Page 88 of Feed Your Fiends

It’s Bae, too.

Gant

“What did you think of my family?” I ask Elle as I massage the prescription balms into her feet after our nightly bath.

It took everything in me tojustbathe her after our dance session, but I’m quickly realising that babying her from her hair to her feet is a different type of intimacy I didn’t know I craved.

It’s a pleasure to see my baby at peace in my arms in the warm water, to see her eyes drift close with full trust as I shave, shampoo, condition and oil her. The gentle, peaceful rise and fall of her tits as she lets me manoeuvre her any way I want is irreplaceable. Like she’s finally accepting that she’s my little doll, and I’m going to take care of her.

She takes a minute to answer me, her eyes focused on my massaging fingers. “I think they want to hold you close.”

Odd wording.

I force my fingers to keep moving across her soles. They’re not swelling as much any more, and the scars are already fading thanks to the dermatologist's product recommendations, but they’ll never be fully erased. “Like an enemy?”

The little swallow before her chuckle tells me that’s precisely what she means.

“Is that why you hold me close?”

She’s changing the subject.

I rest her left foot gently on my lap before reaching for her right.

“It’s why I did. At first. But now I’m not just holding you. I don’t have to because you’ve already diffused into me. You’re embedded in my heart, and you flow through my veins.”

There it is, another little swallow as those pretty emeralds fly to the floor-to-ceiling windows as she tries to disassociate.

“Just like there’s a connection flowing through my veins to the Parrishs via my mother. But I can’t tap into it. I thought there’d be some kind of primal knowing or longing as we detected one another.”

She looks surprised at that, her eyes finally snapping to mine. “But you looked so peaceful with Delphine.”

“She’s a replica of my mother.”

Do you know who else is a surprising replica? Silas Parrish. He’s Jarett Crewley’s twin.

But you already knew that, didn’t you, baby?

He came into the estate in a blur of green so dark it appeared black. But then the sun hit the paint, and dazzling sparkles of green shimmered at me before he disappeared into the garage. And when Elle appeared with that cut in the gardens, and Silas’ tense, pale face appeared over her shoulder in the tea room not even a second later, it all clicked. Because she’d seen the car, too.

But Elle doesn’t know that I know they’d met, and she doesn’t know that I met him too while Delphine was bandaging her elbow.

She says she doesn’t want secrets between us, and yet she isn’t bringing up the obvious resemblance even a day later.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” she asks. “To see hints of Marisol again?”

“A replica is just that. She was familiar, and she wasn’t. My mother’s personality was far different. Delphine knows what it feels like to be a spare. A begrudging afterthought. A tolerance.”

Dove’s lips part and twitch, her eyes filling with disagreement, but she doesn’t interrupt as she strokes my nape.

“I could relate to her in that way. But she’s still different because she’s sweet. Don’t you think?”

Her throat bobs, and I resist the urge to trace it with my tongue. To trace her pulse that I know is quickening its pace.

“She appears to be.”

Odd wording. Again.

“She certainly was helpful,” she says quickly. “I mean, she confirmed that the baby was born in Hungary.”

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