Denial (Goblin's Kiss Series Book One) Read online

  He had a longer stride so catching up with me was apparently easy enough. He was beside me again and arguing with me about smiling.

  His laugh grabbed my attention forcing me to observe his silent amusement. I protested his reactions with staving off my usual feelings. In times like these, other boys would gravel and chase me down just to get a look at my eyes. I could easily cut off the emotions and seal myself from them. Most of the time that would send them away. I cut it off like a light switch and as I did so, the boy named Ames jolted to a stop, midstep on one stair. I knew he wasn’t moving and felt compelled to turn and check on him only because I got the distinct feeling he reacted to my pulling away. It was similar to the way I hid my abilities. He didn’t seem to be hiding his hidden unnatural talents assuming reading emotions was one of them. He couldn’t be normal. His rich laugh rang out again at my reaction or lack thereof. I held my breath to keep my mind closed.

  When my face registered with his knowing what I’d just done, I knew.

  “What are you?” I asked shakily. I could feel his laughter. Fear. Anger. He was sending me his feelings telepathically or something too. I wanted to shake off the “magic cooties” and yell at him for spreading them. It was too weird for weird and weird was something I knew well. But I didn’t want to read some strange guy’s feelings. Or did I?

  His smile was his answer for everything. He said...nothing.

  “And the drum roll was left hanging. I laid it out there. You know where to find me,” I said as angry as I could muster and turned to go but he cleared his throat making me stop to hear him out.

  Still, he said nothing.

  He swallowed the hard lump I saw in his throat and shot up the same irksome smile from before. A façade. “What sweetness? You looking for someone specific?”

  No freaking duh!

  I ignored his taunts and turned back to the upward curve of the path to class that I was late for. If he was reading me now, it was from my backside.

  I kept my emotions in check and walked straight into class letting the door slam in his face. I so did not care about Mr. Hotness and his incessant need to torture me. If he was like me, he dang sure could just say it. Yet, if he was something not so natural, I just told him that I wasn’t either. Great!

  I moved to the first available seat that was on the far side of the room that happened to be a two-seater table by the window. I was so mad I didn’t take time to care about what it would mean. Mrs. Cauldron was my freshmen English 101 teacher so a greeting wasn’t necessary and being late just meant she’d mark me tardy. She was cool like that.

  I scowled at the window and didn’t bother to see if anyone else in the room was someone I knew or what the Mr. Hotness Ames was doing at the front of the room.

  Sure enough, the collective sigh went out and at the first comment about his presence I sent out a wave of fear to dissolve their rudeness.

  Everyone feared me. I couldn’t stop the way they reacted to me.

  “Emma the bad girl. Already sneaking off with the new guy,” the goth girl with no name shot behind me just loud enough.

  “Oh, Emma. You naughty girl,” came a boy behind her whom was one of the many who pursued me after I broke up with Rick. They didn’t really like me.

  Just stop it, I thought. I wasn’t a bad girl. I’d never even done anything but kiss a boy. Now, since this last year when I found myself locked in a room with my boyfriend twice during school hours everyone thought the worst of me. I wasn’t that kind of girl.

  My anxiety and anger shot out like waves. The windows shook enough for me to pop my head in the direction the rattle came. The hinges were loosening.

  I stretched my neck back to the front of the room only to be angered more at the sight of the new guy staring me down. His one eyebrow rose up to his hairline and hid there, making me notice his hair was a little more mussed up than before and super sexy looking. His eyes shifted from mine suddenly to the seam where the windows creaked beside me.

  No way! He could tell. He wasn’t anything human or normal like the rest. He really was like me.

  AMES

  In the halls for none to see, she put her soft looking hand out to me and grazed my fingertips with her own for a brief half a second before recoiling the unused energy and spoke something I didn’t hear. I was under some friggin’ spell. She pointed off somewhere but I was too enthralled with the warm sweet scent that waved through the air when her hand went up. Like some kind of summertime. She said something about being late and moved the air once more with circles around my face. I thought I was going to hit the ground with the need that came my way. She was the sweetest rose on the vine and her scent was driving me to all kinds of hurt.

  What did she just do to me? I gained what little composure I had left and answered trying not to let her see how she affected me. I gave her my best fake man smile that made girls giggle and cover their pretty mouths with their fingers, but no go. She didn’t budge.

  Her eyes did shift across my face as if analyzing my features, or memorizing them I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell anything with this girl. I simply watched her watch me.

