Free Fusion by Nicole Williams Page B

attention.
    “He’ll come pick you up tomorrow morning and take you back to Hayward headquarters‌—‌” I said, not sure if I should divulge he was already tailing her without her knowledge.
    “In Montana?” she interrupted, one notch south of a shriek.
    One of the guards in the middle of a yawn zeroed in on us, but not for long as a couple of lovers in a mini bout couldn’t hold a candle to whatever was bothering him up his right nostril.
    I nodded once, hoping somewhere in my eyes, expression, or soul she found the reassurance she needed. “Trust me.”
    “Remind me to be anti-trust in my next life, will you?” she said, curling her fingers against the glass. Save for a half inch of melted sand, we would have been entwined. “So, Montana. Tomorrow. Answers.” Shaking her head, she grinned at me. “Sounds like it will be a hell of a weekend.”
    I grinned the one she loved most. Well, all the girls loved most. “Guaranteed, baby.”
     
    One day. Twenty four hours. Fourteen and forty hundred minutes.
    I’d lived two centuries plus worth of days, but after living this past one, I’d come up with a new name for them.
    Hell.
    I’d never wanted a day to pass so quickly before. Just as much, I never wanted a day to pass so slowly. I was such a wreck on Saturday I accidentally substituted salt for sugar in the vanilla sheet cake and been the catalyst for a very near full-on inmate rebellion. I learned my first week that you can’t mess with one of the few luxuries left in a man’s life.
    And to top the day from hell off, Mr. Rogers took his sweet time falling asleep. Every night before, I swear every last one, he was off to dreamland about two point five seconds after laying down. Tonight, when I knew my girlfriend was waiting for me‌—‌for the first time in months, I’d be able to really touch her‌—‌a half hour wasted away before his breathing evened out.
    I didn’t waste one more impatient second.
    I was pulling on the first suit I put my hands on in my closet before you could say eager. I heard the chorus of familiar voices a floor below, and my heart sped up, moving faster than my hands‌—‌I couldn’t change fast enough.
    Her voice wasn’t mixed in with the rest, but I knew she was here. It was like another piece of me was one floor down.
    I was in such a hurry, I buttoned my shirt up wrong and had to start again. This time, I made sure I was getting the right button in the right hole. I was a ball of nerves, the good ones that derived from excitement and the bad ones too. The ones that derived from apprehension and fear.
    I had no idea how informed I’d find Emma. I would walk down those stairs, towards her, having no shadow of a clue how much she knew of the not-so-finite me. I knew my family would handle this situation delicately and try to leave the Q and A session to me, but I didn’t underestimate the persuasive qualities of the woman I loved. She’d been with Joseph‌—‌the man couldn’t keep a secret if you sewed his mouth shut‌—‌since this morning. Trapped in the confines of a car on the way to the airport, trapped in first class, then trapped on the ride from the airport to home.
    I’d be lucky if she didn’t already know every last damn secret of Immortality and didn’t burst through the back door running away from me forever when she saw me. Then again, maybe Joseph bit into his tongue and went against everything in him and kept his mouth shut. Maybe she knew nothing and was waiting for me to spill it.
    Stepping out of the closet, I realized how screwed I was.
    I was walking into a situation I had little to no knowledge of, a situation I had next to no control over. The odds for coming out of this one unscathed weren’t good, but nothing I could do would change the odds in my favor, and I was in far too deep to walk away. This was Emma we were talking about; walking away had never been an option.
    I closed my eyes at the top of the staircase and imagined