“One good thing, Kai.” Ryder’s chuckle was a soft roll of heat, tickling at parts of me I didn’t have the time or inclination to scratch. “There must be something.”
There were a lot of things—moments and times I didn’t think a Sidhe lordling would understand. I knew nothing about his childhood, and here he was poking at how Dempsey raised me. Bringing that point up would have Ryder saying I was avoiding his question, and he wouldn’t have been that far off the mark. Especially when the road seemed a bit filmy until I blinked against the sting in my eyes.
“He always made sure I had books.” I grinned, remembering the excitement of discovery while digging through the boxes he would dump on my lap. “I mean, some of them were shit. Don’t get me wrong. Like really crappy books, because he’d go through abandoned houses, places the black dogs or something else with teeth cleared out, and scavenge what he could find. Shit, a lot of my clothes when I was younger came from places like that. His too.”
There’d been boxes of books stacked up behind the seat in the old truck we rattled around in. They took up valuable weapon and supply space, but he hadn’t minded. I worked to keep the number I kept down to a minimum, and he kept shoveling more at me, forcing me to cull my collection. I thought about something personal—something I hadn’t thought about in years—and debated sharing it.
Ryder was so earnest. So dedicated to—not trying to normalize me but trying to understand who I was and how I got there. First time I met him, I thought his sole purpose for meeting me was to use me. Meeting his grandmother and nearly dying under her clenched-fist magic didn’t change my mind about the elfin being manipulative and selfish. If anything, it only confirmed my suspicions, but Ryder kept at me, aware of the growing attraction between us but not pushing at me. He worked instead to make sure we were friends at the very least. I’d never been friends with anyone I slept with. Relationships were a tangle I didn’t need, and I never had any hope anyone would want me for longer than one or two nights.
I wasn’t somebody you kept forever.
I’d never been somebody anyone really wanted in their life. Not that way. Never someone to wake up next to more than a few mornings in a row, and sure as hell not someone who became part of a daily routine, much less a presence in their hearts.
Ryder was asking for something different, and I shoved him away each time, keeping him at arm’s length with my suspicion and doubts, but the truth was I was afraid—afraid to wake up next to him for two mornings only to find out I was unwanted on the third.
What he was asking for now was for me to trust him. To trust that someday—on the third morning—he would still want me in his bed.
And in his life.
I took a long breath and leaped into the unknown.
“After Dempsey got hurt and it looked like he wasn’t going to be able to work, he asked me where I wanted to make our home base. The idea was always that he’d retire one day and I’d pick up the slack, supporting him like he’d supported me. That was always the plan. Just… the end date moved up a bit once his knees blew.” Shrugging at Ryder’s noncommittal hum, I continued, “So when that time came and he asked, I told him I wanted to go down to San Diego, because that’s where the truffula are.”
“What are… is the truffula?” Ryder shifted, wedging himself against the door and the seat, facing me as much as he could in the Mustang’s bucket seat.
“They’re plants. Real ones. Sort of. But the first time I heard of them was in one of the really old books Dempsey got me. The guy who wrote them was from San Diego, and when I heard that, I wanted to see them. Just to see the fields of truffula.” I eased around a dip in the road, slowing the car down. A bit of crackling lightning sparked across the clouds to the right, and the clouds flexed and darkened, promising to unleash something onto the rough brush before pounding into us. “He wrote about these trees and flowers, fantastical things that couldn’t exist but did. Or at least in some way, but he’d seen them as different and more than what they were. We hadn’t really explored San Diego. Not really. I mean, visiting Cari’s family down south and then Jonas when he moved onto the ranch, but not the outskirts. So there he was doped up to the gills with me driving, and we were heading to Jonas’s place to stay for a bit when I made a wrong turn and we came across this hillside covered in pink-and-purple puffballs… the truffula.
“They weren’t the flossy cotton-candy balls I’d read about, but the idea of them was there. I pulled over and got out while Dempsey grumbled that he was hungry or had to take a piss, but he understood because, hell… there were truffula all over the field.” The rain began, dappling the car’s windshield with a light kiss of water drops, but it wasn’t heavy enough for me to turn on the wipers. I did anyway, mostly to give me something to do where I didn’t have to look into Ryder’s too-open expression. “They’re flowers. Gomphrena. All different kinds of those, but they were truffula. I grabbed a handful of them and brought them back to the car, and you know what Dempsey said to me?”
“No,” Ryder murmured gently. “What?”
“He lit up his damned cigar and said, ‘Well, guess we’re moving to fucking San Diego, kid. Now that you’ve found your fricking truffula flowers.’” I did my best impression of his garrulous voice with its harsh smoke-and-bitters lilt. “See, the thing was, I never talked to him about the flowers, about how they fascinated me. And once I found out they were based on something real, I wanted to see one. I didn’t share any of that crap with him, but he knew. He knew how I felt like one of those damned things—halfway between real and imagined.”
“Those dried purple flowers on the bookcase. The ones in the green case. Is that them?”
“Not the ones I picked that day. Jonas’s goat ate them after it got into the truck, but those are the ones Dempsey gave me to replace them. They dry out nice. First thing he put up once I got the bookcases built. It sounds stupid but—”
“No, it sounds like home.” Ryder laid his hand on my thigh and squeezed my knee. “We should put some around the Court.”
“You’re not going to tell anyone I told you this shit, right?” I eyed him, liking the heat of his hand on my leg but not trusting the warmth in his voice. “Because….”
“No. Something just between us, Kai. Something just for you,” he assured me, giving me that smile he always had lurking somewhere, ready to gild me with its shine when I needed a lead out of the darkness I’d put myself in. “That way, whenever you see them, you know you’re finally home.”
Seven
A HINT of smoke drifted under the heavy scent of impending rain, probably a carryover from some distant wildfire eating through a nearby but unseen mesa. Hemmed in by thick threads of impervious black lava, the occasional erratic fires raged with intense heat, only to die off in mewling whimpers when their devastating flames met the paho‘eho‘e and a‘a swaths brought on by the Merge. For all the trouble the Underhill caused, it effectively put an end to the devastating wildfire seasons, although I could have done with less rain.