Bound by Secrets

by Angela M Hudson

  As I closed his door behind me, Mike stood like a bouncer in the hallway, stopping me from leaving. “I heard what you were talking about.”

  “And?” I shoved past him.

  “Let her be, David—”

  “She’s going to the lookout, Mike!” I wheeled around to face him. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let my wife lose her virginity in the backseat of some teenager’s car—unless that teenager is me.”

  Mike scoffed, folding his arms. “If you show up there, she’ll hate you.”

  “She won’t even know I’m there.” I could feel the mischief changing my expression, and Mike softened to the idea, unfolding his arms. “You wanna come?” I offered.

  “She’ll smell you. You may be human now but she’s not.”

  Damn. I hadn’t thought of that.

  Mike turned his head toward the room at the end of the hall. “Hey, Ems?”

  “Em?” I whispered. “What good can she do? She’s as human as me.”

  “She can give me permission to go,” he said with a grin. “Em?” he called again.

  “Yeah?” she called back.

  “I’m going out for a bit.”

  “Where?”

  “To help David ruin his wife’s date.”

  “You’re not?” She gasped in disbelief, poking her head out of their room. “Mike, don’t get involved—”

  “David’s right, Em,” he said. “We can’t let Ara make this mistake—”

  “You’re both children.” Em shook her head at us. “She’ll hate you if she finds out.”

  “I’ll hate me if I don’t at least try to stop her,” I said.

  “And who says she even plans to do anything with this boy?” Emily stepped right out of the room, her hands on her hips, making the rapid increase of her… girth more obvious in that pose, to put it nicely. “Give the girl some credit.”

  “That’s just it, Ems,” Mike said. “She thinks she can sit and talk with this guy all night. She doesn’t realize what she’s getting herself into.”

  “And you think she’s in some sort of danger from this guy?”

  “No,” I said. “But…”

  “But you love her.” She nodded, softening then as she looked at Mike.

  “We’d do the same for you, Em,” Mike said.

  “I know.” When she backed into her room, she left a stain in the air that reeked of jealousy.

  I waited until Mike looked back at me before speaking. “You wanna stay here instead, bro?”

  “No. I need to get out for a bit,” he said, defeated. “The last thing I need tonight is another argument about my feelings for Ara. I don’t love her—”

  “I know.” I patted his shoulder and turned toward the stairs. But both of us knew that was a lie. He’d fallen under the curse of Ara’s blood long ago, and despite his attempts to move on, even in her death, Ara had always been the third person in their relationship.

  Mike won Emily back from Blade, convinced her to marry him, but after several returns to the human form over the last twenty years, Em still hadn’t fallen pregnant. And this time had not been the exception. Mike put it down to stress, but I felt like nothing would happen until she was certain he wouldn’t run away with Ara if he got the chance.

  Everyone knew Ara would never fall for Mike again, but an old friend returning with a new mind, and a heart open to everything in life, was unpredictable. The fact was, Ara had become a new danger in their relationship since she woke up, and she’d been a ball and chain around it before that. Emily wouldn’t relax until Ara was completely out of the picture again—be that by death or miles between—and I could see Mike was hanging by a thread. If Emily didn’t back down soon, he would walk. He already had one foot out the door. It was his promise in marriage and the love they once had that kept him here when there was barely anything left between them, but even that was getting weaker by the day. Add Emily’s recent fluctuation in size and the bingeing and self-loathing that came with it, and their entire relationship was a time-bomb waiting to go off.

  With that in mind, it was a terrible idea for him to come out with me tonight—to be anywhere near Ara—but, selfishly, I needed the company. So I followed him out to the car, and stayed silent when I knew I should have said something.

  * * *

  The drive to the lookout—the only place in this entire flat beach town with a hill—was spent in relative silence. I was lost in thought, worrying about Ara and what she might have been up to in the car with that predator, and if my instincts were correct, Mike was worrying about how he’d react when he saw her for the first time in over a year. If he had even half the love for her that I did, it would be hard for him to control the need to hold her.

