Kindred (25 page)

I don’t care about this Praverian crap, or that it should have me bewildered beyond imagination. I don’t care that I should stay longer and find out everything that I can about them. Because none of that matters. I don’t have much time and I’m going to spend every bit of what time I have left with Isaac.

“We’ll talk about this more tomorrow,” Isaac says to Nathan and Nathan nods back at him.

The only one I look back at is Harry as Isaac and I walk away from the beach, Isaac’s arm wrapped around my waist.

~~~

“It was between Dr Pepper, milk and flavored water,” Isaac says coming into the walkout basement where I sit curled up in the corner of the couch. “I knew you’d want the water.” He places the plastic bottle in my outstretched hand.

“Thanks.” Without leaning my head up the rest of the way, I untwist the loose cap and take a small sip.

“I’m going to figure this out,” he says, looking down at me, but I don’t raise my eyes to see him.

The air is rife with silence.

He moves closer and crouches in front of me, combing my hair away from my forehead. “I guess I didn’t want to tell you just yet that there are things out there worse than us. I’m sorry.”

“For what, Isaac?” I say, turning only my eyes to see him. “Sorry for sparing me?” I look away again and my voice becomes softer. “No, you did the right thing. I wasn’t ready for anything else yet. I’m still trying to find my place in
your
world, y’know?”

Isaac sits on the floor directly below me. This way I can’t look away from him unless I move my whole body on the couch. “Your place in my world is with me,” he says, reaching up to touch my bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “You believe that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” I say and it’s true, I do believe it, but I can’t stop thinking about how long it will last, how long I have left.

I stare off toward the large sliding glass door that opens up onto the beach, watching the lights from the fishing boats move around in the darkness. I can still hear the ocean with the door closed and I try to let the peaceful sound of waves calm my mind.

Isaac pushes himself up and kisses me on the temple.

I didn’t come inside with him expecting this to happen, that I’d start feeling strange again, but I don’t want to tell Isaac about it. Honest to God, I just want to scream at the top of my lungs about how
sick
I am of being sick. I can’t take it anymore; fine one minute, fainting the next. Great one day, the next day sick as a dog. I snuck into my bag minutes ago and took one extra pill beyond the normal dosage of my anxiety medication, but I don’t think it’s working. Nothing on the market was really made to help with this sort of thing.

This has got to stop.

I feel Isaac’s arm close around my bent legs, pulling me to lie against him instead of the couch arm. I nuzzle my head under his arm and let my legs fall over his lap. I hear the blood pumping through his veins with my ear pressed against him. I shut my eyes and let the calming sound of it soothe me. Blood. Why didn’t I think of this before? Oh, probably because sitting around thinking about drinking someone’s blood isn’t necessarily the normal thing to do. But maybe that’s it. It’s been seven months since Viktor bonded me to him and I know I’m going to need to drink male werewolf blood sometime. Maybe that’s what this is all about. If I had blood, maybe it would make me better, make all of this craziness stop and let me live a normal, faint-free, sick-free, hallucination-free life for a little while longer. Maybe it would make me strong enough to keep Genna off my back. And Aramei—she lived a normal life for fifty years before the Blood Bond started taking her mind. This has to be the answer!

But how would I pull something like that off?

Upon realizing this little kink in my revelation, the enthusiasm drains from my pores. And when I think more about Isaac possibly already knowing about the Blood Bond, I’m confused because if he does know, wouldn’t he want to let me drink from him as Aramei drinks from Trajan? Why hasn’t he offered his blood to me?

I can’t take this uncertainty anymore!

And I feel incredibly hot. My skin is
burning
….

I lift away from Isaac and toss the thin cotton blanket I had been using to cover my feet onto the floor.

“Baby, you’re burning up.” Isaac cups my forehead in his palm and then touches it to the inner side of his wrist.

I feel sweat prickling in my hairline.

I breathe in deeply and get up from the couch, moving back toward my bag. I sit on the floor and dig through my not-so-folded clothes inside until I find the shorts I usually sleep in. I’ve never stripped completely naked in front of Isaac before and I’m still a little shy around him when it comes to changing my clothes, so I do like I normally do and turn my back to him. I practically rip off my jeans and slip the comfortable cotton shorts on over my panties and feel some instant relief from the odd heat wave attacking my body. But it’s not enough and the little beads of sweat on my chest are causing my bra to feel itchy against my skin. I reach behind my back, unfasten the bra and pull it off through one sleeve of my top, tossing it on top of my bag with my jeans.

Isaac has been watching me the whole time from the couch, holding my bottle of strawberry-flavored water in his hand as he sits leaning forward with his forearms propped on his thighs. His eyes are soft with concern; the black of his messy hair pushed back away from his face as if he had just run his fingers through it. He hasn’t shaved in a few days and the facial hair sprouting up all around his chin and his jawline is so sexy to me that I’m starting to wish he wouldn’t shave at all.

“Do you want to take a bath?” he says. “I’ll go run some water for you now.”

“No,” I say looking toward the sliding glass door. I think about the cool nighttime air and quietly yearn for it. I got drunk once, last year when I went to a party with Alex. I didn’t want to drink—living with an alcoholic had the opposite effect on me than what alcohol did to some of my friends, but I tried it anyway. And I regretted it. All night all I wanted to do was puke my guts out and lay out in the cold air. It was the middle of winter and I remember my body being so hot that the only place I felt comfortable was outside on the porch in a pair of shorts and a tank top. It was thirty-five degrees.

What I wouldn’t give for something as simple as being drunk, as opposed to the reason I so desperately want to feel the coolness of the air.

I walk to the glass door and slide it open. A cold fifty-degree wind rushes inside and I can feel tiny droplets of moisture in the air. I close my eyes and let the coolness wash over me, raising chill bumps from the back of my neck down to the backs of my bare legs.

