There was nothing special that jumped from her skin to mine—no awareness of anything that would make her unique. She felt mortal, but she couldn’t be, because there’d be no reason Apollo would want me to guard a mortal college chick. Unless this was another warped form of punishment, and hell, that actually wouldn’t surprise me.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered.
Her voice broke through my thoughts. My gaze dropped to where my fingers curled around her slender wrist. The skin around my hand was turning white. Shit—I was hurting her. I dropped my hold as if her skin had scalded mine. Surprise flitted through me, but I had no idea if it was real or just wishful thinking that I hadn’t truly intended to harm her.
Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure what my intentions were anymore.
“What are you?” she asked, her nose scrunching as she spoke. “Other than a heart-stopping hot guy with obvious boundary issues and problems with anger management?”
I blinked at her. She thought I was a heart-stopping hot guy? Well, of course she did.
“God. Just my luck,” she went on, rubbing the skin around her wrist and eyeing me with more than just a hint of distrust. “Why do all the hot ones have to be such freaking D-bags?” She pushed up to her feet. Her eyes met mine as she stepped to the side, pressing against the wall. “What do you want?”
Seth, what do you want? Those words from the past were accompanied by angry, whiskey-colored brown eyes. I drew back so fast I was surprised I hadn’t given myself whiplash.
“You know what? I don’t want to know. It’s probably a good thing that I don’t. I’m just going to get my bag and keep on going. Okay? All right, sounds good to me.” She edged down the wall. “This is me leaving.”
An odd sense of déjà vu washed over me as she pushed past me—literally knocked her shoulder into mine—and snatched up her bag.
“Crazy asses,” she muttered under her breath. “I am a weirdo magnet.”
I turned as she hurried down the steps, away from me like I was the maniac people didn’t want to meet in a dark alley. And well, that wouldn’t be too far from the truth. Some would probably prefer to come face to face with a harpy instead of me.
At a set of doors, she stopped to look over her shoulder, and again, I was struck by the familiarity of those deep, dark-blue eyes, of the curve of a stubborn jaw and chin, and bow-shaped, pouty lips. From my vantage point, I could really see her now. If that oversized sweater weren’t hiding her ass, I bet it would match her heart-shaped face.
It was like taking two people I knew and mixing them together to form a brand-new person, and that was entirely unnerving.
Then she was gone, slipping out the doors, and I was left standing on the landing like a dickhead.
Seth, what do you want?
Everything and anything and nothing at all?
Yeah, that sounded about right. My hands tightened into fists. Closing my eyes, I tried to center myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been here before, but with someone else.
A crack of loud thunder from outside reverberated through the stairwell and echoed inside my skull. A storm was brewing, matching the warring emotions inside me.
What do you want?
My eyes flew open and the stairwell was tinted in amber. No, fuck no. I staggered back against the wall. It didn’t make sense, but godsdammit I had been here before.
Dammit.
I was going to commit god-slaughter on Apollo.
Too freaked out from the run-in with the kind of scary, yet extraordinarily hot, guy in the stairwell, I didn’t end up calling my granny before the start of Statistics. I shouldn’t have even bothered going to class, because when the fifty minutes had passed, it felt like I’d only just sat down and cracked open my notebook.
I’d taken about two sentences worth of notes and somehow ended up with a doodle of something that looked like a zombie in the margin of my page. Real effective note-taking skills right there.
Once outside the class, feeling like I’d somehow just gotten dumber rather than smarter, I checked in with my grandparents. Like I’d expected, they were totally aware of Mom’s feelings and were watching her closely. Granny told me not to worry, and while that was easier said than done, it did ease some of the stress. Mom had support. She wasn’t alone.
As I walked to my dorm, my thoughts coasted back to the stairwell in Russell Hall. Who was that guy, and why in the world had he asked what I was? Like there was some other option besides human? That had be the oddest question I’d ever been asked, and I’d been asked some peculiar crap.
God, I really knew how to attract some weirdos.
I had an elaborate history of them, starting with Bob. I’d never known his last name, which was probably a good thing, considering the whole weirdo magnet thing. But when I was a little girl, he’d been my world for one summer.
I’d spent most of my days at the lake that was hidden by the sad willows and the bright-yellow oak trees that butted up to my grandparents’ property. At that age, the lake had appeared the size of an ocean. And it was there that I’d met Bob.
He’d shown up while I’d been playing by the dirt-and-pebble shore one afternoon—an important afternoon to me. One of the girls at school had had a huge slumber party that night in celebration of school ending and the beginning of summer. I hadn’t been invited—I’d never been invited to any of those things— and I’d been sad and confused, because all I’d ever wanted was for the other kids to like me. And the boys didn’t like me until high school, but then they’d done so for all the wrong reasons.