Andreas chuckles. “Right. Dom snuck that last one and inhaled it, and then Jake noticed Griffin’s was gone and demanded to know who’d stolen his brother’s cookie. He was kind of a self-righteous dick even back then, wasn’t he?”
I’m outright smiling now. “I think I’d better plead the fifth, or next time he’ll have me sleeping in the garage.”
Andreas’s hands falter for just a moment before they resume their work on my hair. “Zian got all flustered and guilty-looking even though he hadn’t done anything, because he wasusuallythe one who’d eat the most, so he figured he’d get blamed. But Jake pointed out the extra crumbs by Dom’s spot and started glaring at him.”
“I thought Dom was going to faint, he looked so agonized.” The image swims up through my mind of the much younger version of the man I know now.
“No kidding. So Griffin finally gets back and Jake wastes no time calling Dom out, Dom sits there all horrified with his eyes starting to well up with tears, but just before he can babble a gazillion apologies, Griffin just smiles at him. And says if Dom took it, he must have wanted it a lot, so it’s okay.”
My throat constricts. “Yeah. That was just… how he was.” Griffin would have been able to sense how awful Dominic felt about his petty crime without the other guy needing to say anything.
Andreas shakes his head in bemusement. “Funny how that guy was more mature at five or six than the rest of us are even now.”
I arched an eyebrow on the side he’d be able to see. “Speak for yourself.” But an unexpected sense of peace has settled over me, as momentary as it might be.
I haven’t let myself think about Griffinthatfar back in a long time. Mostly I’ve just beaten myself up with images from our last night together.
Twisting my head as far as I dare without disrupting the detangling session, I peek at Andreas’s face. “You’ve always been our memory-keeper as well as the memory-reader, haven’t you? Keeping track of all our history.”
He smiles at me. “I like my collection of stories.”
Yes, all the stories he’s compiled from the people he saw on missions whose minds he dipped into. The remark sparks another jolt of curiosity. “Did the guardians still have you all go on missions after—after we tried to escape.”
“Yeah,” Andreas says, casually enough that my anxiety around asking fades away. “Not as often as before, and they’d still have us on a low dose of whatever drug they kept us doped on so we couldn’t do anything too crazy. And the same old threat hanging over us that if we acted out, the others would pay for it.”
His smile twists. “After they saw how we reacted to losing Griffin, they must have been even more sure of how effective that warning would be.”
Losing Griffin, he says. Not losing both of us.
Because they didn’t think ofmeas being lost—because they assumed I’d left them behind on purpose, for reasons I still don’t totally understand.
But I don’t want to bring that up again now, not when it’s gotten me nowhere before and we’re having this moment where things feel almost okay.
I gaze across the room toward the washing machine. “Any good stories I missed?”
Andreas clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Let’s see. What would the best ones have been…?”
He lowers what must have been an entire section of the braid, now knot-free, and moves to a matted area closer to the middle. His fingers graze my spine.
“There was this woman I noticed in a park in Seattle one time,” he says. “She looked like a very bookish, cautious type—hair in a tight bun, cardigan buttoned all the way up, plaid skirt down to her ankles. Sitting there with a book on her lap and a notebook she was writing in propped against it. I figured she had to be a super-committed student studying for exams.”
I inhale slowly, resisting the urge to sink back and take in even more of his warmly musky scent. “But I’m guessing that’s not what you found in her head.”
“Nope. I got all kinds of memories of going out scuba-diving. Cruising around in this boat with fancy radar-checking maps. Swimming way down to find ruins of sunken ships, showing off artifacts she’d found online.” He laughs. “An underwater Indiana Jones. I bet she was actually taking notes on what her next dive site could be.”
“I bet she’d have lots of interesting stories too.”
“Looking for my replacement already?” Drey gives my hair a playful tug. “I’ve got a whole library in this head. You don’t need anyone else.”
“Fine,” I say, wishing it could be like this with him—with all of the guys—always. “Tell me another one then.”
He’s silent for a moment, thinking and unwinding my hair. Then he starts to speak in a softer voice than before.
“The last mission I did, I saw an elderly couple in a coffee shop. I noticed them because the woman was gazing around all dreamily while the man looked just… beaten. Sad and weary. I couldn’t help wondering how they’d ended up like that—why he’d stayed.”
My stomach clenches in anticipation of an awful explanation. “What was it?”
“Well, I searched his head for memories about her. And there were tons of them, going back decades to when they must have been only in their twenties. And in most of the memories, they were so happy, having a blast, building their life together… But then the ones from recently, when they looked a lot older, she was forgetting things, getting cranky, often not even recognizing him…”