Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3) (23 page)

“You’re sleeping on the couch,” I said. “And I want two months in advance. And no drugs.”

He held up his hands. “I’m clean.”

I stared at him for a moment longer...and then I nodded.

For better or worse, my brother and I were reunited.

***

I was meant to be meeting Ryan at the police station for more training. I should have canceled, because I knew as soon as I stepped out of the Starbucks that something was wrong. I could feel the difference in the people around me, in the way they were looking at me.

It wasn’t them, of course. New York and New Yorkers hadn’t changed, since I’d been in the coffee shop. I had. Seeing Nick had reminded me of the freezing, dark waters that lay within my soul, just waiting for me to crash down into them. It had reminded me of how flimsy my Jasmine raft was, and how easily it could tip.

Steady. Breathe.

I put my head down and
went.

The thing about men is, they can smell fear. Or shame. Or despair. Sometimes, the harder you try not to present it, the more it comes out. Normally, I’d be projecting Jasmine—a big, shining, golden glow that said
look at me!
in such a way that they all looked, without really seeing. Now, I was like a swimmer with an injured leg, trying to stem the trickles of blood that spread through the water.

I stopped at a crossing. A guy to my left, in a suit, was staring right at me.
Right at me.
I didn’t look back, my eyes firmly focused a half block ahead.

We crossed. I walked just fast enough for him to drop behind me. But then three guys staggered out of a bar, drunk in the middle of the day, almost colliding with me. There was beer on their breath.

Beer on their breath…

I took a staggering step to the left as the guys finally saw me and leered at me. That sent me into a fat guy who put out his hands to stop me. It was an innocent touch but, as soon as his hands touched my arm, I felt—

Them.

I surged forward, almost running, stopping only when I reached the next intersection. The “Don’t Walk” sign was on.
Come on.
Don’t Walk.
Come on!

The man who’d been staring at me before caught up. I could feel him standing next to me, close enough to touch. His eyes on my breasts, so intimate that he might as well have been groping me—

I stepped forward, away from him, and heard the blare of a horn. My brain didn’t register it, but my legs knew just enough to lock up. The truck shot past so close to my face it sucked the air out of my lungs. A dangling cargo strap actually slapped against my arm, stinging it.

“Jesus!”
said the man beside me, and I felt his fingers try to close on my shoulder, to pull me back to safety—

I ran. I ran as if I could outrun the memories, the dark waters that were bubbling up from below.

The bar. The back room of the bar.

—

I ran until I couldn’t think anymore. Until my screaming lungs and aching legs drew all my attention and I couldn’t smell stale cigarettes and spilled beer anymore. And then I stopped and turned into a side street so that no one could see me, and I pressed my back against the cool bricks and let them soak the sweat from my body.

***

I stopped in a Burger King bathroom to fix my face. A half hour later, I was bouncing up the stairs of the police station as if it was my birthday.

Ryan gave me another one of those looks. The cop look. The
I know there’s something going on
look. And I told myself, for the five hundredth time, that this was why I’d never gotten involved with him in the first place. Cops can’t stop digging. It’s in their nature.

He led me downstairs, deep into the part of the police station that civilians never see. I could hear the muffled bangs long before we got to the door.

“I want to teach you how to fire a gun,” he said. “Is that cool? I know you’re a little...nervous.”

I went blank for a moment. Then I remembered sitting with him in the cop car, freaking out when I saw the shotgun. He’d assumed it was because I had a civilian’s fear of guns. He didn’t know I’d been remembering what a shotgun can do.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. Then, “I mean,”—I let my eyes go big—”it won’t be too loud, will it?”

That worked. He looked adoringly at me and patted me on the back and gave me some ear protectors and a fancy pair of yellow-tinted glasses. Despite everything, his big hand felt amazing—warm and strong as it pressed against my upper back and directed me through to the range.
Solidity.
That’s what it felt like. He was
real
in a way I wasn’t. Him touching me made my whole internal battle become just noise and, after Jasmine and acting and lying had all faded away, the only thing that was left behind...was Emma.

And then I caught my breath and came down on myself hard, because that was a dangerous place to go to.
Be Jasmine,
I told myself.

Several officers were standing in lanes, shooting at paper targets. I had to remember to jump every time one of them fired.

“You’ll get used to it,” he told me, voice raised over the gunfire. Then he handed me the gun, unloaded, and showed me how it worked. I nodded timidly as he told me to never point a gun at something I didn’t want to kill, and to always treat a gun as if it’s loaded. I pretended to be scared. I tried to look as if I’d never held a gun before, holding it as if it was going to bite me.

He gave me the magazine to slot in, and I managed to drop it twice. Other officers shook their heads despairingly. Perfect.

At last, Ryan stood behind me, guiding me into a shooting stance, and helping me aim at the target down at the end of the range. A nice, safe, anonymous outline of a person.

“Squeeze the trigger,” Ryan said in my ear. “Don’t pull it.” He was snuggled up close to me, the hardness of his pecs and the fullness of his arms making it difficult to think.

I fired. A hole appeared in the target, dead center.
Shit!
I hadn’t meant to do that.

“Beginner’s luck,” I said quickly.

I fired again, the kick of the gun and the smell of the cordite taking me back. Shooting cans, with my brother. Shooting at the ground, to scatter a gang. Shooting above a guy’s head, so that he’d leave me alone. And those memories took me back to other times, times when I’d sat alone in my room in the middle of the night, tracing the engraved flames on the gun with my fingertips, trying to work up the courage to creep into his room.

I felt sick. Emma was rising from the depths, heading straight for me.

