Page 28 of Fathom

On the third hand, the map to the spaceport was in my bra.

I didn't need four hands to decide what to do next.

TEN

EUN

I didn't know how I could fix this.

What I'd just done was unacceptable.

I turned on the cold water to the sink in the restaurant's kitchen.

The problem was, I shouldn't say anything at all. I shouldn't even go talk to her again. I should avoid her, never see her again. It would be better that way. I had no business living with an herbivore. It was insane that I would choose to do that. People like me only made choices like that for one reason, and that reason was clear the moment she touched me, and I lost myself again, giving into the mine, mine, mine that chanted through my brain anytime I got too close to her.

I was so far gone that I was going to fight my uncle for her.

Then she bit me with those blunt little prey teeth of hers and...

I leaned down and stuck my head under the cold stream of water, letting the chill shock me as it ran over the back of my head, streaming over the long locks of my hair as it ran down off my chin into the sink. It did nothing to soothe the rising heat inside of me, the fire that she ignited that wouldn't go out. That little quiet voice inside of me whispered in the back of my mind that she was mine.

Mine to envelop.

"I've sent her back to the apartment and closed the restaurant," my uncle said from behind me, pulling me from the strangeness of my own thoughts.

I turned off the water, standing up as small rivulets ran down my neck and under my shirt.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"This isn't your fault, Eun," my uncle said. "You know that."

It wasn't her fault either.

It wasn't her fault that every time I glanced her way, my heart thudded in my chest like it was trying to break free from the cage of my ribs. It wasn't her fault that the sunlight would catch in her brown hair, and I would wonder what it would feel like to run my fingers through it. It wasn't her fault that the soft curve of her hips mesmerized me, and the sound of her laughter made my own want to bubble to the surface.

"I should be able to control myself," I said, staring down at the floor.

"You shouldn't have ever been put in the position to have to," he said. He strode forward and put both of his hands on my shoulders. "You're young. You should have been able to grow up without any of that in your system. You should have had a family that let you make the choice for yourself when you were an adult."

"I am an adult," I said.

"You are," my uncle said. "And I'm proud of the adult you've become. Choosing to get clean is not easy. You are the one choosing to make it harder. You're torturing yourself by being around Leija. It is one thing to work here in the restaurant and get small doses of the interactions with herbivores to acclimate yourself; it is another entirely to be around one person who you... that is..."

He couldn't say it, so I finished the words for him.

"Triggering my deviance," I said, looking down at the floor.

My uncle let out a sigh and squeezed my shoulders. "You're making everything harder on yourself, and you're putting her in danger. You shouldn't spend so much time with any individual herbivore until you've really gotten a handle on this."

He was saying everything we both knew that I already knew.

I also knew what I was supposed to say now. I should ask him to help me find a safe place for her. I should say that I was going to get her situated with an herbivore community.

But if I wasn't around her, I couldn't protect her.

Someone might hurt her.

"She's mine," I growled, letting him know the depth of the problem with those two words. The rest of the words that followed after, the strange feeling of being too small, of wanting to envelop her, those I kept to myself. Those feelings didn’t make any sense to me.