Chapter 12 #2
“I saw you do that thing with the water in the prison,” I say. “You turned the shower water into… like, icicles or something. I haven’t seen any other fae do things like that. And sometimes you seem to know exactly what I’m thinking—”
“No.”
Still, that stare chills me, cold and steady.
My lashes flutter. “No?”
His breath loosens, almost like a sigh, and he watches the waterline sway over my chin. “I do not know your thoughts. Fae and humans are alike in feeling. Emotions surround them.”
I nod, because I know this. I figured it out that he can’t literally read my mind. I was being hyperbolic.
Samick sweeps his hand away from his chest, like he’s imitating something swelling off of him. “The stronger the emotion, the stronger I feel it.”
“You feel it,” I echo.
I guessed that, too. Well, more like I fleetingly suspected it.
But it’s crazy.
It was a crazy thought back then, and a crazier confession now.
He feels others’ emotions, and that’s just something my brain can’t fully process.
Samick’s cheek is stroked with shadows as he looks to the drawn curtains, but they aren’t even remotely interesting, so I suspect he just wants to look anywhere but me.
I consider him, the light dancing over the corner of his pink mouth and the angle of his jaw, chilling his complexion even more.
I see it in him.
Born of winter.
Sculpted from ice.
But utterly belonging to the dark.
Those shadows curl over him, like they’re trying to bring him closer.
“It must be hard to be around others,” I say after a moment too long. “Overstimulating, you know? Feeling people’s emotion-bubbles all the time. That would suck.”
My heart lurches—
Because something happens to his face.
It cracks.
The mask, the stone, fractures.
I swear, I swear on my fucking life, he smiles.
For the shortest moment, the quickest millisecond, the corner of his mouth lifts… then I blink, or time passes, or I’ve lost my mind.
Maybe I did imagine it.
Because now, staring at him, his face is once again chiselled from ice and marble, completely unfeeling, and the light dances over the green of his eyes, washing out the colour.
He looks more inhuman than ever before.
And for a long moment, water trickling with the passing seconds, he just looks at me.
My toes curl under the water.
“Bubbles,” he echoes, “is an accurate description.”
Relief ribbons through me.
My toes relax.
I dance my fingers against the pressure of the water. “Everyone has their own… bubble?”
“Most.”
My eyebrows meet in the middle. “Most?”
There is no smile on his face, no whisper of one, as he repeats, firm, “Most.”
He doesn’t explain, doesn’t elaborate.
And I don’t push it, no matter the curiosity nipping at my insides. Because this might be the most he’s spoken to me in all the time we’ve been stuck together.
It makes me wonder if he would have spoken to me more away from the unit. If prying ears weren’t around, would conversation have flowed easier between us over these cold months?
I guess even I crave conversation sometimes.
Usually, I’m the kind to hide away. To dip out of parties and nights out without a word of warning, just a half-hearted apology text I would send when I got home.
I even hid from Bee sometimes.
I love her, she’s my best friend, my rock—but I lived with her, so sometimes I did feel a bit of relief when she’d be out working at the club or be gone for a weekend visiting her family.
I can comfortably exist in silence.
But months of it?
I feel it now more than ever, in the relief, the softness of my muscles sinking into the bathwater.
I’ve been craving company.
Real company.
But if I was Samick, and I couldn’t get away from the swell of emotion bubbles all around me all the time, I would be a recluse.
Constantly hidden away from torment.
Then the thought strikes my brain and my gaze swerves to him, alert.
“How can you do it?” The question just spills out of my mouth, over my tongue, way too smoothly. I shouldn’t ask, and yet, “How can you kill people when you can feel them like that?”
Leathers slink as he angles away from me and pushes up from the tiled ledge. He moves for the cupboard doors under the sink, then drops to a knee.
I listen to the thuds and clatters of his rummaging—until he draws back with a handful of items balanced in one hand.
He tosses them at me.
I flinch, but they hit the water just above my belly.
Water splashes all over my face, the walls, the tiles.
And the moody look I spare him is risky.
But Samick slips back onto the ledge, hikes a knee, and looks right at me with a face of stone.
“Wash,” he says with a chin-gesture to the bottles and washcloth floating on the water. “And I do not find that I care.”
My face crumples into something ridiculous. “If you don’t care, why are you throwing bottles at me?”
“I do not care,” he echoes, firm, “about what others are feeling. I care nothing for their sorrow or fear.”
And yet, you got in a huff about the question and threw bottles at me.
I sigh and grab the nearest bottle.
Dandruff shampoo.
