Interim(55)

“I do wanna kill those people!” he yelled. “I told you that already! I also told you that I’m not a killer! Yeah, I have the desire. Guess what? We ALL do! But I would never act on it! How many different ways do I have to convince you that I’m not planning anything?”

“But your back is telling me something else!”

“I got this tattoo over a year ago! When I was lonely and desperate and in need of something to make me feel strong! It’s got nothing to do with a school shooting!”

He turned his back on her and walked toward a shed on the far end of the property. Regan followed.

“Then please explain it to me,” she said softly. “I . . . I’m freaking out over here, Jer.”

“Don’t say my name.” The words were cold and distant, the way he needed them to sound.

She fell silent in an atmosphere of raw tension. She was offended, and he didn’t give a f*ck.

He turned to face her. “I discovered that verse a few years ago and wanted to understand it. So I looked it up—” He paused and looked her over. “—exactly like you did last night.”

Regan dropped her bag and folded her arms over her chest.

“I liked the message of a powerful god avenging someone who’d been wronged. It seemed right to me. It seemed just. So I adopted the verse—” He paused again, deciding how much detail he wanted to share. “—but not in its entirety.”

Regan opened her mouth, but he cut her off.

“You’re maybe a little too smart, Regan,” Jeremy said. “You read waaaaay too much into the fact that only half the verse is tattooed on my back. It doesn’t mean I left God out of it. It doesn’t mean I plan to take my own revenge. All it means is that I wanted the first part of the verse tattooed on my back. That’s it.”

She screwed up her face in concentration.

“So, you don’t want to get back at your enemies, but you want God to?”

Jeremy shrugged. “Not anymore.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“But your tattoo . . . what does it mean then?”

“It’s just a desire to see justice done. Doesn’t mean I plan to dole it out. I’m just gonna let the universe take care of it.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Regan asked.

“Yes.”

“So what? You’re into karma now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think what goes around comes around?”

“I hope so.”

“You don’t sound very convicted for a guy who has permanent ink on his back,” Regan pointed out.

“That’s my point. You read too much into it.”

Regan sank to the ground, pulling her legs in Indian-style. Jeremy followed suit, sitting close beside her.

“I can’t keep going back and forth,” she said finally. “I have to trust you, or I’ll go crazy.”

The words shattered his heart. Shattered his hope. There was no way to plant a permanent seed of faith inside her. He realized that now. He would fail at nurturing it, and it would die. Over and over and over, running them to exhaustion in a never-ending circle of doubt. He couldn’t live in constant fear. It wasn’t fair for her, too, either.

He made a decision and took hold of her hand. She jumped but didn’t pull away.

“I wish I knew how to make you trust me,” he said softly.

His thumb moved slowly over the back of her hand, and she shivered. She thought it an uncharacteristic move and wondered where he found the courage to do it.

“I . . . I maybe exaggerated the meaning,” she said. “Like you said: reading too much into something that was never there.”

He nodded, though he didn’t believe a word she said.

“I’m completely at your mercy, Regan,” he admitted. “Do you understand that? You have all the power over me.”

“But I don’t want power over you,” she argued.

“Then you have to believe me. You have to believe I’d never hurt anyone. If you don’t, I can’t live. You understand that? I can’t live except in constant fear, thinking every moment someone’s gonna come to arrest me.”

She turned sharply, catching his eyes and demanding silently that he not look away. He acquiesced, recognizing that this was the moment he’d dreamed about for years. He could do it, and she would let him. Why? He wasn’t sure. Perhaps out of sympathy. Maybe out of mutual desire. Maybe as an apology for what she knew she’d have to do next: turn him in. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He just knew that the moment may never again present itself, so he had to take advantage of it.