A big, beautiful smile took over her equally beautiful face. “You live here. It is your bathroom.”
“Just for now,” I tried to clarify.
They looked at each other. Selene smiled almost innocently, but Hiromi just smirked.
I could smell bullshit a mile away, and I’d been dealing with Alex long enough to know when someone was being sneaky.
And this was his family. Sneakiness must run in it.
I didn’t know what was going on with these little looks, but…
Most of these people, they all gave me a good feeling.
Some more than others.
“Does it have to be so loud in here?” I yelled across the table.
“People don’t like to talk to each other anymore!” Selene yelled back at my question, nursing her bottle of beer beside me.
The niece and aunt, who really acted more like sisters, were sandwiching me between them at the bar we were at. I might have been the oldest, but they treated me like I was The Precious that had to be protected. I liked it more than I should have.
I’d told them a few days ago that I had never been to a bar with friends that were girls, and they’d taken it upon themselves to give me another experience. It was funny though because Selene couldn’t get drunk—just like Alex had said—and Hiromi had just turned twenty-one a few weeks ago. Selene only drank fruity beer—just like me—but not really anything else, and Hiromi mostly just guzzled Sprite with a lemon wedge. It was what she ordered the couple of times we’d gone out to eat dinner.
Because they were two of my newest friends.
“Speaking of not talking to each other,” Hiromi started, those bright eyes flicking toward me. “You still haven’t heard from Uncle Lexi?”
I shook my head, trying to be as casual as possible. Accepting reality wasn’t that difficult. I got where his priorities had to lie and why.
It had been a month since I’d last seen or heard from him.
At least in person.
I had laid eyes on him via television. Twice. The first had been when he’d helped with a collapsed building in Wales, and the second time had been during footage of a train accident in France.
It wasn’t like he was exactly crazy busy.
Which only meant one thing: he was avoiding me. I’d realized it and accepted that about two weeks ago when Selene and I had gone to lunch and she’d mentioned talking to Alex and how he had asked how I was doing. He didn’t call me to check in; he’d called his sister.
Yeah. Cool, cool. I wasn’t bitter about it or anything.
Maybe I’d weirded him out telling him about his grandmother’s vision. Or holding his fingers the night before he’d left. Maybe I was cramping his space.
He’d already warned me that he wasn’t used to taking care of people. That he didn’t want to like me. If it had taken his family weeks to start worrying about him and his disappearance, it was for a reason. Why worry about people who were 99.9999999 percent invincible?
So why would Alex even think about calling someone to check in with them? Why would he think about calling me to let me know he was fine? We were friends, yeah, but we were top 10 best friends.
At least he was my top 10 best friend.
A little higher than that if I wanted to think about it.
I tried not to get too hung up on it.
Fortunately, I’d been busy while he’d been away. I still hadn’t decided how to proceed with my career as a teacher, which bummed me the hell out. If I launched a new site with conveniently all the same languages the cartel had found books for at my house, they would find me. Probably pretty easily unfortunately. I had changed focus to starting to learn the basics for Japanese. I’d known it was going to be hard, but I hadn’t anticipated just how difficult. I had taken for granted how easily I had picked up every other one I’d learned. One night, Hiromi had confirmed that my “talent” for languages was part of my Atraxian gift.
On that same night, Selene had taken my hand and told me about a cousin of mine that she’d found in Costa Rica named Valentina. One year ago, this Valentina deposited ten thousand dollars into her bank account in cash. Almost immediately, she used every penny to pay a hospital bill.
I couldn’t even muster up that much anger over it. If she had given away my name to pay off her debt, I understood. I was no one to her but a name.
She was a traitor, but I didn’t blame her.
I didn’t have a whole lot going for me being in this weird limbo situation, but I did have one thing that lifted my spirits.
I finally had people in my life. People I liked a lot. I had friendships with a twenty-five-year-old, a twenty-one-year-old, a three-year-old who was stronger than me, and a terrifying woman I had a feeling was a hell of a lot older than she looked.
It made me wonder how old Alex would eventually be. How old my grandfather had actually been. I knew now that he hadn’t been lying when he’d whispered to me that he was turning one hundred so many years ago.
He’d told me the truth.
The knowledge made my heart so full.
Over the last month, I usually spent time with at least one of Alex’s family members every day. On that first evening with Selene and Hiromi, we’d gone to buy groceries… and gone back to his house with a couple frozen pizzas and a pack of raspberry beer that we’d destroyed in record time while we watched a reality show about an attractive man on the hunt for the love of his life.
The day after that, Hiromi had shown up and taken me with her to get my hair cut and colored. I think they’d called it a “balayage job” or something like that. I didn’t remember, but apparently I’d told her all about wearing a wig the day before. She hadn’t let me pay for it either, saying it was an early birthday present. In hindsight, I couldn’t believe I’d drank enough to do that, but it made me glad I hadn’t trusted my big mouth around people, otherwise who the hell knows what I might have told a total stranger.
After that, Selene showed up with a USB-looking stick, and we’d watched a not-yet-released Shinto Comics movie about Justine Justice. That was the night I learned that she handled “privacy matters,” or as Hiromi had explained immediately after, she was a “fucking hacker.” Apparently, she had set up some kind of program or algorithm that alerted whatever member of the Trinity was closest to natural disasters and specific kinds of emergencies. And here I’d thought they had some kind of team with a hotline that people called into.
I’d also figured out the night before that Hiromi bounced around jobs because she couldn’t get to work on time, and the family wouldn’t hire her. The Akita side or the Shinto comics side, which was also known as the Drakos part of the family.
Another day, Grandmother and Asami had paid me a second visit with a different board game. Then she had asked me to drive her to her daughter’s house. I’d wanted to say no, but my balls had picked up and walked away, so I did. That’s where I got to meet Alex’s dad, a tall, lean man with dark, serious eyes but a warm smile that told me exactly where The Primordial got it from. The energy coming off him had been a warm, steady one that was the complete opposite of his wife’s. I had wondered just what gifts he had.
One evening, Hiromi brought Asami over, and the little girl found an Xbox in the TV stand that I swore hadn’t been there the last time I’d gone through the cabinets. On top of it had been a brand-new copy of a racing game and one with a blue hedgehog. We played that night, and when they left, I played by myself afterward too. It had made me smile. Another afternoon, I met up with Selene for lunch and had been surprised when that “snobby shit” Achilles showed up with Asami, and he’d been surprisingly loving toward his daughter and little sister.