Three (Article 5 #3)(108)

Tucker Morris.

I stopped there, as I always did, unsure what to feel. Maybe someday I would come to peace with the role he had played in my life. I might accept what he’d done and his twisted logic behind it. The anger and the pity and the questions would all die down, and I would know him as a boy who’d been hurt by his family, who’d found a new family in the FBR, and who’d done what he thought he had to do in order to survive.

Perhaps he’d been right when he’d said we weren’t that different.

From behind came the low groan of a motor, and with one final good-bye, I turned and made my way toward the water. The sand gave way to a cracked concrete walkway, which rose above the lowering beach and stretched twenty feet out into the waves. In the distance, a boat approached, its silver hull gleaming in the sun. A smile tugged at my lips, and soon I was jogging toward it.

He was standing at the front of the boat, his hair shaggy past his ears, his skin darker than I’d ever seen it. As the boat slowed and drew closer, he moved to the side and grabbed a pile of rope from the deck, flinging it across the divide to where I waited.

“Take your time, why don’t you,” I said. It had only been four days since Chase had left, but might as well have been weeks.

“You miss me?” A grin turned up the right side of his mouth, and as the engine went dead, he tied off his side of the rope using only his right hand.

It had only been three months since the gunshot that had almost taken his life, and though the medic at Sanctuary had given him a clean bill of health, I still worried at the way he favored his left arm.

I finished knotting the first rope to its anchor on the dock the way Sal, the carrier to Mexico, had taught me. From the back of the boat, a short, shirtless man hopped over the siding and finished the task in half the time it had taken us.

“I missed Sal,” I said. The carrier grinned, dimples deep in his cheeks, and whistled my way.

“Te amo,” he called, gripping his heart dramatically.

“I see how it is,” said Chase, tying off another rope. My stomach did a small flip as the breeze flattened his damp shirt against his chest, revealing the ripples of muscle beneath.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

After Chase and I had arrived at Sanctuary, we’d volunteered to help the carriers transport refugees over the border. There was a time we’d considered going ourselves, but we’d never made it. Now I ran the check-in station in Tampa, and Chase served as the liaison on the Mexican border.

“Just as planned,” said Chase, swinging his long legs over the side and finally toeing the dock. I reached to help him automatically, habit from the early days after his injury when he needed it.

When his feet were firmly planted, his hands rose, cupping my face. I touched him, too: his rough cheeks, the straight line of his jaw down to his chin. His gaze found mine and held, and I remembered dozens of times I’d felt the world slow, just like it did now.

When I was six years old and he’d walked me home from the haunted house up the street. The first time he kissed me, in the woods after he’d been in Chicago with Jesse. In my bedroom, the night before he was drafted.

A tent in the woods. A truck in the Red Zone. An abandoned building the night before we’d gone for Rebecca.

A barn loft in Endurance.

And now. I would add this to my collection, and carry it with me always, as he had once carried my letters, as I now carried his ring. Our someday was now, not some distant point on the horizon. Almost losing him had taught me that.

He smiled—that small, secret smile he saved just for me.

I wet my lips, preparing for him to move closer, wrap me in his arms, and kiss me, but a second later I was twisting through the air and landed with a heave of breath over his shoulder. Frantically I gripped at his back.

“What are you doing?” I screeched. “Put me down!”

He walked to the edge of the dock. Through my mess of hair I could see the water softly slapping against the algae-stained concrete, ten feet below.

“No, wait,” I said. “Wait, hang on.”

“Didn’t miss me, huh?”

“I missed you!” I giggled, legs bicycling uselessly through the air. “I missed you, all right?”

I hit the water feet first, a half second before he jumped in after me. Sputtering to the surface I found him grinning from ear to ear, and soon we were splashing each other, kicking through the waves toward shallower water. When my feet could touch the ground, I launched across the space between us and tackled him.

He didn’t let me go.

The water was warm as a bath, and as I shoved my hair back he pulled me close. My legs wrapped around his hips and his arms around my waist. The collar of my shirt swelled open in the water, and he kissed the corner of my scar. The mark forever reminding me that I was, under it all, an Article 5.

Somehow, when Chase’s lips pressed against it, I was proud of what it stood for.

His mouth rose up my neck, a path of saltwater kisses that found my lips and left me flying. My blood heated, and I inched closer, tightening my grip around his neck.

“Get a room!” called someone from the shore.

Chase smiled against my temple as we pulled apart. On the beach was a horse with white stockings, and on her saddled back sat Rebecca, her blond hair already growing back to her shoulders. Against her leg leaned Sean, cackling at his interruption.