Maybe I should take the choice away from him. Maybe I should get up and just start packing. I'd spent too much time procrastinating. I needed to stop this madness and get to Anchorage, start over, and Caleb . . . Caleb was still staring straight ahead, which was starting to worry me.
"So back at the station, you weren't really talking to me, huh?" he finally asked.
I shook my head.
"You were talking to him? The guy who gives you nightmares?"
I nodded, not able to look up at him. "I never got around to counseling. I read all of the right self-help books, worked through them as instructed. I was offered anonymous talk therapy over the phone with a specialized counselor, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Somehow, admitting what happened to me, making it real, seemed to make all of the progress I'd made unreal."
"I know you have some stuff in your past that you don't want to tell me about. And I've tried not to pry. But eventually, Rabbit, you're going to have to talk to me about it."
"Do you really want a blow-by-blow account?" I asked. "Do you want to look at my journal? There's an entertaining read, or at least it was before I realized he was reading it. Giving me even that tiny bit of privacy was just too much for him. Do you want me to tell you I was some sweet, naive girl who never suspected a thing? Because I did suspect-a lot-but I just couldn't figure a way out of it."
"No. I'm not asking you to share anything with me you don't want to," he insisted. "For now, you should know that I'm not whoever you were yelling at. I wouldn't ever lay a hand on you in anger. I may bluster and fuss, but I wouldn't try to take your choices away. I kind of like that you're always trying to get around me to do what you want. It's what makes you interesting and frustrating and, well, you. I wouldn't want it any other way."
I nodded, resenting him for being so damned understanding. I didn't know how to respond to this. I knew what to do when someone was yelling or threatening. I didn't know what to do in the face of respectful boundaries. God, that was sad.
I slipped an arm around him. He tucked my head under his chin and kissed my hair. "Also, you have to stop kicking me in the shin. It's emasculating."
A snort rippled up from my lungs, and I covered it with a cough. "I'm sorry. There's no excuse for it."
"I know."
He ruffled my hair, his hand lingering on top of my head. I leaned into it, tucking my face against his chest. He wrapped the other arm around me and secured me there.
"I'm sorry I raised my voice," he said. "I should have known better. You showed all those skittish signs. I knew you wouldn't tolerate that."
"So I'm a walking advertisement for post-traumatic stress. Awesome," I muttered.
"No, the signs are pretty subtle, but I watch you closely."
"That doesn't make me feel any better."
"Sorry."
I looked up at him. "Can we just go to bed and pretend you're not still crazy angry with me?"
"I'm not ‘crazy' angry with you. I'm ‘sane person' angry with you. And we're going to have to talk about your bleeding-heart tendencies at some point," he told me.
"I know." I sighed, flopping down on the threadbare pillows. "But not tonight."
He scooted up on the bed, under the blankets, and curled his body around mine. He rested his chin on my shoulder and draped an arm around my middle. I closed my eyes and sighed as the heat from his skin seeped into mine.
"My name's not Anna."
He gave me a squeeze. "I figured that out a while ago."
There was another long, silent pause. He wasn't going to ask me. He was waiting for me to tell him myself, to make the choice to share that part of me.
"It's Tina," I told him. "Christina, if you want to be technical about it. But I was named after my mother, and we couldn't have two Christinas in the house. And I refused to be called Chrissie. Since then, I've been called Anna, Melissa, Brandy, Lisa, and Tess. I was Anna the longest."
"What do you want me to call you?"
"When you're not calling me Rabbit, you mean?"
He laughed into my skin, a canine whickering noise that was more wolf than man.
"Tina." I sighed. "I would really like to be Tina again."
He kissed the nape of my neck, sending a pleasant warm tingle down my spine. "I like Tina, too."
I woke up to the sound of Caleb whispering, "You're kidding me!"
I rolled over to see his bare back as he hunched over the edge of the bed. He was talking into his cell phone, muttering furiously under his breath.