  Along the steep peak of rock, five cars were lined up with their noses overlooking the beach. Without my immortal senses, I would have to walk past each car and listen to see which one was Shaun’s, but Mike knew before we even pulled up. He quickly jerked the handbrake into place in the spot beside them and put his head on the steering wheel.

  “You okay, man?”

  “I never thought I’d hear her voice again,” he said.

  “Now is not the time to lose control,” I reminded him, opening the car door. “If her lips touch that douchebag’s, I’ll kill him. You need to stop me.”

  I slammed the door and Mike hopped out after me, both of us standing for a moment to take in the scene. The windows were fogged, so we couldn’t see in and she probably couldn’t see out, but even I could hear her laughing.

  “Funny bugger,” Mike said, unamused.

  “I’ve never met anyone like you,” Shaun said.

  I angled back and rolled my eyes at Mike, who shook his head, groaning.

  “What do you mean?” Ara said timidly.

  “The way you take it all in your stride.” The car wobbled with movement. “You don’t remember your past at all, and yet you make jokes about that. How do you do that?”

  “What else can I do?” she said in a small, high voice. “I’m not gonna just sit on the floor and cry about it. I’ve got a life to live, and I already missed out on more than a year.”

  “That sounds like a lot of missed weekends.” He laughed.

  I groaned. He was leading her to something, I could tell. But what?

  “Yeah. I guess,” she said, from the sounds of it thinking the same thing I was.

  “Have you ever been to the beach?”

  “Yeah. Of course. I lived here for three months before I came to school.”

  “Right, but…” The car wobbled again. Mike tensed, standing taller. “Ever been swimming at night… naked?”

  Mike appeared beside me, the wind of his swift and unnatural shift moving my jacket. “He undid her button.”

  “Someone’s out there,” Ara gasped, her hand appearing in the fog on the glass. Mike and I ducked into the shadows beside the car as her face appeared, scanning the night.

  “Ara.” Shaun laughed. “There’s half a dozen people out there—”

  “Yeah, but this voice sounded like the authoritative kind, someone’s dad or something.”

  Shaun laughed again. “Sounds like someone’s about to get busted. Come on”—his door opened—“let’s go down to the beach for a swim.”

  I barely rolled myself to the back of the car before her door swung open and she stepped out, buttoning up her shirt. My eyes zeroed in on it, cooking my blood, every nerve in my body screaming to reach out and grab her, drag her skinny ass home and tell her not to be so stupid. How does she even know this boy can swim? Or swim well enough to rescue her if she gets dragged out to sea in a rip they won’t notice under the darkness out here? And naked? She can’t go around taking off her clothes for boys she just met. Doesn’t she know that’s his way of getting her naked so he can move things a step further?

  “Calm down.” Mike squatted beside me, holding on to the back of the car. “Give her a chance. She didn’t seem all that comfortable with the idea.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, well I’m not waiting around to find out.”

  “Don’t get hasty, mate.” He pocketed the car keys. “I think you should stand back and see what she does.”

  “You have a hell of a lot more faith in her than I do.”

  “I always have.”

  I stood up, watching as the ‘couple’ vanished down the dune to the beach below. “If I still had my abilities…”

  “I know.” Mike cupped my fist as I bashed it into the other. “But if you do anything to hurt Shaun, or make it known that you’re here—spying on her—she will never talk to you again. Not even if you tell her you were once married.”

  I forced myself to relax a bit. He was right. This needed to go smoothly, or it would destroy things with Ara for good.

  We crawled up to the edge of the limestone cliff and peered down the slope to the cove. Ara sat in the sand, clothes on, while Shaun stripped down to nothing, dancing around like a drunken fool.

  “Oh my God.” She rocked back, covering her mouth.

  “What?” Shaun said as he spun around, hands out in question.

  Mike and I cringed, getting a full view of what he was packing.

