“Then you don’t know me as well as you think.” I may have told him all about the Institute and my life, but I never told him about all those romance books. He didn’t know that my hopes, my daydreams, were all about being loved. I wanted, more than anything, to hear those three words. I didn’t tell him that, although he got me right in my weak spot.
I’d never have pretended to love someone.
Tickling hair falls over my eyes as I shake my head. He releases a hand to smooth away the hair, back over my shoulder. “Don’t be angry,” he says.
His eyes are dark as I pull my other hand free, glaring up at him as I twist away. My belly brushes against him and I freeze. I might have imagined it, but – he flushes and steps back, turning away, and I’ve read enough of Geraldine’s books to know that he wants me. I stare at his back, unsure what to say. For the first time since I left the Institute, I know something real about how he feels.
“I’ll go back to my room,” he says to the opposite wall, “but I’m not going to stop telling you what I think, and what I think is that you should take the fight to Forever, use KHH to help you while it’s still there, do something for your friends and the Vol if you can.”
He wants to just pretend that didn’t happen? I catch his arm and pull him back to face me. He’s going to admit that he wants me. I want to hear him say something true.
I’ve been kissed once in my life. By Will. Will, who tasted of spicy food and alcohol and pushiness. I want to know what it’d be like with Rehan. Want to know if there could ever be anything real between us, something separate from the illusions he sold me.
He lets me draw him close.
Our faces are inches apart, sharing the same breath, as he looks at me, eyebrows raised in question. I’m not sure who leans in first, but suddenly his warm lips are brushing gently against mine, and we’re kissing and it’s so much better than Will, this is what I wanted, what I’ve been waiting for, and this is a part of why I’ve been so angry with Rehan. When he started whispering to me in the night, he woke up something, and ever since then, that something has been waiting. He’s kept me waiting.
I feel warm, and kind of floppy. I don’t feel like standing up. I twine my arms around his neck and let my body shape itself to his. This, finally, feels like something true. Even if it’s just true for right now. I don’t care, don’t want to think about anything anymore.
Rehan sinks a hand into my hair, his other arm curving around my waist. Unlike Will, he doesn’t immediately move his hands to my belly, to my chest, but this time I want that. My blood is fizzing inside my skin. I’m almost queasy with anticipation. Somehow the bed is behind me and I sink back into it, pulling him with me. I’m not thinking about what will happen next, I’m not thinking anything at all, and I love that. I want to kiss him for hours, hold the world away. But he hesitates, and breaks the kiss, staring down at me.
And suddenly I’m at the farmhouse again, lying on a roof as he leans over me, raising a fist to slam towards my face. My blood chills, and I swear I can feel my chin twinge.
Rehan bends to kiss me again. I turn away, offering him my neck as I try to shake the memory. I don’t want to stop, don’t want to talk, but I shiver as he brushes his lips over my throat. Desire? Or the memory? I don’t have names for these feelings, and although I haven’t moved, I feel like I’m drifting away from him, not with him.
He lifts his head. “Are you—”
I pull him back. “Make me forget,” I demand.
“Forget what?”
“Everything.”
Chapter Nineteen
Rehan tries hard to make me forget, but there’s a separateness to us now that wasn’t there at the beginning of the kiss. We both know it, but we also know that we’ll have to talk when we stop kissing, so we don’t stop.
My head lolls back as his lips skim over my throat, working his way to my lips, then kissing me again. I kiss him back, searching for that sense of forgetting myself, and failing to find it. But it’s still miles better than Will. Or talking. It feels so nice.
Eventually we’re interrupted by knocking on the door. Rehan jerks away and rolls off the bed, coming to his feet in between me and the door.
“It’s Anna,” says Anna.
Rehan moves to stand behind me as I click the locks open again. The door swings wide. Anna’s eyes immediately flick to Rehan. “Oh. Rehan. Could you give us a moment, please?”
