Page 18 of Cerulean Truth
Then she threw him a softer look, as if she was finally grasping what he was trying to tell her, giving him a short nod.
I quickly took out my Nexus to nex her my info.
She glanced at it and raised an eyebrow. “What’s that? Your wand?” she quipped.
Stephen smiled more kindly than I would have. “We don’t have wands, this is solely for communication and travel purposes. It allows us to portal through space and to communicate in the spoken and the unspoken, with each other and with humans.”
She frowned. “How does one communicate unspoken words?”
“You have heard of non-verbal communication, right?” I snapped, not giving a fuck about Stephen's glare. I was so done with this experiment.
“Nexus allows communication of all our senses,” Stephen said in softer tones, “like sounds, tastes, smells, basically. We can also convey our emotions through it, like fear, sadness, love. One sends it out, the other one receives.”
“So, you guys have emotional phones. How magical,” she responded, her voice loaded with sarcasm, but a hint of curiosity showed through, which she was of course too proud to admit.
“Not really the same,” I mumbled dryly as I clicked my personal info onto her phone without her having to accept it. Her eyes widened at the sudden appearance of my name and number on her phone, but she still kept her mouth tightly shut. She stepped away and before I could follow up, she took off.
Stephen moaned and I shook my head. “This is not going to end well, Stephen,” I said warningly. “We really should report this.”
“Not just yet, James. She is smart, she will come around, you’ll see,” he said but he sounded a lot less certain of it than he had before.
FIVE
EMMA
James, the Jerk. The insufferable jerk. The arrogant asshole with his holier-than-thou attitude. Who did he think he was? The man had even gone so far as to threaten my life! He had threatened my life, for crying out loud! I wasfuming!If I were a cartoon, there'd be steam coming out of my ears.
James, with his arrogant, egotistical demeanor and hideous behavior, was clearly someone I had no choice but to utterlyloathe.
With his annoyingly piercing green eyes.Urgh. His infuriatingly broad shoulders, and well-muscled arms, also irritated me to bits. He really had to be that tall and athletically built? And then, to top it off, there was that ridiculously handsome face, clearly chiseled by angels before birth. He had that sharp jawline with a slight stubble, which made him look aggravatingly attractive. The man could’ve been a model with those features if he didn’t look like he’d blow up the runway just to watch it burn.
He was incredibly hateful. So why oh why did he have to be so unbelievably good-looking? It was so unfair.
There was an undeniable darkness surrounding him though. I could sense it, not just in his words, but in the tone of his voice,in his demeanor even, as though he could take a life without a second thought.
Most chilling of all was the darkness emerging from his eyes whenever he cast his gaze on me. Of course, the death threats didn’t do much to ease any suspicions I had about his intentions.
And there was no doubt he could’ve easily carried out his threats. His toned, muscled body, which I could discern through his shirt, could probably crush me half to death with just a hug.
Last but not least, there was that sinister tattoo etched on his right forearm—an inscrutable design which made my skin crawl.
If ever there was a man who embodied the essence of an assassin, it was him.
All my instincts yelled at me to never go near him, not even in broad daylight. But he was too hot to ignore, and after fuming about his sense of self-importance during those initial ten minutes after our encounter, all I could dwell on for the rest of the day was his dark hotness—or hot darkness, I honestly couldn't decide which was more captivating—enveloping my body in ways which were far from innocent.
Having watched so much porn in the days leading up to our meeting certainly didn't help.
He also unmistakably carried himself with an air of dominance, as if he were accustomed to a position of power in life. He had that attitude, expecting others to look up to him. He was the kind of guy you instantly hated, yet secretly craved his approval.
Undeniably, he was the most striking man I'd ever laid eyes on, and it took immense effort to divert my gaze away from him during our entire conversation at the coffee shop. I wasn’t particularly proud of it, but even as he was uttering death threats, my mind had ventured into some rather non-lethal fantasies involving him. I'd done everything in my power not to stare, which was precisely what I had longed to do—like a love-struck puppy. Well, not love, only raw desire. A desire-struck puppy.
Which is exactly why I'd refrained from being friendly in any way. Because if I had, he might have reciprocated, and if he had, I might've found myself asking him to properly “you know what” my brains out in the bathroom of that coffeeshop.
I really needed to lay off the porn.
Naturally, I didn't hesitate to take his phone number. I mean, no one in their right mind would ever pass up the chance to get the phone number of the hottest guy on the planet. I had accepted it without any intention of ever using it. I simply wanted to be done with the entire conversation.
During the rest of the day, I tried to distract myself, though James and his phone stayed on my mind despite my best efforts. It was weirdly shaped—the phone, not James—it couldn’t have been much larger than a lipstick or a USB-stick, and it had vanished entirely into his hand. I’d only caught a brief glimpse of it, but it seemed to resemble a small, serpentine handle or something. I couldn't help wondering about it, what kind of role it played in their world.
