Above The Surface

by Akeroyd, Serena

  Maybe it was stupid, especially when I’d only been thinking how I needed to avoid him ten minutes before, but I twisted around and hurled myself into his embrace. When he opened up his jacket, letting me sink beneath the folds, I tucked my body into his and knew that heaven couldn’t feel this good.

  Breathing his air?

  Sharing his heat?

  Bliss.

  He sighed. “I thought you said after Louisa you couldn’t do this anymore.”

  My nose wrinkled, and when I blew out a breath, my eyes flared wide when I saw how I could see it—like it was freezing in here. Like it was freezing outside. My breath was visible. Fucking visible.

  That was how cold I was.

  What the hell?

  “I couldn’t see auras,” I clarified as my teeth started chattering. “Not as many as I could before, none for a while. Now, I just see them every now and then.”

  “What made you heal this one?”

  “Her aura is usually so pretty,” I whispered. “A bright, cheery yellow. I could see her pain. I wanted to help.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  His grim question had me thinking about it. “Probably not. She ran off like I had the measles—”

  “Of course, and let me guess, no thank you.”

  “No.” But I snorted. “You know I’m persona non grata here, Adam.”

  “Fuck, I can’t wait for graduation.”

  I rested my forehead on his pec. “Me either. Not long now.”

  “Five months.” He blew out a breath. “I applied for Stanford.”

  My brows rose, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why he’d picked a college on the other side of the country—me. That was where I was going.

  “Didn’t they send out their scholarship offers already?” was all I said.

  “There was another grant. Coach helped me. We’ll see.”

  My throat tightened at the prospect of us attending the same college. I wasn’t sure if the idea made me happy or if it terrified me.

  Because I wasn’t sure, I decided to tell him the truth. “I miss you.” That was constant.

  Unending.

  “You don’t have to. We could hang out—”

  I shook my head. “No. It isn’t fair.”

  “To who? Her?” he snarled, and in his outrage, his temperature surged, and somehow made this goddamn chill deep in my bones disperse some.

  “No. Me.”

  He stilled at that, then he hauled me tighter against him, held me like he’d never hold me again and rasped, “This isn’t going away, Thea.”

  “It never will,” I stated calmly, knowing he was completely, one-hundred-percent correct. “It’s always going to be like this.”

  “I don’t think I can stand that,” he ground out.

  “We have no choice.” That was when the blessing of what we were to one another had become a curse. I gulped at the thought, then whispered, “I feel better now. You can let go.”

  “Bullshit, I felt the cold too. I can still feel it,” he grumbled, surprising me, even though I remembered back with Louisa, how he’d said he’d felt how cold I was too. That the only time he’d felt better was when he was back in the pool.

  I sighed, didn’t bother struggling to break free of his embrace which tightened, and whispered, “Adam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you for finding me.” Even if I’d been cursing that inbuilt GPS he had, now I was grateful for it.

  A grunt rumbled from him. “You don’t have to thank me for that. It’s my—”

  When he broke off, I knew what he’d been about to say, but I tapped his waist where I was holding him and soothed him.

  Whatever the word was, be it ‘job,’ ‘duty,’ or whatever, the meaning was the same.

  Adam was mine, and I was his.

  Forever.

  ADAM

  “Where are you going?”

  “To train.” I said the words with little energy, but then, that was how I felt.

  I didn’t understand why Maria nagged me. We weren’t regular man and wife. We’d never kissed, never fucked. We didn’t share a bedroom. We didn’t even really share a kid. Freddie wasn’t mine, but I treated him like he was—I just didn’t do it when Maria was around, which, thankfully for me, but shitty for him, wasn’t often. The mall took more of her attention than Freddie did, which made her more of a fool than I already thought she was.

  He was my bud, and it wasn’t his fault that he was related to his bitch of a mother, so I had to make up for the fact that she was a twisted, vindictive cow, and that his father was a fucker who I hoped I’d never have to see again.

  Stopping beside his highchair, I bent down and pressed a kiss to Freddie’s forehead. His giggle made me smile, especially as his face was dotted with toast crumbs which danced and fell off with his gurgling, and as was usually the case, Maria glared at him and me. She was jealous. Jealous of her own kid.

  I felt sure she didn’t want me, but the more I pulled away from her, the harder she tried.

  There was a reason I had a lock on my bedroom door.

  No way did I want her skank ass anywhere near me, and even more so now.

  When I thought back to the meet in Fort Worth, it felt like it was last week and not months ago.

  Time seemed to be slipping through my fingers, even though life, as always, was busy.

  Maria had miscarried her baby, and I knew it was self-induced. She’d taken a bunch of drugs a few weeks after I’d returned from Texas, and after having her stomach pumped, she’d lost the kid.

  Ever since, her parents had been on me to make her behave, to make her act like a wife and mom, but she wasn’t either.

  She was a shit wife, and she was a shittier mom, who left the raising of her son to a nanny and me, unless it was time for her to look like the good little homemaker where she put on airs and graces for her parents and mine.

