Chapter 30 - The Truth About The Ex-girlfriend

“He kissed you?” Joshua asked Kerri, surprised. They were sitting in their secret spot in the garden.

“Yeah, I can’t believe it.”

“Me neither. Arik never kisses anyone first. Not even Sitara.”

“What?” Kerri stared at him. “Why not?”

He shrugged. “He says that if the girl likes him enough, she’ll do it first. Otherwise it isn’t worth it.”

“So what does this mean?” Kerri asked him, mentally adding “that he likes me enough?”

Joshua shrugged. “That he must’ve gone crazy.”

Kerri glared at him.

“Or,” Joshua added hastily, “that you two are True Loves.”

Kerri looked at him, frustrated. “We are not True Loves!”

Joshua looked at her and shrugged. “You may be right. One can never tell whether they’ve found their True Love until they Join.”

Kerri choked although she wasn’t eating anything. “What?”

Joshua shrugged. “You heard me.”

“Join?” Kerri struggled to say. “What do you mean, Join?”

“To join physically and mentally. You know, to take part in sexual intercourse, to have sex, to make love?”

Kerri swallowed. Then she frowned. “Wait a minute. You don’t join mentally when you have sex.”

“You do when you’re True Loves.”

Kerri narrowed her eyes. “And you’d know how?”

Joshua looked away. “Someone I knew told me about it.”

Kerri forced him to look at her. “So you have no personal experience whatsoever in the area?”

Joshua looked straight at her, his arctic blue eyes piercing through her and making her shiver, but she held on.

“I might have,” he said eventually. “What’s it to you?”

She let go of him. “Sitara,” she said quietly. “Sitara was your True Love.”

For the first time, Kerri saw Joshua blush.

Aw, that’s so sweet, Kerri thought. It must’ve killed him when she left them.

“Did Arik know?” she asked him, and his head snapped up immediately. He searched her, his blue eyes probing.

“I’m not going to tell him, I promise. We’re friends, right? I’d never do that to you.”

He licked his lips. “He didn’t know.”

“Did it absolutely kill you when she left?”

He gave a bitter smile. “Almost. I survived. Barely.” He said that as if it were a bad thing.

“Do you know why she left? And don’t give me that ‘werewolves betray’ shoot.”

Joshua licked his lips again. “I…” he trailed off, plucking a blade of grass and wrapping it around his long fingers.

Kerri considered doing something that always made the members of the opposite sex feel guilty, but then she remembered Joshua had already found his True Love and wasn’t going to fall for it. She sighed.

“You don’t have to tell me. I understand.”

He searched her with his eyes again, looking at her for an immeasurable length of time.

“I’ll tell you,” he said finally. “Under one condition. You will tell no one, and I mean no one, about this.”

“I promise. I swear on my life.”

“When Sitara first came to the Sterling, I was away on mission, and when I came back, she and Arik were already together.” He shredded the blade of grass in half.

“When I first saw her, she was with Arik and she didn’t see me. But straightaway, I knew. I didn’t know what I felt for her exactly, but I knew I had to stay away from her.” He shredded the blade of grass into quarters.

“For the next few days, I ate my meals earlier or later, and I completely avoided them. Then one day Arik told me he wanted me to meet his new girlfriend. What choice did I have? When we saw each other, I knew I was—we were—in trouble. Deep trouble.” He ripped the blade of grass until the pieces were so small they looked like green powder. He dropped the pieces onto the ground and started on another, pausing momentarily to look up at her.

“It was like…” he trailed off, struggling to find the right words. “She completed me. Like the moment I saw her, I felt whole. Like I realised that for the first hundred and four years in my life, I was incomplete, and she…she completed me.”

“If Arik and I are True Loves, then why doesn’t it feel that way for us?”

“It does feel like that. You just…don’t recognise it. Or you just won’t accept it. For some reason, some women don’t feel that way at first, but afterwards, the feeling just kind of grows onto them.”

“I see. Go on.”

He wetted his lips before starting again. “I…we both knew how we felt. And I can speak for her, because the moment she saw me, she had the same look on her face I had on when I first saw her. We tried to avoid each other as much as possible for the next few days, until I found her in my favourite spot one day.” He smiled a quick soft smile and gestured to their secret place. “We started talking and…well, it just happened.”

“What just happened?”

Joshua looked at her.

“Oh. Right. And how did that feel?” she asked him. “Not that I want any of those…details,” she added hastily. “I meant, how did you know you were True Loves when you two uh, joined?”

He smiled warily at her. “It’s…kind of hard to explain. You know how you and Arik have a telepathic bond? Well, it’s like that…but not really. You just feel…connected to them. Like something’s holding you together.”

“And did it feel good?”

He shot her a look. “Do you really need me to tell you something so obvious?”

“No, I meant, did it feel better than when you did it with…someone else?”

“Everything was better with her than when it was with someone else. It could be a kiss or even a mere touch, and it would still feel so much better.”

Arik’s kiss appeared and lingered in Kerri’s mind. She pushed it away. “What happened then?”

“We kept it a secret. Then one day, a person from the C.E. showed up and somehow got hold of Sitara and tried to persuade her to join the C.E. Of course, she knew what the C.E. was and didn’t join, but he threatened her. He knew about Sitara and me. He told Sitara that if she didn’t join the C.E., he’d tell Arik about us. Sitara knew how important the relationship between and Arik and I was, so she went.”

