Raymond shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t around for most of your teenage years… but I remember you bringing boys home and telling you to leave the door open.”
“What boys did she bring home?” Thornton asked with a frown. “I don’t remember any boys. She had no friends.”
“I had friends,” Pax said defensively. Then she gave them both a sheepish smile. “Actually, no. I didn’t. You must be thinking of Ash, Papa.”
“That’s right,” Raymond said with a nod. “It was Ash who was always bringing girls home. After our father died. Never mind.”
When Raymond moved away, Thornton closed the door with a puzzled expression. He moved over to sit beside Pax on the bed, and leaned close to her ear to whisper. “I guess your dad doesn’t realize we’ve had sex thousands of times.”
Pax was sure that something inside of her melted at the sound of those words. “Are you sure it was thousands?” she asked.
“I could get out my calculator,” he teased, “but several times a day for all those years… don’t you miss me?”
“Of course,” Pax answered, eyeing his neatly-styled blonde locks. She allowed her gaze to drift slowly over his blue eyes and chiseled face, lingering on every inch of him all the way down to his toes. “I dream about you sometimes. Most nights, actually.”
“Me too,” he said, reaching out to grasp the side of her waist and pull her against him for a hug. “I didn’t sell your apartment. You can use it again if you ever decide to return to your job at the hospital. Or if you ever need any private time from prying fathers and grandmothers.”
“And uncles who highjack my television,” Pax added with a smile, relaxing into the hug. “I am sure that Papa will be going back to Sakra’s Point any day now. I think he was just hanging around because he was worried about me.”
“Did he have cause to worry?” Thornton asked.
“Not really. I guess I’ve been a bit out of sorts, but I’ll be better soon.”
Thornton placed a hand in Pax’s dark hair, intentionally messing it up. “Being in this room with you makes me feel a bit sleazy. It reminds me of when you were a kid.”
“You used to climb in the window when Grandma was sleeping,” Pax murmured.
Thornton grinned. “We’re so old now, aren’t we?”
“You’re much older than I am.”
“I can be frozen at this age,” Thornton said seriously. “Do you like this age on me?”
“Oh, you’re thinking of doing the yearly rejuvenation on the autumn solstice?” Pax lifted an eyebrow. “Is that why you came to talk to me? If you need beauty tips, you should ask your sister.”
“I didn’t come to you for any particular reason,” Thornton said quietly. “I just couldn’t stay away any longer. Father told me to leave you alone and let you rest, but I couldn’t do it.”
“I’m getting really tired of resting,” Pax admitted. “I feel so useless.”
“I hear that’s common—after you do the most important thing that anyone can do, doing anything else should seem insignificant and unsatisfying.”
“When did you become so insightful?” Pax mumbled against his chest.
“I’ve always been this way. We were just apart for so long that you forgot.”
The rain was pelting the roof of the house and its windows with an incredibly calming disposition. Pax enjoyed the sensation of Thornton slowly running his hand over her back. It felt right to be close to him again. She could not resist cuddling closer to the warmth of his body. Without really intending to, she slipped her hand into his and interlaced their fingers together. She had no idea how long she stayed like that with him when she felt his lips against her cheek. She felt the familiar tingle of electricity as his lips crept across her face to connect with the corner of her mouth. Turning her face into his, she met his lips for a slow kiss. She felt the warmth of his tongue burrowing between her lips and plunging into her mouth, and she could somehow taste the specific quality of his energy. She had missed him; more than she had allowed herself to admit.
Shifting for better access to her lover, Pax slipped her arms around his neck. She had almost achieved the blissful state of forgetting everything when the sudden memory of an hourglass filled her mind. She saw the emerald sand dribbling through the narrow neck of the clock, and she remembered everything. Her eyes shot open and she pulled away a bit too harshly. Oh, Sakra. What am I doing? She placed a hand on her lips in shock, almost trying to wipe away the kiss.
