Page 88 of Homebound
“You don’t trust me.” She shouldn't have felt hurt, but she did.
“Don’t assume,” he warned.
“You don’t,” she stubbornly repeated.
“I don’t trust you,” he agreed before adding, “but not in the way you think.”
“Is there any other way?”
“You over-analyze things. Your mind is this long winding road and I never know where it leads. You come to conclusions that blow my mind. Feeding you information is… counterproductive.”
“What? You don't want me to think?”
“There you go again. It isn’t what I said,” he sounded mildly frustrated. “Trust yourself, Gemma. Things are what they are.”
There was a meaning behind his words that eluded her. He was hinting at something raw and real, and his rolling purr was almost tender, almost… intimate.
Upset and filled with yearning for things that were never meant to be, Gemma switched the topic to a more pressing subject, “I saw Dr. Delano yesterday. He still treats Uncle Drexel.”
“Let’s hope his treatment methods have improved since I last experienced them,” Simon said, coolly sarcastic.
“He tried to interrogate me about aliens in our prison. He inspected Perali’s bodies at the morgue and he knows they weren’t killed by a human.”
“Unfortunate,” was all Simon said.
“Simon, I have to ask… When does your sentence run out?”
Slowly turning his head, he fixed her with his otherworldly eyes. “I wasn’t aware that I had a sentence, Gemma.”
“Why are you in prison?”
“Why is every prisoner? To keep us miscreants contained.”
“For what… crime?”
“For being an alien.”
Gemma’s huffed a breath. “You aren’t being serious. There are plenty of aliens on Earth, roaming free.”
“I’m a bad alien. I point and shoot at humans.”
Dr. Delano’s tale about a standoff between Rix and the City militants came immediately to mind.
“Did you… kill someone?”
“I didn’t check them for a pulse but when I shot they fell. And bled a lot.”
“Simon!”
“What?”
“It isn’t funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
Frustrated, she almost gave up asking. Almost.
“How come you ended up with Dr. Delano?”