  Ara giggled—the adorable, sweet giggle that I’d always loved. “I’ve never seen a…”

  “What, this?” He aimed two fingers at his manhood. Boyhood, I should say. If Ara thought that was good, she’d slip off her seat when she saw mine.

  “He really shouldn’t be advertising that so openly,” Mike said, his voice low in the dark despite the sudden breeze, and without my immortal ears, I barely heard him. But Ara did. Her head whipped around, eyes landing right on the spot we were laying before we rolled apart and into the shrubbery.

  “I never realized how hard it is to sneak up on an immortal.”

  “No kidding.” Mike laughed. “So what’s our plan from here?”

  “I need to stay downwind,” I said. “If she smells me—”

  “Yeah, but if she smells me, she’ll know I’m Lilithian.”

  “Not likely. Your kind aren’t that easy to smell, and she’s relatively new, all things considering. I doubt she’ll realize what you are.”

  Mike looked thoughtful. “You’ve got a point.”

  We both rolled back over and edged our way to the tip of rock. Below, Shaun helped Ara stand and moved himself uncomfortably close to her. Her shoulders lifted and she looked down at her feet as he unbuttoned her shirt again.

  “She’s gonna reject him.” Mike sounded certain.

  “What do you smell?” I asked. “Her hormones? Is she—”

  “She’s… her blood’s running hot, but why wouldn’t it? She’s never been that close to a boy before.”

  “Don’t wanna know,” I said, covering my ears.

  “You asked.” He punched me in the arm; it actually hurt.

  I narrowed my eyes at the two on the beach, jutting my neck out. “What are they saying?”

  “Shaun,” Mike said in likeness of a girl, phrasing the word, remarkably, in the same way Ara would—that odd mix of an American-Australian accent. “I’m not really ready for this.”

  “Aw, come on, Ara,” Mike said in a husky male voice. “Just one swim. I promise I won’t push you to do anything more.”

  Mike and I grunted.

  “What’s he saying now?” I asked.

  “He said at least not until the third date.”

  My lip curled. “What did Ara say?”

  “Is that the standard before…”—he turned to me and batted his eyelids like a little girl, making his voice wispy and airy—“you know…?”

  I laughed. “What’d Shaun say?”

  “I didn’t hear. Shut up.” He reached out and backhanded my arm.

  Shaun moved in to Ara, one foot then the other, and held her in his arms, his nakedness pressed against her.

  I bit my knuckle, my ears tuning in to Shaun’s voice as the wind died down a little.

  “But if you really like the person,” Shaun continued, “you don’t have to wait, right? Because you’re still gonna like each other after…”

  “Shaun just said—” Mike started.

  “Shh. I can hear now,” I snapped.

  “Even then.” Ara pushed away from him and my heart soared with pride. “I’m not really ready for any of that yet. I haven’t even had my first kiss, and I don’t really want it to be with a guy I just met.”

  “Why not? It’s just a kiss.”

  “I dunno,” she said, shrugging one shoulder as she sat down again. “It feels like maybe it’s kind of a special thing.”

  Shaun sat down in the sand beside her.

  “I hope he gets sand in his anus and has to stick a hose up there to get it out,” I muttered.

  Mike laughed. “Speak from experience, do you?”

  “Shut up.” I shoved him in the arm, tipping him sideways.

  “So, what’s say we end this nightmare?” Mike suggested, grinning like an evil clown.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  11

  Ara

  Shaun’s penis sat limply on the sand between his legs like a raw sausage. I wanted to laugh, but I knew that was impolite. It had gotten to the stage now where the talking was done, and I just wanted to go home. I was tired after a long day of learning new stuff, and all the fake laughing I’d been doing with Shaun made my cheeks hurt. I vowed to myself then never to pretend a boy is funny ever again. Shaun really wasn’t that great, and it was an important lesson for me that looks aren’t everything. Not just good looks, but the look of a person—like that they might be a nice guy or even a jerk. Shaun looked like a nice guy; David looked like a jerk, but they were polar opposites. Still, I wouldn’t want to be sitting here with a naked David either. I was done with boys and penises for a while. And I was certain now that I really did not want that anywhere near me, especially not after it’d been sticking its head in the sand. It looked crusty and the tip of it had a sandy-coated wetness, like the slimy trail behind a snail.

