AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The boy at the rail yelped and clapped his hand to the seat of his baggy jeans, looking around and glaring. When he spotted the rubber band, his attention went to a group of younger boys laughing at him. In two steps he'd reached the first one and grabbed his shirt front.
"Hey, pukeface," Reba called out, loudly enough to get his attention. When he looked toward her, she toggled another rubber band around her erect middle finger, which appeared to be some form of insult. He scowled, but when he noted the chair, whatever retaliation he'd had in mind apparently vanished. He settled for sneering "freak," before he disappeared down a corridor directing patrons to other attractions.
"So pay up, pretty boy," Reba said, giving him an expectant leer.
Dante settled against the wall, crossing his arms. "Why are you here? You are not looking at sea creatures and educational displays."
"I like it here, so Mom drops me off when she has errands to do. Gives her a break from looking at her dying daughter, and me a break from her looking at me like I'm already dead." Reba rolled her eyes. "God should plan better. If he's going to assign people to be parents, he needs to makes sure the ones who get terminal kids can hold it together until the funeral. Mom's shed enough tears for all the starving people in India. By the time I croak, she'll need drops to fake it for the funeral. The well's gotta be dry."
"That was a nice hit."
Dante glanced up to find Alexis had joined them. She was surveying Reba with her hands on her hips. "We could use you as a regular monitor on the tanks."
"Yeah, make the crippled kid feel useful. Gives me warm fuzzies, cue the sappy music. Piss off, no offense." Reba snorted and put her hands on the wheels of her chair. She couldn't make her exit though, because the odd stranger was holding one wheel fast. No matter how she tried to move it, it wasn't budging.
"She doesn't do that." Dante met her gaze squarely. "She does not lie to make you feel better. She means it."
"I've seen you here regularly of late," Alexis noted, as if Reba hadn't said anything offensive. "If you want a volunteer job, let me know. I think people would pay attention to you."
"Because I'm in a wheelchair."
"Because as long as you have rubber bands, they wouldn't like the consequences of ignoring you. I've watched you maneuver that thing. You'd probably do a better job at getting between a trouble-maker and the tank than someone on foot. After all, if you knock someone down, what are they going to do? Say a crippled girl whipped their ass?"
Reba stared up at her, and Alexis gave her a grin. Try as she might, she couldn't seem to hold on to sarcasm around the woman. She had a freakish urge to ask her for a hug. Unsettled, the teenager glanced at Dante. "I won a kiss off him, and he hasn't paid up. I think he's scared of you whipping his ass."
"With tongue or without?" Alexis didn't miss a beat.
"I let him off without. But if you're willing to negotiate that for my volunteer time . . ."
"Don't push your luck," Alexis chuckled, but she cocked her head at Dante. "The kiss is a fair request."
Reba had the odd feeling they were talking without words. Their eyes stayed locked as if they were the only ones in the room, and Alexis's lips parted as if he'd said something to her that any girl would like to hear. But then Reba got very distracted as Dante rose from the bench, laid his hands over hers on the wheelchair arms and leaned down. Hair as dark as a panther's coat spilled forward. He kept on his dark sunglasses, the ones that had made her think he was blind when she approached his bench. But blind people didn't look toward you, and he had. She sensed a peculiar heat from behind the lenses as he leaned in.
Now faced with the reality, Reba was gripped by a blink of absolute terror. She was going to mess this up, be a dork, oh-my-God he was really going to kiss her, and then he was. Lips firm and the right kind of hot and moist over hers, gentle pressure. No tongue, but definitely not some weak-assed kiss he'd give a kid. It shot heat to parts of her she'd been sure didn't have feeling.
It might have been over in three or four seconds, but when he straightened, her world was doing a slow spin. "Wow," she said, her throat thick.
"Yeah, I've had that reaction, too," Alexis smiled, but there was pain to it. God, Reba didn't want to make her jealous. Everybody should have a boyfriend like this. But Reba had a feeling it wasn't jealousy, particularly since Alexis said right after, "How would you feel about staying after hours and swimming with us and the manatees?"
