“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” she said, a snort escaping. “Honestly, I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I don’t! I mean I didn’t! Shut up!” Leah said, giggling herself, surprised by how hilarious this all seemed to her friend.
“And here I was, worried I was the only one thinking it.”
Leah managed to get the diary back into Rylee’s bag, pulling it shut quickly before she fled the room with her friend in pursuit. Paige was nearly failing to keep from laughing, biting down on the inside of her lips as they crossed the hall into her room. Paige shut her bedroom door behind them, then conspiratorially opened it a crack to check the hallway and make sure they hadn’t been seen.
“You have to tell me!” she said, turning back.
“Okay, you caught me,” Leah said. “You don’t have to be so damn pleased about it.”
“Can’t help it! Speak, woman!”
“I can’t.”
“Spill it, Leah,” she said, pretending to growl.
Leah found herself smiling gratefully. She wasn’t sure when it had happened exactly, but at that moment, she realized that her friendship with Paige had stopped being a means to an end long before today. This would have been so low a moment for her, being caught—having her insecurities on display. Yet Paige had laughed, mocked her kindly before signing on to be an accomplice. The girl was so unshakably on her team that she hadn’t hesitated to split the guilt with her.
“I think I love you a little bit right now,” Leah said.
Paige smiled at her knowingly, but soon her eyes narrowed. “Hey, I know what you’re doing, lady. Don’t change the subject! Start talking.”
Leah frowned. “I can’t.”
“Don’t even dare pull some ‘respect for privacy’ crap with me now.”
“No, I mean I really can’t,” Leah said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “It was all in Portuguese. I couldn’t read a word of it.”
“Arrgh! Damn clever, bilingual harlot!”
Leah smiled, shaking her head a moment as she watched her friend. “I’ve never seen you like this. It’s charming, in a delinquent sort of way.”
“You know,” Paige said, “I’ve never had a friend I’d want to play sneaky jealous girl games with. I’m finding myself strangely okay with it.”
Leah groaned as though the comment might make her sick. “Oh, don’t go calling it out like that—now I feel like a cliché.”
“Embrace the dark side, Leah.”
Stifling a laugh, Leah attempted to put on a serious face. “Please, don’t ever let Jonathan find out. I would be—”
“Find out about what?” Paige stopped, grinning.
Leah hadn’t expected this moment to become a bonding experience, of all things, but she finally remembered her reason for having come over in the first place—or, at least, the reason she had been ready to give if anyone had been in the living room when she came in.
“So, um, Evelyn’s asked me to come get you for coffee,” Leah said. “Seemed like it was urgent coffee.”
Paige groaned, her face already paling at the thought of what Jonathan’s mother could want after their last phone conversation.
As they headed back out the door and down the stairs, Leah gave Paige a warning just in case it hadn’t gone without saying. “Brace yourself. I’m fairly sure this is a mom trap.”
Her friend sighed knowingly. “I swear, if you abandon me with Jonathan’s mother, this amnesia I have about what did or did not just happen in Jonathan’s bedroom may make a startling recovery.”
“Ahh, extortion,” Leah said. “I see how it is.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THEY LAID ON the floor of the garage, sweat-soaked from sparring. Jonathan stared up at the ceiling, still catching his breath; Rylee, for her part, had at least broken a sweat.
“You aren’t even tired, are you?” Jonathan asked.
She turned to him, one eye open. “Would it make you feel better if I said I was?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Well, I’m jealous—never really met anyone with your endurance.”
She looked back at him, her expression matter-of-fact. “Well, I do like to move it-move it.”
When he laughed again, she couldn’t hold onto the straight face, and the corner of her lip raised in a grin.
