Her laughter reached the front door before I did. I stopped for a moment and let it eat me up, consuming every part of me that thought it could cope seeing her with him. She was falling for his act. I knew her well enough to know that much, and as long as Cal was in the picture, she wouldn’t so much as glance at me as anything more than her dorky new friend.
I rapped on the door louder than was polite and stood back, waiting. By the time it opened I’d pasted on a friendly smile, nodding my head in greeting at Cal, then at Ara as she bounded up behind him like an excited school girl. Their cheeks were flushed, and she was breathing heavily, and for a second my blood rushed with anger until I realized they were chasing each other around the house, not making out.
“Ara thinks she can outrun me,” Cal said, aiming his thumb at the excited little girl behind him.
I looked at Ara. “I just joined Cal’s track team,” I informed her. “You can’t outrun him.” But both her and I knew she could. If she wanted to. But, as girls do when they like a guy, she played herself down.
“You’re probably right.” She waved a dismissive hand. “So let’s get working on this social experiment instead.”
Cal stepped back and offered me entry, confirming my welcome place in their little circle. A circle I would crack wide open before it had a chance to fuse at the ends. As I turned to close the door, Ara’s gaze fell on my eyes and held there for a moment before she looked quickly away, her chest lifting. I smiled to myself, knowing she’d seen the way the afternoon sun made my eyes greener—an effect she had always loved.
“Come on. We’ll work upstairs,” Cal said, leading the way, but I stopped Ara short of the steps, my hand on her arm.
“So what’s with you two?” I asked, trying to sound like a teenage boy. “You an item, or what?”
She shrugged out of my grasp and readjusted her clothing, still ruffled from playing around with Cal, which sent my imagination into overdrive. “No. Why?”
“You seem pretty cozy, is all.”
“What’s it to you?”
“Just curious.” I shrugged, slinging my backpack over one shoulder as I moved past her.
“I don’t know why you would be.” Ara followed.
“Cal’s a good guy,” I said, as if that mattered to me, taking his side instead of hers, so she wouldn’t see right through me. “I don’t want him getting hurt.”
“You’re worried I’m going to hurt him?” She stopped on the stairs.
I stopped too and looked down at her, taking a few steps to get closer. I could smell her shampoo, even without my immortal senses—a fruity mix of blueberries and honey today—different to what she smelled like before.
“You have the mentality of a toddler,” I said in a low voice, “you’re going through immense personal change and discovery right now, and any guy you think you’re falling for is going to end up being a social experiment all of his own as you figure out what love is and how that differs to lust or friendship.”
She was taken aback by that, not sure what to say. “Do you really think that’s true?”
No. Maybe. I nodded once decisively.
She lowered her gaze and released the stiff lip. “How can you tell if what you feel is real or not?”
“You guys coming?” Cal popped his head over the low wall by the top of the stairs, his face shadowed by the light behind him.
“Coming,” I called, smiling back at Ara.
She tried to smile, but all of this clearly bothered her.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “This experiment will help you figure a lot of that out.”
“How?”
I flashed her the cheeky grin she’d always loved. “Once you understand affection and how that makes you feel, it’s pretty easy to start recognizing the different types of affection and, from there, the emotions that go with it.”
She just looked more confused.
“Don’t worry, I’m here to make sure you understand it.”
Ara sat beside Cal on his bed, while I sprawled out across his hardwood floors with my books open in front of me, writing questions down as they came up. If I’d thought this new Ara was complex and confused before, talking with her for fifteen minutes opened a kind of Pandora’s box of depth. She obviously had too much time to think and not many people to talk to—something I would have to address when I spoke to Falcon later. He clearly wasn’t taking very good care of her. At least not emotionally.
“Why do people hug?” she asked, looking from Cal to me expectantly.
“Uh…” Cal looked at me too.
I laughed, swiping my thumb under my nose for a moment to gather my thoughts.
“I’ve never really thought about that,” Cal said.
“Hugging releases a hormone called oxytocin—a happy hormone,” I explained. “Which produces feelings of trust and devotion. So basically, we hug to not only prove that we trust someone but to build it too.”
Cal nodded with thought, and Ara just stared at me blankly.
“You’re serious?” she said.
“Yeah. Why? Did you think I was joking?”
“How can a hug release a hormone?”
