by Nichole Van
My mind reeled with what I had learned over the last few minutes.
Tennyson had tried to commit suicide? More than once?!
Why?
I desperately wanted to ask him about it. About Afghanistan. About his injury. About his psychic powers and how they worked.
About why he was determined to play my boyfriend.
But then, there was so much I wanted to know about him.
Was he a dress-for-comfort guy? Or did he dress for looks?
Did he think maple bacon donut were the food of the gods, like I did?
Which Wiggle was his favorite? (I was betting Anthony. Everyone loves Anthony.)
The more I tried to unthink the questions I wanted to ask him, the more came.
Fallon, Colbert or Kimmel? Cilantro? Coupon or Cue-pon? Cuddler or hand-holder or both? (I had my fingers crossed for both.)
“So.” Tennyson rocked back on his heels. “Olivia Hawking.”
“Yeah. Sorry I didn’t quite get around to mentioning my last name.”
If he had a strong reaction to me withholding that info, he didn’t show it.
His face remained calm, eyes steadily meeting mine. The shining tenderness was gone—that had clearly been for Michael’s benefit—but sincerity remained.
Something lingered behind that sincerity. That same . . . something . . . I had been struggling to articulate. It reached out for me, tangling me up, telling me this man was a kindred soul. That maybe we were destined to be together.
Or maybe I was simply starved for intimacy and figured a mad crush on a gorgeous guy would substitute for a meaningful relationship.
Mmmm. Langley and I were going to have to have a girl’s night session and obsess over this.
“Yeah.” He winced. “Sorry I sorta dropped the boyfriend thing on you. It was the only way they’d let me stay with you.”
Which was what I had supposed.
Not that I minded him being my boyfriend.
Nope.
He could play boyfriend, lover, beau, swain, fiancé— hell, I wouldn’t even say no to husband—because self-respect and I had obviously parted ways a looong time ago.
But—
“You didn’t need to stay, but I’m extremely grateful that you did.” I felt like I had to say it. I hated the thought of being an obligation.
I straightened my IV to avoid looking directly at him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know his thoughts. I kinda liked living in my fantasies.
I continued, “You said being in town was hard for you. I can’t even imagine a hospital . . .”
My voice trailed off.
I finally dared to look at him. Tennyson’s expression didn’t change, precisely. But his jaw tightened and the set of his mouth moved from calm to determined. Ya know, if I were to apply emotions to his mouth.
Which, apparently, I was going to do.
Because . . . chemistry.
He sidestepped my implied question. “Is Michael always like that?” he asked instead.
“Uh . . . like what?”
There were a lot of descriptors I could apply to Michael—
Snooty? Competent? Handsome? Wanker-ish? Annoying? Bossy?
I wasn’t sure which one to offer up. Maybe Tennyson had new words for me.
“I don’t know,” he said. “His emotions were . . . complicated.”
I swallowed. I could only imagine the feelings Michael would feel in regards to me. None of them too positive.
I laughed, soft and strained. “That’s Michael.”
I needed to change the subject. I didn’t want to have to explain to Tennyson D’Angelo my history with Michael. It hit too close to my current situation.
Silence hung between us, laden with all the baggage neither of us was eager to share.
“Are we good?” I waved a hand back and forth between us. “’Cause I still have a lot of questions, and I don’t want all the magic that is going between us”—I motioned again—“to be over.”
Tennyson stilled, his eyes flaring.
I replayed my words in my head and then blushed.
Way to go, Olivia. Why not offer to have his babies while you’re at it?
Which, of course, caused my hormones to perk up because they were excitable like that.
Horny little hormones.
“Crap, I just meant the whole Wriggles . . . ehr, scars and visions and black-slime-demon thing when I was referring to this.” I waved my hand between us again. I gave a stilted laugh, feeling the humiliating burn up my cheeks. “I didn’t mean us us, as in we were together sort of us. Not boyfriend and girlfriend, of course.” Shut up. Stop talking. “I mean, you’re you and I’m me and you’re obviously not the kind of guy who—”
A knock at the door interrupted my stammering monologue of awkwardness and Tennyson’s frozen expression of what? Horror? Offended decorum? I was struggling to identify it.
