by Ann Aguirre
I spent twenty minutes in the shower and when I stumbled out, hair still wet, Kian had cup ramen waiting. Since that was his best dish, I tried so hard not to laugh.
He made a face at me, pretending to be offended. “What? At least I’m consistent.”
“That’s true.”
Once I ate, I was so ready for bed, but there was a new layer. Right now, there was no pressing crisis. Nothing to keep me from thinking about sleeping with Kian. We’d crashed out together before, but it had been a while since we did more than curl up like tired puppies. But the relief of finding my dad unharmed left me too exhausted to get into the “anything more” right now. Without waiting for Kian to finish in the bathroom, I crawled into his bed. Two minutes later, I was asleep.
Though I didn’t know when he came to bed, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling really warm. A few seconds later I understood why. Kian was spooned up against me from behind, as if he couldn’t stand being away from me even in his sleep. The sweetness of it tightened my throat. Deep down I still didn’t understand what was so special about me or how he could’ve fallen in love with me from watching me go about my sad daily life. But maybe that was the key. He saw me as somebody who would understand what he went through because we were basically on the same path, just a few years apart.
Slowly, so as not to wake him, I turned in his arms and realized I was touching skin. I’d known his arms were bare, but not chest and back too. Hello, hot shirtless boy. Which was admittedly shallow but there was no denying his beauty. He’d suffered for that choice.
My arm rested across his waist and I was absurdly conscious of how good he smelled. I’d used the same body wash but the coconut-lime mix mingled with his pH and … left him, well, the scientific term would be lickable. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but when his fingers sifted into my hair, that definitely wasn’t happening. It felt so good that I shivered.
“You’re awake?” he whispered.
“Yeah. What time is it?”
“Late or early, depending on your definition.”
“Did I wake you?”
“Kinda. You’ve been stroking my back for five minutes.” I heard the smile in his voice.
Oh God. How embarrassing.
After he pointed it out, my hand stilled. But I could still feel the firm, smooth muscles beneath my fingers. “Sorry.”
“You think I mind being woken up that way? The only way it could be better is if you were kissing me instead.”
“Uh, that’s above my pay grade. I’m not sure about the etiquette of doing stuff to sleeping people. I mean, am I even allowed to—”
“If it’s me, you are.” Kian cut into my nervous babbling with an amusement that I regretted providing.
Be cool.
“Maybe I should get up.” I shifted, hot from having all of him wrapped around me.
My cheek rested against his bare chest now, and it was all I could do not to start pressing kisses into his skin. But I had no idea what I was doing or if he wanted to. Kian knew I’d never had a boyfriend, and so he was letting me set the pace. I appreciated it, but I had no idea how to tell him I was ready to level up, sex-wise. Why am I so awkward? I’d never wanted anything so much, but I might screw everything up, do it wrong or—
“We have four hours before we’re allowed to visit your dad,” he said gently. “And I feel like I should warn you, the way you’re squirming is turning me on.”
Whoa, that’s honest.
“Me too,” I whispered.
He took that as an invitation, thank God, and kissed me. His mouth on mine was pure fireworks. I had a few confused seconds to enjoy the heat and then he deepened it. His tongue … shorted out my brain. These blissful moments, there was only longing. He tasted faintly of cinnamon toothpaste, and I couldn’t get enough. When we broke apart, I was panting and he immediately set his lips on my neck. Tingles shot through me when he tugged the loose fabric off my shoulder, nuzzling. He slid his palm up over my ribs, smooth and hot. Silently I answered his unspoken question when I pulled my shirt off to let him touch me more.
“Is this okay?” His voice came out hoarse.
There were no words for how good it was. He touched my breasts until I pulled him down on top of me. Last time we had all our clothes on, and it still felt amazing. But now I was ready for everything. Kian went for my collarbone and kissed downward until I was really squirming. His hands were everywhere, and sometimes I felt like stopping him because it was weird and brand-new but it was too good to keep him from touching. And I was exploring too. When I moved my hands, he let out a low groan.
Yeah, now. Right now.
I kissed his shoulder, touching him for the first time. “Tell me this has a happy ending.”
He moaned softly, then pulled my hand away. “Do you want to…?”
“If you do.” That might be a dumb thing to say when I could tell the answer. Of course, that was just his body talking. Maybe he wasn’t ready emotionally.
“God, yes. Be right back.” He set land speed records for getting to the bathroom and back. In his boxers, he was insanely hot in the half-light and I tried not to act both excited and freaked out, because I was totally both. In theory, the idea of sex was gross, messy, and hugely impractical. In reality, I couldn’t wait to find out for myself.
“When did you get those?” I asked as he opened the box.
His smile flashed as he ducked his head. “After Wedderburn didn’t execute me. I figured I should be ready when you were.”
“I like that about you. No, scratch that. I love it.”
“And I love you.” Kian said it with such matter-of-fact tenderness that my heart felt like it would explode.
“Me too.”
The foil packet crackled. Oh my God, this is actually happening. I tried to help out with the condom but he wouldn’t let me.
“What’s wrong?”
“Seriously, you can’t do that for me. Or we won’t get any further.”