  Shaun stopped talking then and his head whirled around on his shoulders, both of us looking up to the cliff as a set of bright headlights beamed down on us.

  “Shit. Move!” He jumped up and dragged me sideways by the arm as his car slowly and rigidly rolled down the slope, bouncing and jerking about over the shrubberies before it came to a rolling stop a meter from where we’d been sitting. The whole thing happened relatively slow but we both just stood in stunned horror and watched.

  “You didn’t put the handbrake on,” I said.

  “Even then…” He frowned, walking over to his car, which had unfortunately but hilariously positioned itself right on top of his clothes. “It couldn’t have gone over the edge without a damn good push.”

  A line of heads started to gather on the cliff edge, short bursts of laughter amalgamating as they all witnessed the scene below. I took a few steps back to hide in the shadows. I did not want to be the topic of tomorrow’s conversations at school, or the punchline of the jokes.

  “Yeah, laugh, idiots!” Shaun yelled, tugging at his jeans to get them from under the tire. “But when I find out who did this, I’m gonna skin you alive!”

  People backed away, leaving us to our humiliation, and I scanned the slope for a path the car could take back up. But there was none. There were only thin paths carved by foot traffic, so the only way that thing could come up that hill again was with a tow truck.

  I checked my phone, opening the map I’d loaded earlier with directions on how to get back. It would only take me ten minutes to walk from here to a road, and then twenty minutes home from there. I’d made sure of that before I agreed to let him pick me up.

  “Shaun,” I called.

  “Yo!” He slipped his leg into his jeans.

  “I’m gonna walk home.”

  “Yeah. Fine. Whatever.”

  I didn’t let his snappy tone get to me. After all, he was in a bit of a predicament, considering he told his parents he was at a friend’s house tonight
—not at the lookout, with a girl.

  The ocean pushed a cool and very strong breeze across the land then, twisting it halfway up the slope where it gathered sand in a slight whirl, making my ankles itch. I stopped for a moment to admire it, casting my eyes out then to the black nothingness that was the ocean. Above it, thousands of stars that would normally be drowned out by the light of a town twinkled like holes in a black blanket, and without Shaun as my chaperone, without Brett standing at a safe distance, I actually felt free and independent, and alone—in a good way—for the first time in my entire life.

  I breathed the newness of this experience deeply and shut my eyes, appreciating every second of it. Until a broad hand touched my shoulder. “Hey, you okay?”

  I looked up into a square face. “I’m fine. But my friend needs some help.”

  “Yeah. I can see that.” He looked down at the beach, his hands on his hips. “My daughter was up here with some thug, and I saw a few kids push the car over.”

  “Don’t describe the perps to that guy then.” I pointed at Shaun. “He’ll hurt them if he thinks he knows who did it.”

  The man laughed. “My lips are sealed. Hey, do you need a ride home?”

  “Thanks, but I can walk.” I wouldn’t accept a ride with a stranger. Even if he did claim to have a daughter.

  “No worries then.” He winked at me and headed down the slope toward Shaun, who was cursing and kicking his car.

  A part of me—the part that had never walked home in the dark before—was feeling adventurous and excited about this. But the cautious part—the same one that knew I couldn’t actually come to any harm—was still a little bit nervous.

  As I walked down through the pitch-black carpark toward the road, I saw a glowing light in the distance, on what I assumed was a hill, but it was hard to tell with nothing but black behind it. When I heard a few loud cheers, I was sure it was a bonfire party, which made this empty dark a lot less menacing. I even thought about wandering over there to see if I knew anyone, but decided against it by the time I reached the road. I’d be home soon enough. I just needed to be brave and remind myself that I was immortal and inhumanly strong. I had nothing to worry about out here.