An older man in a lab coat walked into the room, a clipboard clutched in his fingers. The doctor, I assumed.
He smiled kindly and said something in quick Italian.
Tennyson replied and shook the man’s hand.
A quick conversation ensued in rapid-fire Italian.
I don’t speak Italian, so my brain simply added its own subtitles.
Tennyson: “Hi, Doctor. Thanks for stopping by.”
Doctor: “No prob. Wow. You’re Italian, too. Nice.”
Tennyson: “Thank you.”
Doctor: “You are an incredibly attractive human being. I can’t seem to stop staring at you.”
Tennyson: “Yes, that is a frequent problem when I’m around. It’s my cross to bear.”
Doctor: “I believe it. So about the loser chick in the bed here. None of us believe you are her boyfriend, but hey, you’re too handsome and moneyed for us to question it. Besides, she doesn’t seem to mind.”
Tennyson: “They never do.”
Or something like that. They could have just been making introductions for all I knew.
Tennyson turned to me.
“This is Dr. Vincenzi, the physician in charge of your care.”
“Hello.” I wiggled my fingers at him.
“Ciao.” He smiled in return. “How you are feeling?” he asked in broken English. “No pain?”
I liked Dr. Vincenzi. He had kind eyes.
“I’m good.” I gave him a thumbs up. “No pain.”
“I am okay to talk about your health?” Dr. Vincenzi looked at Tennyson, clearly wanting my permission to speak in front of him before continuing.
“Yes.” If this conversation went the way I thought it would, Tennyson would need to know all this anyway. If he had solutions for the daemon, he needed to understand what it was doing to me.
I hadn’t been lying when I said I was dying. My whole situation was one bad phone call away from devolving into a John Greene novel.
Dr. Vincenzi smiled and looked down at my chart. “You are healthy. The blood tests—” He paused, searching for the words. “—they were . . . puliti.”
“Clean,” Tennyson supplied.
“Yes. Clean. Tutto a posto.”
“It’s all okay,” Tennyson translated and moved to my side, threading his fingers back into mine.
I told my stupid hormones that he was just playing nice for the doctor. The lurch of my heart and my reckless breathiness all needed to settle down.
Tennyson was so far out of my league, I was borderline psychotic to even ponder the possibility of us together. I mean, he had frozen like a deer in headlights when I even obliquely suggested we might be anything more than . . . I don’t know what.
So clearly Tennyson wasn’t aiming too hard for there to be an us.
I sternly told my giddy hand this.
But . . . Tennyson had a really nice hand. Dry palms. Warm skin. Long fingers that flexed with strength.
So, of course, my hand refused to listen to me.
The doctor looked up from my chart. “There were i problemi con il cervello—”
“Th
ere were problems with her brain?”
“Sí.”
Yep. I knew exactly where this was going.
“Un momento, per piacere.” Tennyson held up a finger to the doctor before turning to me. “He’s extremely concerned about you, Olivia. It’s rolling off him like waves. Does this . . .” He paused. “Does this have to do with why you’re dying?”
I shrugged. “Probably. Let’s listen to the doctor.”
I waved a hand toward Dr. Vincenzi. Go on.
The doctor spoke in staccato Italian. Tennyson listened and asked the occasional question back. After a few minutes, Tennyson turned to me.
Again, that same unnamed emotion swam in his eyes. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that emotion because it seemed incongruous on a Hot Person’s face. Like mismatched socks. Or a Kardashian suddenly spouting profound philosophy.
“So you were unconscious for a long period of time,” Tennyson explained. “The doctor says they did an MRI before I first saw you. There were some abnormalities but nothing that looked familiar. He wants to know if you have been working with a neurologist in the States?”