“Pax?” Thornton asked in surprise. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t,” she told him, shaking her head violently. She bolted off the bed and moved over to her window to throw the curtains back open. She stared down at his limousine, which was parked beside her Jeep. Gripping bunches of the curtains in her hands, she felt the usual urge to get in her vehicle and drive as far away as possible—but she knew that she could not run away any longer. Resting was making her restless, and she needed to confront her problems to shake off the stasis. “You’re here, so let’s talk about it,” she said.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked her, moving from the bed to stand behind her at the window. He slipped his arms around her waist, lowering his chin to rest it against her neck.
Pax tried very hard to ignore his touch as she answered. “What happened on doomsday?”
He stiffened a bit, and she could feel the change in his posture against her back. He seemed unwilling to discuss the topic.
“You were with another girl,” Pax said simply.
“It didn’t mean anything. It was only because I was upset that you wouldn’t see me… I was trying to get a reaction out of you.”
“Well, you certainly got a reaction,” Pax said with a sigh. She imagined he could feel the depression of her diaphragm under his hands, which were resting just under her ribcage. “I didn’t think it would bother me as much as it did.”
“If I could take it back…”
“You can’t. You can’t take any of it back.”
“Dammit, Pax! It was just a one-night-stand. I haven’t even spoken to the girl since that night…”
“Why not?” she asked sharply, turning her chin to glare at him.
“What? Because… because I was never serious about her. I was just using her to make you jealous because I was angry. Sakra, do you know how spectacular you are? You saved the planet. I understand that you’re having trouble trusting me again, but I’m not going to give up on the only real thing I ever had. This girl—Medea was her name. She was sweet, but she was nothing to me. She just isn’t the woman I love.”
“And the guy I love doesn’t just have one-night-stands with women and disappear, hurting them for the fun of it. He doesn’t think it’s okay to do that to them, or that he can get away with doing that to me. And I don’t ever have to worry about him doing it again, because he has never done any of that in the first place.”
“Paxie…”
“No, no, no. I can’t do this, Thorn.” Pax pulled herself out of his grip, and moved forward to open her bedroom window. Levitating into the open air, she turned around and gave him an apologetic look. “I think you should show both of us a little respect. Go find your Medea, and explore this thing with her. You obviously made some sort of connection, and you shouldn’t take that for granted…”
“Don’t you dare run away from me! We need to be grown-ups and fix whatever is broken between us. I know you! I know you care too much about this to let it die.”
“What we have is very strong,” Pax said quietly. “It’s very old, and very powerful. That’s why it hurts so much, and I just need the tranquility of being away from you right now. You set my blood on fire, and I don’t just mean in a good way anymore. It isn’t healthy.”
Thornton pushed himself through the window and levitated inches away from her face. His eyes were pleading as he took her hands. “Please, Pax. I can’t be away from you anymore. You weren’t just my lover—you were my closest friend. You were the
person I talked to at the end of the day, the person I looked forward to seeing. You can’t just toss that all away.”
“But you did. If my dad disappeared tomorrow and I didn’t see him for ten years, I would hardly care. I’d hardly notice, because I expect that kind of behavior from him. But I never expected this from you! I just need some more time. Maybe a lot of time. Maybe years.”
“Paxie… you’ll have to see me sometimes, won’t you? What about the charity ball? You’ve been my date for the past five years. Surely you’ll go with me again this year?”
Taking a deep breath, Pax withdrew her hands from his and floated away. “No, I won’t. Go talk to your girlfriend, Medea, and ask her to go with you. I’m done.”
“How can you say that? Pax!” Seeing that she was moving away, Thornton dove forward, extending his arm to touch hers. Right before he could make contact with her skin, Pax placed her hands against her abdomen, teleporting away to the first person that came to mind. Having not used the skill in a few weeks, she found that it caused a wave of dizziness in her head. When her vision settled, she saw that she was standing on Amara’s back porch which overlooked the ocean, and the blonde woman was having a glass of wine by herself.
