Page 67 of Fanged Embrace
“Relax. I slept here yesterday, remember?” River lay on her back beside me and folded her arms on top of the blanket. “It’s not that weird.”
I should have told her to leave. I wanted to return to my solitude. I wanted to go back to feeling nothing—because River made me feel something. Because that small contact, her shoulder pressed lightly against mine, was grounding, and I did not want to return to earth.
But I said nothing, unable to protest her presence. Maybe some small part of me wanted her there.
I’d been in this situation a million times before—the languid, sluggish sensation could last for days. When it happened back in my dingy apartment, it had been difficult to track time passing. The only thing that drove me out of bed was the occasional need to pee, and even then I left it to the very last minute, until the pain in my kidneys forced me out from under the blankets and sent me crawling and crying toward the bathroom.
I’d been here before, marooned on the mattress, but until now, I had always—always—been alone.
I knew I should probably be ashamed, or at the very least embarrassed, that she was seeing me like this. Lying lifeless and empty and unable to get up. Instead, all I felt was slight relief. Her presence was a breath of fresh air in the stale, stagnant space.
After an eternity, I managed to roll, at a glacial pace, onto my side. River mirrored me, until our knees were touching and our eyes were level with one another. She tucked an arm under her head, with her cheek resting on her elbow, and watched me. I stared right back.
River broke the hush first. “So, as it turns out, I’ve actually met Arlon before. That first night, when you found my bag at the bar.”
It took a moment to register why she was bringing up Arlonat all, until I remembered that he’d been there, back at the Doctor’s lab, back when I pulled the trigger?—
I squeezed my eyes shut and forced the memory down along with the bile that climbed up my throat. “How is he?”
“A little concussed, very confused.” River chuckled quietly. “We’ve got him waiting at Leyore headquarters until you’re ready to see him. Needless to say, the guy is pretty shaken after his first brush with the supernatural.”
“I can imagine.” A tendril of guilt snaked around my heart and I forced that back too. It had been my decision to keep Arlon in the dark about the supernatural, and it had almost gotten him killed. I had no idea he’d try to hunt down the Doctor on his own—I was the one who did risky shit like that, not Arlon—but it was my fault all the same.
“Yeah, at first he refused to believe that any of it was real—chalked it all up to head trauma.” River shifted her hips and her knees knocked gently against mine. “Then Amara accidentally flashed him some fangs and that seemed to change his mind.”
I smothered a grimace, a silent mantra picking up in my head:my fault my fault my fault.
It was silenced suddenly by River reaching across the small distance between us. She lifted a hand to my face and brushed a stray strand of hair from my eyes, casually—like we’d always been close enough for that kind of contact. I was too stunned by the small act of tenderness to pull away from her fingers when they brushed lightly along my cheek.
“The hybrids are doing better too,” she continued, her hand eventually coming to rest on the blanket between us. “Some of them have even started opening up on their own. According to Hunter, Mary even managed a smile yesterday.”
I swallowed again, staring at her hand, overcome with an urge to lace my fingers with hers. The last time she’d done it, it felt nice. It was comforting, feeling her long fingers interwoven with mine. But I kept my hand where it was, firmly tuckedunder my chin. “And the—” I faltered, then soldiered on, squeezing my eyes shut like that would make it easier to utter his title. “And the Doctor?”
“Dylan is inspecting his home from top to bottom,” River replied. “If there’s a lead there somewhere that can guide us to the organization’s higher-ups, she’ll find it.”
“Good.” The word rang hollow, and too many horrible memories tinted my periphery. I tried to block them out, tried to go back to feeling nothing. If I could just set those thoughts aside, bottle up all of those emotions, then I would be fine.
I stared at her fingers, itching to reach for them. Aching for comfort.
Like she could read my mind, River’s hand crept toward mine. Her fingers slid into the spaces between my own and tightened, tethering me to the here and now. Her voice was a low murmur, neither pushy nor sympathetic. “Do you want to talk about it? About… him?”
“No.”Yes…?Maybe I did. Maybe saying it out loud would make it easier to swallow. “I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you try?” River dropped her eyes to our hands, intertwined. “You can stop any time you like.”
Where would I even begin? There was too much to cover, too much I hadn’t even let myself acknowledge out loud. Explaining all of it, every single terrible memory that haunted me to this day would require a PowerPoint presentation and about ten hours of her time—the worst delivered Ted Talk in history.
So I chose the short version, the shallow truths I could handle. “Did you know I was a foster kid? Before… before the organization got to me.” River’s attentive eyes prompted me to continue, and I sucked in a breath before speaking again. “I didn’t know my parents—all I knew was that I was removed from their care because of charges of neglect. I spent the first few years of my life jumping from one foster home to another, until the organization got involved.”
I couldn’t remember much of those early years, only a deep, ever present loneliness that haunted me to this day.
“When I was first scooped up by the facility I thought it was some kind of—I don’t know, some kind of Wonderland. Other kids like me, nice adults and… the Doctor… telling me I was special.” A bitter laugh scraped up my throat. “I bought into the fairytale for exactly three days. Then the façade cracked and the experiments started. But I still held onto this idea that he was… kind. That he didn’t mean to hurt me.”
I shut my eyes, unaware that tears were flowing until I heard them plop quietly onto the sheets. “But he was never kind. I was just seeing what I wanted to see.”
My mouth clamped shut again. That was it, that was all I could manage. Everything that came afterward—the one real source of happiness I had, ripped away from me in the blink of an eye—those memories were far too painful to speak of. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
So I skipped ahead. “After I got out, Arlon tried to make me go to therapy, anonymous meetings and all that. I tried it for a while, but… none of it worked. Hell, nobody even knew what I was talking about half the time—they all thought I was crazy, the things I was babbling about. So I just… shut down. I stopped speaking during meetings, and eventually I stopped going altogether. All it did was make me feel more alone.”