“Yes. One of the best at Johns Hopkins.” The findings here were just one more corroboration of what I already knew. Something was wrong with the wiring in my brain.
Surprise, surprise.
It’s one thing to feel like your brain works differently than other peoples’. It’s something else entirely to have a physical confirmation of it.
We all want to be special snowflakes, but it’s kinda lame to find you actually are one. Life is isolating enough without feeling entirely outside the rest of humanity.
Dr. Vincenzi spoke again, expression grave and concerned.
Tennyson took in a depth breath, as if he had been dealt a blow. He swallowed and turned to me.
“He says they need to understand what is causing your episodes. There is a very real danger that if they continue, you simply might never . . . wake up.” He angled his head, eyes soulful, drenched in that same emotion. “Is this what you meant when you said you were dying?”
His raw sincerity knifed through me. “Yeah.”
Tennyson held my gaze, that same something clouding his expression. It was soft and squishy and reached deep inside to thaw things I hadn’t even known were frozen.
It was a fairly lethal look.
My own breathing stuttered.
And then his jaw stiffened, as if resolved.
“I want to know all about this,” he finally said. “You’re not going to die. Not on my watch.”
The fierce undertone of his words caused me to blink.
Whoa.
Tennyson turned to Dr. Vincenzi and they talked for a few more minutes. Tennyson tense and concerned. The doctor kind and responsive, until, with a final wave, the doctor left the room.
Tennyson nodded toward the closed door. “The doctor wants to keep you around for observation.”
I rolled my eyes. “More observation isn’t the solution here. Being in the hospital isn’t going to help me get better.”
“You sure about that?”
“Positive. Can you break me out of here?”
He snorted. “Of course. I’ll talk with them. But I’d first like to know more about what happened.”
He grabbed a small chair from the corner, flipped it around and straddled it, resting his arms across the back. It was ridiculously attractive.
How was it possible? He was haggard and unshaven, wearing rumpled clothing. His hair poked out here and there, clearly having been on the receiving end of one too many hand swipes through it.
And he was still absurdly sexy.
Classic Hot Person behavior in the wild.
Figured.
I didn’t need a mirror to know that I looked like a pack of feral four-year-old princess wannabes had looted a Polly Pocket makeup case and attempted a makeover and hair restyle.
I called the look ‘hospital hobo.’ Fingers-crossed it could be a thing this year.
“Talk to me.” Tennyson beckoned his fingers. “You collapsed right after my vision. You mentioned the Chucky-slime.”
“Chucky-slime?” I snorted.
“Yeah, the black, oily stuff that comes through the scars sometimes.”
“So the Chucky-slime comes through the Wriggles?”
“Something like that.” Tennyson gave a dry chuckle. “The name was Branwell’s idea.”
“Chucky-slime and the Wriggles,” I laughed with him. “That’s either a great name for a rock band or a weird kids’ show on Nickelodeon.”
“It is a silly name for a frighteningly lethal supernatural entity.”
I nodded. “I call the Chucky-slime a daemon—”
“Latin for demon?”
“Yeah. It seemed fitting.” I paused.
“Daemon is a lot better than Chucky-slime. Let’s call it that.”
I tried not to preen over Tennyson liking my naming prowess.
Though that reminded me—“Along that same line, I’m going try to stop using Wriggle to describe the scars because Wriggle is just too—”
“Cute?”
“I was going to go with dumb, but that, too. There’s nothing inherently cute about the danger of the scars and the daemon. So I assume you can see the daemon, too?”
Tennyson shook his head. “No, I don’t see it, unfortunately.”
“But how do you know—”
“Jack Knight-Snow. Jack could see it.”
“Ah.” That made sense, I supposed. Maybe. “Could see it? Past tense?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Like with the scars, Jack could only see the daemon in his ghost form, but once he stopped being a ghost, he lost the ability. You, on the other hand, can see it even though you’re fully physical in our reality.”
“Did the daemon hurt Jack?”