  We lived in an annex just off the main house on her father’s estate. It was a large property, four beds, two huge lounges, and a massive kitchen/dining area. Ironically, I was comfortable here. I liked being away from my parents—well, my dad less so. Ever since Cain had been sent down, Robert had actually started being interested in me, and he’d also taken an interest in Thea. Which, to be honest, I was really happy about.

  Thea needed someone like my dad, who was an overachiever, and who was really encouraging when it came down to reaching your goals.

  I knew what Thea’s new goal was. Money. She wanted it. A lot of it.

  I wished I had it to give to her, but I had one small trust that I’d get when I was twenty-five, and only if I had a college degree. I had no idea how much it would cost to hire a criminal defense attorney, but I imagined it was a fuck ton.

  I wished, again, that I had it to give to her, but I was glad she had a goal.

  Something about her, about the way she lived her life, told me her people’s beliefs had been ingrained in her, even though she’d been so young when her grandmother had died.

  I’d done a lot of reading on the Roma, had learned how they didn’t believe in possessions. How the more you had didn’t mean the luckier you were, or the richer. If anything, it meant you were bogged down, weighed down by stuff you didn’t really need. It meant you were trapped, imprisoned really. Unable to move on, to travel to the next place you were just waiting to discover.

  I didn’t doubt that being raised in poverty had also helped instill those beliefs in her. When you had no money, you couldn’t buy anything, but now, she did have money. I knew my parents had given her an account with which she could buy stuff for school and for her swimming, but as far as I could see, she hadn’t bought new clothes, had only really bought things she needed for school—a laptop, things like that.

  Thea: At the pool. Where are you?

  My heart thudded when the text came through. Thea was more prickly than ever, but since I’d found her shivering away outside the science lab, she’d opened up some. I couldn’
t say we hung out enough for my preference, but it was better than it had been before.

  Smiling at the message, I quickly deleted it, even as I gave Freddie another kiss, and told him, “Eat your banana.”

  He grumbled, but unlike with Maria, who’d been harping on at him to eat it for the last twenty minutes to no avail, the second I asked, he complied.

  My lips almost twitched at the kid’s good taste. Scrubbing a hand over his silky hair, I headed on out without another word to my wife.

  Of course, she stormed after me.

  When she reached for my arm and tugged at me, I frowned down at her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I snarled, keeping my voice low as I looked back and made sure Freddie couldn’t see anything.

  “I need to talk to you,” she snapped, “and seeing as you’re already one foot out of the damn door, I figured I’d better stop you.”

  I scowled at her. “Don’t touch me again.”

  Her mouth tightened. “What? You think I have some kind of disease or something?”

  The slut probably did. But instead, I hissed, “You’re poison,” and shoved my face into hers until she backed up.

  Her eyes flashed with outrage before she slammed down all expression. “Your brother called.”

  I sniffed. “So?” Inwardly, I was wondering why the hell Cain was still in contact with Maria. Cain must be really missing his social life if Maria was one of the numbers he remembered. Shit, he’d almost gone to jail for attempted rape because of her.

  “So? He’s your brother. Don’t you care—”

  “Don’t I care? What? That he trapped me with you? Yeah, I care about that.”

  Her top lip curled in a snarl. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “I’m sure he wants to shower without an audience and take a shit without the rest of his cell smelling it, unfortunately for him, we don’t always get what we want.”

  I pulled away from her, from those nails that had dug into my forearm. Spiky and shiny. They were like claws. I thought about Thea’s hands. Her plain, unadorned hands. So small and soft, the nails low, without artifice.

  Just like her.

  Inside, I shuddered, hating that I was attached to this harpy until Cain was free.

  I pulled away from her and headed toward the door where I saw a pile of letters waiting to be sorted through.

  Surprise hit me when I saw some from colleges, but, more importantly, it surprised me to see one from my father’s law firm—Janus, McKendrick, and McKendrick.

  Far as I knew, I had no business with them, but curiosity had me opening that one first, even over the Stanford letter.

  I knew, for a fact, that was where Thea was going, and it was why I wanted to attend Stanford too. But lawyers didn’t often write to eighteen-year-old kids.

  Not without good reason.

  So that took precedence.

  My heart in my throat, I tore open the envelope and scanned through the letter.

  It took me three reads before my heart stopped pounding, and when I finally processed that I wasn’t in court for something I didn’t even know I’d done, I recognized that the letter was actually good news.

  “What is it?”

  Maria’s interference had me shooting her a scowl over my shoulder.

  “Nothing.” Without another word, I strolled out of the house, carrying on reading the long ass crap that essentially meant my grandfather, though he’d been a hard ass, had rocked harder than I even knew.

  I had a trust fund that I could access upon graduating high school.

  When I saw the amount, two hundred and fifty thousand, glee filled me. There was a helluva lot I could do with that kind of cash, and I knew where I was going to start too. Firstly, I had my answer as to why Cain was trying to call me. I bet he’d received the same goddamn letter. So, my first step was to ignore the hell out of his calls more than I already did. Secondly? Buying some property nearby. Something small. Something shitty, then, hopefully, redecorating the place, building it from the ground up maybe, and flipping it.

