Out Of The Ashes (The Ending Series, #3) by Lindsey Fairleigh, Lindsey Pogue Page B

opinion was.
    His expression turned skeptical
and he searched my eyes for answers I didn’t even know the questions to. “Do you want to?”
    I thought about the dreams I kept
having and how unsettling they were—how exciting and frightening and…confusing.
I nodded once, nervous about what starting over entailed. Then in a bout of
self-consciousness, I looked down at my feet. I didn’t want him to see the
blush caused by the thought of doing all the things we’d done in my dreams.
    “You don’t seem sure,” he said,
narrowing his eyes when I glanced back up at him.
    “No…I mean, I am.” I think.
    “Is it Tavis?” The question seemed
to come out of nowhere. “You guys get along well. I’m not sure—”
    I shook my head. “It’s not him,
not really.” Jake eyed me as I continued, “We get along great, don’t get me
wrong. It’s easy being around him. He’s easy to talk to, and there’s no history
to navigate, there’s no pressure…” Peering up at Jake, I tried to act more
certain than I was, but failed miserably. “Who I used to be…she’s just a lot to
live up to,” I admitted.
    Jake’s eyes lingered on mine
before he scanned the small patch of field separating us from the others. “I
don’t want you to feel uncomfortable around me,” he finally said.
    I smiled up at him. “I know, and I
don’t, I just…” I had no idea what I was trying to say to him. “Things aren’t
complicated with him.”
    I couldn’t help but feel the
slight sting my words caused Jake, but I had to tell him the truth, if for no
other reason than to remind us both that whatever had been between us before
was gone now. It was going to be a lot of hard work to get back a semblance of
what we once had—hard work I wasn’t willing to turn my nose up at, but hard
work I also wasn’t sure either of us was ready for.
    But it didn’t mean we couldn’t
try.

 
    8
    DANI
    MARCH 29, 1AE
    Cahone, Colorado
     
    It was late
afternoon, and I was sitting beside our burgeoning campfire, staring into the
flames and generally despising myself while I built the fire up for Sarah. I
prodded the burning logs with a stick to rearrange them before adding a few
more hunks of freshly gathered firewood.
    I was becoming a
horrible person, possibly the worst person I’d ever met. Okay, maybe not the worst person—I was no Mandy, no General Herodson, no Clara, no Dr. Wesley—but
lately, I’d felt like I was on my way. I certainly wasn’t a good person,
not anymore. I was a horrible friend, a deceiving girlfriend, and a
child-killer. But of my mounting flaws, it was all of the lying that had
started to erode my soul.
    I hadn’t been
lying because I enjoyed the taste of deceit on my tongue, or because I felt a
thrill hurting others; I’d been lying to protect the people I loved…to protect
myself. But the problem with telling so many lies was this: it’s so easy for
one little lie to spawn a dozen more, which in turn birth their own litters of
little lies. And when the first lie, lie zero, is a whopper, the horde of
untruths and not-saids grows much, much faster. My core lie was as big
as they get.
    I was lying to
Jason about his mom, Dr. Wesley. After Camille’s revelation, I’d made a promise
to myself to never tell him that she was alive and relatively well—considering—and
that she was living in the Colony, loving companion to the man who’d
orchestrated the destruction of human civilization. I would never tell him that
I knew why she left him, Zoe, and their dad over twenty years ago, that General
Herodson had threatened to kill her children if she didn’t give him everything
he wanted, do every single thing he requested of her, and that she’d come to
love her captor. I would never tell him that she was the person who created the
virus that killed almost everyone, including their dad.
    And I would never
show him the letter she’d written, the one addressed to him and Zoe that
supposedly explained everything; it