Isaac’s warm body comes up behind me and despite my temperature being hot enough, I still want him close. I turn around and press my body into his and crush my lips against his in a way that I’ve only done one time before. In March, when I wanted him in every way possible. When I tempted fate and he almost killed me. I taste him heavily in my mouth and just kiss him deeper, letting his tongue dance with mine, feeling every inch of my skin tremble with little waves of anticipation. The kiss breaks as we come up for air, but I can still feel his lips so close and I can still taste him. “What are you doing?” he says in a whisper and then he brushes his lips across mine.

He kisses my eyelids and I feel them shut for a brief moment longer.

Carefully, I pull away from him, letting his fingers trail across the skin of my arms. I stare into his eyes, watching how he watches me as if we’re the only two people left in the world. “I’m jumping off the cliff,” I whisper back our perfect metaphor and then smile faintly and run outside into the cool night air. The sand crushes underneath my feet as I run closer to the shore. Isaac is close behind me. I feel the little droplets of ocean spray tickling my face as the light wind scoops it off the surface of the water and carries it. We make it far enough away from the house that the lights from inside seem small and dim and the bonfire blazing not far from it appears as nothing more than a candle flame.

I stop running and as he comes up fast behind me, I catch him by the front of his shirt and take him into another kiss. I push him into the sand and fall down with him and the kiss never breaks. He breathes harder against me, forcing his mouth more vigorously against mine as I straddle him, my body arched over his as he lies in the cold, dry sand.

I lift away, holding my body up with my hands pressed near his shoulders. “Do you want me?” I whisper.

He raises his back from the sand to sit upright, wrapping his arms around me to hold me in his lap. He nods once slowly. I watch how his face searches mine, seeking some kind of assurance, maybe even for the faintest ounce of uncertainty in my plan. Because he won’t sleep with me if he thinks I’m only giving in for his benefit.

“You can’t find it, can you?” I say and graze my mouth across his chin.

He moves his hands from my waist and explores my face with his fingertips, kissing each spot where his fingers have touched. My jawline. My cheeks. The little hollow spot above my upper lip. The hidden one below the bottom lip.

He looks deeply into my eyes. “No…I can’t find it,” he whispers and his arms wrap around my back, pressing me fully into the heat of his chest. I see the stars flip up in my vision as Isaac turns me over and lies on top of me in the sand. I let my legs fall away, giving him access between them. Still fully clothed he presses himself against me and when I feel just how much he wants me, my thighs tremble, the inside of my chest pained with tiny quivers all the way down into my stomach and my hips.

He moans against my mouth. The more forcibly I kiss him back and press myself hungrily into him, the deeper and more abrasive the moans reverberate through his body.

But just when I let myself believe that I’m seconds away from the fate of my virginity, Isaac buries his face between my neck and shoulder and I feel the weight of his body ease from mine in a way that can only indicate refusal.

“Adria,” he says from above, my cheeks resting in his palms, “I’m not going to do this to you. I can’t.”

My tears quickly burn their way to the surface, but I choke them down. I know deep down that his refusal isn’t because he doesn’t want me as much as I want him, but it still hurts as much as rejection and I’m too humiliated and confused and angry to look at him.

“I love you…
so
much
…but I
can’t
do this….” It took everything in him to say it. The pain in his eyes is unmistakable, but this time I can’t stay to try and make it better. I push myself out from underneath him and storm away back toward the house, leaving Isaac alone on the beach.

19

I WAKE UP THE NEXT morning entangled underneath the sheets with him; the sliding glass door Isaac must’ve left open all night for me because I can smell the salty ocean heavily on the air and hear the waves licking the shore and the call of early morning seagulls making their rounds. I feel the breeze, too, brushing gently through my hair, cooling my face.

Prying my eyes open the rest of the way, I squint as the sunlight floods the basement, spilling out over everything except for the couch bed where we’re curled up together. Isaac, feeling my movements, tightens his arm around my stomach as I lay with my back against him. Normally, the first thing I do when we wake up like this is roll over to face him, kiss him and force him awake the rest of the way by tickling him and poking him.

But not this time.

I don’t roll over to see him sleeping, or wonder if he’s already awake, only pretending to be sleeping so he can hold onto various body parts and not get blamed for it. I love his harmless little quirks. But I guess I’m not the only one of us that knows this morning is different from the rest and so he doesn’t do any of that. And while I miss it, I don’t want him to do it.

We spend the rest of our time in Portland together, always together, but there’s an obvious distance between us. And everyone else sees it, too.

I love Isaac with everything in me, but I don’t know what else I can do to show him at this point. And I think the feeling of being rejected by him, for whatever reason, has hurt worse than I ever imagined it would. It hurts because I was more ready than ever, because my heart was fully in it. But mostly because I have come to terms with what has happened to me and that it won’t be much longer before I can’t give myself to him at all. Because I won’t know who I am. I won’t know a damn thing about anything!

I was ready. And he took that away from me.

I can’t be mad at him, just disappointed and embarrassed.

Zia is constantly over my shoulder, trying to pry the tiniest bit of information out of me, but I’m not talking about any of this to anyone. Not even Harry, who has pulled me off to the side once already, asking what happened.

On the ride back to Hallowell, Daisy sits behind me, playing with my hair and whispering things in my ear about how much her brother loves me and that no matter what happened, she can tell just by looking at him that he’s hurting pretty bad.

But I can’t tell her anything, either.

We pull up into my driveway and Aunt Bev is sitting out on the porch with Uncle Carl in his wheelchair, two glasses of iced tea between them on the little round table.