Robin Wasserman - Torn

“Riley, this is an emergency.”

He didn’t move. Like he couldn’t see that this mattered more than some unwashed sheets.

I pushed past him. “Whatever you’ve got in there, it can’t be—” I stopped. Stopped talking, stopped moving.

It wasn’t a what.

It was a who.

The girl splayed on Riley’s bed had spiky red hair, bad skin, and no shirt. Her feet were kicked up on his pillows; her head lolled over the foot of the bed. She tilted her head back, watching me upside down.

“Was wondering when I’d finally see you again,” Sari said, with a sly smile like she’d been prepping the line for weeks, waiting for the perfect moment to deploy it. “Welcome to our home.”

“What is she doing here?” I hissed.

“She was sleeping,” Sari drawled. She didn’t bother to sit up. Or put a shirt on over the flimsy red bra.

I hooked a finger in Riley’s collar and tugged him toward the door. Zo dropped onto a couch in the corner, her face blank, her eyes empty. “Leave her alone,” I warned Sari. Then dragged Riley outside and slammed the door behind us. And slammed it again, for good measure.

“Well?”

Riley did his strong, silent thing, trying to stare me down. Not tonight.

“Say something.” The apartment had only one real room. Small, flimsy partitions separated the living space from the kitchen from the bed. There was only one bed.

He risked a half smile. “Something?”

“What is that girl doing in your bed?” Half naked .

Did every relationship turn into a cliché? I resented the triteness of it almost as much as I resented the girl on the bed. Half-naked ex-girlfriend— hot, org ex-girlfriend—on the bed. Lying, defensive boyfriend. It didn’t take a genius to finish the equation. One plus one equaled girlfriend storming out in anger, boyfriend groveling for forgiveness. I’d played the scene plenty of times before. With Walker—given his Pavlovian flirting with anything of the double-X variety—I’d had it memorized, and could deliver my lines in thirty seconds flat.

But Riley wasn’t Walker. And storming away wasn’t so easy when you had nowhere else to go.

“She needed a place to crash.” Riley gave me a pointed look. “You know how that is.”

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Pretend it’s the same.”

“You need something. She needed something. That’s all I’m saying.”

Sure, exactly the same. Except that Zo was my sister, and Sari… the last time I’d seen Sari, she’d demonstrated her loyalty to Riley by double-crossing him, kidnapping me, and generally doing everything she could to help out the guy who wanted him dead.

She’d also made it painfully clear that “old friends”—Riley’s words—wasn’t exactly the most accurate description of their previous relationship. And that while she might not want him back, she had no tolerance for the prospect of someone taking her place.

“So she’s staying here,” I said.

“Nothing happened. It’s not—”

“So she’s staying here .”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

“Until she can find a—”

“No. How long has she been here?” Sleeping in his bed. Wearing his T-shirts. Or not wearing them.

“A few days,” he admitted.

“She just showed up on your doorstep.”

He hesitated. “I brought her here.”

“You brought her here.” I hated how I sounded. Rigid with cold fury, like someone else I knew.

“I told you I went back to the city a few times,” Riley said. “During the vidlife.”

A few times. He’d told me once . But I let it pass.

“I found her in one of those abandoned houses, right on the edge. You remember?”

I remembered. Enough to know that if he’d found her there, it was because he’d been looking. “You told me no one lives there.”

“They don’t. Not if they have any other choice. But Gray kicked her out. Said he couldn’t trust her anymore after what she did.”

“He must have pretty high standards.” Gray had been her replacement for Riley—at least until it was no longer expedient. Then she’d screwed him over too. If she’d succeeded, I would be lying somewhere in a heap of spare parts; Gray would be dead.

“I found her half starved, hiding in a closet from some assholes who were trying to—” He stopped, shook his head. “She’s a friend. I couldn’t leave her there.”

I remembered a windowless room, ropes digging into my wrists and ankles, chaining me to a chair. Sari’s thug looming over me, his ass resting on my knees, his breath puffing against my cheek, his grubby fingers on my skin. “She’s not my friend.”

“You don’t get it.”

It was the unspoken assumption between us, that his life had been hard where mine was soft, and that made him strong where I was weak. It made me less than. I was tired of the whole thing. No, I’d passed tired a few miles back. I was done.

“I get it,” I said. “Fine. She’s your friend. You had to help her. So why not let me help you do it? Why not tell me? I could have found a place for her, found some credit—”

“Your father’s credit?” he asked sourly. “I think I’ve taken enough of that.”

The mention of my father brought the whole nightmare to life again. And Riley didn’t even know, because we were wasting our time on this . But fighting was easier than saying it out loud.

Fighting was the easiest thing of all.

“I’m not my father,” I said. “I could have helped.”

“So now you know. Help.”

I didn’t have an answer for that one.

He snorted. “Right.”

“Okay, you win. You’re awesome. I’m heartless. She’s an angel. Does that cover it?”

“I’m not throwing her out.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“There’s nothing to be jealous about,” he said.

“Got it.”

“See, this is why I didn’t tell you. I knew you’d be like this.”

“Like this ?”

“But I told you,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

“And I told you, got it .”

“She’s just a—”

“Riley. Read my lips. Not. Jealous. ”

I wasn’t. It was a surprise to me too. Yes, Riley was trustworthy, and no, I didn’t really think anything was going on with Sari—certain as I was she would have preferred it otherwise—but when I was an org, that kind of cold reasoning had traditionally been beside the point. But relationships had been different when I was an org. Even when it was someone who’d barely mattered, there’d been a need , a charge beneath the surface when we were together, a vacuum when we were apart. Reasoning was beside the point. The point was the fever, needing the weight of his arms around you, needing flesh, needing to crawl inside him, to lose everything, even yourself—especially yourself—in the joining of body to body, skin to skin.

It was different now, because I was different now. The body was a body, and, for all practical purposes, it was a rental. It didn’t come equipped with needs. I wanted , but that was different. That was in my head, and that was rational, which was why I could think coolly and calmly through the reality of who Riley was and what he would and wouldn’t do. Sari fell into the latter category. I didn’t need to worry about his intentions; I worried about hers.

“It didn’t occur to you that Wynn sent her?”

“It did. He didn’t.”

“Because she said so.”

“Yeah.”

“And she’s never lied about Wynn before.”