Anna’s eyes flick over us, lingering on my pink neck, Rehan’s mussed hair, the lack of distance between us. She’s never been a mother to me, but she has enough motherly instinct to tell her exactly what’s been happening here, and what perhaps might have happened. And we all know it.
He leaves without looking at me. It’s a relief as Anna clicks the door shut behind him.
“How long do you think he’ll stay with us?” she asks brightly. “He presumably has to get back to that terrorist group or whatever.”
“He said he’ll stay as long as we need him.”
“But you don’t need him anymore, do you? You’ve got me now.” She gives me a reassuring smile and sits on the bed, just like Rehan did only a little while ago, as if they’re auditioning.
“I don’t know what was happening in here,” she says. I open my mouth to answer, but she holds up a hand, “and I don’t want to know. But I do know that you’ve never really had anyone look after you, have you? Not who put you first.”
I shake my head slowly.
“Then let me. Let me look after you.”
“I do want that,” I whisper, “but I’m not sure what it means.” Her arms open and I step forward into a very different embrace from the one I was in moments ago. We hold each other in silence for a while.
“I’m so sorry about all this,” I whisper. “I just wanted to find you, I didn’t even think they might follow me to you.”
“I’m so happy that you found me. So grateful. Don’t worry about anything else.” She strokes my hair, and gives me a little fragment of that forgetting, that peace, that I was trying to find with Rehan.
For a while it’s lovely, sitting with Anna in this room far from reality. She makes hot chocolate in the corner from little sachets that she found in her room, and I ask questions about her – my – family. Her grandmother was a dancer, she mentions, a Romany who came to England from Bavaria after the war. Anna’s parents died in a car crash, and Anna was adopted when she was twelve. I’m part Romany, part German, and I never knew.
I ask again about my father, but she’s shy about how little there is to say. She tells me about a summer spent working as a seaside waitress, and the man she met there. He crewed a yacht and would sneak her on board when the owners were away – stolen moments that turned into a surprise pregnancy after he’d left port. “I did want you,” she assures me fervently. “I was so happy, and so devastated when they told me you were dead.” That kills the conversation.
Where is my father these days, was he Vol – did they have Vol then? I don’t get why the Institute thought I’d be Vol.
Anna leaves eventually. As soon as her door clicks closed, Rehan is back, tapping at my door. Auditioning. Are they going to play this game all night? I stand in the doorway, unsure whether to let him in, what to say about the kiss, but instead he slaps a note on my door – Out with Rehan moving around, back by 12.
I raise my eyebrows at him.
“It’s only sensible to move you around town a bit, if Lia is really tracking you,” he suggests innocently. Oh great. More buses, more plodding around.
He grins at me. “You’ve never been dancing, have you?” he asks. “Come on, time out. You need to see a bit more of the world than motorways and icy paddling. I can’t let the Pencil Museum be the highlight of your life.” And then I’m smiling too, as I let him tug me out of the hotel and across town. We still don’t talk about the kiss, but there’s a different atmosphere between us as he teases me and I shove him and his arm slips around my shoulder to guide me round a corner.<
br />
I don’t ask him if this is a date. I don’t need to ask.
The nightclub looks different to what I expected, on TV they seemed very glamorous, this is just a tatty black archway in an alley that smells of urine, a bouncer either side of the door. “I’m underage,” I mutter at Rehan, my stomach dropping in disappointment as I eye the bouncers.
He snorts. “No-one here will care, trust me, and girls go where they like half the time anyway. They’re just looking out for drunk guys.” He’s right, the bouncers’ eyes skim over me as we pass, but when a wavering guy behind us tries to stagger in, a meaty arm shoots out to stop him.
Rehan hands our coats to someone as I listen to a pounding throb from below. Is that music? It’s practically shaking the floor. He leads me downstairs, and then it’s glorious loud music and coloured lights and shining glasses of drink and everything I expected.