“It tried. Is the daemon the source of your injury?” Tennyson turned the tables.
“Yeah. It hurts me.” I tapped my chest. “It feels like it’s tearing me apart from the inside out—” I stopped, thinking. “It’s hard to describe . . .”
How could I explain what the daemon did? No one understood. Everyone thought I was a bit of a nut job.
Tennyson leaned forward. “The daemon fractures something deep within and takes and takes until you just know.” A pause. “One day it will take too much. It will break something vital and when that happens, you will cease.”
He knew.
He truly and utterly understood.
I blinked. “H-how do you—”
He tapped his chest, mimicking my motion from a moment before. “It’s my fate, too.”
Oh.
My brain stuttered, trying to come to grips with what he had just said. It shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise. I had seen the daemon swarming over him, after all.
But . . . I hated the daemon and what it did to me. And the thought that it might be destroying someone as amazing as Tennyson, too . . .
I bit my lip to stop the ache in my throat from growing.
“For me, it happens only during my involuntary visions,” he continued. I made a mental note to ask him what he meant by ‘involuntary visions’ later. “As Jack would describe it, a scar would open, the daemon would pour out and then crawl all over me.”
“Can you feel the daemon? It wraps around me so tight, I can hardly breath.”
“No, I don’t see or feel it, per se. Just a greater sense of fracturing after the vision is done.”
I shook my head, sinking into the hospital bed pillow. “I’ve lost so much of my life to this. For years, doctors refused to take me seriously. Everyone thought I was on drugs or psychotic or something. A lot of people still do, I’m sure. Obviously, no one believes me that the daemon even exists. I’ve spent so much time chasing down every wacko, paranormal thing . . .” I pulled my mind back from that rabbit hole. “I wasn’t kidding when I said you were my last hope. The doctor was right; I don’t have much time. Thank you for standing up to Michael with me and
insisting I stay here. I need answers as soon as possible.”
Tennyson let out a slow, long breath and threaded his fingers into his hair, elbows resting on the back of the chair. “That’s one of the reasons why I refused to leave you to Michael’s care.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re our only hope, too. The daemon is killing me. Not quite as quickly as you, perhaps, but it’s hurting me nonetheless. We know that the solution is to somehow heal all the scars in reality. But once Jack lost the ability to see them and the daemon, it’s been nearly impossible to know how to proceed. How can we fix something we can’t even see? We need your help just as much as you might need ours. The problem, of course, is how do we keep you safe.”
“From the daemon? I don’t think you can.”
“But my involuntary visions summon it. If you’re around me, the daemon will appear more frequently.”
I frowned. He had a point, but— “Like you just said, you need my help to see the daemon and the scars.”
The scars went where the D’Angelos were. I needed to be around the D’Angelos to help solve this problem. Ergo, being around the scars was a calculated but necessary risk.
That seemed to be the argument in a nutshell.
“It’s a Catch-22. The thing that might save you is also the thing that might kill you,” he said.
“True.” I thought back to Tennyson’s vision. “Usually, when the daemon comes through a scar, it lunges right for me. But with your vision, the daemon actually left me alone. It was crawling all over you. The daemon didn’t attack me until I tried to pull it off you. I think it likes you more than me.”
Tennyson went so still, I was initially concerned he was having another vision. But no. His eyes were focused on mine.
“You tried to pull the daemon off me?” He sounded angry. “Why would you put yourself in danger like that?! You’re one or two bad episodes away from death!”
Uhmmm.
He was really angry, wasn’t he? Brows drawn down, body language tense.
I couldn’t offer the real reason—Well, duh, I pulled it off because I have this monstrous crush on you, and therefore I can’t physically not help you if you need it.
I went with: “It was hurting you.”
He shook his head. “If the daemon attacks me, let it. As long as you’re here and whole, we have a fighting chance to find a solution. You’re too important to lose. If I go down, you can still work with my brothers to solve the scars.”