Harry looks at the scar on my knee, but I doubt he really sees it much. Aside from it being dark, he’s too engrossed in the story and anticipating what all of this will mean.
“I can’t believe Viktor is alive….” Harry’s voice is distant. It’s like he’s not even talking to me when he says this; his mind is somewhere else, in that dark, abysmal place where all shocking realizations go when first discovered.
I pull my pant leg back down and bring my knee back up to sit the way I was before.
“I think Viktor fed me his blood the first night I was there,” I say and it stings as badly as I thought it would. “I think I’ve been bonded to him and I hate myself for it.”
I hear Harry’s breath release as if he had been holding it in for a long time. The air is stiff with silence and regret.
“And I can’t let Isaac know,” I add, my voice softer and more deeply affected by my own words. It feels like tears are burning in my chest.
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what happened,” Harry says, looking over at me. “Really I think it depends on where the wound is and other stuff. Maybe the cut from the can caused an infection and it took longer to heal. You can’t really base your theory on that.” I can tell how unsure of his own explanation he is, but he’s doing his best to seek logic first rather than jump right into the worst case scenario.
“I’m not basing it only on that,” I say and his expression falls. “You know I’ve not been myself lately. Fainting spells. Weird suicidal mood swings like what I pulled with Nataša—that was insane, Harry!” I look at him fiercely for a moment. “And then the talking to myself—I think I’m going crazy. Just like Aramei, I think I’m starting to lose my mind and it scares me to death.”
Harry shakes his head harshly side to side and turns carefully around enough to face me so he can get his point across. “But you said that it was like fifty years or something before Aramei started losing her mind. For you it’s only been, what, like eight months since that happened?”
“Seven.”
He opens his hands, palms up. “Well then see?” he says. “I doubt he did that to you—and when was the last time you drank from any werewolf veins, huh?”
“I haven’t,” I admit.
“There’s something wrong with you, yes,” Harry says, putting his hands back on his knees, “but it’s likely more medical than anything else. You probably just need some iron pills and Thorazine.”
“Harry, that’s not funny.”
He forces the little grin away that tried to creep up at one corner of his mouth.
“I know,” he says, “but you can’t do this to yourself—Watch, you’ll go to the doctor tomorrow and they’ll have a perfectly logical diagnosis and then you’ll feel stupid that you ever let something like this get to you.”
I laugh under my breath, but find nothing about this actually amusing. “Well, I doubt they’ll diagnose me with anything illogical. Bloodbondicitis?” I roll my eyes.
“Okay,” Harry says, giving in to me a little, “maybe they can’t rule something like that out, but if they do diagnose you with something that makes perfect sense, then I think it’ll be safe to assume you don’t have anything worse to worry about.”
“Maybe so,” I say, still not convinced that any ‘logical diagnosis’ is possible anymore. “But what if, Harry?” I turn my gaze on him again, catching the glint of his eyes in the moonlight, the soft set of his jaw, the thickness of his eyebrows. “Let’s just pretend for a moment that Viktor did perform the Blood Bond with me, just like he did with Aramei—he wanted me as his mate bad enough to kidnap me—if he did it, I’d slowly lose my mind and know nothing of who I am, or who I wanted to be. I would become a mindless, unpredictable…thing…and—.” I stop abruptly, wishing that I could just choke back the words and the image of myself that they shaped in my mind.
Harry cups his hand atop my bended knee and pats it once. “Then Isaac would take care of you the way that Trajan takes care of Aramei,” he says with such finality and candor that for just a moment I’m able to see a brighter side to the whole thing. But the moment lasts only as long as it takes for the harsh reality of it all to flood my thoughts once more. The reality of being trapped in a body that can’t even bathe herself or understand simple, yet important things in life like shame and humility and inspiration.
“And maybe Isaac won’t be like his father,” I argue. “Already he’s nothing like his father, Harry. Trajan is cruel and only has a heart big enough for Aramei. He only loves Aramei. The world could burn down around him and as long as it was just him and Aramei left in it, he would be content.” Tears surface in the corners of my eyes, but still I manage to hold them back; the back of my throat and the spot between my eyes stings and itches and burns. “Maybe Isaac will love me less. Maybe he won’t love me at all. Maybe he’ll think of me as used, or tainted. He can never know about this, Harry.” My stare pierces through him at my side. “Do you understand? Isaac can never know.”
The tears break away and roll down my face, one trailing down the bridge of my nose. I reach up and wipe it away to relieve the itchiness it caused.
Harry scoots closer and wraps his arm around my back, grabbing my arm and pushing me to lay my head against his shoulder. “I don’t think you’re giving Isaac enough credit,” he says, rubbing his hand in a circular motion against the side of my upper arm. There is a long pause and then he says, “Adria, what scares you more? Losing your mind, or losing Isaac?”
