by Shelly Crane
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“No,” he sighed. “I’m sorry, for how poorly I handled things. It was never about you. Never. I just felt like the one thing that I got to do and have control over was taken from me.” He quirked his lips in embarrassment. “And then I made you feel like I didn’t want to marry you. Of course I want to marry my significant. I was just…pouting I guess.” He laughed, embarrassed. “And then when I tried to make it better by bringing you coffee—your mind is constantly running with these questions that have no business being there.” His face hardened a little, his version of trying to look stern, I assumed. “Like do I worry about you because of you or because of the bond? Like just now, was I upset because of you or because of Harper?” His head shook, his eyes hooded. “Nothing has changed.” He took my hand and put it over his chest. “Your heart is in here and it’s not going anywhere.” I felt a whimper begin, but held it back. “I can feel your heartbeat, I can find you if you’re hurt or scared and keep you safe, I can give you my touch to make sure you’re right as rain,” he threw my words back at me and smiled, “but none of that can make me care about you, none of that can make me fall for you.” His nose pressed to my cheek. “That’s all you, little bird.”
The whimper couldn’t be contained this time and I gripped his neck to keep me on the ground, sure I was about to float away. He leaned back and used that torturous thumb to wipe away the tear from my cheek.
“I’m not going to stop fighting for you either.”
I shook my head, letting my happy tears fall freely. “I know.” I smiled through the tears that he wiped away again. “I’m sorry if I ever made you think I doubted it.”
“You didn’t.”
We moved to the bed—his bed, he confirmed—and sat side by side, not ready for our make up night to be over yet. I leaned back against the wall, since there was no headboard, and he was close, turned toward me, his knee up on the bed touching my leg. He was mid-sentence talking about the jobs they have to do at the station, when he stopped.
“You have coffee on your shoes.” He scowled as he got up and went to a sink in the corner and grabbed a hand towel. “That’s my fault.”
“I’ll take some coffee on my shoe any day if you want to tackle me like that.”
“Tackle, huh?” he said with a smirk as he came back. His walk seemed lighter, freer somehow. Like the weight of the world was somehow not on his shoulders for the moment.
“You won’t get in trouble for being on break this long?”
He sat closer than before and laughed. “No. I’m not on break. We don’t really have breaks. We have our chores we do and the rest of the time we just wait for a call.” He pulled my leg up on his legs, making my breath stutter for a second. His eyes met mine and he smiled, his eyes twinkling with mischievous. “That was just code for Don’t disturb us.”
After what just happened in this room, I felt a blush race up my neck. I couldn’t help but smile along with it. “Well, then I’m glad they listened to you,” I mumbled.
He chuckled lightly, looking at me so intently, I ducked my head. I should have known he wouldn’t let me get away with it. He put his finger under my chin and brought my face back up, letting his thumb rub across my chin a couple times. He smiled small, genuinely, as if he was happy looking at me in that moment a little bit more than others for some reason.
“You’re blushing,” he said softly, so softly I almost didn’t hear. “It’s pretty on you.” I felt the blush get hotter. He swallowed and then said, “I can’t remember ever making a girl blush before.”
I laughed just once. “Now I know that’s a lie,” I said, and it actually sounded like one. I squinted feeling a weird sense of déjà vu, but not enough to stop me from checking on him. “Is everything okay?”
He smiled wider and nodded. “It is now. I know everything is going to be okay as long as you and I are.”
“We’re never going back to the way it was,” I promised.
He shook his head. “Never going back.”
He leaned up and kissed my lips like it was normal, like it was an everyday thing, like I was his.
“You are mine,” he growled softly against my lips.
Growled.
I’ve always heard about a Virtuoso man when it comes to his girl, and I’ve seen my father firsthand when it comes to my mother, but to have that protectiveness directed at you was a fierceness that melted every bone in my body on the spot, and it was not to be trifled with.
He leaned back as if he hadn’t heard my inner spiel. Though I knew he had when he smirked as he brought my boot to his lap and began wiping the spilled coffee splatters away.
He cleaned my boot spotless, and then pulled my other leg in his lap and repeated the move on the other boot. It was possibly the sweetest thing I’ve ever watched. He was so meticulous, getting every nook and seam. Then he squinted and ran his hand up my leg to my knee, causing a burst of breath to leave me. His head whipped up to mine.
“Sorry,” he breathed. “You have coffee splattered on your tights, too. Let me…” I just sat there, open-mouthed, as he tried like a total guy, but a sweet, amazing, adorable, guy to clean my tights with a wet hand towel.
“It’s okay. I’ll throw them in the wash when I get home.”
He tossed the towel aside and put his hands back on my legs, one near my knee, and the other on my calf. “These tights…”
I smiled and shook my head. I stage-whispered, “I have an entire drawer full of tights.” He groaned dramatically. “Well, now I know what to use against you in a fight. I’ll stop wearing tights.” I looked at him with a little coy smile. “Or…maybe I’ll wear them every day.”
