He didn’t say anything.
“This morning, when I heard they’d sent a team out to get our injured, I thought you were gone. I thought Three had sent you away. Those moments before I knew were some of the worst I’ve ever had.” I sat up and faced him, running my thumbs down his jaw. “If you’re going to fight, I’m going to fight. If you want to run, we’ll run. But I’m not letting you leave without me.”
I kissed him. I pressed all my fear and pride and love into that kiss, and when I pulled away his eyes were glassy with emotion and his breath came in one hard heave.
“Okay,” he said. And then again. “Okay.”
Then he kissed me back.
It was like every kiss we’d ever shared pressed into one, and because of that so different from anything I’d experienced before. The feelings seemed to collide inside of him, spark, and combust, and soon I was straddling his lap, gasping for breath while he poured every ounce of himself into each touch.
Tomorrow disappeared. Everything disappeared.
His fingers threaded through my hair and inched down my back, pressing us closer. I lifted my chin for air, and his mouth found my neck, leaving a trail of kisses down to my collarbone, where the Saint Michael pendant slid along the chain. The heat exploded within me, ricocheting out to my limbs, making every part of me come alive. My hands flew over his chest, his strong shoulders, around to his back and under his shirt to the rippled scar that wrapped around his side. I tugged the fabric over his head, needing to feel his skin. Needing to push us farther.
He stood, and for a moment I was weightless, my knees locked around his hips while he supported my back with one arm. And then the boards of the loft groaned softly as he kneeled and stuffed his shirt beneath us. He hovered over me, balancing his weight on his elbows, pausing for a moment to check my reaction.
I flattened my hand over his heart, feeling it beating hard. Feeling it as if it were mine, and knowing if he was gone, mine too would go silent. His chest rose and fell with each breath. He seemed to think I was pushing him back and added more distance between us, but I stopped him when I shimmied out of my shirt and tossed it aside.
I stared up at him.
He slowed then, and shifted to his side. His finger drew a line from my throat to my belly button and I wondered if he could feel the way my muscles jumped beneath his touch. I focused on his Adam’s apple bobbing, aware of a new, demanding need taking over, overriding the fear and insecurities, blending us together, stripping us down to the truth: that there was nothing more than him and me, than warmth and trust and right now.
“Wait.” I reached down into my pocket, and removed the two plastic squares Rebecca had given me, reminding myself to thank her later. I shoved them into his hand.
He shook his head, as if trying to clear it.
“Where’d you get this? Never mind, it doesn’t matter.” He cleared his throat. His fingertips skimmed down my neck, to my bare shoulder, and down my arm to my wrist. “Are you sure?”
I knew he meant not just about this, but about my promise to stay with him, and I nodded, terrified, but in a good way, because he made me strong.
“Yes.”
I watched as he placed a gentle, trembling hand in the curve of my waist.
He kissed me then, firmly, but slowly enough to break my heart. Our words turned to whispers, then to sighs, then to gasps. And as the moonlight shifted across the window, every worry of what tomorrow would bring, every worry that I didn’t know what to do, melted away, until there was only us.
SOMETIME later we untangled our limbs and shyly sorted through our clothes. We took a long time to dress, as if dusting off our shirts and slowly tying our bootlaces meant that this thing—this really big, important thing that had happened between us—was over.
It was late; the moon had disappeared from the small window near the barn’s ceiling and risen in the night sky. The heavy breathing of the horses in the stalls below filtered up through the boards. I stared at the ladder leading down to the ground, and thought of the dorms, of my bunk above Rebecca and Sean, who were preparing to say good-bye, and felt a sharp pain in my chest. I didn’t want to go back.
Tomorrow Three would send us out to fight. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew we would play our part. And hopefully, that would mean more than just these stolen moments.
Chase was seated on a bale of straw beside me, and I couldn’t help but smile at the pieces of hay that stuck to him. I leaned forward, a little embarrassed, and shook out my hair, knowing it probably looked like a bird had made its nest there. He caught a piece in his hand, and as I sat up, he placed it back on my head.
“What are you doing?” I giggled. He put another piece back in my hair just as I removed the previous one.
“I like it.” Another piece. “There,” he said as if he’d completed a masterpiece. I went to jab him in the side, but his smile had softened. “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I swallowed, feeling my cheeks warm as all the other emotions rose up inside of me, love and fear and need and even sadness, because as much as this was the beginning of something, it was the end of something, too.
Beneath us, one of the horses stomped and snorted, and I glanced down, seeing the note he’d sent me that had fallen out of my pocket. I scooped it up.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Not a lot of options for scratch paper around here.”
I nodded, thinking of the boxes of Statutes in the north wing, and the woman at the computer who’d told me they hijacked the distribution trucks on their way from the printer.
“Very clever,” I said, unfolding it and staring at the words that had brought me here. Barn Tonight. I wondered if he would think I was silly if I kept it.
I flipped the sheet over again, preparing to fold it, but paused when I saw how the words written on the back had bled through the printed type when the sheet had gotten wet.
I thought of the Statutes posted on my door during the arrest. Posted on every door in the towns we’d passed through on our way here. Posted all over Knoxville and Louisville and every city in the country.
I thought of my mother and her magazines, the articles inside filled with treason.
And DeWitt: The people are sleeping. We needed a way to wake them up.
“What if Three doesn’t have to fight the MM alone?” I asked.
Chase’s brows arched. “What do you mean?”
“What if we could get the people to join with us?”
When a government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government. Jesse’s words echoed in my mind.
“Then we’d have a revolution,” he said.
I stood up, the note tight in my fist.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to find DeWitt.”
CHAPTER
13
THE Lodge was quiet—eerie quiet. Like something might jump out of each shadow the flickering torchlight threw across the hallway. We bypassed the first two men guarding the north wing without any trouble, but once we got to the door of the radio room we came face-to-face with Rocklin. He crossed his arms over his narrow chest and leaned against the closed door.
“Why am I not surprised you’d show up here?” he asked.
“How strange,” I said. “I was just about to say the same thing.” I mimicked his posture, sick and tired of all the suspicion.