Reaching for my plate, the king places it on his lap before giving me his. “Eat,” he says, tapping my plate with the fork. I furrow my brows as I look at the plate. Kyson also looks rather disgusted by my own well-done steak, but says nothing other than encouraging me to keep eating.
“All of it,” the king says when he finishes his,leaving only the salad. The steak is huge, and I am struggling to eat the entire thing after getting through half of it. I force another mouthful down, my stomach full but my tastebuds savoring the taste. I watch the king pull his phone from his pocket and scroll through it.
“I can’t eat anymore,” I say while trying to cut through another. Kyson looks up from his screen before staring at the half-eaten steak and sighs.
“You hardly ate anything yesterday. Eat half of it, and then you can call her,” he says, and I glare at him. A growl emanates from me, and he arches an eyebrow at me.
“Ivy!”
“I will eat two more pieces. I can’t eat much more. You will make me sick,” I snap at him.
“Three.”
“One!” I retort and he sighs.
“Fine, two more mouthfuls then,” he growls, turning his attention back to the phone. I quickly eat, wanting to speak to Abbie. It feels like a lifetime ago since I heard her voice, the longest we’ve ever gone without speaking. When I finish, I snatch the phone from his grip. He growls at me but takes my plate, setting it back on the tray and placing it out the door before coming back to sit by me, staring over my shoulder as I scroll through the letter A’s. Yet some of the names have similar spelling which confused me.
“No, back up,” the king says, clicking on her name for me. “You can video call her.”
“What’s that?” I ask, listening to the phone ring. He takes it from me, pressing a button, and the screen changes, and I can see myself on the screen.
“Now, you will be able to see her if she can figure out how to turn her camera on. Gannon did show her, so hopefully she remembers,” Kyson says. The phone rings, and I glance at Kyson, who sits up. He dials her number again, before passing it back to me.
When she doesn’t answer again, he takes the phone from me, leaning against the headboard. He opens something else on hisphone and types away. I peer over to see what he is doing, watching as he types quickly.
“I messaged her mate,” Kyson says, before patting the spot between his legs, wanting me to sit there.
“What did you say?” I ask him.
“Come, I will show you,” he says, and I roll my eyes but crawl into his lap. He presses his lips to my shoulder and pulls up his messages.
Chapter Forty-Two
“Ineed to teach you how to read. Try and read that,” he says, and I peer at the screen in concentration. I recognize Abbie’s name this time, and I recognize the letter’s but can’t make sense of how they fit together.
“I can tell Abbie’s name,” I answer, my face heating up that I am unable to do something that is so basic to others.
“Why. Isn’t. Abbie. Answering. Her. Phone.” Kyson says, pointing to the words. Kyson leans forward before reaching into his bedside drawer and pulling out a bigger phone.
“This is a tablet, like my phone, but bigger,” he says before scrolling through it. “I had some reading apps put on it for you. It will help you identify different words. Kind of like a game. I want you to use this when you aren’t doing anything, but it also has a voice to text,” he says, opening an app. He clicks on the little microphone picture in the center of the screen before speaking into the tablet.
“Kyson loves Ivy,” he says, and the words he spoke flash across the screen before reciting them back to him in a robot voice.
“You can also type words into it, and it will read them to you.Copy the text on my phone into it,” he says, bringing up a small keypad on the screen. He hands me his phone, and I place the tablet on my lap before copying the letters when Kyson leans over my shoulder to peer at the screen.
“You need to put spaces between the words,” he murmurs, his breath warm on my neck as it fans over me. I shiver involuntarily, and he purrs softly at my reaction.
“I don’t know how,” I tell him before he hits a long blank button on the keypad.
“That one. Now redo it,” he says, deleting everything I just painstakingly typed into the screen. Remembering to use the space button this time, I type his text message again into the tablet. When I finish, Kyson presses the speech button, and the phone reads out what I wrote, and I smile that it said what Kyson read from his text message.
“Good, you will get the hang of it, and I will read to you at night, so you should pick it up quickly with some help.” I glance at the bookshelf, since he finished readingTreasure Islandlast night. I am eager for him to read me another book.
His phone vibrates in my hand, and I glance at the small screen. “He is going to mindlink her to get her phone. He said he isn’t with her right now, but they have the mindlink now that he has marked her,” Kyson tells me, and I nod before typing his new message into the tablet to read it to me again while he watches behind me. A few minutes later, another message comes through.
“What does it say?” I ask him.
“Says to try her now,” he answers before pulling me back against him and fiddling with his phone. It starts ringing, and he turns the camera thing on, and my face pops up on the screen along with the king’s chest behind me. It rings a few times before she answers.