He laughed. “You wouldn’t.”
“I might.”
“Man, I love this side of us,” he sighed and moved his hand on my knee, making me shiver. Goosebumps ran down my arm. His eyes followed them and he looked so happy about them. He opened his mouth, but someone yelled upstairs.
“Breaks over, Romeo!”
He chuckled, but sobered, his mouth falling into a soft smile. “This was one of my imprinting visions.”
I blushed again. “It was?”
His smile was smug. “Not the whole thing. Just this—us, on my bed like this at the firehouse. None of my visions confirmed whether we’d be really together or not, we were just…together in them. So I didn’t know what to think about them. But now, I kinda like them. I don’t know what they mean or why we get the ones we get, but their mine. And now it’s yours, too.”
“Mine were the same, except for one.” I smiled. “I should have known…and trusted. But I’m not telling you. You’ll just have to wait ‘til it happens and then I’ll spill the beans.”
He looked so amused. “Deal. And one more thing.” He reached in the little drawer beside his bedside stand and tugged out a messy notepad. “I guess I half-lied to you that day in my apartment,” he hedged. “When I said that I would draw you one day.” He opened the notepad to reveal page after page of me. Most were just my face. “I really love to draw you, your face. It’s my favorite thing. I do a lot of drawing up here with all the spare time we have.” I kept leafing through. There were some that weren’t me, some landscapes, some of the same old man and dog that I’d seen before, some of the firehouse, but most were of me.
I looked up. “Wow.”
He grimaced. “Your mind is pretty blank right now. Is that a good wow or a yikes he’s a psycho—”
I reached across the papers, feeling some of them float to the floor as I pulled him to me. “I love it. I love them.” I pulled back and looked at the ones still in my hands. “They’re all so beautiful and different—each one. I love that you think about me when I’m not here.”
“I don’t have to draw you to think about you.” He chuckled.
I leaned in and kissed him. “It’s so beautiful. And it’s sorta beautiful that you thought you had to hide it from me.” I smiled, shaking my head a little.
I gave my head a weighing shake. “Okay, I may not have been so open to the idea, but seeing my face next to Harper’s that day wouldn’t have been so bad.” I poked his chest.
“I’ll remember that for the next time we bond,” he said sarcastically, a little embarrassed, guilty smile on his face. “And I’m sorry that you’re going to be hurting in the morning. I’ll have to work out something with the schedules. I’ll…”
“Figure something out for us,” I finished. “I know. I believe you.”
“Ah, little bird,” he sighed and cupped my cheek, “you’re making it so easy.”
He stood, picking up all the papers and tossing them back in the drawer, before he pulled me up with him. I looked up at him so close to me. “What’s that?”
He smiled and I guess he decided to keep his secret because he turned to go. Well, that wasn’t flying with me. I didn’t know why our minds didn’t work the same, why he got to see my every thought and I had to fight to see the tiniest thing in his, but I looked at his retreating form and focused on the one thing I wanted.
The one thought I wanted to know.
He stopped dead still.
Just as he turned I began to feel him all around me, warm and luscious, he was everywhere. His buzz on my skin, his heartbeat in my chest.
He had a layer of things on the outside that were for me: protection, adoration, his care of my feelings.
His thoughts were all a jumble. Nothing was focused or in place or organized. It was almost as if he wasn’t thinking of anything, or maybe thinking or too many things at once.
I closed my eyes and focused. I didn’t want to know everything, all I wanted was the one thought. It wasn’t fair. I could keep no secrets from him. I was an open book whether I wanted to be or not. I just wanted the one thing, the one thing. What was I making so easy for him? It was a simple thing and probably silly, but I couldn’t leave without having done this with him at least once. We’d never explored each other’s minds yet, never even talked about it much, but I just needed it.
And then out of the jumbled mess came one clear thought, one line. He had been thinking that I was making it so easy for him to fall for me, because he was definitely falling, one foot in front of the other.
I opened my eyes slowly to find him right in front of me, watching me as I searched his mind. If I expected him to be angry, I was sorely mistaken.
He looked so in awe, as blissed out as I felt. “We have to do that again. Soon,” he said roughly.
The look he was giving me made my toes curl. With my neck turning pink, I told him, “We’ve had so much going on that we’ve never really talked—”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “And I know that something’s not right. I know you have to fight to hear me and feel what I feel.” He swallowed. “We’ll talk, I promise, and we’ll make everything perfect.” He lifted his hand to tug my lip from my teeth. I hadn’t even realized I was biting my lip. He smiled and leaned down to press him lips against my ear. “But in the meantime, you can come inside my head anytime you want to. Because that felt amazing,” he whispered huskily.
I nodded too fast. “Yeah. It did. I thought it was just me.”
“No, little bird.” He leaned back just enough to see my face, his nose almost touching mine. “Next time, I’ll do the digging.”
I could only gulp and hope he wasn’t kidding.