As they had sparred, Jonathan had given her the answers Heyer had denied her—most of them, at least. Why the Ferox came to Earth, the mechanics of their devices, the limits imposed by genetic compatibilities, and the nature of their enhanced strengths when together. He left out a lot of the details, more for the sake of getting to the meat of the information, but…
He had not mentioned the nature of the bond, had steered clear of anything that might have led to him breaking the news to her that Heyer expected him to send her away. He had found himself keeping other items to himself, like that the prophet of the Ferox was actively trying to kill him, and that the alien expected him to lead mankind’s army. Rylee, for her part, didn’t ask a lot of questions. Once he explained that Heyer’s A.I. was manipulating the camera feeds, she had focused on listening intently, understanding that every second he was explaining was time that Mr. Clean had to actively hide the details of their conversation.
When the smile she’d given him faded, he found himself frustrated by Rylee’s situation. “It’s not fair,” he said. “Your compatibility is handicapping you—forces your strategies to be reliant on cunning and skill, but there isn’t anything Heyer can do about it.”
Rylee’s eyes came back off the ceiling—he felt them study him. “What has fair ever had to do with anything?” She nudged him playfully in the side. “As if women haven’t always been putting up with having to be ten times better than a man for the same results anyway.”
Jonathan worried she was making light of the problem—addressing the situation with humor because there was nothing to be done about it. He should have kept his concerns to himself; sharing them wouldn’t accomplish anything. The thing was, he couldn’t count the number of times strength kept the jaws of the enemy from closing around his neck, literally.
Rylee’s skills were a perfect strategy against the over-eager Ferox youth. Her tactics would frustrate them as they yearned to engage in a toe-to-toe exchange of blows, and she denied them that. It turned their frustration, their impatience, into a weapon against them. The Greens would eventually grow more and more careless with their attacks, take chances. Then she had them.
The Reds were a different story.
Watching her breathing on the floor, processing it all, he saw a future he wished he hadn’t. It looked like Sickens the Fever or Bleeds the Stone—a monster with control over his instincts, calculating, and able to dish out blows she couldn’t match. If they got hold of her, got her into a tight place where she couldn’t maneuver, that would be bad enough, but what worried him was that a fighter could possess twice the skill of their opponent and still find themselves at an insurmountable disadvantage.
In boxing, they called it “having the puncher’s chance.” Jonathan had learned it first-hand months earlier, when he sparred with a man a hundred pounds heavier than himself. His opponent had no need to be as careful, didn’t have to defend every time he tried to land a blow. The man walked right into some of his jabs as a tactic—he could take the punishment, knowing Jonathan’s guard would have to give an opening whenever he took the offensive. Meanwhile, Jonathan had to cover up or dodge every assault.
It had ended with Jonathan on the mat, unsure of what direction was up or down—it was why there were weight classes, why there weren’t co-ed professional fights. In an exchange where the gap between two opponents strength was staggering, the stronger fighter always had an unfair advantage. One devastating strike, and the fight was over.
Rylee was the strongest woman he had ever met, and that was what troubled him. Realistically, she wasn’t going to be able to gain much more muscle mass. Jonathan was under no delusion that all his concerns f
or her didn’t apply to him as well. Yet, aside from his compatibility with the device, he had some level of control. He had not yet hit the limits of his human strength—could continue to build himself up, always working to shrink the chances of confronting something so much stronger that he’d be forced into a defensive fight.
Defensive fights were losing ones.
“Do they give you names?” Rylee asked, seeming to want a change in subject. “The Ferox, I mean.”
Jonathan let his worries fall to the back of his mind and answered her. “Brings the Rain. At least, that’s the most consistent.”
She frowned, but nodded. “I remember, the Red we fought the night I first met you, he called you that. Isn’t it a bit disturbing that they would call you the same thing?”
“That my reputation precedes me?” Jonathan asked. “Yeah, it’s one on a long list of things that disturb me.”
“Pfft. ‘Reputation.’ You live in Seattle. It’s probably just because you’re always fighting in the rain.”
Jonathan studied her, his eyes narrowing with a growing suspicion that made it hard not to smile as he lay beside her. “Soooo, Rylee, what do they call you?”
