Page 109 of Drown Like Heaven
“I don’t have—”
I handed her a blue pen—the kind with a cap, not retractable. “Put your initials at the top.”
She seemed to understand, so I backed off.
She’d trust me more if I showed I trusted her.
I listened to her reading off each temperature, confirming that everything was running smoothly, then watched her write each number down. Her handwriting was neat and careful, practiced purposefully. But she didn’t hesitate forming the pen strokes.
Dakota climbed up on the stool to check the gauge at the top while I observed her, seeing if she was steady on her feet. She almost didn’t wait for me to confirm this value before writing it down, trusting her own instincts now. Ambitious.
After a while of this temperature data collection game, I decided to have her change the reflux ratio, wanting to test her confidence again. If she made a mistake at this point, it wouldn’t ruin the run, but I could tell she was nervous about it.
Her hand was slightly unsteady as she adjusted the valve and I knew she was waiting for me to step in, to take over, to give her more direction.
I didn’t. She could figure it out.
And she did.
Her eyes found mine over her shoulder when the temperature stabilized again, a flicker of something in her gaze, like she wanted my praise, or confirmation she’d done a good job. I didn’t give it. She knew she’d done it right. She just needed some confidence in her knowledge. I checked the data on the computer, deliberately quiet, letting her hunger for my unnecessary approval in silence, knowing the wait would make everything taste that much sweeter later.
Hunger looked so pretty on her.
“We’re at about an hour now,” I noted aloud. “You’re welcome to head to your next class, or wherever you were planning to go after my lecture.”
She wiped her palms on her jeans. “Okay. When should I be back here?”Eager.
“Email me your class schedule and I’ll let you know what windows will work.”
Dakota nodded, quiet. She grabbed her bag from the stool she’d set it on earlier, then looked around once more, perhaps expecting me to say something else, before she finally just decided to leave, the door swinging shut behind her.
Chapter 29
Mason
Dakota shouldn’t have been able to smell the scent coming off me, and the fact that shecould…it freaked me out a little bit. Kapnos. It was a pheromone for angels, and it was related to arousal level. Though the scent was faintly there all the time, the more turned the angel got, the stronger it’d smell.
There was a biological reason for it, not that I ever cared about its actual purpose. In Heaven, the smell was more muted, and pretty much the same for everyone. It changed a bit when I fell to Earth, got stronger maybe.
It was all related to how difficult it was for angels to procreate. Conceiving an angel child wasn’t easy. So, my kapnos signaled to female angels that I was ready to fuck, and put them in the mood too. It felt so unnecessary and more of a hindrance than anything because I didn’t want kids, and thus didn’t care about female angels smelling when I was ready to try and make one.
I also didn’t interact with angels hardly ever now that I was out of Heaven. So there were no angels needing to smell my kapnos to get horny. And humans supposedly couldn’t smell it. I imagined it would make people more suspicious of us.
But here was Dakota, apparently not only able to smell it, but to also beaffectedby it?
Nothing about her felt like a coincidence.
She was made to crash into my life, just like I was made to crash into hers. An unavoidable collision.
Sometimes I wondered what would’ve happened if she hadn’t gone into the ocean after me on the first day, if she’d just stayed on the beach, watching the waves. Somehow, I felt like it wouldn’t have mattered. We were destined for this.
Even if she’d run the other way, the tide would’ve dragged her back to me. She could live a thousand lives and every single one of them would’ve ended up in my hands. Her soul was tied to mine.
I’dfeltit in the back of my mind, before I ever met her.
I shifted my car into park, staring out the windshield at Blackpine’s gloomy campus through the pine trees lining the small parking lot. It was mostly private because of the trees, and not a single other car was in the lot. I turned off the car and climbed out, locking it as I walked away, cutting through the grass to get to the sidewalk.
I had shared Dakota’s location with me from her phone while she was sleeping, and she either hadn’t noticed yet, or she somehow didn’t care, because I still had access to it now. Based on the location of the blue dot on my screen, I could tell she was in some class building across campus.
