He waits, and when I don’t continue, he says, “What?”
“Can I see you without your glasses? I want to look in your eyes while we talk.”
His mouth kicks up at the corners in that dark, sexy, dangerous smile. “You’ve seen me without my glasses. You know what’s behind them. Not scared I’m going to suck your life away?”
“If you were planning to kill me, you wouldn’t have saved my life in the game.”
The smile disappears. “Maybe I’m planning something worse.”
I roll my eyes. “Stop with the secretive, self-hating threats. Let’s just have a conversation. A normal conversation. It’s like you’re trying to scare me away.”
“I am.” He pauses. “You’re obsessed with normal. Sometimes being outside the norm is good. It makes you special.”
My mouth goes dry because I know he didn’t mean that as a generic use of the word you. He means me. He thinks I’m special.
“What are we doing here, Jackson?”
The smile comes back. “Having a conversation,” he says, purposely misunderstanding me. He turns his face toward me. I don’t even try to hide my frustration. “You’re gorgeous when you’re annoyed, Miki Jones. Your cheeks get all pink”—he brushes the backs of his fingers along my cheek—“and your eyes get sort of squinty.”
I laugh, but the sound comes out breathless. “I’m gorgeous when I squint?”
“You’re always gorgeous.”
I shake my head. I never really think about myself that way and, until Jackson, I never cared if anyone else did.
He swivels on the bench so he’s straddling it, facing me, mirroring my posture. Then he tips his glasses up so they rest high on his forehead and stares at me for a long moment. I stare back, taking my time, really looking at him. His eyes are Drau silver, both human and inhuman at the same time. The Drau’s pupils are long and oval, slitted like a reptile’s—which makes sense if they come from a planet that’s so bright. The slit would allow them to narrow their pupil in a way that protects them from the strength of the light.
But Jackson’s pupils are round and human. His lashes are long and spiky and darker than I expected. His eyes are widely spaced, his brows sandy brown and straight, one of them bisected by a scar. From the same Drau attack that scarred his arm? From something else? Without thinking, I reach out and run my finger along the scar. His brows rise. I drop my hand. And my eyes never leave his.
They’re exactly as I remember them, frightening and foreign and beautiful.
“Can you do what they do?” I whisper, remembering the way it felt to look in the Drau’s eyes, the pain, the sensation of drowning and losing myself, of having my life sucked away.
His expression shuts down. This topic is clearly off the table.
I redirect and come at it from a different angle. “How do they do it? What exactly are they doing?”
“I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll tell you what I know,” he says. In generic terms. I won’t talk about me and what I can or can’t do, he doesn’t say. “It’s like tuning in to a radio station. They catch your gaze, catch your frequency. The human body works on electrical charges. Action potentials. That’s what makes your muscles work. Your nerves. Your brain cells. Everything. The—” He looks around and lowers his voice. “The Drau grab that electricity and drain you dry, like draining a battery. That’s why it feels like they’re sucking the life out of you. Because they are. By the time they’re done, they leave a husk without any spark to fire the engine.”
I shudder, remembering exactly how that felt. “Why the eyes?”
“That’s a tough one. There’s no one I can really ask about this stuff.” He pauses. “No, that’s not totally true. There’s the Committee. I can ask them, but they don’t always answer, or if they do, it’s sometimes a bit philosophical and hard to grasp, so it’s the same as having no one to ask.”
“The Committee?” I remember his sardonic tone when he’s said stuff before about things being decided by committee. I thought he was kidding. “There’s an actual committee?”
“Yeah.”
“So, who’s on that committee?”
“Committee members.”
That’s all he offers, and rather than pressing on that topic, I jump back to the one he was willing to talk about. “So why the eyes?”
“I did some reading. From what I can figure out, it’s because the pupil is actually a hole. It’s an opening, a doorway the Drau can use to connect to the retina and from there to the optic nerve as a way to draw electrical charge from the body. The optic nerve’s a direct bridge to the brain. Makes the whole process pretty easy.”