“Never mind,” she said. “Forget I asked.”
“Huh?” He tried not to smile as he stared at her.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You know,” Jonathan said, attempting to be smug, “it’s really not a competition.”
That got him a glare. “Okay, fine,” she finally said. “I’m not sure what it means, anyway. I hear the words in Portuguese half the time. So don’t laugh.”
“I promise.”
She wavered a moment longer, biting her lip before she spoke. “The names tend to be…” Rylee sighed. “Slug themed.”
Jonathan nodded as he tried to give the appearance that he was considering this admission in a scholarly manner.
“My guess is that they mean to call me slippery. But whatever animal they’re trying to reference, we don’t have it on Earth, and ‘slug’ is the closest translation.”
Jonathan said nothing for a moment, turning his head to the ceiling. “Makes sense….” He trailed off, keeping a straight face becoming a challenge. “I guess.”
A brief quiet filled the room.
“Hmm, I’m thirsty,” Jonathan finally said. “Slug, you want to pass me that bottle of…”
“Oh, hell no,” Rylee said. “You aren’t calling me that.”
“Come on, Slug.” He smiled. “You can call me Brings the Rain if you want.”
“About to call you Brings a Swift Kick to the Nuts.”
Jonathan laughed, and soon she was laughing beside him. When they stopped, a moment passed in silence between them.
Eventually, Rylee rolled onto her side to look at him, her expression serious now. “Don’t go to work tomorrow,” she said.
A reluctance crept on to his face. “I have to,” he said. “I can’t afford not to.”
“Tell your boss that someone died. Stay home, spend a few days with me. We’ll train.”
It was as though she hadn’t believed him, thought he was avoiding her. He was about to explain his financial situation but she spoke before he started.
“I’ll front you whatever money you’d lose,” she said, raising a brow at him. “That is what you were going to say, right?”
He blinked at her for a moment, realizing she had put more thought into this than he’d realized initially. Jonathan wasn’t comfortable with the idea of taking a hand-out—it wasn’t his nature. The motorcycle had been one thing, and if he hadn’t been able to rationalize it as a useful tool, a far more dependable replacement for his old bike, he probably wouldn’t have accepted it. Now though, he hesitated, seeing how important this was to her.
Never in his life had he found himself in a situation where not knowing something about himself had made him safer. He wished he didn’t know about the bond. Heyer had been right to keep it from both of them. The alien having his hand forced to tell him had compromised them both. If Jonathan could be forced to confess this to The Cell, he would be powerless once they found out that a threat to Rylee might motivate him to give up anything. Telling Rylee herself doubled the chances of The Cell using the same against her.
Concerning enough as this was, it was unnerving to see how easy it was to rationalize his other hesitations. His thoughts were already trying to convince him. A week of training together would sharpen both of them, and when the time came, he would be sending her away stronger than when she came.
Time. The thing Heyer had stolen from her. Was it not the one thing he should try to give her?
The only voice he should have been listening to was the one he desperately didn’t want to acknowledge. He kept forcing that intuitive whisper into the background, not wanting to acknowledge the possibility that he was lying to himself.
Time? For her? Or for you?
He felt sick to his stomach when he imagined telling her. It got worse each time he failed to tell her—the betrayal she would feel grew heavier. Yet, despite all he’d learned about Rylee, the one thing he was blind to was who she would be when he wasn’t there. What if, on confessing he had withheld this, she no longer trusted him and left in anger—seeing that, in the end, he treated her with no more honesty than Heyer had? What if she left in anger and The Cell approached at just the wrong moment?
Jonathan had always imagined he would be better than this. That when the decision was his, he would prove the alien was wrong to keep them in the dark. That the wiser move was to share with her the consequences so they could make the decision with their eyes open. Yet, here he was, another day going by, and he had yet again delayed. And he couldn’t be sure—were emotions outside his control making these decisions for him, making every choice seem so much more convoluted than it really was? Turning a simple problem with a simple solution into a blinding fog? Did it make the urgency to send her away seem like it could wait just another day?
