BAY #18
Thankfully Uncle Van doesn’t let it go much further. He gathers us, thanks the owner and the officers, and ushers us to the car.
We pile into the back, still buzzing with leftover panic.
Everyone starts talking at once, reliving every second of it, and Alex presses himself against me as if he’s afraid I might vanish if he lets go.
The entire drive he stays close, our shoulders touching, his knee brushing mine every time the car turns.
Van asks Alex if he wants to call his dad, but Alex shakes his head right away. He says it would only make his dad panic and drop everything to rush here, and that wouldn’t help.
Once we get home Van pulls me aside.
He explains that Gabriel has a gift, something that lets him sense things a moment before they happen, especially if they’re dangerous or carry strong emotions.
Two seconds, sometimes three, just enough time to react.
It doesn’t happen all the time, not for everything, not for words or normal moments, only spikes of danger or discomfort.
I listen quietly. Snow has something similar, although as I’ve said, it never seems to work on me, at least not from the moment he predicted the car accident after which I was born. And those black streaks I see…? We are quite a family.
At dinner Alex stays by my side the whole time while lively conversations unfold with Van, Uncle Zenith, and the rest, but I don’t comment on anything, and Alex does not say much either.
He already knows about Snow’s talent from me, so maybe he has accepted that strange things and strange abilities run in my family.
My hands hurt badly, and it looks like part of my vacation may be ruined because of it.
But Alex is here, offering his help.
That same evening, since the four of us share one room, Alex asks if I need help changing and washing up, but of course I refuse, because I would rather deal with soaked bandages than let anyone see me naked, that is absolutely out of the question.
I have become almost obsessive about keeping my body covered all the way down to my wrists. I never want anyone to look at me without clothes on, it only reminds me of horror, of feeling weak, of losing something precious.
When we finally turn off the lights, Veyron and Rain twist around in their beds for a while, whispering excitedly about everything that happened at the ice cream shop.
They keep asking how I managed to push the tire away, and Veyron insists that I must have done some kind of secret alpha training I never told them about.
Rain tries to reenact the moment in the dark, mumbling and kicking his feet against the mattress. I tell them both to calm down, to stop overthinking it, to go to sleep because we are waking up early tomorrow.
Veyron still giggles under his breath, clearly thrilled, and he keeps praising me in a way that makes me very uncomfortable, but eventually I manage to shut him down, urging him to try to sleep.
At last, they both quiet down, and within minutes I hear their breathing deepen and settle into the steady rhythm of sleep.
But I stay awake. The silence in the room feels heavier than usual, broken only by the faint tapping of branches against the window and the soft hum of the ceiling fan.
I stare at the wavering strips of moonlight drifting across the ceiling, unable to relax.
Every time I blink, I see a flash of that tire rolling toward us, the blurred shape of the table skidding, the sudden weight against my hands when I stopped it.
Finally, I push the flood of thoughts aside and turn onto my side, hoping exhaustion will drag me under, when I suddenly hear a soft rustle from Alex’s bed.
There is the quiet creaking of springs, the faint thump of a small foot touching the floor. I hold my breath, listening carefully, wondering if one of the boys woke up, but their breathing stays undisturbed.
Then I hear a subtle scrape, something like a palm brushing across the floor. In the dark, Alex moves on all fours, crawling low, pausing once when Rain sighs in his sleep. Alex waits, frozen, until Rain rolls onto his side and quiets again. Only then does Alex push forward.
A jolt of panic spikes through me the moment I feel the mattress dip under his weight. His small body slides beneath the blanket and settles beside me.
"What are you doing," I whisper, my voice tight. "If my uncle sees you here our stay at the summer house is going to end real fast," I mumble quietly so I do not wake Veyron and Rain.
"I’ll leave in a minute," Alex whispers, trying to calm me as his small hands move across the sheet, searching for me until they reach my shoulder. I feel the light touch of his fingers drift down toward my wrist, careful and slow, avoiding the bandages.
"You saved my life today, Bay. I wanted to thank you, the whole day was so chaotic there was never a chance," he murmurs, and his voice breaks like he has been holding something in since the moment the tire stopped.
