Walking Dead. C.E. Murphy

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      “Okay” wasn’t one of the words I’d have chosen for much of anything right then. “We are?”

      “Yeah, you know. Coworkers dating and all that. Gets frowned on, but the captain looked okay with it.”

      “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what I thought of Morrison being okay with me dating. I mean, obviously he shouldn’t think anything of it, and I shouldn’t think of him thinking anything, but—I cut myself off before I got caught in a recursive loop and said, “I guess so. How many people are staring at me?”

      He twisted to look over our shoulders, then came back to me with a grin. “About thirty. Should we give them something to look at?”

      “I think they’ve already got something.” That sounded meaner than I meant it to and I gave him a lopsided smile of apology. I wasn’t very good at having a boyfriend.

      He squeezed my shoulders and put a kiss on my forehead. “You’re not a freak show, Joanne. Don’t worry about them.”

      My smile got less lopsided. “Yes, I am, but thanks. And thanks for staying, back there. I appreciate it. It was probably dumb and dangerous, but I appreciate it.”

      “You really know how to lay on a compliment, Walker.” Thor sounded like Morrison, all dry and faintly amused. I made a face and he laughed before his expression faded into something more serious. “I can’t run out when things get weird or dangerous if we’re going to make this work. I want to be there to help. To keep you safe.”

      Warm fuzzies collided with bemusement to give me indigestion. “It’s hard to keep me safe from things you can’t see. I don’t need that much protecting.” It was true. Typically, what I needed was information, which—much as he might want to—I doubted Thor was in any position to provide. On the other hand, he really was making an effort to fit in to my life, and I didn’t want to push him out just because the dangers I generally faced were one step removed from the reality he was grounded in. I nudged my hip against his, hoping I hadn’t sounded ungrateful and that I didn’t now sound patronizing: “But if I run up against Loki, you’re the first one I’m calling, okay?”

      “Sounds like a date, especially if you’re going to wear that costume when you start fighting gods.”

      I said, “I’m usually in jeans and a sweater,” without thinking, and he looked a little nonplussed. See, this was the problem with starting to accept my own surreality. It made me say things that sounded as if they’d been brought to you by the new brand of azure giraffe.

      Sirens and flashing lights heralded the ambulance’s arrival. I stopped beneath a leafless tree, trying to avoid drops of water from its black branches, and watched paramedics jump out of the vehicle and run into the hall. “I should go back.”

      “To give a report or to help?”

      Only half listening, I said, “Yeah,” and Thor slid his hand to mine and tugged my fingers, a shy and sort of charmingly little-boy action.

      “You heard the Hollidays. You need to check for—”

      “Ghost riders,” I supplied, then ground my teeth. “Yeah. Okay, so to give a report, then, though I don’t know what I’m going to say. Still, I…” I turned away, but Thor caught my hand a little harder and pulled me back. I looked up, surprised, to find his expression much like the gesture had been: shy and sort of charmingly hopeful.

      “It’s a kind of spirit quest, right? You’ve got that drum. Do you need somebody to play it for you?”

      My heart and stomach took a quick drop toward my feet and left my cheeks burning. The question itself was fairly innocuous, but what lay under it ran a hell of a lot deeper. Thor had seen the skin drum that held place of pride on my bedroom dresser, and I’d seen his curious gaze linger on it more than once. He’d never touched it, apparently—and correctly—regarding doing so as an intimacy he hadn’t yet been granted.

      In fact, since my powers were so rudely awakened, only three people’d touched that drum: me, my friend Gary—who’d been invited to do so long before I considered using the drum as an intimacy at all—and Morrison, whose touch on the painted leather might have been fire on my skin. Part of me didn’t want Thor touching the drum because it might not have that same sensual, completed feeling when he did.

      The other part of me wasn’t ready for him to handle it in case it did.

      He didn’t know that. He didn’t have to. What he did know was the drum, and the out-of-body experiences it sent me on, were important, and that he hadn’t yet been invited to participate in that. It was a glass wall, invisible but holding us apart, and all my rational bits thought I probably wasn’t being fair.

      My less rational bits—like my heart and stomach, which both still felt as if they’d fallen into the southern hemisphere—didn’t give a damn about fair. They were worried about the right choice, and the lurchy feeling they left me with was way too much like a fifteen-year-old girl going against her smarts and having sex with a boy in hopes of getting him to like her. I’d been there, done that, got a lot more than a T-shirt, and like I said, I do at least try to make new mistakes. Edward was a great guy, but I wasn’t anything like ready to ask him to drum me under on a spirit quest.

      And he was a great guy, so as my heart resumed its regular place in my chest cavity, guilt swam in to fill the empty spots it’d left. There was no way out. I liked him too much to want to hurt him, but I couldn’t give him what he was asking for, so of course he’d be hurt—not angry, because he was too decent for that, but disappointed, at least—and so up came the guilt, which made me think maybe I should, you know, go ahead and do what he asked anyway, and…

      I didn’t know if men ever went through that kind of thought process, but this was one of those emotional hatchet-job moments where I couldn’t help thinking that being a woman really sucked.

      And Thor, who really was a decent guy, didn’t make me fumble my way through an apology. He just studied me while my face went stricken, then sighed quietly and nodded. “Maybe next time.” He squeezed my fingers, then glanced toward the party hall and the paramedics. “Let’s go see if they need your report, huh?”

      “Edward.” I didn’t often use his real name, so he was looking back even before I pulled him to a stop, determined not to utterly blow a good thing. “I like you.” Those were pretty simple words. It didn’t follow that saying them should come out all shaky and nervous. “I like you a lot. This thing with the drumming, it’s not…it’s not because I don’t like you or I don’t trust you.”

      His eyebrows went up a little. “I like you, too, but you don’t trust one of us, Joanie. I’m willing to bet on it being you, at least for a while.”

      I followed him back to the party hall, well and truly subdued.

      The dancers were whisked away to the hospital suffering from severe electrolyte imbalances, which my mind insisted on processing as “severe acolyte imbalances.” Once I’d been assured they’d be okay, I kept snickering at visions of little hooded figures singing Gregorian chants and stumbling around like drunkards. Thor looked askance at me, but apparently the joke lost something in the telling.

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