And this was my time to shine. But Cal beat me to it, taking her hand and turning it over before I even got to my knees. Stupid mortal body. If I was still a vampire, I’d have been on my feet before he even thought of it.
“It’s your body’s response to touch,” Cal said, slipping his fingers into the curl of her palm and gently opening her hand. Even without my immortal senses, I could feel her blood warming. “You feel that?” Cal asked, wearing a grin like a teenager about to get laid.
Ara nodded slowly, lost in the feel of his touch. And I was on my feet before his fingertip reached the base of her wrist.
“It’s the same with negative touch,” I said, grabbing Cal by the wrist. I yanked him to his feet and punched him hard in the arm, making him yelp. “Your body reacts to that too.”
“Right.” Cal stood taller, rubbing away the ache. “It makes your adrenaline rush and gives you more power to, you know, do this.” He swung his arm back and hit me square in the side, just under the ribs, and I went down hard, coughing out as I hit the ground. I worked out four times a week, but he clearly benched a pound or two more than me. Okay, a pound or ten.
“I get it now.” Ara stood up. “So everything you do pretty much causes some kind of chemical or hormonal reaction in your body?”
“Right.” Cal jumped up and down on the spot as he spoke, pumped by the challenge I’d presented him. “From skipping to eating to sleeping—”
“To sex?” she said innocently, and Cal stopped jumping. I got as gracefully to my feet as I could, laughing it off, knowing Cal could only ever dream of what it would feel like to hold Ara in his arms the way I had—to do the things to her body that I had. I almost went and stood proudly beside her, claiming victory, until I remembered that she had no idea who I really was to her and, therefore, wouldn’t remember the things we’d done together in bed.
“What?” She looked between us, holding her hands out. “Why did you both react that way when I said sex? What’s wrong with that word?”
“In a room with two teenage guys,” I said, “a lot.”
“Why?” She put her hands on her hips, and then lowered them as it sunk in. “Oh, because you want to have sex… with me?”
“I never said that.” Cal walked away and busied himself with something near his easel.
Ara looked at me. I shrugged and made no effort to hold back my grin. “What? You’re cute,” I stated simply, “what sane teenage guy wouldn’t want to have sex with you?”
“But it’s not just about sex, Ara.” Cal spun around, casting me an accusing glare. “Sex is amazing, but with the right person it’s… phenomenal.”
“Why should who it’s with change that?”
Both Cal and I laughed.
“Because sex alone is just a bunch of feelings—physical feelings, but if you fall in love with someone first”—Cal gave me a challenging look—“it feels like the world is turning inside you.”
“So you’ve been in love before?” she asked him.
“Hasn’t everyone at some point?” He shrugged it off, but anyone could see he was still cut up about it, like I was about Ara. I forgave him a little then for being such a dickhead.
“I’ve never been in love,” Ara offered, then looked at me. “Have you?”
“Yes.” I held her gaze firmly, as if maybe she’d remember loving me, or at least that I had and still did love her with all of my heart. But all she got from that stare was awkwardness, so I looked away, found my books, and sat back down on the floor again, leaving Ara to sit with Cal.
“So, in our experiment, we’re looking to see who will hug who, and what class of high school society those huggers come from; will the popular kids hug Cal and not us?” I said to Ara. “Will the least popular kids brave a hug at all, even from Cal? Will guys hug guys and will girls hug guys—”
“I don’t think you’ll have a problem, David,” Ara cut in, grinning. “All the girls seem to think you’re something pretty special.”
“Yeah?” I pretended not to be aware of this already.
“Yeah,” she said. “You hadn’t noticed?”
“Not really.” I smiled bashfully at the ground, toying with a pen as if this made me nervous. “So what about you then?”
“What about me?” she said.
“Do you agree with them?”
Having another guy in the room while I tried to work my magic was putting me off my game, especially when he’d scoff loudly at my obvious attempts to woo Ara. She heard it and thought I was joking around with her, but I really did want to know what she thought. Desperately.
“So add that to our page of notes,” Cal said, “Ara’s theory is that the girls will use this as an opportunity to get a free hug from the school hotties.”
“Hotties?” I added emphasis to the plural.
“Yeah, sorry dude,” Cal said smugly, “you got competition, you know.”
