Page 62 of Awakened and Betrayed
I know out of all of them, this relationship and the way I up the ante with the Sentinel aspect of it, is probably the hardest for Sabin to come to terms with. The loss of control that seems so important to him and the speed at which I’m pushing things forward is an issue for him. I’m confident that Sabin is here by his own choice, and that he cares for me, but I still worry that I’m pushing him too far and too fast out of his comfort zone.
“Vinna, your presence in my life is not creating holes. It’s just opening up possibilities I never saw before. Maybe the goal of paladin shifts to badass, vigilante peacekeepers. Maybe there needs to be more balance out there when it comes to who makes the decisions about what’s right and what’s wrong. I don’t know, and I don’t think we’ll know what the best move for all of us is until we’re faced with it.”
“But what about your families? What about your home here?” I press.
Sabin shrugs.
“I don’t know. I have no idea how to fit all the pieces together yet. We all talked about it this morning, but none of us think we’ve reached that tipping point where we know one way or the other, which way things are going to go down.”
I throw my hands up in exasperation. “You guys did have a super-secret meeting without me, I fucking knew it!”
Sabin laughs.
“We just didn’t want you to feel guilty or put too much on yourself. All that shit just happened with the guys and the runes, and we didn’t want to push you over the edge by bringing up a bunch of hypotheticals that none of us are sure could even happen. You’re dealing with enough; we don’t want to keep adding to the stress.”
I run my eyes over Sabin’s profile as he drives and confesses why they kept me out of the loop. My initial reaction is to get mad, but when he talks about what happened with the Knox and Ryker this morning, I realize that I was doing the same thing to them. Making decisions that I thought were in their best interest, cutting them out of the stress, putting the weight of it on my back, so they wouldn’t get bogged down.
“I get why you all made that decision, but I don’t want you guys to do that again. I’m also going to make sure that I’m not doing the same thing to any of you.”
I reach over and grab his hand, and he relinquishes it willingly to me. I set it in my lap and trace the lines of his palm as I work through how to explain to him what I need.
“What we’re all dealing with is a lot. It sucks. It isn’t easy, and there’s a strong likelihood that not much in our lives ever will be. But I realized that we need to look at things like my Awakening. Alone, I felt like I was dying, I couldn’t take the pain, but when we shared it, it was manageable for all of us.”
Sabin’s hand closes around mine, and he brings it to his lips and presses a soft kiss to the back of my hand. I smile at the gesture that exposes the romantic hiding in the body of a bad boy.
“You’re right; I’m sorry we left you out, and I’ll make sure it never happens again,” he tells me, and my heart swells.
“Well that was easy, I thought I’d have to put more fight into getting my way,” I admit.
Sabin laughs and navigates the Bronco onto the main street of Solace.
“I’ll make it harder next time,” he teases, and I bite down on thethat’s what she saidjoke.
The struggle must be obvious because Sabin laughs even harder. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?” he asks, and I crack up.
* * *
I closethe Bronco door behind me and walk through the side parking lot to the front of Gamull’s Spell Shop. The front is all pristine glass, and it’s the corner shop attached to a strip of other shops located on the main road in the center of town. Sabin leads me into his family’s spell shop, and the scent of clove with the faint undertone of something woodsy fills my senses. It’s not overwhelming or headache-inducing but welcoming and soothing. I look around the well-organized space and the shelves of different things available for sale. Sabin was right; it does resemble a bath and body shop.
“Bean!” a girl squeals, and tackles Sabin in a way that would make an offensive lineman proud. Sabin stumbles backward as he catches her and absorbs the momentum of the hit.
“What are you doing here? Don’t you have school today?” Sabin asks the green-eyed ball of energy currently attempting to separate his torso from the rest of his body via the tightest hug I’ve ever seen.
“I got sent home,” she pouts, and it’s like I can see all the previous excitement drain out of her.
“For what?” Sabin demands, and the little girl and I both cringe at his tone.
“The Alson sisters mess with me all the time! They talk crap and shove me around. Today I threw water on one of them to get them to back off, and I’m the one to gets into trouble!”
“Cyndol, we talked about this, if they start something, you tell an instructor.” Cyndol rolls her green eyes at Sabin and focuses on me like she just now noticed me next to him.
“You look tough; if some girls were picking on you what would you do?” she asks me.
“I’d go for the nose.”
“Vinna!” Sabin scolds me.
“What Bean, I would.” I look back down to Cyndol, who I’ve deduced is either Sabin’s little sister or related to him somehow.
