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“You read my mind.” I offered her my cup that said: Everything is Energy -Einstein on it.
Bahar started for the door but halted before the threshold. I’d thought William’s tongue in Bonnie’s mouth had distracted her, but it was me she swiveled around to look at. “What would you change if you could go back, though? In your own life, I mean? If there’d be no ripple or butterfly effect thing? No consequences?”
I hated my first thought was of Carter Dominick. To thinking about the man I wanted to “poke” me a hundred times over and then some.
The truth softly left my lips as I revealed, “I’d wish my path never crossed with someone.” I wish someone else saved me the day of the embassy bombing.
She tipped her head, studying me as if expecting me to explain. But how could I tell her about Carter without sounding off my rocker? How would I boil down all the feelings I didn’t understand into the sum of a few words?
What if I hadn’t met him in the way I had? What if he hadn’t saved my life, and then we hadn’t shared a few moments between then and now that had me questioning so many things? Things like the palpable energy that flowed between us when we were within arm’s reach of each other. I refused to believe the connection I felt toward him, as if it’d been powered by the sun itself, was all in my head.
So, yeah, I wished we’d never met that day. Because then I wouldn’t compare every man I’d met since then to him.
Mom always said to be with a man who gave you security, not butterflies. To which I’d responded, “Why can’t he give me both? Why not be with someone who makes me feel like I can fly, but then know he’ll be there to catch me if the wind abandons my sails?”
And, of course, thinking about my dad, she’d bluntly told me, “Because he’ll be the one to put a hole in your sail.”
After meeting a man who I was sure could make me feel both ways, how could I resort to wanting less, though? Once given a taste of something so strong, so elite at the highest of levels, how do you settle for anyone who doesn’t make you feel that way?
“What about you? What would you change?” I finally brought myself back to the present after dipping into that very place I’d wanted to avoid.
“Easy.” She sighed. “I’d have become a vet instead.”
Ah, now I get why you still like Pierce’s dog despite his nonstop barking and his much more annoying owner.
Bahar stepped through the doorway just as I called out, “Wait. I, um. I gave you the wrong answer.”
Bahar peeked her head back in. “And it is?”
“Save Rebecca, that’s what I should’ve said.” I gulped. “I would save her life.”
She had no clue who I was talking about, but she gave me a little nod, then left.
I spun back around toward my desk and bumped into my laptop, accidentally hitting a few buttons. Shoving my glasses higher up on my nose, I leaned in at the realization that—holy shit.
I stood in shock, the cord from the headphones snapping free from my phone, and I knocked my chair back. “Oh my God.”
I read the slight change to the formula I’d been working on that my bump with the keyboard had caused. Then I read it three more times. This is bad. Horrible. The opposite of what I had wanted to create. How’d I . . .?
“William!” I faced the glass wall and began waving my arms, trying to get his attention.
He unglued his lips from Bonnie and looked over at me, a rush of red flying up his face in embarrassment. Brain cells depleted from that kiss, apparently. He smoothed down his white lab coat before rounding the glass divider to enter the office he shared with us. “What is it?”
“I think I accidentally?—”
Red lights started flashing, and siren-like wails echoed all around us. William shifted behind me, and it took me a second to lock on to the problem.
Two masked men with rifles were in the lab next door. Bonnie shot her hands up in surrender while lowering to her knees. William, the coward, moved farther behind me, using me as a shield.
Oh my God. “They’re on their way to us. We need to get out of here.” I whirled around to face him. “Come on.” But then I remembered my computer, and what I’d discovered before the sirens, so I committed the formula to memory before deleting it.
“Down. Now. On your hands and knees,” a man wearing all black military-looking clothes ordered. Only his eyes were visible, but there was black paint around the circumference of his lids. He had an accent—but at this lab, so did thirty-three people representing eleven other countries aside from the U.S.—and I couldn’t recognize where this guy was from.
William lifted his palms. “Please don’t kill me.”
The man nudged his rifle in the air, a command to walk toward the door.
“What do you want?” I asked as I finally lifted my hands, following William while trying to come up with a plan. We were in the office, not the lab, so I couldn’t pull a MacGyver and knock the bastards out with an explosion.
