“It’s beautiful.”
So was she. She was so incredibly pretty. I wasn’t sure whether I should say that or not. I wanted to. Because it was always my first instinct, to say whatever I was thinking. But that had not always served me well in the past. I didn’t like that I made people uncomfortable.
But it was what made me good at my job too.
I just didn’t want Bliss to see me that way. I was trying so hard to be normal. Living in a normal house, in a normal suburb. Getting a normal job, though that hadn’t worked out too well. But I would try again, even though real jobs seemed to pay a shockingly small pittance. Everything else I just wanted to leave behind.
I wanted to date a woman. I wanted to know what her skin felt like, soft and pliable beneath me in bed. I wanted to know what it would feel like to sink inside her body and have her welcome me there.
Scythe had all those memories. He kept them locked away from me, where I couldn’t reach them. I desperately wanted some of my own. Some he couldn’t take from me.
“So is it just you and your parents?” Bliss’s gaze flickered from the smorgasbord to my face. Her fingers hovered uncertainly over the food so long that I picked up one of my favorite hot pastries and held it out to her.
She bit into it, murmuring her pleasure at the taste.
I liked that. “I have two sisters as well. Ophelia is older. Fawn is younger.”
“What beautiful names.”
I nodded. They were. “I don’t see them though. Fawn left about a year ago. She wanted to make a clean break from the family and be her own person. Ophelia travels a lot. I never know where she is from one moment to the next.”
“You must miss them.”
“I do.”
I missed Fawn’s sweet innocence. And I missed Ophelia’s loud voice and constant action. I missed them because their absence left me the sole focus of my parents. In particular, my mother. Despite being a tiny woman of five feet two inches, my mother had her own ways of getting what she wanted.
Always.
“Would you ever go visit Ophelia on her travels? I’d love to go traveling. I’ve never been outside the States, but I really want to go to France.”
“I could take you. It’s nice there.”
Her eyebrows raised. “You’ve been?”
“A long time ago. For the family business. But I liked it when I was there. I’d like to go again.” I’d like to go anywhere with her.
“I want to see the Eiffel Tower and the…”
Bliss continued on, listing out all the tourist hot spots. But a noise at the front of the house had caught my ear. I closed my eyes for a second, hyper-focusing in on it.
No.
No. No. No.
I pushed back from the table and shot to my feet, cutting Bliss off mid-sentence. “Will you excuse me for a moment, please? I need to take care of something.”
Without waiting for her to answer, I spun on my heel and strode through the open doors, past the kitchen to the front of the house. I yanked open the door before the person on the other side even had a chance to knock. Not that they would have. Because they never did.
“Here he is, my boy.” My father stood on the stoop; my mother’s hand tucked into the crook of his arm. His dark-gray suit was stylish and expensive. My mother’s long dress floated around her ankles.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“We’re here for dinner.”
I blinked at the two of them. “You’re…I have company.”
“We know.” My mother patted my arm. “We’d like to meet her. So here we are.”
I stared blankly at them, my brain whirring. I had picked Bliss up. Her car wasn’t sitting in my driveway. I most certainly hadn’t told either of them that I had a date.
Which meant one of three things. They had my phone tapped. They were having me followed. Or they had cameras installed in my house.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were all three.
I glanced back through the open-plan house and caught Bliss watching. I raised a hand in an awkward wave and then moved outside onto the step with my parents, closing the door firmly behind me. “I did the job you wanted me to do. I told you, that was the end.”
My mother held her hands up. “We just came to meet your girlfriend. She’s a pretty one, isn’t she? All that beautiful long hair. Long enough to strangle someone with, isn’t it?”
My fingers clenched into fists. “You’re not meeting her. Not now. Not ever. I told you, I’m finished.”