Seeing that she had company, Amara lifted her hand to use her telekinesis to open her sliding doors. She floated an empty wine glass over to her table and had the bottle pour itself for Pax. She glanced up at her friend as Pax ripped the wine glass out of midair and gulped down the liquid.
“You should do that a bit slower—enjoy the flavor,” Amara advised. “It’s the good stuff.”
“You can read my mind,” Pax said with determination as she deposited the glass back onto the table. “You know what I want to do.”
Amara nodded, lifting her eyes to gaze at her friend. “Game on?” she asked softly.
“Game on,” Pax agreed.
“I won’t waver again,” Amara vowed. “Not for a second. Not until this is all over.”
“It would have been nice to waver,” Pax admitted, “but they still are who they are. And we still are who we are.”
“No we’re not.” A glimmer of mischief entered Amara’s eye as her lips quirked up deviously. “Not for long, anyway.”
Pax smiled, feeling an odd sense of security wash over her. She reached out and grasped the bottle of wine, pouring herself another glass. “Time to bring back Para?”
“I’ve been hoping to hear you say those words for weeks,” Amara admitted. She used her telekinesis to float her own glass up into the air at a slight angle. “Here’s to us—getting back into the business of revenge.”
With a decisive nod, Pax clinked her glass against Amara’s and took a long, deep drink.
Chapter 5: Whole Once More
Amara used a cotton ball dipped in rubbing alcohol to disinfect her shoulder before jabbing a needle into it. She winced as she released the sedative into her body. “You ready, Paxie? He’s going to be here in under a minute.”
“Sure,” Pax said, ripping her gaze away from the hourglass in the room. She peeled off her gloves aggressively and extended her hands to her friend. Amara instantly put out her hands, allowing her fingertips to connect with her friend’s. The two women made eye contact as they began to chant the incantation that would join their bodies together for a brief interval of time:
Be in me. Be of me. Be with me.
Only but fragments, let us be whole.
Seamlessly we unite, soul to soul;
My heart is half yours, this half hour.
When the magenta flames began to spread over their hands and consume their arms and torsos, they both welcomed the impending implosion. This time, they felt less like they were leaving their own bodies and more like they were about to become whole once more. When the fire and smoke cleared, only one girl remained where two had previously stood.
Para clenched and unclenched her fists in delight. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “It has been too long. It feels so good to be me again! Pax and Amara are just pathetic disappointments on their own—I’m the real thing.”
The doorbell rang and Para breezed through the house in a millisecond to stand by the front door. Passing a full-length mirror, she had time to smirk at her reflection and admire the elegant way Pax and Amara’s clothes had fused together to make an entirely new and flattering style of dress. Shaking her shoulders out to relax them, she reached out and flung the door open.
“Thorn!” she said enthusiastically, feigning surprise. She had caught him in the middle of straightening his tie with one hand—a bouquet of flowers was held in the other. “Oh, are those for me?”
“Of course,” he answered, handing them to her. He cleared his throat shamefully. “Look, Medea, I’m really sorry that I haven’t been in touch. I’ve been so busy since the comet…”
“Uh huh,” she said, in a slightly disappointed tone as she took the bouquet. Are you much in the habit of giving roses to women? With no mild amount of frustration at his womanizing, Para gestured for him to follow her into the house. “So why are you here? Why now?”
“I wanted to explain myself to you—try to make it up to you.”
She looked at him skeptically. “I didn’t think I’d ever hear from you again. You asked me to be your girlfriend, you had really violent sex with me, and then you disappeared.”
He blushed furiously at this. “Truth is… I was embarrassed for hurting you. I didn’t think you’d ever want to see me again.”