I found that incredibly hard to believe. Until I looked at Ara for no particular reason and saw the way she was looking at Cal. Again.
“What about embarrassment?” she asked, tearing her eyes from Cal’s. “What do I do with that? I’m not really sure how to handle it.”
“Why would you be embarrassed?” I asked.
“What if no one hugs me?”
Her face, as she said that, looked so young and so innocent that my heart broke a little for her. She truly believed that was a possibility. Cal beat me to it again, while I struggled with the newly torn corner of my heart that wanted to hold her and tell her she is the most worthy and beautiful girl in all of this world and that she never has to worry about that, because a hundred guys will fall at her feet to tell her the same in a heartbeat. And yes, most of them would be drawn in by the curse—the one that makes any man with a heartbeat fall for those in her bloodline—but take that curse away and the majority would still be there at her feet. Maybe I was blinded by my love for her, who knew, but Cal clearly seemed to feel the same way.
“I’ve known you for less than a week, so it might seem a bit weird coming from me”—he shuffled slightly closer—“but I’d hug you. And I know a lot of other guys that would too.”
“Why would you think no one would hug you?” I asked, searching for the root cause of this low self-esteem instead of using it as an opportunity to win her over. High road, as they say.
“It’s not that I think that. It’s just…” She fiddled with the ring on her thumb, and it was only then that I realized it was her wedding band—slightly melted but still very much intact. I was so wrapped up in the elation and sadness of seeing it again that I barely heard her response. “I’m up against the two hot guys of the school—”
“And you think you can’t hold a candle to that?” Cal asked, his smirk clearly illustrating his attraction to her—attraction that I realized was too strong for the three days he’d known her. He was being drawn in by the curse, which meant these two had ‘connected’ on some level.
“It’s as simple as this,” I cut in, jumping up to sit beside her, and for the first time all afternoon, she broke away from Cal, even turning her knees slightly toward me. “While we get hugged by all the girls, what do you think all the guys will be doing?”
“Wishing they’d thought of this?”
I laughed loudly, competitively drowning out Cal’s laugh. “Yes. But they’ll soon realize they can get a free hug from the prettiest girl in the school.”
“The prettiest?” she scoffed, scrunching her nose up. She obviously thought I was flattering her, but she had no idea how serious I was. I’d looked, scanned the faces of other girls to see if she truly was the most beautiful, and every time I came away more certain than before. Without fail, she was and always would be the most beautiful girl in the world, even if it was just in my eyes.
“Anyway.” Cal stole her attention. “We need to start work on our signs, so if you get the cardboard, Ara, I’ll go get the markers from the garage.” He stood up. “Dave, you wanna help, man?”
“Nah, I’m fine here,” I said, not meeting his eyes. I knew he’d signal for me to come so we could ‘talk about Ara’ once we were away when, truthfully, he just didn’t want me alone with her. It was as obvious to him that I liked her as it was to me that he did.
He left, reluctantly, and I finally breathed a sigh of relief.
Ara busied herself arranging giant sheets of cardboard on the floor among Cal’s dirty laundry and smelly running shoes, clearly pretending I wasn’t even in the room. I couldn’t read her. At all. She could be acting this way around me because she liked me as easily as it could be because she didn’t. This girl was a shadowed maze, and I hated that. Hated navigating new relationships without my mind-reading abilities.
“Hey.” I stood right beside her, waiting for her to melt me with those big blue eyes.
“Hm?” she said, not looking up.
“I’m heading to the beachfront for dinner tonight. You wanna come?”
“Uh…” She stopped what she was doing and tensed. “Do you mean, like…”
“Not a date,” I said quickly. “Just a chance for me to show you around and introduce you to some of the local gems.”
“Um…” I could tell she was thinking about it, but I knew from the way her eyes shifted to one side that she’d say no. I needed to connect with her on some deeper level, and until I’d been let through that door, everything with her was off limits. Even dinner.
“You know what, never mind.” I turned away to give her space. “I just remembered I have a… I gotta take my cousin out, so… raincheck?”
“Raincheck?”
“Yeah.” I turned back and paused a moment to consider her. “Oh, right—a raincheck is when you take someone up on an offer later.”
“Oh. Right.” She smiled, nodding once. “Raincheck then. I’d like that.”
“Great.”