  She made some kind of soft sound from her throat in protest to my standard give me what I want lines that usually worked on her kind. No, the human version of her kind, but definitely not her. I laughed at her uneasiness liking that I made her uncomfortable. She disappeared from my view as her tight little butt wiggled upward and through the next set of doors.

  It was a good twenty seconds before my brain caught up with what just happened and I took three steps at a time to catch up.

  “You smile much?” I went for nothing talk as opposed for awkwardness. Everything about this was awkward. Something new for me.

  She spat all catlike and I swear she even purred her words out, “For someone I care to smile at.”

  I couldn’t stop the laugh. I’d never pursued a girl who didn’t show me easy interest. Was I pursuing her?

  No one, and I mean no one, had turned away from me in my lifetime much less put me down. Not if they knew what was good for them. This girl was dynamite and I was lighting the fuse.

  She still held off her power. I couldn’t read her completely at the moment, yet her body and face told me so much. Just then, she left it all out there and I’m not sure she knew she was doing it. I certainly have never felt someone’s desires before. The same pumped up feeling from before like I would explode if she didn’t give in to me was making my face sweat. I stopped midstep on one stair. She sensed it too. She faced me slow and steadily where she stopped halfway above on the stairs.

  Whatever was happening here, it wasn’t on the regular menu. She turned when I didn’t answer whatever she said next, but stopped when I made a noise to hold her there. There were things I should do. With this girl, there was a long list of should nots. Unfortunately, the should not’s were winning.

  I swallowed hard for the second time being confronted by this girl and instead of my instinct, I fake smiled my way out of answering her real question and BS’d her with some line that always worked on chicks.

  She huffed and returned her cute backside up the staircase. She disappeared again behind the door marked “Mrs. C” that was closing in my face and only meant we’d finally made it to class. Late.

  She didn’t even speak to the teacher but dropped her empty coffee cup in the trash bin and moved to the only table available that was on the far side of the room. I liked the seating arrangement as much as I liked the scowl her face held. For some unearthly reason I took pleasure in the fact that that anger was towards me. It meant she was thinking about me no matter how vehement the look was intended.

  Walking to the teacher’s desk, I heard the distinct sounds of murmured voices in the room and knew she was catching flack for being late. The shock of it was the vulgar way they spoke about her yet she screamed anything but. She was pure, good. Didn’t they see that?

  Her pencil tapped in a rhythm. The emotional roller coaster moved
around the room telling me she had no idea what her power was doing to these poor humans. The energy scraping through the humans was beyond what any of my kind could do. Had she done this for years and no one was sent to help her?

  A soft synced sigh went across the room like an audible wave of tension and then the windows shook enough I thought I done it myself. When my surprise was edged into my face like a Roman statue, I saw that she knew...I knew. My eyes zoomed outward to the window panes that were busting at the seams. How could I not look? No one had ever done so much in front of me and a group of humans in my lifetime alone. I was struck dumb right there.

  I tried to not look her way and appear halfway focused on what class it was I just entered. I had glanced at the schedule in a hurry when making it to be sure I had most of her classes, but not all of them. I’m thinking now I should have just booked an all day security detail for the sake of not missing a moment of her sassy attitude.

  As soon as the thought passed, she snubbed her nose in the air at me if anything to remind me I was staring too much. And I was.

  EMMA

  I slid back in my seat and held my breath. He was acknowledging in a pointed way that I wasn’t alone and I wasn’t normal. I wasn’t like the others in this room. I was like him. And he was like me.

  A throat cleared. At that I knew the entire room of twelve give or take was ping ponging back and forth between the two of us including Mrs. Cauldron. Brilliant!

  “Mr. Ames Cahn, I presume.”

  Ames Cahn. At least I had a full name now.

  He left my gaze only to shift them to the teacher’s controlled look. She was none too happy with the little display that I would’ve gladly avoided. “Pleasure to be here. Sorry I’m late. I was detained and Emma showed me the way to class. It won’t happen again, ma’am.”

  The class snickered. Mrs. Cauldron pointed to the seat next to me. I tapped even faster. I sang the same sad song in my head while I tapped the beat. As ridiculous as it seems, it was on old song. My stepfather used to sing it a lot. I don’t know the name of the actual song, but its main chorus for which I tapped to was the following:

  “Hey there Little Red Riding Hood.

  You sure are looking good.

  You’re everything a Big Bad Wolf could want.”

