resisted the urge to scoot closer to him, as good as it might have felt to have one of those well-toned arms around me. Which was the right choice, because a moment later, he said, “It has something to do with the man you saw in the store, doesn’t it? You knew him, and it wasn’t with happy memories.”
Since he wasn’t touching me, he couldn’t feel how much my body tensed up at the question. I gazed determinedly at the city lights in the distance. “There were some happy ones,” I said finally. “A lot of them. At least, I thought they were happy at the time.”
“Do you want to talk some more about that? Get it off your chest?”
I didn’t really want to talk about Malachi any more than I’d wanted to see him, but it could be I didn’t have any more choice about the former than I’d had about the latter. As long as I held the thoughts in, they’d keep gnawing at me. It wasn’t as if Ruse was going to judge me for my failures in committed relationshipping.
I shrugged, picking at the tab on the beer can. The sour smell of the stale alcohol fit my mood perfectly. “He’s the only serious boyfriend I’ve had. We were together for two and a half years, lived together for almost a year of that… Everything seemed to be going great. I was in love with him, thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. I hadn’t told him about the Fund stuff or Luna yet, but I figured we’d get there.”
Ruse sprawled back on his elbows, watching me with a mild expression. “I sense a rather large ‘but’ coming this way, and not the sort I enjoy checking out.”
I rolled my eyes at him, but my lips twitched at the joke. “Yeah. But.” The memory came back to me, so sharply it stole my voice and my breath. I braced myself, summoning all the detachment the years afterward had allowed me to cultivate.
“One day I got home from the job I had back then, manning the cash register in an ice cream shop, and it was like… like he’d erased every trace of his presence from the apartment. All his clothes and books, his shower stuff, the armchair his dad gave us—gone. Oh, except that he’d bought all the dishes and silverware, but he was kind enough to leave me one plate with a knife and fork.” I grimaced.
Ruse blinked, looking genuinely taken aback. “Totally out of the blue—no arguments beforehand? Not that up and leaving that way would be normal even under those circumstances, as far as I understand it.”
“Nope. As far as I knew, nothing had changed. He left a note…” I swallowed hard. “He said he felt like he was lying when he told me he loved me, that he couldn’t seem to fall in love with me because I wasn’t quite what he needed. That’s the last I ever heard from him. He ghosted me completely. I hadn’t even seen him again until tonight.”
“This may not be much comfort, but if that’s how he deals with his problems, I’d say you’re better off without him, Miss Blaze.”
“Obviously. I just…” I just had never quite been able to shake the question of what I’d been lacking that had made me unlovable. But maybe I knew now. Maybe there was something not quite right about me that he’d been able to sense even if he couldn’t have put it into words.
I didn’t want to linger in the chill of that possibility.
“It would have been hard to take when you were so fond of him,” Ruse filled in for me.
“Well, yeah.” I gave myself a little shake and forced my tone to turn wry. “It doesn’t matter. What’s so great about a normal life anyway? I’m having way more fun fleeing murderous psychos on a daily basis.”
Ruse chuckled. “Your involvement with the shadowkind has brought a certain sort of excitement into your life, hasn’t it?”
That was one way of putting it. But I did want him to know— “I don’t regret breaking you three out of those cages one bit. I let some of the things that should have mattered slide while I was with Malachi, not wanting to risk him getting caught up in any trouble I got into. It was only after he left that I really started going after the collectors, emancipating their zoos and all that. So