Eloden walked on one side and Dr. Johnston on the other. I felt sandwiched even though nobody was touching me now. A few seconds later, we turned the corner in the hallway and Dr. Johnson threw an arm around my shoulders, pulling me to a halt.
I didn’t know where Eloden had gone. I froze under Dr. Johnston’s arm even though I knew him. He wasn’t familiar with my dislike of being touched. I usually avoided situations where I would have to deal with it.
“The more promising research is in stem cells,” Dr. Johnston said as he pushed buttons for a cappuccino, oblivious to my discomfort.
“Like bone marrow?” I asked.
“Cord blood is what we’ve been studying. Families with known affected persons. We take the blood from the cords after birth, with consent. The babies without the gene aren’t the ones we need. We’re doing gene treatments on the cord blood itself. Of course, we can’t offer to give the treated blood back to the individuals as none of the treatments have been proven, but the animal studies have been promising.”
I nodded, very interested, but I didn’t know what I could offer him. “Do you need someone to help at the lab?” I asked, assuming he was short staffed.
He handed me the cappuccino. “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I know you are involved with some affected families, and if you hear of any pregnancies, just pass along our lab’s information. We’re able to offer direct entry into our other phase two and three trials for interested, affected individuals that can provide incentive.”
I thought about Ai Lung. She would never have consented to a trial even when she was still walking.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, disappointed. I wanted to be more involved, but I had missed my chance this morning.
“Have you ever been tested, Eve?” Dr. Johnston asked, bending closer to me. I was short, but he was standing close enough to be offering to sell me street drugs, not discussing scientific research.
I sipped my bitter drink. “No,” I answered, not offended. Everyone asked.
“Do you plan on having children?”
Now I felt uneasy. It seemed different talking about my children. Even saying it made my heart flutter.
“No,” I repeated. “I can’t take that chance.”
“I understand,” Dr. Johnston said, straightening up and releasing me. He didn’t understand. Doctors and counsellors always said they understood or empathize, but it wasn’t possible when their children could never be affected.
“Have a good weekend,” Dr. Johnston told me, not bothering to get a drink for himself. He smiled and turned his back to me to walk the way we came.
I stood there for a few moments. He had wished me a nice weekend, as anyone would after running into you, a social nicety. I had told him my mother had started showing symptoms of her terminal illness. What kind of nice weekend did he expect me to have after that?
Eloden’s hand found mine. I squeezed it as hard as I could and didn’t let the tears fall.
“We need to go to the health clinic to get medicine for Ai Lung,” I lied to Eloden, releasing his hand. I dumped my cappuccino in the trash and walked further down the hallway to find another stairwell, not wanting to see Dr. Johnston or the clinical researchers right now. I quickly made my way down the stairs and outside, ripping off my ID and stuffing it back in my pocket. I opened the back door to the Civic and looked behind me.
Eloden pulled me into a hug.
“You didn’t say anything about your mother’s injury,” he gently admonished me.
I cried. It burst out of me and once it started I couldn’t stop, sobbing all over his shirt. He stood there and took it, not saying anything more. His arms held me up when I wanted to slip down to the cement and lie there. I don’t know how long we spent wrapped in my grief and hopelessness.
“Let’s go,” I said, wiping my face on my hoodie-sleeve. I didn’t acknowledge my break down.
Eloden kissed my eyes, pausing a second for me to close them as he came near. With my tears dried, he let me go and got into the back seat.
I backed up Baby slow and careful, using my turn signal in the parking garage. I drove to the nearest clinic after lying to Eloden about why I needed to be there and I told the doctor that I needed contraception. I promised myself I would never have children while I let the nurse pump me full of birth control. It would be effective immediately since I had just finished my menses, she had reassured me. She reminded me to return in three months and gave me a stamp card with a single happy face on it.
