Alex gapes at me. “You feel sorry for Nicholas?” He steps toward me, examining me closely. “Are you sure your head’s okay?”
I nod, touching my head. “It’s just that he’s branded with the mark… and from what little I can remember, it has a lot of control over you.”
“Yeah, but even when he’s not possessed by the mark, he’s an ass**le.”
“I know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I just feel… well, bad for him.” I scratch the back of my neck where the prickle is tickling. “I’m blaming it on the whole emotional thing. It confuses me sometimes.”
One side of his mouth lifts up to a half-smile. “I know.” He steps toward me, reducing the rest of the space between us. “But trust me when I say that you never, ever have to feel sorry for him.” His fingers tangle through my hair and before I can stop him, he pulls me in for a quick kiss, then moves away. “Now let’s get him back to the house.” He rubs his hands together, fully enjoying this. “I have big plans for him.”
The prickle continues to dance on my neck, little pointed shoes made of sharp metal. Poking. Poking. Poking. Tormenting me. My emotions are on overdrive and I start to wonder if this is really about feeling bad for Nicholas or feeling bad for Alex too because I’m keeping such a huge secret from him. But I can’t help it. Every time I open my mouth, it seems as though another problem arises.
Dizziness overcomes me again. “I think I’m going to be…” I drop to the ground like a bag of bricks. The last thing I see is the sunlight before the sky above me darkens like nighttime only the stars are missing.
***
I wake up in the bed at the beach house, surrounded by curtains flapping in the light sea breeze. The door is open and I can hear voices coming from the living room. My head feels a lot clearer, although my body a little achy, but I still manage to easily sit up and swing my feet over the edge of the bed.
“Feeling better?” Alex’s voice alarms me as he enters the room.
I stretch my arms out above my head and yawn. “Yeah, I think so. Although, I felt better the last time I passed out and still did it again about five minutes later.”
He crosses the room to sit down on the bed, nervous energy gently flowing off him. “You’re starting to worry me with all the times you blacked out.” He puts a hand on my forehead. “I’m worried that maybe… maybe I’m doing it somehow unintentionally.”
“What do you mean? Why would you being doing it?” My walls start to go back up. It’s not that I don’t trust Alex, but at the same time our past has been full of lies and I can’t help but be wary.
He puts his hand on my knee, his grip firm, subtly holding me in place. “I have to tell you something… about me.” More tension builds and I calculate the distance to the door. “Relax,” he says. “It’s not something that’s going to be life crushing, it’s just something… well, something I don’t tell a hell of a lot of people.”
I meet his penetrating gaze. “Then why are you telling me?”
“Because I want you to trust me and trust comes from telling stuff I might not want to tell.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
He takes a deep breath. “I have an ability that I haven’t told you about yet.” He pauses. “I can…” he withdraws his hand away from my leg to yank it through his brown hair, making it stick up in various directions, giving him that bedhead sexy look I love so much. “I can drain energy from people.”
I think of the energy flowing around inside me right now, connected to him through the star. “When you say people, do you mean everyone or just me?”
“Everyone for the most part. I can make them tired when I need to, but with you, it works a little bit different. I literally drain the energy from you.”
“Have you done it to me before?”
“Not that I know of or can remember,” he says. “Although, from the details you told me about what happened when you tried to kill me and you were possessed, it sounded like I might have. And now I’m starting to wonder with all this passing out that you keep doing, if maybe I’m unintentionally doing it to you.”
“I don’t think that’s what it is. What happened at the beach, at least the last time, felt like it came from my emotions. Sometimes it feels like they’re too much to bare so my body just sort of shuts down.” I could get angry that he didn’t tell me about his ability earlier, but I’d be a hypocrite since I’ve been keeping something from him too.
Avoiding his gaze, I summon the strength to finally put the inevitable out there. “I need to tell you something.” I force myself to meet his gaze. “About you and me… and it’s bad…. Something your father told me while I was at the Wastelands.” As soon as I mention his father, hatred mixed with vulnerability masks his face. “He told me that if you and I,” I motion between us repeatedly, stalling. “If we… if we feel too much for each other… fall in love then the star’s power will eventually fade and die and you and I… you and I will fade away and die right along with it.” Wow, that hurt more than I thought. A deep, tender ache begins to grow inside my chest, as if my heart is hollowing out.
He sits there for what feels like an eternity and I swear I actually can see when the lights go off in his eyes. “Well, okay then.” He gets to his feet.
“That’s all you have to say?” I follow after him as he strides out of the room, determined not to look at me. “After what I just told you.”
He pauses, turning to face me, eyes cold as the day we first met. “What do you want me to say?” he asks. “We can’t be near each other, so we won’t.”
“I never said we couldn’t be near each other. Just that we couldn’t feel…” The word was so hard to say, so foreign, never felt.
“Love,” he finishes for me. “It’s all the same.” With that, he walks away and this time I let him, wondering if he meant that when he was around me, he does feel love.
Chapter 6
I let Alex be for the next few hours, figuring it’s probably for the best. Let him be irritated with me. Still, it’s hard being in the same room with him, knowing that all those intense, passionate, in-the-heat-of-the-moments were going to be no more.