_ _ _
“Seth?” I whispered in the dark, confused. I knew he was there. I sat up in my bed and scooted closer to him as he sat in my window sill. “Why are you sitting way over there?”
His sigh was tortured, guilty. “I don’t know what to do. Why am I here, Ava?”
I reached him and touched his arm, but he pulled back. “What’s wrong?”
“Why am I here?” he said harder. “We worked everything out. Everything is fine, more than fine, everything is great.” I couldn’t see his face in the darkness—only his back in the moonlight. I could imagine what it looked like though as he spoke. Hard, angry, sad, confused. Not happy to see me, but happy in his life with me. With her. And that was okay because she was me.
Gah, it was so confusing.
“Explain how an echoling works.” I moved to sit on the bed across from him so he’d feel less threatened. He seemed to feel like she and I were separated, like we were two separate people, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the case. And I had a feeling he was about to tell me that as well and blow his little theory of ‘the other Ava” out of the water.
He leaned back against the window. The cold window pane had to be freezing on his back, but maybe he felt he deserved it. “It’s a dream, for all intents and purposes. I can only come to the person when they’re sleeping. I can tell me people sleep. If I’m trying to reach a person, I just know if that person if asleep, even it’s not at night, even if they’ve just dozed off for a minute.”
“That sounds kinda neat.”
“It’s neat for a person that wouldn’t abuse the gift. What good could come from this gift though? So far, I haven’t found a use for it except to travel and sightsee. And this,” he said softly. “But I don’t know why this is still happening. I thought I was supposed to come here so you could help us stop fighting, but we’re fine now.”
“So what happens to the person when you…echoling them?”
He chuckled in the dark, despite his foul mood. “Nothing. They’re asleep. This is your subconscious. And mine.”
“So we’re not really here, awake. This isn’t really my body.” It wasn’t a question because I was getting it.
“No. Your body is right there.” He pointed at the bed behind me. “Safe and sound.”
“Could you hurt me in an echoling?” I asked, making sure it was a strong voice.
“I could. Anything that happens to you in an echoling will carry over to the real you. That’s why it can be dangerous. That’s why I never wanted my family to know I was one,” he said angrily, more angry than usual. I wondered why that was. I wondered what had happened to make him so. I thought he was happy? “My uncle…he did awful things as one from what I heard.”
“So…if I’m here asleep,” I patted the bed behind me, “and this is my subconscious, then how can I be two different people?” I asked quietly. “I’m me. This version of me just remember everything yet. And the other version of me doesn’t remember everything yet either.”
“Ave,” he said, tiredly. I got it then. He was tired.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” I rushed before he could say anything else.
“I’m working. And…there’s some issues with my job and not getting to Ava…you on time in the morning. It’s a damn mess,” he growled and put his head in his hands.
I couldn’t help it. I went to the floor in front of him and put my hands on his forearms. He looked up and started to move away, but stopped.
“You’re still my significant, Seth. You said I’m in that bed and this is my subconscious. It’s still me,” I said, feeling tears gathering, not knowing if he could see them in the dark room or not.
He gathered me to his chest in between his knees and sighed in my hair. “I don’t know why this is happening.”
“I wish I could help you.”
He laughed once and squeezed me. “I told you once, but you don’t remember, that just being here is helping me.”
I sighed all the way into my stomach. He hadn’t said “the other you.”
“I’m glad you’re here, I really am, but if you didn’t want to come here, why did you?” I said very carefully.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to.” He leaned back and I could make out his face just a little this close. “I want you to remember. I was sitting on my bed, thinking about what I was going to do about the withdrawals, thinking about sneaking out to come see you, when I felt you fall as
leep. But I thought since we’d already taken care of everything that I wouldn’t feel the pull anymore. I tried to ignore it, but when I drifted off, I ended up here anyway.”
“Maybe,” I hedged, but closed my mouth.
“What?”
“Never mind. I don’t know anything about echolings.”
“Ava, you’re the smartest girl I know. You know me and you know the world we live in. There’s no one else I would trust to give me advice about this. Tell me.”
I stared, dumfounded.
“Am I a good kisser?”
His smile was slow and a little smug if you asked me. “Ava—”
“I might not remember anyway, I just want to know for right now.”
“You’ll remember,” he promised. “One day.”
“Then tell me so I’ll know for sure.”
He breathed out. “Breathtaking.”
I absorbed that. If I ever wanted to be described in one word, I thought that taking someone’s breath was a pretty good daggum description.
“Okay,” I moved along, “Well, what if what’s going on is something else we need to work out? What if you’re here because of something that hasn’t happened yet and maybe there’s a reason for it?”
“We’re moving on from the kissing, just like that?” He had a little smile.
“I got what I wanted,” I quipped.
He laughed softly. “Uh…I don’t know. I’ve never had this happen before. I’ve gone in people’s minds before more than once, but never had the pull before to keep going back. I’ve never had a pull before at all.”