Ai Lung was breathing better and had no more fevers. I had forgotten the rice, but the money I had left the Changs must have been enough because I could smell rice cooking when I walked in. Eloden didn’t have to glamour himself invisible as Ms. Chang remembered his heroics last visit. I gave Ms. Chang the muscle relaxant I had gotten from the clinic as well, claiming back pain that had gotten a sigh from the physician when he double checked my age. I told him I had been lifting heavy weights and winced convincingly. The relaxants eased the tonic contractions for Ai Lung and helped her sleep.
When we got back to the apartment I didn’t talk to anyone and locked myself in my room. Poor Eloden had gotten the cold shoulder the rest of the afternoon. I had been too numb to care. I didn’t undress for bed, even wearing my tearstained hoodie. I didn’t brush my teeth, eat or drink; partly because I didn’t dare put anything in my stomach and mostly because I just couldn’t think of anything beyond my pain. If I had been alone in my apartment, I could have stayed in my room for days.
I flipped over onto my stomach, ignoring the light still coming through my window. How long would they leave me alone? Why wouldn’t they give up? I needed so desperately to collapse and I couldn’t with them watching me.
I softly admitted in the privacy of my own room that I wanted the suffering to end and it wrenched sobs from me again. Ai Lung would be ashamed of me. It was cowardly and I knew I never would do anything but the moment was quick and painful that I felt death was the only release.
Someone knocked on my door and I threw a book hard, scaring whoever it was off.
A devil was waiting outside to claim my soul. How bloody poetic.
His kiss had tasted of sin. I still felt it to the tips of my toes.
It was bound to happen someday. I couldn’t avoid hell forever. There was no other place for me. I didn’t believe in heaven.
Chapter 10:
I WOKE UP HAVING TO pee. It was the middle of the night. My room was pitch black and this time, I didn’t rush to get up.
“Do you need to get out of there?” whispered Falin’s voice.
I shut my eyes again for a moment, wishing it was anyone but him.
“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t whispering. If those apartment-squatting bastards wanted to sleep on my bed in my room, then they were in for a rude awakening every day.
A hand wrapped around my ankle and tugged, shifting me towards the end of the bed. After a few tugs, he pulled my legs over the footboard and then reached for my hands, yanking me up with one swift pull. I couldn’t see anything, frightened I was going to smack heads with Falin, but I ended up sitting on the footboard, injury free.
“I have to pee,” I informed him.
Falin crouched down and put his shoulder to my pelvis, picking me up. My bladder protested.
“I will pee on you,” I threatened. I wouldn’t. I was embarrassed to even think about it.
“More dirty human habits?” he asked.
“Pee is sterile,” I replied, the random fact popping out of my mouth.
Falin carried me and my bladder to the toilet and plopped me down on it. He crossed his arms and leaned against the towel bar.
“Get out,” I ordered.
It didn’t work any better than the other half-dozen times I had said it.
“We’re not supposed to leave you alone,” Falin told me.
My bladder didn’t have the patience for this. What was wrong with them? I had made it clear earlier that I wasn’t to
be disturbed. I had stormed into the apartment with Eloden on my heels, probably making faces or explaining things with hand signals because even Dain had bitten back his greeting and let me stomp on into my bedroom with my runners dragging in dirt and my disgust with life.
I felt a tear slip down my cheek.
Falin saw it.
“Please,” I begged.
He stepped closer. He turned on the tap. He closed his eyes. He reached down and grabbed my pants and underwear with two hands, pulling them down, strong grip managing even when I didn't help at all. He got down onto his knees in front of me with his eyes still closed, holding my pants around my ankles.
“Did you know some Fae have green pee?” Falin asked like he was checking I knew the sky was blue.
“What?”
“Like a shamrock. Do you think the Irish got that end of the rainbow nonsense from the Fae? You take a great piss-” He paused. “Go pee,” he said.
I try to keep it to a tinkle.
“A great piss,” he said, exaggerating the great and I let it go. “It seems to shoot for miles if you angle your dick, right to the sun and back, and a rainbow-”
“I thought you said the pee was green,” I interrupted. I grabbed the toilet paper and wiped.
