Page 25 of Avelina

“Are you sure?” I asked.

He paused, then nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “That looked like consent to me. What do I do first?”

“First you have to picture what you want. This will guide the flow of Protection from your reservoir. The Protection fragment works to halt or reverse forces of change and decay. The body has a stable state that it prefers to be in, and Protection forces that state into existence or prevents it from diverging in the first place. It is the complementary fragment to my own, which is a force of change.”

“You and I are opposites?”

“Not exactly. The Absorption fragment is the true opposite of Protection. They repel each other. Protection and Evocation are complementary and work together. You also have access to Connection, which will let you sense what you need to heal. I’m honestly not sure how this will work, since I’ve never heard of anyone having both greater Connection and greater Protection.” He grimaced for a moment, then said, “Not naturally, anyway.”

“How do you know I have this greater Protection thingy?” I asked, gliding past the last comment.

“Because I have lesser Protection, and I know what it feels like. I can sense it in you, in fact. It gives us a sort of resonance, but lesser Protection doesn’t speed up the healing process at all. It only ensures that it meanders in the correct direction. Your face was burned badly enough that it would have left scars on most people, but today you’re healed.”

“That’s what you meant when you said that you were protected?”

He nodded. “Yes. Protection helps you heal, and it shields you from needing to be healed in the first place.”

“Okay, so I have to what? Imagine healing you?”

“Not exactly. Imagine that I’m already healed. Picture the end result, then direct your fragment to work toward that result. You won’t have to know how, it will just happen, the way that your body knows how to use the air when you breathe.”

He took my hand and I felt him immediately. The pain above his eye was sharp, and I felt it as if it were my own. Then, without warning, the memory of his night flashed through me like a shiver, showing me what he had been trying to hide.

The pain above his eye was difficult to ignore, but he’d been scratched many times before and always overcame it. He knew how to endure pain, but this time it felt different. The dragon’s talon had dug far too deep into him, and its poison had gotten into his blood. His body was spending too much effort to purge it from his system for him to also prevent his skin from dissolving and sloughing away.

He had been worrying about it but not saying anything. He hadn’t slept all night. He’d spent a few hours listening to me breathe and feeling an annoying jealousy of Rogue. Then he got up, gaped at my legs and half-uncovered bare ass, laid a blanket on me, and climbed up to the roof. He was exhausted. His fatigue had left his mental defenses weakened, allowing me to get all of that from him in a split second.

I sucked in a breath and yanked my hand away. The pain and memory vanished. I stared at him in shock. I had felt far more than his emotions this time. I had seen right into his mind and spied on his memories. I had physically felt his pain. I lifted a hand to my forehead, rubbing at the tingling skin above my own eye.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.

Aaron swallowed. “It’s not your job to solve all of my problems,” he said.

I nodded, though his response was infuriating, despite me having already had that same thought. I ground my teeth, wondering if he had picked that phrase out of my brain in the same way I had just seen his memories. If so, had he also heard me debating the ethics of sleeping with him? I felt my face flush.

“But if I can help you,” I said, “there’s no reason not to, and every reason to do it. I need your help to get home just as much as you need mine. Probably more so, and you can’t help me if you’re exhausted and blind in one eye.”

He didn’t respond but took a big breath as if trying to calm himself.

“Can I try again?” I asked. “I didn’t even get to the healing part.”

He nodded. This time I took his hand, bracing myself for the pain. It stabbed me again and I winced but held on. The skin around the wound burned, and the vision in his right eye was blurry. The wound itself was numb, which made me worry that it might be too late.

I marveled at how Aaron already felt familiar to me after less than a day. So familiar, in fact, that I was comfortable lecturing him like a child. Maybe that was the resonance that he had been talking about. I had to ask myself if I was actually interested or if this was just a coincidental relationship between us. I had just met him yesterday, and now I was going to touch him in a way that felt like sex?

Yep, I thought, and despite his literal groaning at the prospect, he was voluntarily holding my hand, so he couldn’t have been too opposed.

I glanced over at Rogue. He had rolled over to face the door, as if he were too embarrassed to watch. I took a big breath and delved in deeper. He was more apprehensive than scared, but he was also more open to me than he had been yesterday. The grief was still there, but our conversation about his family had helped. He wasn’t quite as alone as he had been.

That was rather heartwarming, and I smiled. He smiled, too, and I realized, with amazement, that Connection was, indeed, a two-way street. I felt him, and he felt me. We had created a space there together, where we were inside each other’s most private joy, fear, and shame. It was frighteningly intimate.

Aaron was filled with a yearning I knew well. It wasn’t just a physical need but a deep desire to be connected, a desire which, when unmet, humiliates you with its deprivation. I went through an entire childhood with no friends. In college, Drew had been my sole social support until she ended things. I met Marti at a bar in Trinidad the night after my breakup, and I’d tried to drink myself to death. Marti says she drove me home, but I don’t remember any of it. She probably saved my life. Even more incredible, she became my first female friend.

Aaron breathed in and out, and I did the same. His scent filled my nose and then permeated the rest of me, seeping into the dark corners that I preferred to keep hidden from everyone, even myself.

There was something else there, too, that was similar to what I had previously experienced as heat, except this time my mind interpreted it as a scent. It smelled like him but more vivid.

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