Chapter Thirty-Six
Yun
My entire body felt overly sensitive, and my headache had refused to go away no matter what I did. I drank water, I pressed ice against my eyelids, but nothing helped.
“You should sleep more,” Shear said, sitting on the bed beside me. He hadn’t left me since I’d woken, plastered to my side.
Kenyon had checked me over as well, but it seemed as though Shear was less willing to give me any space.
“You don’t have to stay here,” I said.
“Yes, I do.”
I rolled over to look at him, noting that he was more casually dressed than usual. Sure, he’d stripped down before, but seeing him in pajamas was strange. He had on a pair of bottoms made of a soft black fabric, and no shirt.
He wasn’t as built as the others, his body more lean, but like all espers he still had a nice physique. He had an ereader in his hands, and the back light cast a yellow glow on his face.
He was strange, too pretty to be handsome, and perhaps with features too ethereal to even be considered pretty. His black hair was tied back, and it made me wonder what it would look like if it were down.
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “You don’t have to babysit me. I’m just going to rest for today, anyway.”
He didn’t move his gaze from the reader while he spoke. “I know you’re fine.”
“So why are you doing this?”
“Because I can’t not be here.” His voice was soft, like he hated having to say that aloud. “I tried to leave, but I keep thinking that if I turn my back, Corsa will find another way to link with you.” A tremble started in his voice, one totally at odds with the man I’d grown used to.
I pushed myself up to sitting so I could look him in the face. “You aren’t at fault for this, you know that, right?”
His tensed jaw suggested he didn’t agree. “I should have realized it was happening sooner. You’ve been with us for months now, and that entire time, I didn’t know.”
“No one knew. I didn’t even know.”
“But I should have. This is my skill set, my expertise. I should have realized it and stopped it sooner. Even when I figured it out, I couldn’t do anything about it.
” He still kept his focus on the ereader, despite it being pointless.
Everything in his response said he paid all his attention to the conversation.
Then again, given both what I’d seen of him and what I’d heard about him, he rarely seemed to experience much in the way of emotions. Someone who didn’t experience that themselves probably didn’t have a lot of coping strategies when they had to confront them.
The way he sat there, the way he seemed to barely breathe, it all went to show just how unsettled he truly was.
Which was strange. I was used to him being solid, unreacting even as the others behaved like kindergarteners when their teacher left the room. Seeing him thrown now was almost endearing, even if it had no right to be.
I slid my leg over him, then rested in his lap. It forced him to hold the ereader slightly closer to him, but even still, he refused to look at me.
“You’re the reason we figured it out,” I said.
“Not soon enough.”
“Sooner than it would have been without you.” I cocked up an eyebrow.
Somehow, his upset helped me to deal with my own feelings about the whole thing.
The idea that he—Corsa, as I had now discovered—had actually been in my mind terrified me.
It was a leash I hadn’t known was there, one that made me sick.
Focusing on Shear instead helped, made me feel as though there was something I could do.
When he refused to look at me, I plucked the ereader from his grasp and tossed it onto the bed. It gave him nothing to use to ignore me, so he offered me a glare worthy of a teenage girl.
“What?” he asked.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t do enough. I should have been better.”
A part of me heard Mr. Yorn in the back of my head, the way he’d talked about his subjects, including Shear.
I set my hands on his cheeks and leaned in, pressing my forehead to his. “You did enough.”
“It didn’t work.”
“That doesn’t mean you didn’t do enough. I wouldn’t have known it was real, that anything was going on, if not for you. You risked yourself, and that helped me. Just because something didn’t work doesn’t mean you didn’t do enough.”
He breathed a long, drawn-out sigh. His breath tasted of mint, and it made me realize…I hadn’t done this as much with him.
He’d never really pushed, never tried to get more, so I hadn’t realized how little focus I’d spent on him.
I also recalled what had happened between him and Ingram. The way he’d gone down on Ingram suggested they’d done that before.
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“You’re not supposed to read my mind.”
“I try not to, and when I catch stray thoughts, I try to ignore them. That isn’t how it is, though, between Ingram and myself.”
“So you’ve never done that before?”
“I didn’t say that. You know the needs Ingram has. There have been times when I have helped him with those.”
“Helped him?”
He nodded, then sighed. “It was a safe exploration, I suppose, and I never minded it. We weren’t romantic, though.”
“You just didn’t seem as interested in me that way, so I thought maybe I wasn’t your type. Maybe your type has a penis?”
He stared at me like he’d just realized I might be stupid, then let out a soft chuckle.
It caused me to freeze, the sound unusual from him.
It wasn’t loud, didn’t last long, but it felt like a rare glimpse of the real him, the one beneath all he’d been through, beneath whatever Mr. Yorn had done to him.
It made me wonder what exactly had happened to him, who he might have been without Obsidian. Would it have been someone who laughed like this?
“I don’t know if I have a type, but penis or not, it hasn’t really mattered to me. Sex can be a strange thing for me as the more contact I have, the harder it is to block out thoughts.”
“That seems nice,” I said. “If I knew exactly what people were thinking, it’d be easier to trust them. I’d know they were going to screw me over before they did it.”
He shook his head. “There were times when I’d come to realize in the middle that the person saw me as a freak, as something to try out for fun. It meant it was easier to simply not indulge in that.”
“But Ingram’s different?”
“Ingram wants what he wants and he doesn’t hide it, at least not when it comes to sex.
” He paused, then added, voice softening, “You’re also different.
” At my lifted eyebrow, he continued. “You’ve been far from honest about your past, but you are honest about your feelings.
You never pretended to like me just to gain my favor.
You never hide your distaste. People are so often two-faced, but with you, I know what you think of me at all times without reading your mind.
I have only ever experienced that with Carter, Kenyon and Ingram.
It feels…” He hesitated, searching for the right word.
He seemed unhappy with his choice but finally settled on, “Nice.”
I stared at him, our little conversation so unexpected that I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d focused mostly on my own fear, my own reservations. Shear’s words reminded me that it wasn’t just me.
Carter felt the need to control everything, to keep his guard up because he expected others to betray him. Kenyon spent his life trying to keep people who didn’t value their own lives alive. Ingram had that hunger inside of him, one that never seemed sated.
And Shear? He was constantly bombarded with people’s real feelings, their real thoughts, and understood exactly how little he could trust others. On top of that, there was the entire Obsidian thing—
“Stop staring at me like that,” Shear said.
It made me lean in and press my lips to his, offering a sweet kiss. He responded, parting his lips, letting me delve into the heat of his mouth. The kiss didn’t stay sweet, but that was okay.
It was a wonderful distraction that I think we both needed, so I gave myself over to it. Sometimes the only thing that got people through this mess was a moment of pleasure between disasters.