I don’t have dandruff, but I fiddle with the lid anyway.
For now, I snub the soap and the facecloth.
My mum always taught me to wash my body last—make sure to get all the shampoo and conditioner off my skin, so I don’t get breakouts.
Maybe she was right, maybe it’s bullshit.
But I do it her way.
“Your sadness now,” he says, and lures my furrowed gaze to him, “is for what?”
“My sadness?”
“Yes. You are sad now. Why?”
I run my tongue along the inside of my cheeks.
The annoyance buds in me—that he dares to even ask me that.
But why wouldn’t he?
My questions can sometimes be more invasive than ‘why are you sad?’
I give a dull-toned answer, “I just thought of my mum, that’s all.”
His eyes crack with frost. “She is alive?”
I shake my head. “Dead. Has been for years.”
If he gives a shit, he doesn’t show it.
He watches as I dunk myself underwater, shake and sway my hair around, then rise with a splash.
He says nothing as I lather the shampoo through my hair, then rinse, then repeat. Still, he watches me, even as I soap up the facecloth and scrub over every inch of my skin.
And I’m done.
I climb out of the tub with a splash.
Water strikes the tiles.
Samick hands me a towel from the rack—but as he does, he makes no effort to hide that he looks, that he runs his gaze over me, head to toe.
I snatch the towel and wrap it around myself.
He watches as I stalk for the towel rack and snatch up another. My hair is soaked to the core, spilling water too freely to the tiles.
So I attack it with the towel.
Samick starts to unzip the sides of his leathers.
He strips—right here in front of me.
I face the mirror, cheeks hot…
And an uncomfortable coiling sensation disturbs my gut—because I watch him in the reflection.
The first time I saw them, these fae creatures, they made me sick to my stomach. The off-ness of them made my bones feel icky. I saw their wrongness, their almost humanlike appearance distorted.
I still feel that way.
For all of them—but for Samick, that disgust is lessening. Maybe it’s gone completely.
His white blood doesn’t revolt me anymore; the points of his ears don’t cringe me anymore—and as he strips to the bare flesh, smooth and marble all over, no scars or blemishes in sight, just pure slinking muscle as he steps into the tub, I feel something in my belly that should be disgust… but isn’t.
Samick throws his gaze to me.
I look down at the sink.
Flames eat away at my cheeks, a shame that even reddens my freckled chest.
I wrap the towel around my head, let it soak up as much water from my hair as it can.
Samick doesn’t waste time relaxing like I did. I hear the splash first, then the rubbing of soap over a facecloth.
Keeping my back to him, I wander the bathroom.
It’s not large enough to be an exploration or anything, but there are enough cupboards to hold my interest just by rifling through.
It’s more entertainment than I’ve had in months.
I don’t waste the time I have.
Samick is already washing his body, so I get started on applying moisturiser all over me, and night cream for my face, and I comb out my hair, then clip my nails, and by the time I’m fingerpainting an avocado green mask to my face, Samick slices through the silence—
“How did your mother die?”
I look over my shoulder at him, his stare running over the back of my legs.
Then he lifts that stare—and his face turns to a blank canvas of surprise.
Because my face is green.
Guess there’s no avocado face masks in the dark fae world. Or he wasn’t paying attention, and didn’t see it coming.
Samick blinks, then drops his gaze to my fingertips, glazed in a glossy green sludge. His frown is unamused and full of judgement.
“It’s skincare,” I tell him, then stroke my fingers down my neck, covering more of my winter-beaten skin in the mask. “And she died of cancer.”
He looks at me. His stare is blank, unaffected.
He says nothing.
“Do you know what that is?” I pry.
There it is again.
The echo, the whisper, the fucking ghost of a smile. “Even plants get cancer.”
I lower my lashes and, with a roll of the jaw, turn back to face the mirror.
I’ve never heard such a fucking minimalization of cancer before—and it churns something ugly in me.
The water splashes gently behind me. “My mother died long ago, too. But I do not wallow.”
The ugly churning in my belly hesitates.
I rinse my hands, then I angle towards him.
Wrapping my arms around my breasts, I hold the towel in place.
Cloth tossed aside, stuck to the ledge, he runs his shampoo-slicked fingers through his hair.
“How’d she die?” I ask.
“A territory dispute.” He sinks into the water to rinse his hair free of blood, grime and suds. Then when he rises, water spilling down him, his face and hair are sparkling clean. “My father, too. I do not remember them.”
“So it’s easy for you to not care, right?”
His dull stare returns to me, fringed with long lashes and surrounded by a water-glistening face.