Almost no-one is dancing, it’s too early, but I don’t care, and Rehan doesn’t object as I pull him to the dance floor. “At least it’s not country music,” he murmurs. For a moment I remember that I don’t know how to dance, but Rehan is just stepping from side to side and nodding in time to the music, and I think, well, I can do that, so I do.
Then music is vibrating up through my feet to tease my blood, and I think of my Romany grandmother who loved to dance, and the fact that no-one here knows me or cares what I do, and I grab Rehan’s hand and twirl, laughing. He goes with it, spinning me around and around while I grin.
Either we’ve inspired the rest of the room or they too are thinking ‘well I can do that,’ the dance floor begins to fill up as the track changes to a faster beat. I want to dance forever, but soon Rehan is miming drinking, so I let him lead me to the bar.
“No alcohol,” I say, shaking my head.
He says something that’s drowned out by the music.
“What?” I ask.
He shrugs and says something to the bartender, who hands Rehan a beer and a pink coloured drink.
Rehan leads me away from the bar and through a corridor, into a side room filled with dingy sofas. There’s no music in here, and I realise that my ears are ringing. We’re the only people in here, everyone else is still drinking and dancing.
We sit on one of the sofas, and Rehan hands me the pink drink.
“What is it?”
He half smiles. “Cranberry juice. You never told me what happened to you? After the train station. How did you end up drunk?”
My escape from Rehan is just one of the many things we haven’t talked about yet. “I went to a theatre and auditioned for a play.”
He chokes on his beer. “Of course you did. Did you get the part?”
“I’m not sure. The guy I was auditioning with fell over, so I left and sat upstairs in the theatre café because it was warm. Then I met some guys and they bought me drinks.”
“I bet they did. What happened next?”
I don’t want to talk about Will. Rehan probably assumes that he’s the first guy I’ve kissed, and even without that, everything with Will went so sour. “I ended up trying to walk it off,” I say vaguely. “Then I met this girl…”
The nightclub recedes as that scene recaptures me, and I’m shivering again in that dark doorway, wet bricks under my hand, stomach lurching as I turn, knowing what I’m about to see. “She was young, twelve maybe, but Forever shot her. She was waiting for them, I think. She knew that they were coming. She was just waiting. I’d hate to go like that.”
“Then don’t wait,” Rehan says. “Do something. It doesn’t have to be KHH, do whatever you like, but don’t just wait for them to come to you.”
“I’m not waiting—”
“You’re not fighting.”
I don’t want to argue with him again, so I sip my drink, and change the subject. “I saw Arlo in the car that shot the girl, and he was messed up about it when we met him. Lia said that Forever made my friends hunt Vol. I think they’d both been given drugs.”
“Sounds about right for the Institute,” he mutters into his beer.
“My friends thought they were searching for me, but Forever knew where I was, because of – your Dad and stuff. So my friends weren’t really searching for me, not until Lia took off on her own. Why would Forever need my friends to hunt Vol?”
Rehan shrugs. “Set a thief to catch a thief.”
“What?”
“How else were they going to find them? Every time KHH, I, tracked down a Vol to join KHH, they were dead shortly after. That’s why there’s no other Vol in KHH, at least as far as I know. I thought Forever was just really good at hunting them, that the murders proved how important it was to find them, but I guess Forever followed me to them. Or Dad told them where to hunt.” He looks sick.
“Nevi’s the only Vol I’ve met in two years, and thank god he said no to KHH early enough that Forever didn’t find out about him. It’s my fault they’re dead. They were using KHH. Me.” He stares into his beer. “And now they’re using your friends. I can sense talent, if I’m close enough, probably they can too.”
“But why? Even if they need Vol to find Vol – why kill them at all?”
Rehan takes a long drink, and I’m distracted by the foam lingering on his upper lip. He wipes it off. “Forever reckon that they’re never going to die, right? And despite the ban, I bet they’ve sold the ‘life extending’ serum to a bunch of rich guys around the world – they’d be mad not to, and it explains how they got so rich, so powerful, in so little time. It’s the ultimate bribe. So what are they really going to hate? Change. The world starts to evolve psychics, that’s going to throw a spanner in the works for immortal mafia. They can’t evolve, and they don’t want anyone to know about their bribes and whatever else they’re up to.”