Twenty-five
AFTER the Conservancy closed, Alexis apprised Bran of what they'd be doing with the girl in the wheelchair. It only took a little push to get him past worries about liability, and a call to Reba's mother reassured him that she was on board, thrilled her daughter had been offered the rare and usually prohibitively expensive chance to swim with manatees. That settled, Alexis locked up after Branson and then took Reba to a locker area to help her change into an extra swimsuit she had.
While Dante waited on them, he thought about his merangel. When he'd kissed the girl, he'd felt a wave of sadness from Alexis. He could read her thoughts. He just couldn't understand the emotions that went with them, damn it all.
When Reba returned in the swimsuit, a towel lying modestly over her thin legs, she rolled to the viewing tank and flattened her hand against the glass, watching the manatees swim past it. Dante slipped into the locker room, where Alexis was preparing the oxygen tank that Reba would wear so she could breathe underwater. He propped in the door silently, watching her. The brown tail of her hair curved over her shoulder, and her fingers moved competently, but those feelings had grown like the balloons he'd seen people purchase for their children, expanding in her mind, pushing out any other thought.
"Do you need a tank? You don't have to breathe, right? Not like us."
"No." He put his hands on her shoulders. "Alexis, what is it?"
"I feel her emotions, Dante. I always feel them. She wants to live so much. And she deserves to live. Look at her. What an amazing kid." She shook her head. "I have the filters, but for someone like that, I don't want to use them. I want to give them anything they want, because they're going to get so little, you know?"
Dante wrapped one of her curls around his hand, let it slide away and tumble down her back. "Her lips tasted like that fruit you were eating this morning."
"Orange. She probably has on an orange citrus lip gloss over that black lipstick she was wearing." With a rueful smile, Alexis straightened and stripped off her shirt. "Can you help me cross the straps?"
He wasn't sure what she meant until she'd unfastened the swimsuit straps and rethreaded them over her shoulders, crossing them and explaining where the hooks were. "I can't wear them straight for this. My wings will snag them."
"Aren't there rules about showing humans your true form?" He pulled his attention away from the pleasant display of her bosom she'd given him, suspecting now was not an appropriate time to let lust take the uppermost hand.
"Yeah. Pretty strict ones. But angels will appear to kids and pets, and despairing people, to give them comfort, though it's not really laid out in the rules. It's just known, like upping a dying person's morphine until they drift away in their sleep, rather than keeping them suffering."
As always, the images in her head helped fill in the gaps that his lack of experience with her world created. It captured him for several heartbeats, thou
gh. A place where, when the end came, there was an effort to make it as merciful and pain free as possible. Astounding. Threading the straps down her back, he let his knuckles slide over her soft skin, the delicate protrusion of shoulder blades, the tender nape.
"It's surreal, isn't it? Here you are in a locker room, hooking my swimsuit, when three days ago you were in such a different place, a different frame of mind." Her gaze drifted out to Reba, visible through a crack in the locker room door. "Like her. It's odd to do normal things, like getting up each day and brushing your teeth, combing your hair, watching a dumb commercial on television, when you know that your hourglass is tumbling faster than everyone else's . . . at least as far as they know. I guess I almost died a few days ago, so we never do know, do we?"
He stared down at her nape. "Why do you not hold that against me, Alexis, the way your father does?"
"Because I was in your world." She looked at him at last. "You're scary, Dante. I won't deny that. But two days were unbearable. I can't wrap my mind around being there for decades. What's remarkable to me is not the dark, scary side of you, but the fact you managed to keep that spark of light. That means something, something really important."
He wasn't sure how he felt about that, but if she knew what it meant, he wasn't ready to hear it. Realizing that, he changed the direction of their conversation onto surer ground. "On the other hand, I think my darkness explains many of the things I feel when I look at you."
Alexis couldn't help pressing her lips together, moistening when his gaze fell upon them. He'd hooked the sunglasses in his pocket while alone here with her, and her stomach contracted at the things she saw in his eyes. "There are dark, wicked things that I want to do with that mouth, with your body," he said. "I want to pull your soul inside of me, chain and hold you to me forever. A tether, like those birds I saw upstairs in this place."
"The raptors?"
He nodded. "I heard the woman caring for them say that, when certain ones are used as hunters, a tether is placed upon their leg. The master wraps it around his hand to hold the bird there. I have that desire with you, but . . ."