Then I feel his face move closer to mine in the dark, and I tense up with fear, pressure, excitement, something frantic inside me I am not ready to look at, and then it happens for the first time.
Alex’s soft, warm lips brush against mine for just a brief second.
I immediately turn my head away, filled with absolute unworthiness crashing over me. Not me, not the filthy, disgusting me… how could someone like Alex want to kiss me?
"You don’t need to thank me, Alex. I will always, always protect you," I whisper with a trembling voice, and as I say it I feel the weight of it land somewhere deep inside me, like I’m giving him a promise, but also making one to myself, a promise that settles deep inside me forever.
Alex exhales softly.
"Don’t say stupid things, Bay. Why wouldn’t I thank you? You did something heroic." Then he raises his phone and the screen lights up the dark. "Look. You are already on the news."
I freeze as I stare at the display. The local outlets really are showing the camera recording.
"Heroic teenager saves group of kids," the headline says.
My name is not mentioned. I feel a wave of relief wash through me when I see the angle of the footage, filmed from the side, my back partly turned. Even the commenters seem unsure of what they are looking at.
"Wow, how did he do that?"
"No way."
"Physics says nope."
"That wheel had too much momentum."
"Dude, that thing should have crushed him."
One comment even does the math, pointing out that a wheel like that can carry anywhere from several to more than ten thousand joules of kinetic energy, which basically rules out the possibility of a human stopping it without severe injuries, broken bones, being crushed, or being thrown across the ground, and so on.
More people replied underneath with arguments about impact force, deceleration, the angle of collision, all of them trying to understand something that I myself cannot explain.
Alex watches me, the screen’s glow caught in his eyes.
"How did you do it, Bay? It really seems impossible."
"You’re not considering adrenaline," I say quietly.
"Adrenaline or not, that’s basic physics. I’m good at math and the calculations that guy posted make sense. It’s like being hit by a small car."
"I don’t have an answer for you, Alex. It was adrenaline. I wanted to save you, that was what mattered to me. That’s what I focused on."
The bright rectangle of the screen reflects in Alex’s beautiful eyes, and they stay fixed on my face.
"You performed a miracle for me, Bay. I’ll always owe you for that."
He leans in again, but I reach out and touch his lips gently with my fingers, stopping him.
"Alex, I think you should go back to your bed," my voice comes out strangely tight, like something is closing around my throat, and honestly that’s exactly how it feels.
Silence fills the room for a moment. Alex nods slowly, and I know he feels rejected.
"Sure," he whispers.
He turns off the phone and darkness settles again.
I feel the blanket lift when he slides off my bed, then the soft shuffle of his knees against the floor as he crawls back across the room. The springs on his mattress creak softly when he climbs in, and for a moment everything grows still.
I lie there for a long time, staring at the drifting shadows on the ceiling, listening to the wind nudging the branches outside the window.
I can’t explain what happened today, not even to myself. Maybe I don’t want an explanation? I don’t need another dilemma weighing me down. I squeeze my eyes shut and eventually I manage to fall asleep.
◆◆◆
The next days of my stay with Alex at Uncle Van’s place pass fairly quietly, my hands heal after five days, and the cuts and scratches weren’t deep enough to keep me from enjoying the vacation activities.
At the very end of the stay, the day before we leave, Uncle Timothy arrives, he's Veyron’s father, and is supposed to drive him home.
I always liked him, because he has this positive energy and talks to us, taking us seriously, like we’re adults.
He is the youngest brother of my father, who is the oldest of the three siblings.
Timothy has always been a kind of joker and clown at family gatherings, and Veyron inherited part of that cheerful nature.
Timothy and Van sit together for a long time, talking animatedly, and Uncle Zenith sets up a barbecue, the atmosphere is warm and easy, and at some point the conversation drifts to the fact that Uncle Van used to do a bit of arm wrestling when he was young.
Since Timothy is fifteen years younger than him, he probably feels confident enough to challenge Uncle Van, sixty-two, to a match.
Of course Alex, me, my brothers and cousins gather around them in an excited circle as they sit down for the match.
Timothy is pretty massively built, just like my father, and he clearly thinks he has a chance, I see it in his face, but it doesn’t take Van long to pin his arm with a kind of dramatic flair, he clearly knows a lot about technique.