"I thought you didn't like to talk about feelings."
He bared his teeth at her.
She smiled, happy now that she'd gotten under his skin. "I'm fine. I tend to bounce back pretty fast after an episode." It had been either that or give up on life. And though she might not have cherished her body as she should have, she cherished the life Clay had fought to give her. If he hadn't killed Orrin, the other man would have used her in the most brutal fashion, then buried her in the same graveyard as his other "brides."
"Talin?"
She came back from the memories with a shiver. "Sorry, woolgathering. Thank you for taking me out last night. It really helped." She'd never known there was so much life in the night, so much beauty.
"That's not what you were thinking about before. It was the junkyard, wasn't it?"
She didn't have to ask how he knew. "It's our nightmare, isn't it?" No one else could hope to understand. "After they found the bodies, I used to think about how we played there. On top of their graves."
"Yeah." His voice was matter-of-fact. "But you brought something good into that junkyard. Maybe they felt it. Maybe it helped them rest in peace."
It was the last thing she would have expected him to say. "I never thought of it that way. Do you really think that?"
"Why not?"
Yes, she thought, why not? "Did they ever identify all the bodies?" Pa Larkspur had banned her from following the case after she began to get obsessive about it. He'd been right - much longer and she would have fallen back into the abyss.
"Yes." Clay's hands tightened on the wheel. "They were all DNA-banked at birth."
"I'm glad. I visited two of their graves," she confessed.
"So did I." His tone hardened. "After I was told you were dead."
The tension between them went from bearable to cutting. "I thought we'd gone past that." Had last night meant nothing to him? "How many times do you want me to apologize?" Her guilt was crushing.
"I don't want apologies. I never did." He swung out onto a relatively clear track. That wasn't saying much - trees stood tall and thick on either side, blocking them in a tunnel of dark green. "I want an explanation."
"I told you," she said between gritted teeth. "I wasn't in a good place. I needed some space. You're so bossy, you take over everything and I needed to be my own person."
He threw her another look. "There might be some truth in that, but it's not everything. Why, Tally? Why tell me you were dead?"
"Clay - "
"Why?"
"I don't want to - "
"Why?"
"Because you left me!" she screamed, driven to the brink. "You left me!"
Clay brought the Tank to a rocking halt, his brain stunned into silence.
"You promised you'd be there for me always," she whispered, hugging herself. "Then you left." She shook her head and swallowed. "I know you had no choice. You were arrested. But it didn't matter. You were the only person I ever trusted, do you know that, Clay? The only one. Then you were gone and I was alone with strangers again. I was so mad at you!"
All this time, he had believed she hated him for killing Orrin the way he had, hated the violence of what he was. "I let you down," he said, accepting her charge.
"Don't," she whispered. "Don't be so nice. It makes me feel even worse."
"'Nice' is not a word that applies to me." He let the leopard color his voice. "So you were angry as hell with me - why not just tell me to get lost? Why go so far?"
"Don't ask me that." She looked out the window.
He reached across and clasped his hand on the back of her neck. "Look at me."