“Are you done?” he said.
I nodded but somehow, he knew even with his eyes closed. He started pulling up my pants and this time I stood.
“Rainbows have green. Keep that in mind next time you chase the end of a rainbow,” he sagely advised, and my pants were back in place. His eyes opened.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” I told him, washing my hands. I refrained from pointing out his eyes were green, too.
“Are you trying to logic magic?”
His eyes probed mine. I couldn’t look away. His pupils almost swallowed the bright green of his irises in the dimly lit room. I had never seen eyes that vivid on a human, cat-like in their intensity. Only night creatures needed eyes that reflected in the dark.
He blinked and for a millisecond his eyes were all black, a primal warning. My heart raced.
“Don’t look at me like that, Evie.”
I shivered, hearing him call my nickname with possessive familiarity.
“It’s Evie-baby,” I corrected him, dry swallowing. Grief hit the back burner. I wasn’t being coddled by Falin any longer. He looked like he had given me all the patience he had left and now the beast that drove him was out to play.
I recognized the dangerous change. My heart raced and I felt myself roar back to life, tearstained face yesterday’s memory.
He put his hands on either side of me, gripping the sink.
“Evie-baby,” he whispered. His dark eyes dropped to my lips. “Knowing my Mark is on you makes it very difficult not to fuck you up against this sink. I want to strip your pants back off and turn you around, so you can watch your pretty pussy take my cock in the mirror. I’d make you stand on one leg while I lift the other one up for you, so you would get a perfect view.”
All the adrenaline pumping my heart and blood found another focus. I hadn’t even thought about Falin that way, but suddenly, lust hit me hard. I could picture him naked behind me, lean hips dancing against mine, green eyes peeping out between his sweaty, too-long bangs playing peekaboo with his eyebrow piercings, staring at our bodies in the mirror.
I had to say something before Falin decided to make fantasy into reality.
“Did Dain say you could fuck me tonight?” I asked, reminding him of who was in charge. There was no point pretending it was me.
“No,” Falin answered.
“Carry me back to bed,” I ordered, putting plenty of bossy into it to drown out everything else I was feeling. I was not going to use Falin’s body to drown out the pain.
He turned me around, hands on my hips so quick, all I saw was my eyes widening in surprise in the mirror. My hair, he brushed aside, and he licked my neck where he had bitten me. His tongue felt a little rough and very hot. He watched me in the mirror, standing behind me like a dark, sexy shadow, bigger and stronger and impossible to shake.
“Forget Dain tonight, Baby, dream of me,” he said, crowding me.
He gave me a moment to think about it, then bent and picked me up princess style after flashing a smirk at the mirror.
“You are an incorrigible flirt,” I told him, knowing he would never have done it, but he enjoyed making me think otherwise. “And it is Evie-baby,” I corrected again.
He laughed.
I took a deep breath and felt some of the tension leave my body. What would have seemed impossible hours ago was suddenly more survivable. I had cried lots of nights alone but this was the first I had woken to somebody that cared since I had moved out of home, and I had no doubt that Falin waited purposefully for me to wake so he could check on me. They had all snuck into my room once I was too asleep to throw books or insults.
“Does that mean you don’t want to sleep in my arms tonight, Baby?” he asked.
“No,” I answered, probably surprising him. Falin wouldn’t do anything I would regret tonight. He was quite the big talker, but if Dain told him no, he would obey. I didn’t really understand the bond between the two of them, but I respected it.
“Let me lie on your chest,” I said. “You stay on top of the blanket,” I told him. The twins and I did it all the time.
Falin did as I requested and I got a few more hours of rest. This time when I woke up, Falin was the one asleep.
“Get up,” Aeric told me.
I hadn’t even opened my eyes yet. I don’t know how he knew I was awake, but I suspected he had been watching me much too closely for comfort, noting a change in my breathing when I woke up.
