Page 35 of Caelum

EREN

“But what is it?”

I had to laugh as Eve stared down at the Dyson. She kept on pulsing the button making the turbo motor roar to life. Every time she did it, she jumped. She knew to anticipate the noise, but that didn’t prepare her.

Her innocence should have grown tiring, but instead it was amusing as all hell.

“It’s a vacuum,” I told her expectantly, wondering what shit she’d spew now.

“A vacuum?” She peered down at it. “It isn’t how I’d have imagined one. What does it do?”

“How did you imagine one?” I asked, surprised.

“A space entirely devoid of matter,” she recited blankly, her eyes spacing out as she repeated something she’d obviously memorized a long time ago.

My lips tightened as I thought about her childhood. I’d already come to see how voracious a reader Eve was. In three days, she’d devoured the Harry Potter series, for Christ’s sake. That was speed-reading to the max.

For someone like her, I couldn’t imagine how it had felt to be denied books. And although she didn’t speak often about the place that had been her home for so long, little tidbits would pop out from time to time.

Like the fact she knew the dictionary and the Bible verbatim because that was pretty much all she’d been allowed to read past a certain age.

A fucking disgrace considering how smart Eve was.

How many kids out there were like her? So smart, their potential unknown, yet denied a decent education so they couldn’t fulfil their destiny?

I had a shitty feeling that the cure for cancer was out there in a kid like Eve. Honestly though, that would be exactly what humanity deserved.

“This isn’t that kind of vacuum,” I explained after a few more seconds of watching her pulse the button. “This picks up dust and shit from the floor.”

“Like a broom?” she queried, her head tilting to the side as she pinned me with her quartz-like eyes.

“Yes, like a broom. But better.”

“I thought this was called a Hoover,” she said after few moments of watching me run the machine over her floor.

“Yeah, it is. Hoover is a brand, Eve.”

She hummed. “So, that’s its name?”

My lips curved. “Well, it’s not a name like Eve or Eren, but yeah. I guess. It’s like a title.”

“Now isn’t the time for an existential crisis, guys,” Nestor grumbled around a chocolate—the lucky fucker had foundbrigadeiroson the menu today and was on his tenth truffle. “Just vacuum the damn floor.”

She stuck out her tongue at him then took the machine from me and began to vacuum her space.

The noise had stopped making her jerk back, but I could tell she wasn’t comfortable with the device. I slumped back on the sofa in her room and watched her. It was surprisingly entertaining observing Eve.

I knew most of the guys liked watching the women around campus. Especially when they were training and wearing close to nothing. But Eve? She did nothing to attract that kind of attention, but she called to me like flowers did to a bee.

For someone who’d been trained, from birth, to be controlled and composed at all times, she was surprisingly sensual. She touched a lot. Running her fingers over something like she could learn it through absorption, almost like a child. But she wasn’t a child. Not at all.

After more time here, I wondered what she’d be like when she was well-read and capable of holding conversations that weren’t about the Bible. I was psyched to know just who she was.

Her memory was beyond incredible. I’d never seen anyone recount passages from the Bible the way she could. It reminded me of theHafiz—people who knew the Quran word for word after a lifetime’s study. And while it could be said that Eve previously had nothing elsetostudy, it wasn’t the same at all.

Eve wasn’t religious.

Crazy, but true.

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