“What—oh.” Hopefully it was too dark for him to see me blushing. Since this was my first time, not his, it made me feel good to know he was so worked up. “So … how do we…”
Yeah, I can’t ask that. Dammit, pausing for protection has me thinking again.
“Don’t worry so much,” he whispered.
He seemed to understand I wasn’t quite there due to the intermission so we went back to kissing. Stroking and caressing him felt almost as good as his hands on me, and eventually, I was moving with him, mindless. He surprised me by rolling us.
“It’s all up to you.”
I didn’t think, I just did what felt right. There was some resistance but not enough to make me stop. Once I had him, we both went a little crazy.
Afterward, he disposed of the condom and came back to cuddle me. I was still light-headed, baffled. I never dreamed I could make sounds like that. But the best part, I wasn’t alone. He was just as mindless, as lost in me. Phantom pleasure shivered through me.
We snuggled for quite a while before I spoke. “On a scale of one to ten, I’m going with damn.”
“Damn’s not a number,” he pointed out.
“Huh. But I’ve heard it’s always awkward and bad. Does that mean we’re outliers?”
“‘Always’ is an empirical impossibility. Even among control groups, there are always statistical exceptions.”
“You know you’re hot when you science at me, right?”
“Please. I’m always hot.” Kian kissed my temple.
“True. Can I have another poem now?”
“You want me to be a romantic cliché, don’t you?”
“Hey, I let you off with the rose petals on the bed, didn’t I?”
Grinning, he admitted, “Original or someone famous?”
“Psht to famous poets. Weren’t they all on opium or dying of a depressing disease?”
“Most of them, probably. That or clinically depressed. So you want me to get out of bed, rummage for my notebook,
and read you something. Is that right?”
“Please?”
“For the record, I’m not doing this just because you sexed me into submission,” he grumbled as he went into the living room.
Nice butt.
I felt a little weird ogling him but since he was my boyfriend, consent was probably implicit. He’d said I could feel him up in bed and looking was definitely less invasive. I propped myself up and turned on the bedside lamp, then pulled the sheet up to my chest. That might be goofy, but I wasn’t as confident as Kian. Half the time I still didn’t look at myself naked, even now that I looked good. Years of avoiding mirrors and dodging photos had a choke hold on my psyche and I wouldn’t change inside that fast. So I’d go on faking it until the shift became real.
When he got back in bed, I was a little alarmed at how natural it felt, how fast I could get used to something so amazing. He opened his arms, journal in one hand, and I went into them. His heartbeat thumping beneath my ear sounded like home. The rhythm had a tiny skip or hesitation, a difference I cherished. Around me, Kian flipped the pages, sounded like a lot of them. I closed my eyes to focus on his voice.
“You know how you told me to start writing again?”
“Mmhm.”
“Well, this is a new poem, the first one I’ve written in years. It’s called ‘For Edie.’”
Then I did kiss his chest. “I already adore it.”
He cleared his throat a few times, his heart beating faster. It seemed incredible to me that I could make him nervous. “Write down my soul again / Inky dark, paper heart / Alone I only knew to burn / Yearn / Outside, looking in / Dying spark, where to start / Wondering where you end and I begin / To make sense of love / You are love / I am yours / We are infinite.” He paused, waiting for my reaction. “Sorry, it’s a little beat-poetish. I haven’t written in form in a long time, used to be pretty good at the sonnet. God, I should have written you something else. Something less—Edie, would you rather have a sonnet? I can—”
“No thanks.” I had no yardstick for knowing if it was a good poem but the way he stressed you, I, and we put a lump in my throat. “This means a lot to me.”
He’d spent time with a pen, thinking of me and staring off into space. The idea of Kian daydreaming about me while searching for the perfect words? I love that. Curious, I opened my eyes and pulled the notebook down for a look. Yeah, sure enough there were false starts and scratched-out lines, words replaced with others. It looked like a poetry ransom note and took some doing to pick out the final lines amid all the edited wreckage.
“Don’t judge the process.” He pulled the journal away and closed it.
“I’m not. I’m admiring. In English classes I have the worst time coming up with original material. Even my essays are too heavily bolstered with quotes from other people and indisputable facts.”
“I like that about you,” he said.
“The fact that I have no imagination?”
“That’s not true. If it was, you wouldn’t be so into science fiction and fantasy. And it’s a pretty big leap from enjoying someone else’s world to being able to create your own.”
“Hm. Well, I have too many questions about the way our world works to focus on inventing something else. Plus, some of it seems incredibly contradictory.”
“You’re talking about the immortals now.”
I nodded. “It drives me crazy that I can’t quantify everything.”
“Welcome to my world.”
“I’ve been here for a while.”
“Thank God,” he murmured, kissing the top of my head.
“Okay, so according to the clock, it’s almost six. Do we go back to sleep or…?”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“I’ll probably be busy with my dad for a while.”
“Is that a warning?” He clicked off the lamp and set his poetry notebook next to it. “Don’t worry, I know you’ll have a lot on your plate.”
