Veiled (Ada Palomino 1)

“Uh, yes.” I’m looking at Jay with wide eyes. “That’s true. I’m with him now.”

“Is he being okay to you?”

I laugh.

“It’s not funny, Ada. You don’t even know the guy.”

I roll my eyes with a sigh. “Yes, he’s being okay to me.”

Jay frowns and gestures to the bed in disbelief as if to say I think I’ve been more than okay.

I dismiss him with my hand. “Anyway,” I say quickly into the phone. “We were wondering if we could come over tonight.”

“Tonight?” she asks. “Where are you? He said you were in Seaside. If I didn’t hear from you soon I was going to start calling every single hotel.”

“We’re here but we’re leaving. I don’t want to go home quite yet,” I tell her this white lie.

“You know you have school next week.”

“I know. Don’t worry. So can we come say hi or not?”

“We?” she repeats.

“Well obviously Jay is with me.”

She exhales noisily. A pause. “Yes. Fine.”

Sheesh. What’s up her butt? “Okay, great. So we’ll see you in like four hours or something.”

“Text me when you’re near so I can run down and let you in the parking garage.”

“Will do.”

Pause.

“Perry?” I ask.

“Yeah?”

“Be nice,” I tell her. “Dex is rubbing off on you a bit too much.”

Then I hang up.

Jay raises his brows at me. “I get the distinct feeling they don’t like me.”

I shrug with one shoulder. “Eh. She’s had bad experiences with Jacobs and I’m pretty sure she’s against any guy I spend too much time with.”

“But she has no idea about . . .” he trails off and motions to the room.

“Oh hell no,” I tell him. “And she’s not going to know. She’s protective over me as it is.”

“So am I,” he reasons.

“She wouldn’t understand. I’ll always be fifteen years old to her, just a kid.”

“You’re still just a kid,” he says lightly, eyes dancing.

I glare at him. “Compared to someone who is ageless and immortal, yeah I guess I am.” I exhale and get up on my knees, about to slip the dress on. “So, when we get there, this can’t happen anymore.”

“Are you sure you’ll be able to control yourself?” he asks, cocking a brow.

“Hey,” I chide him.

“Because you came on to me pretty hard.” He gets on the bed on his knees and crawls toward me. “Temptress.”

“And you came on me pretty hard,” I counter. It was such an easy pun, I couldn’t pass it up.

“Wouldn’t mind doing it again before we hit the road,” he says, his voice taking on that throaty, thick quality that makes me want to surrender every cell to him.

He prowls over me, mouth going to my neck where he gently sucks.

I wrap my hands around his t-shirt and pull it off, reveling in the feel of his hard back muscles like I’ve been deprived for centuries.

We fall back into bed together, sighing softly.

Reality is put on hold for another hour.

***

We get to Seattle around four, the sun glinting off the high rises and the flat mat of Puget Sound. Perry and Dex live pretty much downtown, by the monorail tracks that have me singing The Simpsons monorail song every time I see them.

In fact, as we head down Fifth Avenue and I see the track, I start singing along.

Poor Jay has no idea what I’m doing.

I think I’m losing my mind, is what it is.

The whole drive I’ve been training myself to go back to thinking of Jay as I did before. Well that didn’t help because I was always being a pervy girl after him anyway. But going from having our hands all over each other, sharing secrets with our sex and souls, to now just a strictly Jacob and student scenario (as if that’s some common situation) is rough.

I want to touch him. I ache for it. I want to feel his body against mine. His lips. His breath. I want to keep him close, closer than ever. This is all so new for me, this transition from one reality (you can’t have him) to another (have all the sex) and back again is disorienting.

I’m like every girl in that head-over-heels infatuation stage where he’s all you eat, sleep, breathe, but it’s been cranked higher and higher—lust on meth—to the point where I feel like we’re fated for each other.

And fuck, as nuts as it sounds, we might be. Because otherwise there’s no way to explain it. I can just guess that having constant sex with someone immortal might warp your mind, body, and soul in ways you’ve never expected.

But if Jay is straining against this new rule (which, I remind myself, was my idea in order to ward off Perry’s wrath), he doesn’t show it. He’s back to a tight jaw, a harsh squint, as if nothing’s happened between us at all.

Or maybe it’s because the more time he spends with me, and the more human, the more emotional he becomes, the more that Silas Black peeks through. And the more we’re apart (aka, not inside me every moment), the more he reverts back to his old self.