Free Learning to Trust by Lynne Connolly

take them home, he said. “I don’t think my parents should see him like this,” he murmured to her. He showed no sign of emotion but when he signed his name on the form, his hand retained a tiny tremor.
    Lina was coming to understand Jon better than she’d ever had before. Her feelings toward him were already too dangerously powerful. She’d miss him when he left, but she feared she might miss him too much. It would hurt. How much she had yet to discover.
    They walked slowly back to the car and she drove this time. She pulled up by the garage, gave him the keys and watched him open the doors. No fancy electronics here.
    Even now, when she’d set her mind to making the events of the day as easy as possible for him, she couldn’t help noticing his butt. The curves just waited for her touch, for her to clutch them, drag him deeper inside her. Her hands tightened on the wheel and she forced a bland expression on her face as she drove forward into the small space. How perverted was she?
    They went upstairs in silence, and she put on the coffee machine. It was one she’d taken from the trash in the café after the jug had broken, but she’d replaced the jug with one she’d found in a thrift store. It was probably the only thing she was addicted to these days, her morning jolt of caffeine, and good coffee was her only indulgence.
    Her mind retained the image of Byron, pale and forever still on that metal slab. In that drawer. He’d always hated being shut in anywhere, always preferred to leave doors unlocked if he could. He gave up too easily. When his art career had stalled, he’d turned to drugs, claiming they inspired him. Then for solace, when the art world sneered at his efforts. “He should have fought.”
    “Sorry?”
    Shit, she’d spoken that aloud. She turned around to face him. “Byron. He should have fought harder.” She paused, bit her lip. “I shouldn’t have left him in Rome, should I?”
    He crossed the room in two strides and grasped her shoulders. “You’re never to think that. You saved yourself. It could have been two bodies I claimed today, not one. Lina, your survival is what’s keeping me going here.”
    “At least you did everything you could for him. You never stopped looking.”
    He sighed. “We did, in a way. Oh, at first, we pushed for finding you. But we couldn’t even discover what flights you’d taken. Not until you were long gone. It took a while to get through the red tape. You’d done nothing criminally wrong, so we had no grounds to see the passenger lists. Eventually we found where you’d gone and for a year we hunted, but you never surfaced.”
    She owed him something. To tell him how it had been. She guessed he needed to know before he could find closure. “We had enough money to lie low. We stayed in cheap rooms and I got a job as a waitress. It eked out what we had.” And they’d been happy, for a while. Until the habit got too expensive. Until she began to realize that Byron wasn’t the love of her life, nowhere near. He’d annoyed her at times, especially when he started to whine about nothing ever being his fault. But she wouldn’t remember that now. Only the fun-loving, good-looking boy whom she’d found a breath of fresh air after the fetid atmosphere in her own home.
    “We scaled down the search after the first year. Cut back. We should have kept looking. Fuck, we abandoned Byron. I even felt relieved that he’d gone and taken his problems with him. How do you think that makes me feel, Lina?”
    “Guilty?” she ventured, since he seemed to want that answer.
    “Sure as fuck I feel guilty. If we’d kept looking we’d have found him.”
    She pulled her chin free of his hand. “Then what? What would you have done, Jon? Byron never took responsibility for his own actions. He whined. A lot. He said they hadn’t understood his genius, that your mother always loved you best and ignored him, that the drugs were being cut with more filth than before. Not