Sure, he’d gone out into the field with Anna, sometimes with colleagues of hers, or even a few times as a team leader in his own right. But those trips had been part of his university life, allowing him to transplant a subset of his stuff, George Carlin-style. And because of that, it hadn’t felt as though he’d truly left UT . . . until the demon within him had driven him in search of the Nightkeepers. And oh, holy shit, it felt strange being back.
“How long has it been?” Jade asked softly.
She understood, he realized. She got it. Automatically, he reached for her hand, drew her to his side, and let their fingers twine together as he stared at the students walking from one place to the next, or lying sprawled in the weird sunlight. The faces might change from year to year, but everything else was the same. “Since last spring. Fifteen months or so.”
“A very busy fifteen months.”
“Except for the part where I was sitting on my ass in the in-between.” He tugged on their joined hands, giving himself the luxury of keeping that small connection between them, despite whether he deserved to. “Come on. Let’s go see what Anna wants.”
Lucius led her in the direction of the art history building. As he did so, a funky shiver crawled down the back of his neck, bringing a serious case of déjà vu. He didn’t think he’d ever before walked a date home from that particular parking lot, but he felt as though he’d played out this scene before, but with one major difference: He’d stopped being invisible. Back then he could’ve walked around the entire campus without getting hassled—which had been a welcome improvement over high school—but also without attracting much in the way of attention. He would’ve gotten a handful of waves and “hey”s from his few hangout buddies and a wider circle of nodding acquaintances, most of whom he would’ve met through one of the classes he TA’d. Some would’ve been girls. Most would’ve been guys. And the likelihood that he would’ve been walking beside a woman who looked anything like Jade would’ve been approximately a zillion to one.
Now, as they walked along, he got five times the nods and “hey”s he would’ve gotten before, and all from strangers. Women looked him in the eye, actually noticing him. And guys—even big ones with football-thick necks—sketched waves in his direction, gave way on the path, then turned to watch Jade’s rear view, glancing quickly away when they saw that he’d noticed. The unreality of it only increased when he finally saw someone he recognized—a friend of one of his former roommates—and the guy walked right past him with a nod, a hint of wariness, and zero recognition.
“Is it everything you thought it would be?” Jade murmured.
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “It is . . . and it isn’t. I can’t pretend I haven’t thought about what it would be like to come back here, looking the way I do now. And yeah, that part is pretty cool.
But at the same time, the campus itself is different. . . . Okay, it’s not, but I am.” He gestured around them. “This used to be my whole world. This and the ruins down south. Now . . .” He trailed off, not sure how to put it into words.
“Now the whole world is your world. And not just figuratively.”
He exhaled. “Yeah.” They walked a moment in silence. Then, as they hooked the last turn heading to the art history building, he said, “Back when I was growing up, I used to picture myself living the adventure, you know? I’d read Tolkein or Bujold or whatnot, and I’d imagine myself in the starring role.” He didn’t need a former therapist to point out that both authors had often focused on smaller, weaker protagonists who fought with their wits rather than their bodies. That was then; this was now.
“I’d think about what I would do if it were my job to save the world, and, of course, I always got everything right, always picked the right battles, fought the right enemies. The harder I fought, the better I did. But now . . . I don’t know. I’m doing my best, and I’m still not getting where I need to be.”
“Maybe you need to relax and stop trying so hard,” she said cryptically. “Besides, to paraphrase Strike, our best is all the gods can ask us to do.”
“And if that’s not enough?”
“Mankind is fucked.”
Her bluntly profane answer startled a laugh out of him. “Such language from a harvester,” he chided. He stopped in his tracks, just short of the moat leading to the office that had once been the focus of his life. Tugging on their joined hands, he spun her into his arms. The sparse foot traffic eddied around them, and the strange orange sun slipped behind an ocher cloud, but he was hardly aware of those peripherals. His entire attention was focused on the woman in his arms, the lover he never could’ve imagined having when he’d been a part of the UT world.
Their bodies brushed, then pressed together as she slid her arms around his neck and leaned in, her eyes and mouth laughing, but darker shadows lingering beneath. Suddenly wishing he could take those shadows away, that he could make it all go away, he leaned in and kissed her, not a friendly feel-good kiss, or one of the oh-yes-there-more kisses of their lovemaking, but a carnal kiss, a full-on public display of possession. Mine, he thought, wanting to snarl it at the other men he sensed watching them, wanting to say it to her. You’re mine . He spread his hands on either side of her waist, his fingers touching the outline of the nine-millimeter hidden beneath her shirt. If anything, the contrast between soft woman and hard-edged weapon made his blood burn hotter, made him want to wrap himself around her and protect the hell out of her, despite whether she could handle herself as a fighter, a mage, or both. More, he wanted to hear the same things from her, wanted to hear her say she wanted more than he was giving.
Heat flared through him, coiling hard and greedy inside him. His blood buzzed in his veins; colors sparked behind his closed eyelids. He wanted—
He wanted the hot girlfriend he’d dreamed of having on campus, he realized suddenly, the heat and buzz dying in the wake of the realization that he mostly wanted Jade as his arm candy for the next hour or so, wanted to know that the other guys envied the hell out of him. And that had nothing to do with him and Jade, and everything to do with his own stunted-ass psyche and a need to prove that he wasn’t still a scrawny, too-tall praying mantis of a dork with a history of Notting Hill-like public protestations of love that ended in monstrous flameouts rather than happily-ever-after.
Gods, could he be a bigger asshole?
Jade just stood there watching him, her expression making him wonder just what she saw in his face, what she took away from it. After a moment, she smiled softly and said, “It’s this place. It changes our perceptions, I think. Skywatch seems very far away. So does 2012. But at the same time, they both seem very important.”
Which totally wasn’t what he’d been thinking. It was a relief to know she was oblivious to the fact that he’d almost just imploded the good stuff they had going on, solely from a dorky need to prove a point that nobody but him gave a flying crap about. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling. “And we need to keep moving.”
Taking her hand once again, he led her across the moat and into the art history building. The heavy layers of reinforced concrete closed around them, swallowing him up. And for a moment, he was kicked back into the past.