.”
Was that why she wouldn’t meet my eyes longer than a few seconds. “How long?”
Her eyes flicked to mine before turning back to my car. “Three seconds,” she answered, despite my cryptic question. Could she read my mind? I knew it was impossible, but she seemed…impossible. If anyone in this world could read minds, I wouldn’t put it past this woman.
That was my new goal in life, to hold her eyes more than three seconds. “I’ve seen some shit too,” I told her.
One corner of her perfect lips flicked up in a dead smile. “It’s not a contest. Life is too filled with broken suffering, if we all started comparing our wounds, we might just start falling in love.”
“And what’s so bad about that?”
Her eyes flicked to mine once more. “I don’t do love.”
One.
Two.