Free Out of the Dark by Megan Hart Page B

The food? The sex, is that too much, Luke?”
    His jaw set, but he didn’t look at her. “All of it’s too much. You didn’t have to…”
    She crossed to him and got up in his face without actually touching him. “I wanted to. All of it. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”
    â€œYou don’t owe me anything,” Luke said, face still turned away.
    She knew she shouldn’t be angry. After all, she’d given him the right to be a prick when she let him come inside and fuck her senseless after months of those useless late-night phone calls. If she let him show up in her life without warning, it was stupid of her to be upset if he wanted to walk back out of it again the same way.
    â€œYou owe me something,” she said. He looked at her then, without moving away, so close the heat from his bare skin lingered on hers. “You owe it to me to take care of yourself. So that when you’re out there, doing what you do…”
    Her throat closed on the words. What was she saying? What was she thinking? That the monsters were real, and Luke hunted them down? Killed them? Set fire to the remains? Nothing in her entire life had prepared her to believe in this. Not the strange light in the sky she’d seen at thirteen, the glimpse of what might’ve been a ghostly figure in her grandmother’s house when she was twenty-four, not the scarily accurate Tarot card reading she’d had just before the split with Jeremy.
    But she did believe it. She believed him. She stood on her toes to brush his mouth with hers, to say against his lips, “You owe it to me to come back here in one piece, Luke. And if taking a few days off now and again, letting me take care of you, makes it easier for you to go out there and find them. To…kill them. If letting me do these simple things for you means you’ll be better prepared to do what you do, then you owe it to me to stay here and eat a goddamn cinnamon roll, drink some coffee and make love to me and at least take a fucking nap before you go.”
    His arms went around her. His kiss, deep and thorough. He buried his face in her neck, then lifted her so that her legs went easily around his waist, his big hands supporting her ass. Luke looked up into her eyes.
    â€œOkay,” was all he said, but it was enough.
    Â 
    Two days.
    She’d convinced him to stay through the weekend and leave early Monday when she went to work. He’d made it all the way until dawn, when he woke with wide eyes and a pounding heart. She’d still been sleeping beside him, her soft breath steady, regular and precious. When he kissed her bare shoulder, she barely stirred, and Luke had slipped naked from the bed to dress in the almost-dark without waking her.
    He hadn’t left a note, but he had taken the last cinnamon roll on his way out the door, his pack full of clean and fresh-scented laundry folded so expertly he had plenty of room left where before he’d had to crumple and shove everything to get it to fit. She’d been right, he had to admit it. A few days of good food and sleep…and yes, the sex, had invigorated him. Replenished him.
    Still, he snuck away from her even though she’d been the one to say it was okay that he go. Not because he was ashamed and not because he thought she might try to change his mind. In between the food, the sleep and the fucking, he and Celia had talked for long, long hours about the life he’d found himself living. It had been an immense relief to unburden himself to someone who believed him. To share what he’d learned about these things that still had no name. To tell her how it felt to kill them, how it never got easier or better, how he never even came close to any sort of joy from it. Revenge was not sweet, Luke had learned. It was a bitter, bitter thing.
    He snuck away because the last memory he wanted Celia to have of him was not the word goodbye.
    He was forty