  It was something I’d always wanted to do, and something that had never really been open to me. I was expected to go to school, expected to complete college—hell, my trust fund depended on my coming out of college with a major in something. I wasn’t even sure if my parents cared what I got my bachelors in. They just wanted me to come out with a college education—and so, my path had been set.

  Until Granddaddy Ramsden had knocked me a curveball.

  Glee filled me, and it settled inside for as long as it took me to head over toward the garage.

  The estate was big, and there were three different properties on it. Where we lived, where Maria’s brother lived, and then the main house where her folks holed up. They were doomsdayers, and had the entire place kitted out with safe rooms and shit. Though I had my home comforts here, it still gave me the creeps to be on the property period, but hell, I knew if there was a zombie apocalypse, I’d be safe.

  Until Thea wasn’t, and then I might as well just get eaten.

  No way was I going to live in a world where she wasn’t in it.

  And that’s why my heart sank when I read the rejection letter from Stanford.

  Where I knew she was heading.

  Where I knew her future lay.

  A shaky breath escaped me, and I accepted that, for the next few years, our futures were going to take us on entirely different life courses.

  Even as my brain registered it, even as I got it, I loathed it.

  We’d be on two separate coasts, and I had a feeling that was why she’d picked Stanford in the first place—to get away from me.

  But things were different now.

  We were talking.

  We weren’t having an affair, even if it felt nuts to me to think that what I had with Thea would be considered adultery. In my mind, what I had going down with Maria was totally that.

  Every day and every night, even though her touch reviled me, I felt like I was a cheating scumbag.

  I was Thea’s.

  She was mine.

  And we couldn’t be together.

  Not until my fucker of a brother got his ass out of jail.

  Eleven hundred and ninety-eight days.

  Yeah, I had a countdown reminder on my phone for his parole board meeting.

  I checked it every day.

  Down to the minute and the hour. Hell, down to the second.

  The minute he was out, Catholic or not, I was getting a divorce.

  I didn’t give a shit if I had to beg, steal, or borrow—I’d be making sure that I was no longer tied to Maria the instant I could.

  But, as I stared at the letters in my hand, one offering me a new life path, the other taking a choice from me, I wasn’t sure what to do.

  Thea was my future. Maybe at eighteen, I shouldn’t know that. Maybe I should be questioning everything, doubting it all. I should be wanting to go to college, just to fuck anything in a skirt. I knew, before Thea, that was what I’d have done.

  I’d have gone to school, done the shit I needed to do to access my trust fund, and then I’d have lived my life however the fuck I wanted it. Boning chicks here and there, doing whatever the fuck I wanted once I was out from under my family’s roof.

  Instead, I was out of that roof and into the pit of doom that was this place.

  Thea had, somehow, turned my life around. She was a catalyst, and not always in the best way. That didn’t take away from the fact that I loved her, that I wanted her in my life, but as shitty as things had been before her, things were definitely worse now.

  She was my bright spark amid the gloom of my life, the light that could guide me through the fog, and suddenly, I was now facing a future where she wasn’t there to be that light.

  And I didn’t know how to handle that.

  THEA

  “You should have told me, goddammit.”

  I heard Adam’s voice, heard it and felt something inside me shiver in response. God, I loved
his deep rumble. The thick Boston accent didn’t even offend me anymore. I’d been here long enough to get used to it, but even though my own voice was missing the roots of my past, with no southern twang to declare who I was once and for all, I sounded neutral like Adam, only his roots made themselves known when he cursed.

  Like he was now.

  He wasn’t here. It was late in the evening, and school had passed. He’d been tardy for training, had been harried too. We’d restarted doing what we’d done at the beginning—training and swimming together.

  I met him at the team pool and we got on with shit. We weren’t as close as before, how could we be? But it was enough. Just to have that link. To be a part of his days, even if it was only while we were in my favorite place—it had to be enough.

  Of course, hearing his voice now was a reminder that it wasn’t.

  That it was a lie I was telling myself.

  But I shoved that aside. I didn’t need to think about that, not unless I wanted to start planning the many and varied ways that existed to kill harpies.

  Were they like vampires? Needed silver and stakes? I was Roma, not Buffy, but fuck, what I wouldn’t do to see Maria pay for the way she treated people.

  “You should have told me,” he ground out again, making me press back against the wall so Robert wouldn’t see me on the landing.

  “If I’d known, I’d have told you.”

  Robert and Anna shared an office space in the house. It was a massive room, probably the size of the Majors’ entire downstairs layout. So it surprised me to hear the way Adam was talking to his dad. Normally, when he started talking smack, that happened with his dealings with Anna. Not his dad. Robert didn’t take much shit. Well, Anna didn’t either, but Adam didn’t give it, to be fair.

  Where his family was concerned, he was, I thought, a little too easily rolled over.

  Which surprised me, because I knew how he was at school. Especially now that Cain was locked up.

  The king.

  He roamed the halls of Rosemore like he owned them, and I knew why—he didn’t give a fuck anymore.

  Sure, he had goals like everyone else, but something had changed when he married Maria, and now I understood. I got it. I did.