The High School Reunion From Hell - Saranna DeWylde Page 0,61
decided he wouldn’t.” Vlad had taken to licking Ryder now, and he kept trying to wriggle in between us to hog the attention.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Ryder said. “My first mom didn’t choose to leave me.” She was quiet for a long moment. “Did she?”
“No, baby. She’d have stayed if she could. But hell, I’m the chosen one. How useless would that be if I didn’t have some kind of power?”
“We will accept that answer and will kick your ass next time you scare us like that.”
I grabbed her face and looked into her eyes. Then I turned her head to the side and made a big show of peering into her ears. “Is that a mouse in your pocket, or are you possessed?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s the royal “we.”
I could tell that it had really scared her, though. It had really scared me, too. Yet, we’d come through mostly unscathed.
“I know you didn’t have to grow up with me doing the job. It was all stories, and training, and fun. The occasional op, but nothing like this. This is what it is, honey. This is the reality of being a slayer. It’s why they don’t live long.”
Ryder hugged me tighter. “I understand why you didn’t want me to come now. I get it. But I don’t think, no matter what, that I could have stayed home.”
“So you do get it,” I said softly.
She looked at me, and I saw the woman she’d become. The child was still there, those chubby hands, those round cheeks, but that had moved to the background, and for the first time, the woman was in the foreground.
“I guess I do. I love you.”
“I love you too. More than my own breath.” I hugged her tight.
“My turn!” Marc, instead of joining us on the floor, snatched me up and held me aloft up in the air like a Kewpie doll prize. “Goddamnit, woman. Don’t you scare me like that ever again.”
“I… can’t promise that,” I whispered in his ear as he hugged me close.
“I know, but I need to pretend right now that you’re going to be safe. Let me have the illusion for five minutes so I can catch my breath.”
“I’m fine, Marcus. Really.”
He pulled back and looked into my eyes. “I love you, Margie. I’ll always love you. You know that, right?”
My eyes watered and my nose tingled. I didn’t cry when a new kind of vampire almost killed me, but my ex telling me he loved me, that was going to do me in.
“I love you too.” It was hard to say the words for some reason. Maybe because I knew what they meant between us had to change.
“If you love each other, you should get married. Oh, right. You did. Stop fucking it up,” Ryder commanded from her spot on the floor with the dogs.
Before this weekend, I’d have replied to that comment by looking at Marc and saying, “Yeah, stop fucking it up.” But now? Now, I understood. It was like that Don Henley and Patty Smyth song: sometimes love just ain’t enough.
No matter how badly you wished it was.
“Maybe we should work on it some more,” Marc said quietly.
I couldn’t believe I was saying this, but there it was. “No, we shouldn’t.”
“Margie, I thought you were going to die. It reminded me of all the things we still have to do together. You’re my best friend.”
“I’m your best friend who wants you, but doesn’t need you,” I reminded him. “That hasn’t changed. I can’t give you what you want. I love you, but I will never need you the way you need to be needed. As much as it’s tearing me apart, you were right to ask for a divorce.”
Marcus buried his face in my hair and hugged me tighter. When he pulled back, he was crying. Not ugly crying, but one, single, tear. I think the kids were calling it the “manly tear” but Marc had never been afraid of his emotions. He’d never had trouble expressing them, and that was part of the reason I loved him.
“Can I still call you to dump a body?” he asked, as if he didn’t already know the answer.
I put my hand on his cheek. “Always. I’m your ride or die forever, Marc.”
This wasn’t how I wanted to say goodbye to him, to the dreams we had for our future together, but somehow, it was okay. It was like cutting necrotic flesh out of an old would that wouldn’t