Getting my dad home, dealing with the authorities, possible vendetta with Death. To say that almost sounded like sarcasm. But Kian meant it.
“Just a statement. I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“Our options.”
He pulled me down so I was cuddled with my head on his chest. It took me some maneuvering to work out what to do with my arm, but once I got that, it became really comfortable. I could get used to this. Then the realist asshole part of my brain—stupid frontal lobe—whispered, No. You can’t. He’s still terminal. While I might have gotten my dad back, I’d also gotten Aaron killed, along with how many of the Teflon crew? I immediately felt horrible for being in bed with Kian—for being happy and forgetting about my mom, even for a second. If I let them, these thoughts would pull me down to a dark, dark place.
“What are they?” Thankfully his voice broke the awful spiral before it could become a shame-phoon.
“Well, we could sleep.”
“Or…?”
“We could do it again. At least, I could. What about you?”
“Seriously? If you had any idea how much I want you … or for how long, you’d cut the question from your vocabulary.”
“Less talk, more kissing.”
The second time was slower and less frantic, but just as good, maybe better because I wasn’t nervous. It was all sweetness and heat as Kian tried to control himself. Near the end, instead of kissing me, he pressed his face into the curve of my shoulder, so I could feel it happening to him, crazy-wonderful when he panted and shivered. I was in the neighborhood but not … done, but I guessed he knew that. Quietly he touched me.
“You want me to … like this?”
“Here.”
It turned me on that we were both learning. Ironically his uncertainty relaxed me, so I could let go. He watched my face, killing me with the intimacy of his eyes, but I didn’t look away. People had said it to me before, and I always thought they were exaggerating—that it was abstinence propaganda—but sex did change everything. We were more now.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“More than.” I was actually weak in the knees and my thighs were wobbly when I went to the bathroom.
Dad’s waiting. Though I wasn’t ready to start the day, like Charon the Boatman, life didn’t wait. It went on, always.
So would I.
NEVERMORE THAT MELANCHOLY BURDEN
The hospital had no reason to keep my dad, thankfully.
But once I got him home, it was tough because his behavior bordered on paranoid, not that I could blame him. I had no idea what he’d gone through while Dwyer held him hostage. The second day after he came home, he tried to go straight to the lab to check on things, and I straight up lied.
“They’re still repairing,” I said, though for all I knew the university had everything fixed already. “You can’t do anything there, and the doctor said you need to rest and eat well for at least a week.”
Though he grumbled, Dad sat back down on the couch. “You’re making me feel like a feeble old man.”
“Anybody would need to take it easy after…” What did I even say?
He was convinced that they’d gassed us with some experimental hallucinogen and that was definitely a more logical explanation than reality offered. The fact that he was confused, afterward, made me wonder what Dwyer had done to him. At the hospital, the doctors told Detective Lutz that my father had certainly experienced a traumatic event and that some of his responses made them think someone had attempted to brainwash him. Lutz grilled us for two hours on the day Dad was discharged. I understood his frustration; there was major property damage to the university science building and he needed to know who to blame.
I had no easy answers.
That night, I made vegetable beef soup for dinner and turned on the news to watch with my dad. We both needed normal right now, as much as he needed good food and sleep. He frowned but put down the science journal he was reading. They opened wide with conflicts in various parts of the world
, narrowed focus to other parts of America, and then for the last story of the night, the pretty anchorwoman said brightly, “Breaking news, extreme animal-rights group FAAN, which stands for Free All Animals Now, has claimed responsibility for the recent explosion…” She went on to explain how they’d posted some video on the Internet with their faces blurred out and voice modulators on, threatening to strike a university in New York, if all science programs didn’t immediately cease and desist with all animal-related experiments.
My dad was transfixed by the broadcast clip. “But … my department doesn’t do that. I’m working with lasers and mirrors, not chimpanzees.”
Since I knew damn well it was a PR grab, I could only joke, “Maybe they heard about Schrödinger’s cat and made a bad logical leap.”
“Do you think so?” My dad seemed to be taking me seriously.
“Who knows? People who blow things up to make a point about being more compassionate … do you figure they’re firing on all cylinders?”
“Probably not,” he conceded. “But … it doesn’t explain why I was taken. The men who held me never said anything about animal rights.”
Damn. Dad’s too smart for fall for that.
“Maybe someone approached them.”
“To blow up the lab to cover my kidnapping?” He paused, turning that over in his head.
Please decide it makes sense.
“Could be,” he admitted eventually. “I’m not sure why these men were so fixated on me, though, if they paid a fringe group to ensure the focus was elsewhere.”
For the timing of this to be perfect, FAAN would’ve needed to announce their responsibility sooner but my dad didn’t seem as bothered anymore. “Your work is pretty famous. How many magazines have you been featured in now?”
“I don’t even remember.” That wasn’t surprising. “I suppose they might’ve been in cahoots. I’ve heard FAAN is international … and I’m sure my captors were foreign nationals.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They kept asking me to work for them. One of them said they’d make much better use of my research and that they’d pay me handsomely to switch allegiance.”
I bet they were talking about Wedderburn, not America. But under no circumstances could my father find out about any of that. “What was it like?”