“Oh, I didn’t for a little while,” she said with a light, self-deprecating laugh as she discarded the flowers on a table. “Then I thought about it. I realized that anyone would have gone crazy with the kind of pressure you were under. The main thing is that you came through in the end for the whole world—it doesn’t matter if you left little ol’ me all bruised up. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t even think I deserved a phone call the next morning.”
“I know I hurt you, and I’m sorry. Medea, trust me—if destroying the comet was tough, the aftermath was even worse. I’d rather have to deal with a hundred more comets than ever face the press again.” He sighed, giving the weight of truth to these words; some of them were true, and the only way to lie convincingly is to smother it with truth. “I’m here to beg for a second chance.”
She crossed her arms, both impressed and depressed at how genuine his manner seemed. Para lifted her shoulders in a gentle shrug, and that was about as far as she could venture toward professing forgiveness.
“If you’re still experiencing any pain, I have something which can help.” Thornton reached into his blazer, pulling out a vial of Sakra’s water. “Just drink a few drops of this, and it will heal you right up.”
“I am a doctor, you know,” Para said as she took the vial. “What is this exactly?”
“It’s a family secret. A rare extract from an herb in the Himalayas possessing really powerful healing properties.”
“Wow, sounds nifty. I might want to study that sometime,” Para told him as she examined the vial. “I can’t help wondering why your company hasn’t turned it into a product yet. Any bad side effects? Is it a hallucinogen?”
He cleared his throat. “No, but as I said, Medea, it’s very rare. Sometimes there isn’t enough for my family much less a national or global market. Speaking of my company, do you know anything about our annual gala?”
“Gala?” Para asked.
“The Kalgren Tech Charity Ball,” he explained. “I would really love it if you could come with me, as my date for the evening.”
She hesitated. “I… I thought that the tickets to that ball were ridiculously expensive.”
“They are.”
“Weren’t they something like twenty grand?”
“They were, but it all goes to charity. Most guests are CEOs of major companies or celebrities. We even get some foreign royalty. This year it should be a really exclusive crowd because we’re raising the ticket price to two hundred grand.”
“Two hundred thousand dolla
rs! Thorn, have you seen my house?” She hoped that she was acting convincingly appalled, considering she was the one who had set the ticket price; the house was mere pocket change for the double heiress. “I can’t possibly afford…”
“Medea, hon,” said Thornton with a laugh. “I wouldn’t invite you to something like this and expect you to buy your own ticket. Besides, I am the president; I can surely bring a guest with me on the house. It is still my house...”
“No!”
Thornton frowned. “Why not? I promise that you’ll enjoy your time! It’s just a big fun party. It’s not work! We’ll spend most of the night dancing... and the rest of it hanging out with my mom and dad and my sister. Also, you can meet Asher’s family...”
“I don’t know,” she mumbled. Para realized that she had been nervously twirling a strand of her hair around her finger and she stared at the deep indigo strand with irritation. I can’t exactly meet your sister, Thorn. She’s in my DNA.
Thornton nervously ran his thumb over his chin. She has to agree. She just has to! How else am I going to dance with her in front of Pax and cause some drama?
He still thinks that’s a good idea, even after all of this? Imagine his surprise when Pax doesn’t show up at all! She answered him shyly, gazing down with flushed cheeks. “I just... don’t have anything to wear!”
Why does every woman I know repeat that phrase on an endless loop? he wondered. Especially mom, Amara and Layla. But never Pax. Pax would insist that the dress she wore last year was good enough until one of us forced her to get something new. I wish Pax would just get over her anger and agree to go with me. No, I wish it was just understood that we were going together; naturally, like before. Damn it all.
“I’ll take you shopping for a new dress,” Thornton offered, smiling.
Para ran her tongue against the inside of her teeth before speaking. “Well, in that case. I don’t see why not.”
“Great!” said Thornton happily. He reached out to pull Para into an affectionate hug. “You’re a lifesaver. I’d really look pathetic if I showed up to my own party without a date!”
Thirty Minutes to Heartbreak Box Set (Books 1-3) Page 67
