I’d just said “sex” in front of him of all people.
And I’d also done more than pee in front of him. We were way past that point. Down the block, around the corner, and in a totally different neighborhood. He was an adult. I was an adult. We both damn well knew what sex was.
I peeked at him to find him leaning against the counter again, arms still crossed, biceps bulging beneath the hoodie. He didn’t seem interested, but I could tell he was listening.
“Anyway, I want what everyone else wants. Love, happiness, traveling. Not to be alone.” I snorted, thinking about how I wanted my job back too. “It’s not that original. I don’t want to climb Mt. Everest. But when you’re too busy hiding, you don’t really have that many options. You can’t really get to know people too well because it’s too hard to lie all the time.”
Oh boy, that was more than I’d ever told anyone, even my grandparents. At some point, when I started talking about my hopes and dreams as a teenager, they had started making these sympathetic faces that took me a while to process. They had known what my future would hold, and that was none of what I used to go on about.
I gave the pot another stir, a slightly harder one, and forced myself to change the subject. “Why did you want to be a fireman?”
Again, he surprised me by actually answering quickly. “I wanted to help people.”
Huh. Huh. But he didn’t always like being a superhero. That was… interesting. It was what I had thought too.
He made a grumbling sound deep in the back of his throat. “Where were you going to move? You sighed over that atlas on your coffee table a lot.”
Was he trying to distract me too now? “I hadn’t decided.” My snicker was bittersweet but not bad. “I didn’t want to leave. Every time I started making plans, I started doing something else so I wouldn’t. I bet you’ve been able to go a lot of places. Maybe you can make me a list for the future. Maybe I can see how much rentals go for in those areas. The cheaper the better.”
There was a weird, weird look on his face, I noticed. I bet he was probably thinking I was stupid to think I would ever be able to live far away from where he was, if I was going to be in danger. And I guess I was.
But that didn’t change anything.
I wanted to find happiness.
And keep it.
And have a life.
That wasn’t too much to ask for, was it?
Friends? A loved one or two? A furred one and one that could talk back to me?
Some people wanted to cure cancer, fly to the moon, go to every country.
And me? I just wanted to go to a beach for once. Have one friend. Be loved at least once. I would love to one day maybe have a kid or two that I could love just as much as my grandparents had cared about me, but minus the extreme strictness.
Most of all, when it came down to it, I didn’t want to be alone.
If I had to pick, that’s what it would be: to not be alone anymore.
Oh boy, I was depressing, and I needed to steer away from that shit.
And that was probably why I decided to piss him off. “Say… Alexander.” I put emphasis on his name and tried not to gulp. It felt so weird to call him that. Part of me still expected it to be some kind of trap. I peered real hard at the beans before I asked, “Why can’t you fly?”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
“What are you nervous over?”
I froze and slowly turned to look at him. At the man who had finally showered an inch of dirt off and changed into sweatpants and a pullover hoodie that fit him surprisingly well. The same man I was having a harder and harder time picturing in a charcoal, skintight suit that hugged his body better than a glove. It was strange, to be honest.
A lot of things seemed to make me feel that way now.
Everything was different, and it was all going to keep on being different for probably the rest of my life.
That was a hard, hard pill to swallow and accept. I’d always been pretty good about going with the flow. When you fell out of a moving car, you tucked, rolled, and hoped you didn’t get hit by another car. But I was starting to think that was only the case when I knew in advance that flow was changing and when I picked the direction of it.
I was not going to have a shit attack. I was going to handle this future with dignity and grace. Or something like that.
In the meantime, I’d been sitting on the sofa, staring out the windows of the cabin, waiting. And coughing. It had been two long hours of mostly silence.
The only thing Alexander had said in a long time was “next door” and “yes” after I’d asked him where he was going and if I could go with him while he’d headed for the door after we’d eaten in silence.
I’d followed, figuring I needed to stretch my legs and do more than be a human backpack. The day had gotten a lot cooler, I’d noticed as I trailed behind him while he went the long way around the back again before turning toward the road. I took my time, wondering what he was up to.
But he’d surprised the hell out of me for about the hundredth time when he’d gone for the house where we’d talked to the elderly couple. The ATV was gone, but the tree was still in the same spot it had been in. Alexander had gone straight for the big trunk in the yard, circling around it carefully, like he was watching his steps. Eventually, he took a long look at our surroundings—ignoring me while he did it—and like it was nothing, put both hands on a random spot on the bark, then pushed the tree over to the side in less than two seconds. It might have even been faster than that.
That thing had to weigh… a lot. Hundreds of pounds? It was a big fucking tree, and he’d pushed it over like it was a twig.
I’d wanted to ask him why he didn’t lift it, but as I watched, it made sense. If it looked like it had been dragged, there would be less questions than if it was carried. How the hell would you explain that without a crane? Then I’d kept watching as he picked up a few massive branches and dropped them beside the downed trunk in the middle of the yard. I picked up a couple too but got out of breath almost immediately, then got dizzy, and that’s when he’d looked over, gave me dirty look number three hundred and fifty, and I stopped.
When he must have been content with his good deed, I’d followed him back to the house, thinking a lot about stuff. Especially the question I’d dropped on him that had suddenly turned his mute button on. When I wasn’t pondering that, I was trying not to dread the future. The danger we were still in.
The danger I was going to be in until… who the hell knew when.
It felt so real now when before it had been more like E.coli. Something I knew could happen, that could kill me, but chances were, it never would.
Realistically, there wasn’t a whole lot to be worried over. He could hear who was coming, smell them too. If someone approached that wasn’t trusted, he would know well in advance, and we’d be able to get away.
What he had just done with that tree…
Maybe he wasn’t back to 100 percent, but he was closer than he’d been a month ago.
And I couldn’t stop thinking about that when we got back to the house. All that power, that strength. Could you imagine?
I ended up playing solitaire a little while with a deck of cards that were sitting on the coffee table but kept glancing out the window. After that, I set up shop where I currently was, on the couch, with a magazine. I’d poked around the cabin while Alexander had pretended to rest on the biggest of the two couches.