Page 76 of Lost Touch

Drew hadn’t left me here. Granted, he’d gone off somewhere with his laptop, and probably before dawn, but the laptop thing meant he wasn’t shifting to run and going all feral again, and weird didn’t equal abandonment.

Either way, I wouldn’t be going back to sleep—not after the jolt of adrenaline, not to mention how freaking unsettled I felt about the night before.

And the day to come. I’d been avoiding thinking about it as much as possible, and to be fair, I’d had a ton of other pressing concerns, but the prospect of confronting my mysterious past left me with a horrible, hard lump in my gut. Best-case scenario? I couldn’t even imagine. But the worst-case scenarios were too numerous to count.

After a shower and a change of clothes, I didn’t have anything to do but brood. Drew hadn’t come back. I couldn’t leave, because even if I hadn’t been worried about being picked up and arrested, I didn’t have any money, a room key, or a phone.

I fingered the little slip of paper that I’d transferred into my jeans pocket from yesterday’s clothes, and glanced sidelong at the landline phone sitting on the desk.

One phone number to call in the whole world, and a phone right there.

Before I could think about it too hard, I grabbed the handset and dialed.

Jared picked up on the second ring, although his “Yeah?” didn’t sound all that encouraging.

Shit, the sun had only been up for an hour. I grimaced.

“Jared? It’s me. Ash. I’m calling you from a hotel down south. I’m sorry. I forgot how early it is.”

“Shit, sorry,” he said, sounding a lot more awake and, touchingly, a lot less annoyed. “Everything okay? Did he hurt you? We can be there in a few hours. Don’t worry about anything, we’ll—”

“I’m fine! Drew’s fine, and no, he didn’t hurt me. I’m sorry to worry you.” Fuck, now I wished I could sink through the floor, hang up the phone, and never have called in the first place. “I’m not sure why I called you. Drew went out, and I had your phone number. I didn’t—” I swallowed hard, loud in the ringing silence. Jared waited patiently for me to get it together, and I couldn’t be any less than honest in the face of that kindness, no matter how pathetic the truth made me. “I wanted to hear someone’s voice, I guess.”

“I did say anytime. And my voice isn’t all that great, but you’re welcome to it.” I heard a faint rumble in the background, and Jared laughed. “Calder says he likes my voice, but you can borrow it.”

The open affection in his tone made my eyes sting. God, what would it be like to have a bond, a true bond, like theirs? Actually, now that I thought about it, I had no idea precisely what their relationship was, and finding out suddenly felt incredibly important.

“You and Calder, you’re mated, right? I mean, bonded? Is that a really nosy question? I take it back if it’s offensive.”

Jared laughed again, a low, mellow chuckle that gave me a good idea of why Calder liked his voice so much. “Not offensive. Ash, look. What we all went through—you can ask me anything you want, or say anything you want. You, and me, and Calder, and Drew, and that fairy Calder told me about. We’re the only people in the world who get it, unless there’re any other survivors out there who escaped before us, or who they let go. And honestly, I kind of doubt it.”

His grim tone matched my own pessimistic assessment. I’d thought about that too, and I also doubted it. Some nights at Drew’s house in Idaho, when I’d woken up screaming, it’d been because I’d been having nightmares about all the other people who must have died there.

And how close I’d come to being one of them.

“Yeah,” I managed. “Yeah, I feel that way too.”

“Okay, so you don’t ever need to apologize as long as you’re not, like, trying to kill me or something, and I know you’re not. It’s cool, dude. And to answer your question: Yeah, we have a mating bond. Knotted and bitten and everything.”

Which meant Jared had been knotted and bitten, since Calder couldn’t possibly have been more of an alpha.

A hundred other questions boiled up, fighting each other to see which would be the first to trip tactlessly off my tongue. Asking Jared how Calder’s knot felt in his ass had to be off-limits, right? No matter how many prisons we’d all escaped from together.

Instead, what came out was a question I hadn’t even realized I’d wanted an answer to.

“Can a mating bond make you love someone?”

“Hell no,” Jared said, without the slightest hesitation.

My grip on the phone went so tight the plastic creaked. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m really, really sure. It can make you want to please your mate, or feel reactions like you would if you loved someone. Like, if they’re hurt, you’ll be frantic to make them feel better, because the bond’s protecting itself. But it can’t create emotions that aren’t there. I mean, you can feel what your mate’s feeling, and that could fuck with you. But it can’t actually change the way you feel, deep-down. No magic can do that.”

Every word chipped away at the defenses I’d been building, trying to shore up my determination to keep Drew at arm’s length.

Well, emotionally, at any rate. Physically not so much. His cock wasn’t as long as my arm, even though it felt like it sometimes when he had it in me all the way.

If a mate bond couldn’t make you feel anything you didn’t actually feel, then a fake mate bond spell couldn’t either, right?

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