“You okay?” asked Ryan.

Jasmine, you’re Jasmine.

“Fine.” I brought the gun up and fired. And fired. And fired. And suddenly, the target wasn’t anonymous and innocent. Suddenly, it was my dad, all tobacco-stained fingers and pale, muscled arms traced with blue veins and—

I shot until the magazine was empty and then stood there staring.

“Jasmine?”

He had to repeat it twice before I turned to him. Then I nodded and smiled like everything was okay. “I got carried away!” I said happily. “That was fun!”

But he just stared at me and hit the button to bring the paper target down to our end of the range. The bullet holes obliterated the target’s face.

Ryan studied me for a long time. At first, I thought I could brazen it out. “
What?!”
I asked, grinning, wishing I had a cold drink with a straw so I could suck on it and distract him that way.

“Who did you see?” he asked at last.

I blinked. “No one! I just went for it.” Immediately I’d said it, I was kicking myself. Why hadn’t I made something up? Why hadn’t I told him a story about some creepy stranger I’d met once, someone evil enough to be a convincing explanation but distant enough for him to forget all about in a few days? I could have pinned my freak-out at the gym on the same creep.
Idiot!

He reached out to touch my arm, and then thought better of it. Probably he thought I’d go apeshit on him again. My skin tingled where he wasn’t touching it, a ghost of his hand already there...and feeling good. Instead, he reached out and took the ear protectors gently from my head. “What’s going on with you, Jasmine?” he asked. His voice made me ache inside—that combination of steel and tenderness, the tone that cut through all the bullshit, all the layers inside my head. Damn, he made a good cop. And he’d cut just as efficiently through all my lies, if I let him get a toehold.

Lying hadn’t worked, so I tried
angry.
I pulled it up from inside me—there was always a healthy supply—and let it slosh out over the surface, scalding my face. How dare he? How
dare
he invade my privacy and demand to know what was going on deep down inside? Everyone else in the world was satisfied with Jasmine. They all just accepted her and laughed along with her and flirted with her and tried to fuck her. Why did he have to be different?

But he was staring back at me and the coolness of his gaze just seemed to soak up all the anger. As if he didn’t care that I was mad at him, because he knew that was just a diversion. As if he didn’t care about anything except getting at the truth. His eyes were full of pain and I knew, in that moment, that he was doing this because he knew what it was like to have something eating you up inside. Hux’s death must be destroying him, and he could see that the same was happening to me.

Except my past was something he could never know. Not if I wanted him to like me. Not if I wanted keep my career, my friends...my sanity. I understood what he wanted: he wanted to reach down inside me and pull all the bad stuff out, so that I could heal. He didn’t get that
bad stuff was all there was.

Sometimes, the cruelest thing someone can do is to offer help—because then you realize how much you need it.

I could feel my defenses coming down. He had a maddening way of just deflecting the flurry of stuff I threw at him—flirting, teasing, anger—until there was nothing left but just me, bare-faced and vulnerable. I started to say something and was horrified to find myself choking up. What?!
Tears?
Tears, now? God, what was happening to me?! I’d held it together just fine, bar one or two slips, my entire time at Fenbrook. Yet suddenly, with Ryan around...it no longer worked.

I took a couple of deep breaths. “I’m fine,” I said, in a voice that said I wasn’t. “I need to just—just—”
Time. I just need time. Time to get my head straight.
I was staring at the floor, trying desperately not to cry. I could feel Ryan getting closer and closer, leaning over me, and any second the first hot tear would tumble to the floor and then he’d pull me into his arms and I was fragile enough that I knew
Jasmine
was going to shatter into a million pieces, exposing what was beneath.

“
A SHOWER!”
I said, my head snapping up. I did a huge grin, and hoped it looked as if my eyes were shining with excitement. “A shower. There are showers here, right? For cops? I need a shower. I kind of ran over here. I’m all….”

Ryan was suddenly very close to me and the attraction hit me like a sledgehammer, able to smack me right where I lived now that I was exposed. I could feel the heat of his body radiating out and mine meeting it, our warmth throbbing into one another. His t-shirt was stretched tight over his pecs, a solid wall of strong muscle I just wanted to crush myself against.

“...sweaty,” I said weakly.

Ryan stared at me. “Yeah. There are showers.”

***

I made it to the locker room, leaned back against the door and let out a long breath. This whole thing was completely out of control. Ryan was getting dangerously close to me, in a way no one else ever had. I had to figure out some way of shoring up my defenses, some new strategy for being around him, or it was all going to go horribly wrong.

Someone yelled something about double shifts, and there was a collective groan.

For the first time, I focused on where I was.

It wasn’t so different to a locker room at a gym, except with full-size, gray metal lockers, a dirtier floor and more cursing. The women padding around half-dressed or wrapped in towels weren’t so different from the ones at a gym, either, I guessed (I couldn’t afford a gym, so I was basing this on my one guest-pass day at Clarissa’s). It was only when I saw one put on her uniform jacket and check herself in the mirror that it hit me that they were all cops.

I was surrounded by cops. I was deep in the enemy’s inner sanctum.

Just act normal. They think you’re an actress.

What if they don’t? What if they can smell it on me?

Don’t be stupid.

A dark-haired, Hispanic woman who was shorter than me, slighter than me, more naked than me and yet somehow twenty thousand times more intimidating than me stepped forward. “You lost?”

I started to reply, but she didn’t give me time.

“You’re that actress, right? You’re partnered up with Ryan?” There was something about the way she said
partnered up
that made me jumpy.