I sniffle and raise my head. I had never thought of this before and for what feels like forever, I sit on the roof, finally staring up at the stars and I think about it. I think about how while growing up I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever loved at such a young age. My dad. My grandma. My mother. My sister. I think about what it really means to be loved, what it means to be able to love someone. I think about how often love has been taken away from me and how angry I am because of it.
“My mind,” I answer softly, gazing out in front of me at something that I don’t actually see. “I fear losing my mind more because the way I feel about someone else is the only thing in this world that I know I can control. I’ve accepted that I can’t make anyone love me. I couldn’t force my dad to stay. I could never make my mother understand that I loved her more than Jeff ever would and I couldn’t force my sister to love me more than Ashe.” I wipe all of my tears away stubbornly and I never look at Harry. “Even if Isaac ever stops loving me, I want to hold on to my right to love him for as long as I can.”
I’ve never opened up to anyone like this before. Not even Alex. Not even Isaac. I’ve never explored this part of my mind, until right now, in this moment with my best friend who seems to never let me down and always knows the right things to say.
I look up as headlights blur through the darkness at the end of my driveway and my demeanor changes quickly. I sniffle away the last of my tears and rub the tip of my finger underneath my eyes to wipe away any smeared mascara that might be there and I crawl out of this ridiculous, miserable moment that makes me feel exposed. And Harry understands that I don’t want to talk about love and control anymore, so he says nothing in response.
“You’re probably right, about the diagnosis,” I say, watching as Isaac’s Jeep—with a brand new windshield—drives past the mailbox.
“But none of it explains Genna,” I remind him.
“Yeah,” he says, “I admit that if anything really is ‘unexplained’, it’s that whole Genna Bishop thing—that freaked me out.”
Isaac’s headlights blink out after he kills the engine, leaving the front yard dark again and he gets out of the Jeep already knowing where I am. I hear his keys jangling just before he pushes them down in the front right pocket of his jeans. The motion light on the front porch flashes on as Isaac moves closer and he stands near the pool of silver light illuminating one half of Beverlee’s car parked out front. I wipe my face one more time, just in case.
He raises a hand and waves up at us casually. “Take your time, love,” he says from below. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”
Isaac has never even slightly showed jealousy towards Harry and that’s just something else that I love about him. It’s not that Isaac doesn’t have that typical ‘human’ territorial instinct—he proved that two weeks ago when a senior, Mason Bragg, was hitting on me at school right in front of Isaac and Isaac stepped between us, staring Mason down with a look that needed no words. But Harry can do anything he wants. He can hang all over me, hug me, lay his head in my lap—it doesn’t matter because Isaac knows Harry’s heart. He knows my heart.
“I’ll be down in a second,” I say, waving back at him.
Isaac starts to head up the porch steps, but he stops and looks back up at us. “Oh and Harry,” he says, “Daisy wanted me to remind you to…bring your thoughts with you—whatever that means.”
Harry laughs quietly.
“Thanks, man,” he says.
“No problem.” Isaac leaves it at that and disappears underneath the roof overhang.
Harry looks over at me and clarifies, rolling his eyes around a bit, “My lyric tablet—I’ve been accidently on purpose forgetting it for a week.”
He shrugs it off and comes back to the matter at hand. “Anyway, I want you to know that—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—I don’t think you’re completely crazy. Maybe there really was someone there named Genna.”
I snap around, surprised at Harry’s change of thought and letting his little joke about my mental stability slide altogether. “Why do you say that now?”
Harry reaches up and absently scratches the side of his nose, contemplating. “Just that you really do seem perfectly fine, except for the fainting stuff,” he says, “and it just seems weird, y’know?” He thinks about it a moment longer, his eyes knotted pensively. “Is that the first time you saw her,” he says, looking right at me, “in the library today?”
“No,” I answer softly, more to myself than to Harry because suddenly this puzzle just broke into several more pieces. “No, I’ve seen her since the day I started school.” All of the times I remember seeing her rushes through my head now like a slow-moving series of old photos on a projector screen. “Just about every day in Geometry class, like I told you,” I go on, “I’ve seen her on the bleachers in the gym. In the bathrooms. Harry, she was even at The Cove that night when Viktor came with Julia and my sister.”
Harry looks all the more investigative now. He rubs the side of his face before letting his hands dangle over the tops of his knees at the wrists.
Finally, he says, “Then if you’ve been seeing her since before this whole thing with Viktor, that’s proof right there that if she is just a figment of your imagination that your Blood Bond theory has nothing to do with it.”