Page 72 of Eternal Obsession

I removed my jacket before joining her on the couch.

“You know, in my line of work we advise women never to do this.”

“Sit in a luxury hotel and soak in the ambience?”

“You know what I mean.”

I raised my hands up in the air. “You asked me to dinner, remember.”

“True.”

“Then perhaps I’m the one who should be wary.”

“You couldn’t be safer.”

“I believe that, Ingrid.”

Like me, she didn’t mind the silence—the quiet moments that passed between us, as if the distance separating us wasn’t so great, and our profound differences could be set aside, if only for now.

Who are you?

Her question carried silently in her mind, as though trying to find answers to eternal questions.

I ran my fingers through her hair, desperately wanting to linger but knowing that I should not. Her eyelids closed as she responded to my touch.

She was right, though—this was reckless. For her, for me, for everything we understood and everything we couldn’t begin to fathom.

“Tell me about you,” I said, needing to know everything about her.

“I grew up in Devon. We used to spend our holidays in Cornwall when I was a child, until something happened to my mother there. I never learned exactly what it was. After that, we moved to Clovelly—a place you may not know, remote and cut off from the rest of the world.”

As though her mom was hiding from something . . . or someone. Had Orpheus pursued her family back then? If so, why?

“Brothers or sisters?”

“Only child.” Ingrid brightened.

“Maybe that was why I joined the police. I wanted to be close to people, to push back against the isolation that had shaped me. Only now, the work keeps me alone more often than not, and it feels like the whole thing has backfired.”

Was that her way of saying she was lonely?

I wanted to reach for her, to offer comfort, to tell her she embodied everything that was still right with the world. Even as I hardly knew her.

“What about you, Jadeon?”

We stood at opposite ends of the moral compass, as far apart as right and wrong could be.

I let my silence do the talking, wearing mystery like a mask, because the truth in would have doomed any possibility of friendship.

“I’m pretty boring, actually.”

She looked at me with affection. “I don’t believe that.”

Our eyes met, and in that fragile spark I felt two lost souls recognizing each other in the dark, aching to be seen at last.

Wanting to kiss her, to take her, to taste her in every conceivable way.

“Impossible.” I’d said it out loud.