"You're kidding me," he said again.
I sat up in bed, swiping at my face. I padded toward the bathroom to brush my teeth as Caleb continued muttering into his phone. He wrapped up the phone call by sighing and saying, "She's going to be hell to live with after this."
I arched an eyebrow and spat out the excess toothpaste. He ended the connection and flopped back on the bed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"What?"
Caleb sat up, rolling his eyes. "That was Merl's office. Mort showed up at the airfield last night, just like you said he would. He checked in to the hospital this morning for presurgery testing. Merl is expressing his gratitude with a rather large check."
My lips wanted to twitch into a grin, but I tamped it down. "Gloating would be an ugly thing to do even when I was insanely right, wouldn't it?"
"Yes, yes, it would," he said, giving me an exasperated look.
He hauled himself out of bed and helped me gather up our bags. We completed our various packing-up chores side-by-side, organizing the files, securing the equipment, checking under the bed and in the bathroom for forgotten items. Caleb was sulking, but it was a quiet kicking my own ass sort of self-flagellation to which I was not accustomed. He wasn't throwing things around the room, breaking my stuff, or sending me wounded-baby-deer looks because I was so very cruel. He just silently worked through the moving-out checklist with his mouth clenched shut. As we walked out of the motel room, I bumped him with my hip. His lips quirked, but he actively suppressed the smile. Walking toward the truck, I bumped him again. He laughed, throwing his arm around my shoulders.
"We did the right thing, Caleb. We let Mort make the choice for himself. I'm sorry I went about it in a dishonest way, trying to sneak him out of the gas station. But it all worked out in the end."
"But what if it hadn't?" he asked.
I smiled in what I hoped was a winsome, nonobnoxious manner. "Well, then, I would owe you a rather large apology."
"I know you don't agree with what I do."
"Not in all cases," I protested. "But I think that you should check into backgrounds and circumstances a little more before you agree to look for someone. There are people out there who deserve to be left alone."
He nodded. "I'll think about it."
It was probably the maximum amount of progress I was going to make, so I would take it and run. "Who was right?" I asked, preening just the tiniest bit.
"You were right," he said, standing up.
I fairly skipped to stand in front of him, bouncing on the balls of my feet. "Who is smarter than you?"
He crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. "You're smarter than me."
I kissed his chin, because that was as high as I could reach. "Don't you forget it."
"Was that last bit really necessary?" he grumbled.
"Hey, I had a whole ‘I Told You So' dance choreographed. You're lucky I'm sparing you that," I told him. He harrumphed as he helped me climb up into the truck. "It was set to the tune of ‘Single Ladies.' "
Caleb narrowed his eyes at me. "You are evil. Pure evil wrapped up in a tiny pixie package."
"But I was a correct evil pixie package," I said.
8
From Some Senders, All E-mails Are Red-Flagged
I celebrated the arrival of Merl's very large check by finding the world's only Laundromat-slash-Internet café and checked my e-mail while our delicates spun dry. Caleb was meeting with someone about a case that was "too preliminary" to discuss with me. He'd asked me to stick close to the motel, but I needed to check my private e-mail address, and we were running low on clean socks. I was more comfortable with using the café's computers to check the secure server I used for Red-burn's e-mails. I hoped that she'd sent some update on my paperwork.
When I typed my information into the log-in fields, my in-box had sprouted new messages like acne on a One Direction fan. Thirty-eight new messages starting weeks before, right around the time I ran out of Emerson's and saved a werewolf. The subject lines were all the same: "FOUND YOU, BITCH."
I knocked my foam coffee cup from the table, splashing scalding liquid across my thighs and barely noticing the burn. My stomach pitched, and the floor seemed to tilt underneath me. Hands shaking, I clicked on the first one. It was short and to the point: "I found you, bitch. Did you really think you could run from me? Do you think living in the ass end of nowhere will keep me from finding you? Don't you worry, I'm on my way. We'll be seeing each other real soon."