“What? Just like that? You didn’t even try to stop her?”

“Of course I tried to stop her. But she wouldn’t listen. Werewolves are stubborn, and she wasn’t an exception. Well, actually, she was. She was exceptionally stubborn.” He shook his head. “When I woke up one morning, she had gone. She left this.” He reached in his shirt, felt around the back of his neck and took out a necklace.

It was a silver necklace. The chain was thin and fine and looked fragile but Kerri knew it was strong and secure and that it’d take a lot to break it. Hanging from the chain was a clear, circular glass tube that was about an inch long.

“What’s that in it?” she asked him, pointing at the drop of silver inside.

“Liquid mercury.”

“It’s beautiful.” She flipped the glass tube from one end to the other. The ball of mercury dropped followed, bouncing slightly when it reached the bottom. “It’s like a solid little ball.”

“Mercury’s very dense.”

“Um, so was there a particular reason why she left you…mercury?”

“It was her favourite necklace. Her father gave it to her.”

“Does it hurt to talk about her?”

He blinked a few times. “A little, but I kind of got over it. It was hell for the first few weeks though. I had to hear all these ridiculous rumours of why she left and I had to bear the weight of her leaving because of me. Arik was devastated.”

Kerri reached over and hugged him. “I’m so sorry. It must be so hard for you.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he hugged her back. “Thank you.”

“Did you feel guilty at all?” she asked, pulling away from him.

“Of course I did. I wanted to stop. I said that…if Arik found out, the consequences would be…horrible. And I didn’t want that. I wanted her to be happy.”

“And what did she say?”

He blushed slightly. “She said that she’d only be happy if she was with me.”

Kerri smiled gently. “Do you miss her?”

“I miss her every waking second of my life. I even miss her when I’m not awake. I dream about her sometimes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Were they sweet dreams, or you know, nightmares?”

“Neither. Both. It would be like she was communicating with me through my dream. Like she was trying to tell me something, like...”

“Like you two are connected,” Kerri finished for him.

He nodded, smiling gently. “Like we’re connected.”

She looked at him. “Can I ask you for a favour?”

He looked suspiciously at her and nodded after a moment.

“Kiss me.”

He looked at her incredulously. “What?”

“I want to see something. Kiss me. Please.”

He continued to look at her in disbelief. “I…no.”

“I swear it has nothing to do with you. I’ll tell you afterwards.”

He looked warily at her. She looked pleadingly back at him, even though she knew that the look wouldn’t work on him.

He sighed. “Close your eyes,” he said at last.

She obliged, and after a moment, she felt his lips brush against hers for a second before he leant away from her.

She opened her eyes and nodded.

“Why did you want me to do that?” he asked her, still looking at her cagily.

“I just wanted to see whether it really was better with Arik. Don’t worry,” she assured. “It was.”

He sat back and licked his lips. “May I say that what happened just now should never be mentioned ever again in front of anybody, present company included?”

She nodded. “So…no weirdness between us?”

“No weirdness.” He lay back so that he was resting against a rock and let silence claim them.

“Well,” Kerri said after a while. “This is awkward.”

“One may even,” Joshua commented dryly, “call it weirdness.”

Kerri rolled her eyes but couldn’t help laughing. “Did it feel better when you were with Sitara?”

He bit his lip. “No offence, but it was so much better with her.”

“Same. It must really suck for the people who’ve found their True Love and then for their True Love to die.”

Joshua shook his head. “No. Sure, it hurts, and they mourn for a while, but they get over it soon enough knowing that their True Love died and are safe. But for people who’ve found their True Love and to have them separated from them and not knowing whether they’re safe or not, whether they’re hurt, whether they’re happy…that is hell. Pure torture.”

She patted him on the shoulder sympathetically.

***

When she got back to the room—which had now been cleaned up, Arik had just come out from the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist. She stopped herself from drooling over his abs and looked away.

“Did you shower again?” she asked him.

“I felt unclean,” he muttered. “Are you sure that there’s no more white paint in my hair?”

“I’m absolutely positive. We checked for like five times, remember?”

He ran his hand through his unruly black hair. “My hair feels really stiff.”

“It’s probably the soap. Sorry.”

“Sorry? You don’t have to be sorry. You were the one who got the paint out, remember?”

Kerri bit her lip. “No, I meant…I’m sorry. For saying that I hated you.” She twisted the ring that was on her finger. It was a simple silver band, and it fit her middle finger perfectly. “Because I didn’t hate you. I don’t hate you.” She looked up at him.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

He sat down on the bed next to her.

“Can I try something?” she asked him a while.

“Sure.”

“Close your eyes.”

He raised an eyebrow, looking at her suspiciously, but complied after a moment’s hesitation.

She leaned in and brushed her lips to his. She heard his breath catch in his throat, but his eyes remained closed, and after a moment, hers closed as well. His hands went up to cup her face, and then he pulled roughly away from her, his hands still on either side of her face.

“What,” he asked her in a strained voice, “are you doing?”

She looked at him tentatively. “Trying something?”

He sighed and looked down. “I…have to go change,” he said when he realised he was clad in nothing but a towel. He went into the bathroom and came out again wearing clean boxer shorts.

“The boss had a couple of us go to the nearest department store today for clean clothes,” he explained when Kerri looked questioningly at his new clothes. He gestured towards a large plastic bag. “Those are yours.”

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