I think of John, of the intensity with which he lectured us. I thought that he was proud of us. But maybe not, and he was always on screen, never in person. “There’s stuff in their heads that they want to keep there,” I agree. “Stuff that makes them not want telepaths around.”
“Yes.”
“But that girl was twelve. She wasn’t any kind of threat.”
“She wouldn’t have stayed twelve. And you won’t always be seventeen.”
This isn’t just about me, it was never about me. It’s about all of the Vol. About the world’s right to evolve. Forever are prepared to kill to stop the world from changing. Kill anyone who has talent that they’ll never have – anyone who might find out what they’re up to.
My first date is ruined, as Rehan turns our corner of the bar into a war planning chamber, his eyes bright with ideas and plans. I eye the dance floor wistfully as Rehan quizzes me about the Institute and taps away on his phone. I’m fed up of this internet thing, clearly it’s much more interesting than me.
“I’m going to dance,” I say.
He looks up, surprised. “Oh, ok.”
He was supposed to say that he’d come with me. I leave him there and head to the dance floor, where I shake and sway among the crowd, but there’s something missing now, the music isn’t telling me how to move anymore, and I feel awkward and self-conscious. I head to the toilets instead, and splash my face. The other girls there give me odd looks and I notice how different my clothes are from theirs. They’re dressed for a party, I’m wearing jeans and a sweater. I didn’t notice when the club was more empty, but now I feel out of place. Conspicuous.
I step back into the club, and freeze. Lia. I’m sure that’s her, standing a few metres away with her back to me. Are they all here? My eyes flicker around the club quickly. Is that Mark, leaning against a table in the shadows? That could be Amir moving through the dancers. They’re all in between me and the exit, what do I do?
Then she turns, and it’s not Lia. And ‘Mark’ steps out of the shadows and is just some guy. I’m being paranoid – which is how my life is going to be from now on. Because, how do you escape psychics? You can’t. I make my way back to Rehan. “Can we go back to the hotel?” I ask.
&
nbsp; “Of course,” he gets up and folds away his notes about the Institute, but his mind’s still there, scaling walls or blowing things up or whatever it is he thinks he’s going to do. I wrap my arms around myself as we emerge into the frost.
We take a bus back to the hotel, a different route from the way we came. Rehan is still trying to be clever, to keep Lia off our tracks, when neither of us have the faintest idea how her talent works. The bus smells of chips and stale beer.
Everywhere I look, I see Lia. In the shadowy faces of the people outside, in the woman on the bus standing with her back to me, in the hooded figure slumped in a corner. A dozen imaginary Lias, stalking me.
It’s good to be back at the hotel. Rehan is still in his own world and merely nods goodnight as I step into my room. It’s a lame end to my first date.
But, moments later, he’s knocking. Maybe we’re finally going to talk. Or maybe he thinks I want to kiss him again. I don’t – I think.
I unchain the door.
“Have you got the data stick and my tablet?” Rehan demands.
“What? No.”
“I left them in my room. I’m sure I did.”
I stare helplessly at him.
“Great.” He kicks randomly at a fire extinguisher on the wall. “Stupid.” Then he’s gone again. Definitely a lame ending to the date.
I shut the door, the metal cold in my hand as I click the chain back into place. How can he have misplaced both his tablet and the data stick? I really hope he’s just missed a bag under the bed, or perhaps a maid thought his tablet looked valuable and stole it. The police can get it back. That’s what police do, isn’t it?
How could he have kept them both together? How could I have let him? That was the record of my entire life, my friends’ lives – their parents’ names – and now we don’t know where it is. Why was he even carrying it? I’m the one who got the data out of the Institute. It’s not his. I’ve been letting him take charge, and I shouldn’t have.
A Girl From Forever (The Forever Institute series Book 1) Page 15