“You need to tell her about that curse!”
Falcon ran his hands through his hair, walking backward until he flopped onto the armchair by the clean-swept fireplace. He’d purchased a nice house for himself and my wife to live in: a large chef’s kitchen behind me, the lounge room furnished lavishly with the pay he received from the king for babysitting the former queen, and an elaborate staircase leading up to the bedrooms, all five of them for just two people. It made me wonder if he was planning a family someday, perhaps with my wife, who he happened to be deeply in love with.
“I know,” he said quietly, glancing up the stairs at her closed door. “But if I do, I run the risk of her avoiding all friendships—”
“No, just friendships with boys!” I demanded.
“Why are you bringing this up now?” He looked up at me, worried. “What happened?”
“Cal’s falling under her curse.”
“Cal—the kid in her class?”
“Yeah.” I slumped down on the leather two-seater under the window, gazing hopelessly at the stars above me. “And she’s falling for him because she has no idea it’s not real.”
“David, she needs to experience relationships with other people,” he started, sliding forward on his seat like he would when he was delivering bad news.
“No. She doesn’t. She needs to fall in love with me. Only me!”
He just laughed, sitting back. “Good luck with that. A part of a girl’s journey to adulthood is experiencing herself through another’s eyes—by having relationships with other people.”
“I can’t let that happen.”
“And I can’t let you stop her.”
“I’m warning you, Falcon”—I stood up, making my voice firmer—“you have to tell her about that curse.”
“Well, I have orders from the king not to.”
“Fine.” I took my phone out. “I’ll call my idiot brother and tell him to tell you otherwise.”
“Don’t.” He jumped up and capped my hand, stopping my thumb before I could press call. “She can’t know about that curse, David. If we tell her that every girl in her bloodline is cursed to be loved by any man she comes to care for, what do you think that will do for your relationship?”
I stared at him blankly.
“She’ll never trust love—never trust anyone. We can’t do that to her.”
He had a point. I lowered the phone. “Then all hope is lost.” She’d fall in love with Cal purely because he would fall in love with her, but it wouldn’t be real, and by the time her immature brain figured that out, she would have given herself to him and she’d regret it forever.
“What are you really worried about?” Falcon’s all-knowing eye penetrated my outer wall, seeing the true fear inside of me. He nodded when it occurred to him. “You can’t control her, David. She needs to be her own person.”
“No, she needs to be my wife,” I decided. “It’s time to tell her—”
“If you tell her who she is to you now, she’ll reject you. She’ll fight even harder for her independence,” he said firmly, stopping to listen. Upstairs, the bass from Ara’s speakers made the floor vibrate a little, so even with her immortal ears, there was no way she could hear us. “She sees herself and the self from the past as two separate people,” he explained. “It’s her brain’s way of coping with the loss of everything she knew before. She doesn’t like to talk about her past self or any of the choices she made, and if you force something from the past on her, she will make a point of rejecting it purely because she needs to be her own person right now.”
I closed my eyes, wishing I could convince myself that wasn’t true. “How can she be so different to the girl I loved before?”
“Because she hasn’t had the experiences she once had. You know this—”
“Yes, but I didn’t think it would change her so much.”
“That’s why you have to let her explore her feelings for Cal—”
“No.” I slammed my fist down on the back of the armchair beside me. “Because as much as she is changed, she is still the same girl deeper down, and she is still my wife!”
“That girl is not your wife!” he yelled, pointing to her room. “She is an entirely new person, and maybe there are elements about her that linger in her new form, but she has half the soul she once had, and none of the mind. You can’t hold onto the past you had with her, or you will destroy the future.”
But I would hold onto it. Firmly. I would be damned if I let her slip into the arms, or the sheets, of another man. No, boy! He was just a stupid little boy with no life experience and no prospects for the future.
“If you can’t love her after she’s finished finding herself, virginity or none,” Falcon added, “then you don’t have a right to love her at all.”
I rubbed my eye firmly, using every ounce of my inner strength to stop from punching him, knowing that my human hand would be no match for his Lilithian skin. “You’re wrong,” I said at last, aiming a straight finger at him. “I am the only one that has a right to love her. And this”—I showed my wedding band—“is proof of that.”
Falcon said nothing more as I left his house, slamming the door hard on the way out.