“Not like you seem to think.  Have I been completely upfront with you?  No.  Have I lied?  Yes.  But not more than I had to.”

“I know that you only approached me because of whatever was going on with your sister and Dair.”

He cursed, and it was as good as an admission of guilt.  “Yes, that’s why I approached you then.  But it has fuck all to do with me being here now.”

I recoiled.  It was an awful thing to hear, because it made me think that— “So you only slept with me because of—”

“No!  Fucking no.  Stop it.  I checked you out for my sister.  I searched your house.  I got a feel for your patterns, trying to figure out if you were seeing Dair.  But, like I said, that had fuck all to do with us having sex.”

“Then why—”

“I fucked you because I couldn’t fucking help myself, okay?  It was never part of the plan.  It was always against the goddamn plan, okay?  I’ll admit that I invaded your privacy way more than was fair.  I, shit, Lourdes, I started watching you and I liked what I saw.  More than liked.”

He took a very deep breath.  “Listen, to understand why I became so obsessed with you so quickly, you need some background on me.  I’ve done a lot of things.  Terrible things.  Things a man can’t come back from.  You never come back.  Instead, you end up owning those things, and they just become a part of who you are.

“For better or worse, I own a lot of bloody baggage that I can’t ever walk away from.  I’ve survived a lot of things I can’t come back from, and hell, I know there are some still to come.”

He studied me for a moment, trying to gage my reaction, then continued, “I carry all of my burdens as best I can, but I know better than anyone that I can never lead a normal life.  Even if all of my problems were solved, and my sister was safe, my life will never be peaceful.

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin to be peaceful.  I am not acclimated to the rules of normal society.

“When you’re that fucked in the head, deceit becomes a way of life.  Lies become a pattern.

“I don’t lie because I like it.  I’ve never enjoyed the burn at the back of my throat when I open my mouth and deadpan endless falsehoods, big ones, small ones, omissive ones, day after day.

“I lie because the bottom line is: the truth is death for me, no matter how I might crave it.

“But God, I do crave the truth.

“Imagine damaged me with all of that inside of me, abhorring deceit, craving elusive honesty.

“Running into a woman like you.

“There wasn’t a thing about you I couldn’t read.  Even if it was hidden a bit, no matter.  You’re a piece of glass I could hold in my palm.  So what if it clouded a bit, got a bit of sand on it?  All I had to do was turn it this way, brush it off, and poof, shiny and transparent as ever.

“But really, I didn’t even have to do that.  The beauty of you, this gorgeous creature that for some fucking reason let me have her, over and over, was that if I wanted the truth from you, all I had to do was ask, and you’d tell me.  You play no games. You’re incapable of deceit.

“You’re the truth, Lourdes.  So what if I couldn’t, shouldn’t have you?  I craved you, and so I kept coming back.

“I’m not dead inside.  Not all of me.  Something remains, something that doesn’t only live for vengeance.

“That’s what you taught me.”

He’d left me speechless, breathless, without a leg to stand on.

He did care about me.  I was positive of that now, at least.  So many other questions remained, but that was the one that had bothered me the most.

I was such a girl.

I moved to him, laying my cheek against his chest.

He wrapped his arms around me.

We stayed like that for a long time, pressed together as I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do.  Had this changed anything?  It felt like it had.  But feelings and reality were two different things.

“She said she was your lover,” I finally broke the silence.  I’d tried to keep that in, but I just couldn’t.

He sighed and stroked a hand over my hair.  “She’s a good liar.  It’s what makes her great at her job.  We’re not sleeping together.”

“Since when?”  Another thing I couldn’t keep in.

“Since I was fifteen, and only then to mark her as mine to keep her safe from the other people we were working with.  They were scared of me, and her being mine made her off-limits.”

“So why is she so interested in me?”

“Hell if I know.  If I had to guess, I’d say it’s some leftover jealousy from the past.  But I’ll tell you one thing—she won’t bother you again.”

I took a deep breath, trying to hold in yet another question.  Tried and failed.  “Have you been with . . .  anyone else, since you’ve been with me?”

He stiffened up, but didn’t hesitate.  “No.”  Long pause.  “I won’t be asking you the same question.”  His voice was pained.  “I don’t want to know.”

I was gearing up to answer him, to set him straight when he continued, “Once I was tortured by a particularly sick motherfucker.  He sliced me to ribbons with a rusty, dull knife.  When I heard about you and your other man, heard he’d spent the night here, it hurt worse than that.  Just so you know.”