A part of him felt that he was hiding from something else altogether. It was almost as though something within him wanted to make the situation worse… to blame the bond for taking away his ability to make the right decision.
Jonathan noticed that her playfulness was succumbing to the expectation that he was going to deny her request, and he found himself unwilling to do so.
“Okay,” he said, finally.
Rylee smiled at him, her head tilting curiously. “I thought for sure you were going to say you were too good to be….” She pretended to cough. “A kept man.”
He was about to argue over the word choice when a stirring in his weapons cupboard drew his attention.
“What…” Rylee said, slightly alarmed. “What was that?”
Jonathan smiled and winked at her. “That, I believe, is a request I put in,” he said. Then he looked at her curiously. “Any chance you know how to sew, Slug?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You know, you’re in luck. I recently hired a kept man—‘seamstress’ is one of his duties.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
PAIGE HAD HER guard up, approaching with caution, as she and Leah found Evelyn at the table.
However, if Evelyn was about to spring a trap, she hardly looked up to it. Jonathan’s mother held her coffee, cupping the mug as though the warmth alone was keeping her fingers from freezing; she hardly acknowledged their arrival, looking exhausted from a day with too much heavy thinking.
“Evelyn?” Paige asked. “Leah says you wanted to speak with us?”
The mother looked up from her coffee cup and nodded before gesturing to the empty seats on each side of her. They sat down slowly, Paige casting one more discretionary glance at Leah, a plea reminding her friend not to abandon her.
“Paige, I owe you an apology,” Evelyn said. “I never should have spoken to you the way I did. I was lashing out at the only person who would take my call, and I’m ashamed of it. I hope you can forgive me.”
Paige didn’t feel she was owed an
apology—she hadn’t been upset at Evelyn in the first place. If anything, she felt like Jonathan owed both of them an explanation. She nodded sympathetically. “You don’t need to apologize.”
“Well, thank you for that, but after the day I’ve had, I think I may have over-stepped more than I imagined.”
“You had every right,” Paige said. “You did exactly what I would have. I’m just glad Jonathan finally told you himself.”
Evelyn’s lips pursed, her eyes descending into a deeper state of concern. Paige had assumed that Jonathan must have come clean with her last night in the garage. Now, seeing how Evelyn reacted, Paige realized Jonathan still hadn’t told her anything.
“Oh,” she said. “With you being here, I thought Jonathan must have….” She trailed off and groaned.
Evelyn drew herself up with a breath, her face becoming quite serious. “I need you to listen to me, both of you. I learned several frightening things today,” she said. “Now, you don’t have to say anything. But, if it’s not too much, please at least tell me there is a perfectly good explanation and I’m just getting paranoid.”
Paige glanced to Leah, both failing to hide that they were now more intrigued than worried.
“I went down to the University today. I talked to the guidance counselor assigned to Jonathan’s case file,” she continued. “As he had dropped out of school, and I was the co-signer on his student loans, I wanted to know what Jonathan’s options were.” She shook her head. “I never would have thought I’d be saying this, but you damn kids are a lot less trouble when you’re younger. You turn eighteen and all of a sudden I need permission to know why I wasn’t notified of his absence in the first place.”
She sighed heavily, angry or frustrated—it was hard for Paige to tell.
“They wouldn’t give me specifics, only that Jonathan was allowed a quarter of leave because of a police report, indicating he had been admitted to Virginia Mason’s emergency room. That he’d suffered a violent attack with life-threatening injuries, the nature of the assault being so psychologically traumatizing that the University had granted him a recovery period so that his grades would not be affected by what he had endured.” Evelyn’s eyes had started to shine, as though she might be on the verge of tears. “That was all this piece of crap was able to tell me without overstepping his position.”
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 37