“Creep,” I muttered, snuggling closer to Falin. The irony was not lost on me, especially given how perfect Aeric appeared with platinum hair and blue eyes and a tall, toned body, just like a modern-day Legolas. He was the ivy-league boy you brought home to meet your mother unless your mother was mine.
“Your phone is glowing,” Aeric remarked. “Kheelan wanted to wait until you were awake.”
Was he worried my alarm was going to go off again? I cracked open one eye.
“Where is it?” I asked. I opened the other eye. Someone had been nice enough to shut my bedroom curtains.
I was handed a phone by a gloved hand. Really? Phones were mostly plastic.
I quickly entered my unlocking pattern with my thumb and saw a message from my mother. She wanted me to pick up some eggs for the pancakes.
I had completely forgotten about breakfast for the twins at home.
Falin had a heavy arm around me, binding me to his chest. I tried to wiggle, but his grip tightened. Aeric grabbed me around the wrist of my hand holding the phone and pulled. Falin growled, the animalistic sound going right through me since I was still lying on top of him.
Aeric threatened to put an arrow between Falin’s eyes if he didn’t behave and kept tugging me.
Nobody was shooting arrows in my room. In fact, I ought to ban all weapons from the bedroom after what happened to my favourite feather pillow.
“Falin, I have to go,” I said.
“Morning kiss?” he asked, opening his mossy eyes.
“No,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
If I gave Falin an inch-
He kissed me. His head left the pillow and we bashed mouths more than anything romantic because Aeric dropped me. I tasted blood.
“Ouch, fu-” I started, but Falin muffled it, drawing my bottom lip into his mouth to suck on the tiny wound. I had hit my lip against my own teeth when he bumped, not his piercing, but that little metal loop felt very different as he kissed me. It was smooth and really quite small, yet it made his kiss feel unique. I decided I liked it.
Not that I would let him know.
I broke from the kiss by finally rising from the bed. I put my hand on his chest and pushed up. He could have held me in place with his arm over me, but he let me go.
“When yo
u’re bored with Aeric come back to play with me,” Falin said, closing his eyes again. He looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes that made his face look thinner.
Aeric leaned over and picked me up. He might look like a boy but he was strong. I felt like a box being moved and not a very heavy one.
“I can walk,” I complained.
“This is faster,” Aeric said.
“It’s not a race,” I retorted.
“Do you have to use the bathroom?” he asked, finally putting me down on my feet in the hallway.
“Yes,” I answered. Then, “No,” I amended, thinking about it. I was not repeating last night with Aeric.
He stood there.
“Don’t you have something to do?” I prompted.
“We’re not supposed to leave you alone,” he said. “You’re in a mood.”
He made it sound like PMS. Not this again. I needed to have a talk with Dain. It was morning and talking to him would be less intimidating in the daylight. Maybe Eloden as well. He must have been the one to snitch what happened at work and then my cryfest over my mother’s condition. I could tell them I had it back under wraps.
“Where is everyone?” I asked, peeking back in the bedroom. Only Falin was lying on the bed.
“I’m responsible to accompany you today,” Aeric said.
“No.”
I was not introducing Aeric to my mother. She would think I had gone mad. I wouldn’t date someone like him in a million years. He was wrong for me for all the right reasons. Too confident, too gorgeous and way too easy to tease. Opposites don't really attract.
“I’m sick of this apartment,” he whined.
Too easily bored could be added to my list of opposites. I was always too busy to be bored.
“Feel free to leave the apartment and never come back. I didn’t invite you to squat here, anyway,” I said. “What about Falin?”
“He’s nocturnal,” Aeric dismissed. “Let him watch your things. Lock up the rat.”
I rolled my eyes. “He is not going to eat Lady Antebellum,” I said, although now I was going to worry about it. He wasn’t human, after all.
“I didn’t say anything about eating the rat, but he might want to free it, and then we’ll have an infestation. He hates to see anything caged.”
No Faerie Tale Love (Faerie Series Book 1) Page 14