Chapter Seven #3
Had he finally loosened the mortar on that brick perimeter around her heart? What was she thinking? Whatever it was, the threads frayed, the ones that kept her from completely falling into the abyss of this foreign emotion she had kept at bay since the moment she laid eyes on him.
He sucked in a breath as his lips parted just enough for him to reply, but nothing came. He pulled away to the other side of the table, leaving Erica with the dizzying sensation of falling. The urge to let out a cry of protest when she felt his warmth completely withdraw was strong.
She caught herself and looked to see that Dominic’s focus was no longer on her, but on something in the crowd. A man emerged from the masses, slipping his way between two families in the middle of the street to make his way to her table.
Erica went cold at the approach of this mountain of a man with the stern, fixed look in his dark eyes.
She thought for sure he had come to pick a fight with Dominic.
Why else would they glare at one another so intensely?
The crazy thought entered her mind that if he did, she’d have to step up and stop them. Or at least try.
So lost in thought and the residual tingling sensations that Dominic had left in his wake, she totally missed the first part of the mumbled, less-than-civil conversation.
“Why can’t you take care of it?” Dominic growled in a tone that vibrated in her bones.
The man shot a glance toward Erica before he lowered his own voice so she could barely discern his reply over the noise of the crowd. Bewildered, she watched their lips moving as hardly any sound seemed to come out, though she was less than four feet away.
Suddenly, Dominic turned and gave Erica an apologetic look. “I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”
All she could do was nod. This had to be one of those times when Dominic was called on to help someone in Tolstone. She looked through the crowd, as if the person in distress would have been close by, but she saw only happy faces.
The two men weaved their way through the festivalgoers without another word.
Erica braced herself against the table and tried to reason through all she had just heard, seen, and felt.
This otherworldly awareness of drifting and sinking, flying and yet falling, scared and yet giddy out of her mind. How could one man affect her this way?
Erica watched Dominic walk away and stand at the mouth of one of the narrow one-way roads that led east toward Jade Lake.
Desperate to ease the pain of his departure, Erica grabbed her camera and brought it up to her face so she could zoom and get a better look at what was going on.
She couldn’t see who Dominic was talking to, but she knew they were not in a friendly discussion by the way his mouth formed harshly spoken words.
She zoomed further and watched as Dominic continued to rage at someone out of sight, though she couldn’t hear anything they said.
Other faces and blurry bodies moved in and out of her view, but those few glimpses of Dominic troubled her.
Whatever was going on, it couldn’t be good, and she wondered if Officer Spradley was anywhere close by in case of trouble.
In a split second, her finger developed a mind of its own and began snapping pictures whenever Dominic came into focus.
She had captured him when he was calm, and now she saw him at his worst, when he was furious.
It was kind of hot, in a weird sort of way.
He wasn’t just a mediator. He held some kind of authority in this town.
She still couldn’t understand how or why he should be called on to solve other people’s problems. If they were so helpless, then why was everyone so helpful toward her?
It didn’t make any sense how a network of people could be so dependent on one another, and yet still so generous.
But why should so much fall on Dominic’s shoulders?
He certainly didn’t deserve the stress, and if he didn’t like the job, then why didn’t he just tell everyone to fuck off?
Dominic’s face turned, and she captured something in two shutter flashes that made her almost drop the camera.
The zoom feature was so detailed that she could make out the fine hairs on his cheek and chin from across the square, but it caught something else.
His eyes. The ones that should have been a bright, vivid blue, had become golden and glowing, luminescent through the lens of her camera.
He didn’t see her, or at least, she didn’t think he did.
Erica slowly eased herself into her folding chair and lowered her camera into her lap.
Hitting a few buttons, she navigated back to the gallery menu to make sure that she wasn’t going crazy.
There, two bright yellow eyes glared up at her.
They made him look deadly, feral, wolfish even.
She had seen camera flares before, but none like this. He had been in the shadows, away from any sunlight that could reflect in his irises. Even if it was a flare, there was no way blue eyes could become golden like this from a raw photo.
Erica stared longer, and let those eyes burn into her memory.
She couldn’t think of any way to explain it, not with rational logic anyway.
In all her years studying photography, she had never come across something like this.
If this had nothing to do with lighting, then it had to be something Dominic had done.
She wanted to laugh. There was no way someone could change their own eye color.
She had heard about people with green eyes that sometimes looked like they had blue instead, or hazel eyes switching from brown to a dark green, under the right lighting, but never blue to gold.
Gold wasn’t even natural. Not in humans.
When she looked back at the alley, Dominic was gone, vanished in the crowd or down the street.
She wanted to shut her mind to this, pretend it never happened and delete the picture from her gallery, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
She had to know what this was, whether it was some weird light trick, or if this had anything to do with Dominic himself.
Trapped between the absurd and the inexplicable, Erica couldn’t believe that it did nothing to quell her feelings toward Dominic.
She still felt as if her soul had become fused with his without conscious effort.
All she knew was that her defenses weren’t strong enough anymore.
Dominic had blasted through it all with just a look, a whisper, the feel of his lips almost brushing her ear, and his genuineness.
Those small, simple things had snuck up on her in a moment of total weakness.
Erica couldn’t fall apart. She frantically tried to pick up the rubble and shove it all back in place before she lost herself completely to Dominic and those eyes.