“Go. In!” He was now bent over me, pressing more weight into my body than I thought he was capable of. If he kept it up, I was going to end up with a fractured hip.
“You sure this is going to work?” Before he answered, something happened. My body was absorbing the light and flesh he’d been trying to force. It slowly sank into where the tattoo was. Paddy was propelled away from me, colliding with the door, and at the same time I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
The door crashed open a second later and sent Paddy sprawling in the opposite direction.
Fate stood in the doorway, looking ominous. His eyes ran the length of me and then he stepped closer, as if he saw something of interest. “Why are you glowing?”
My eyes shot to Paddy first, thinking it was him, but the spot on his arm was already healed. If it wasn’t him…
I looked down. I wasn’t actually glowing, my tattoo was. It looked like there was a flashlight from underneath my skin, pointing outward.
“What did you do to her?” Fate towered over Paddy, who was holding his ground pretty admirably.
“I only did what we discussed.” Nothing, not even Fate’s glowering expression or being banged about the room, seemed to dim Paddy’s satisfaction. “That’s just a little after effect. It’ll probably wear off,” Paddy said. “Maybe.”
Fate walked closer and ran his fingers over the ying yang tattoo. “It tingles when I touch it.” He dropped his hand. “She’s reconnected?”
“Through me,” Paddy explained.
“Is that the same thing?” I asked. I trusted Paddy for no real reason other than an overwhelming gut urge. I mean, let’s face it, the guy had screwed me out of moving on. Yet here I was, still letting him do crazy shit to me, but it was just one of those things I couldn’t explain. I knew people, even if they weren’t actually human. Paddy was one of the good guys.
“No, but I think it’ll be pretty close.”
I think and my theory; there was a lot of guess work going on here from Paddy, and I hoped he wasn’t going to let me down again. I didn’t want to think he’d turned me into a nightlight for nothing. I tugged up the corner of the sweat pants to cover it.
“You’re going to have to do more than that.” Fate was scowling slightly. Looking down, the light shining through the tattoo easily penetrated the cotton. “We’ll find something for you.”
“Do you think it will dull?” I asked Paddy, as I moved my palm over the tattoo.
“Recent events are causing me to step out of the box a bit. You can’t expect me to know everything. I’m not God.”
“And what exactly are you?” I had a piece of him literally pulsing in my body; I could feel it, and I still didn’t know what he was.
“And here we go with the twenty questions again. You give them an inch and they want a foot! We have other more pressing issues. Must we get bogged down with the trivialities of name calling?” He walked out of the room, yelling he’d be waiting in the living room.
Left alone, Fate turned to me. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t mean physically.
“I don’t know what I am anymore.” I had too many emotions roiling within me to be able to claim just one.
He shut the door and then paused a minute before he spoke again. “Are we okay?”
I nodded. All my words about hating him last night came rushing back to me. If anything, I hated myself, because as I stood there, the strongest emotion I felt about what he’d done last night was relief. That relief boomeranged back at me in self-disgust.
Fate, sensing the downturn of my emotions said, “No matter how you feel, it’s not your fault.”
“I can’t…” I turned away from him. My tenuous grip on my composure didn’t leave a lot of room for introspection. The mixture of pity and compassion in his eyes alone was enough to unravel me if I looked too long.
“I’m fine,” I said, and would’ve sworn to the lie just to get that look out of his eyes. “I don’t need your pity.”
“It’s not pity.” His arms came around me, pulling me to him, even when I would’ve walked away. It felt good, and I could’ve fallen apart right then, but I managed to hold it together until he spoke. “I forced last night on you. If Kitty doesn’t make it, it’s my fault.”
He was trying to shoulder the weight of her death again, and it undid me.
In life, I’d become jaded. After being an attorney for a while, I’d started to develop opinions of people in fairly short order. I’d title them and file them away as this or that. Everything they did was then filtered through that title, whether it was accurate or not. But once in a very rare while, something would happen; a word or action caught me off guard and made me reassess, but nothing ever this dramatic.
Fate’s file had been clearly labeled arrogant, egotistical and selfish, in big bold letters, written in a permanent, thick black marker. And in less than twenty-four hours, he’d blown apart that file into tiny shreds.
I’d assessed every action of his by a miscalculation on my part, and now I didn’t know what to do with him. I didn’t know how to label him anymore, and his file had turned out to be completely wrong. But then again, maybe that was the whole problem. Maybe I never should’ve labeled him to begin with. People very rarely ever live up to their titles anyway.
Pulling myself together, I took a step back from him, but needed a minute before I could meet his stare.
“You know, Paddy could be the devil for all we know.” He was joking with me, lightening the mood because he knew I needed it. I knew he didn’t think anything of the sort.
“True.” I nodded but didn’t believe it either.
“And yet…I trust him.” Fate looked how I was feeling. Bewildered.
“Yeah, me too.”
I started to walk out, but his arm snaked across my front, pulling me back against his chest. His other hand shut the door in front of me and then wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me even tighter. His chin rested on the top of my head.
My body tensed, and not because it didn’t feel good, but because I didn’t know what this was. It wasn’t to comfort me.
Then he was letting me go, pushing me out the door toward the living room.
Chapter 33
Who did you say you were?
Paddy was relaxing on the couch with a cocktail when we entered the living room. He lifted his glass toward us and motioned for us to take a seat on the other couch, as if it were his home. We did.
He took a sip and then placed the drink on the table between us. Leaning back and looking more serious than normal, he settled in and began to talk. “I think we’ve all come to the same determination. We’ve got a problem.” He pointed to me, “You’ve tried to deny it was a problem.” There was no defense against that statement, so I sat and played with the string on my borrowed sweatpants instead.
He looked to Fate. “You’ve feared it was a problem but couldn’t stop it.” He paused and then leaned forward, picked up his glass again and finished off the remainder in one swig. “I’ve known it’s a problem.”
Uncurling my legs out from the corner of the couch I’d tucked myself into, I got up and walked over to the wet bar. If Paddy needed a drink, it might be a good idea to join him.
My hand went to the Cutty Sark when I couldn’t find my preferred brand. “Where’s the Maker’s Mark?” I knew he had some, and I was having a bad day. I needed my drink. My head swung to where Fate sat on the couch.
“I don’t know.” Fate wasn’t looking at me when he spoke.
I shifted some bottles around and lifted a few up to peek behind them. “There was a full bottle and I’m the only one who drinks it. Where did it go?” I wasn’t crazy. He’d given me a glass not that long ago.
“Drink the Cutty Sark,” he said curtly, as if he had no interest in addressing the missing bottle.
“I don’t want Cutty Sark.” I plunked down another bottle a bit harder than I meant to. “I thought we were in a good place?”
“Darling,” Paddy said, in his older and slightly raspy voice. I immediately looked at him, wondering what was up. He’d never, ever, called me darling. He wasn’t that type of guy.
“Yes?”