  The Big Bad Wolf in question was right here, beside me now. His black jeans squared the corner of the table and slid into the chair next to me. Moving air was not a good thing. When he came so close I realized I’d found his scent back in the group of cheerleaders before I’d even approached him. He was something earthy and pine, like the wintery smell of the trees when I traveled through Louisiana and Mississippi once on my way to Mobile with my adoptive parents. We went on vacation to see the navy ships across Baton Rouge and Mobile, a signature vacation since my adoptive father, Phillip, was a retired navy officer.

  Taking in his scent made time stay too darn still for a longer than average second. When I opened my eyes he was there, watching me. I wondered if he knew what I’d just done. He seemed to have figured other things out about me no one else ever had in the short span of time and everyone else I’d known a lifetime. Too short a time to be analyzed this much so I needed to be careful with this one. Some of the others-as in strange characters who just show up-in the past who had snooped around seemed to be aware of my oddities, but I never let them see. This one was different. He got under my skin the second he appeared.

  I never know how any of the others knew about me or what they wanted. They always disappeared before it got too weird.

  Class resumed since we were the latecomers and both of us drew our attention away from each other to open out crisp new notebooks and started writing. Creative Writing class meant starting off with...creative writing. We were free writing anything we wanted to put on paper. Ack! All I could think of was him.

  I doodled a flower and expanded it to a size that covered half the page. A buzzer went off and the teacher said, “Switch.”

  I bugged my eyes out in the teacher’s direction at not knowing first what she meant, and second because freshmen year she’d been so direct and not this laid back in her teaching. While I might have found that refreshing and even a little bit spontaneous for her, I was scared stiff at the implications her words meant for me right then.

  I looked over at other tables to see what they were doing and sure enough, they were trading notebooks, now private journals, to their table partner. What did I do next, you ask? I traded mine with Mr. Dark and Dangerous next to me. All two words and my flower design slid over to him.

  His notebook rose and fell in front of me. I stared at the paragraph before me not wanting like anything to read it. I wanted to close my eyes and start a do-over day. Let it not be real.

  “How did you know how to spell my name?”

  Huh? I looked over at my notebook, not him. Wide-eyed, I stared at the page where I’d drawn the large daisy in the middle. Above it was his name in all caps. How did I know how to spell it and why the heck did I write it?

  He seemed to register my surprise as was our way for the last thirty minutes.

  “I didn’t even know I wrote it,” I whispered out like a lame idiot. It seemed harsh sounding, but I didn’t really mean it that way.

  “Well, kudos. No one has ever got it right on the first try. You must be some kind of amazing.” He smiled over to me with the same laugh from earlier that spoke more than words alone, the husky sound that somehow managed to reach out and shake me up on the inside. I caught something in the smile. It wasn’t fake this time. I looked around and saw that no one was paying us any attention and this left me less vulnerable maybe to prying eyes. I tried it out.

  “Why are you here?”

  He stiffened in his chair and said gruffly, “Why, do you know?”

  What? What would I know? What the heck!

  Instead of answering with a whack job answer, I turned to his notebook in front of me. It read,

  I am alone in a world where no one wants me.

  The sky is the limit. The earth beneath me.

  I am nice. I am not. I am bad. I was worse.

  What am I?

  After I read it I knew the color drained from my face. I courageously moved my head up to find his watchful eye. “Why did you write this?” I was scared to know.

  “Write what?” he asked slowly and exact.

  Incredulous. “You are a—

  He stopped my sentence with his hand grabbing mine. The warm feeling returned. It washed over me, embraced me. I felt it ripple at my hand and move out over the whole of my body. When it stopped, it didn’t really. It just held there and stayed over me like a warm fire blazing in front of me. His hand jumped back to his lap leaving me wondering how long I’d held it. Ten seconds maybe.

  His eyes said he either felt much the same or some other possible effect. I sure wouldn’t ask. Realizing that I was staring at his hands in his lap, I didn’t hear what he said. He cleared his throat and I knew he said the same thing again that I missed.

  “Read it again,” his voice was rougher than before.

  I darted my eyes at his and them back to the paper all kind of at the same time. On the notebook in front of me it said,

  Emma Steele.

  I know what you fear the most.

  I lurched upward and out of my seat. The screech of the chair got the attention of the room and the teacher.

  “Miss Steele. Are you okay?”

  No! Not really. And yes. But the demented freak who was remarkably gorgeous and had way too much in common with me might not be okay if he shows me anymore of his super powers.

  You see, Mrs. Cauldron is a nice teacher. Another teacher would be sarcastic and make some rude comment that would force me to be embarrassed to exist and I would cringe and return to my seat. Mrs. Cauldron always had your best interest at heart. Oh, she could be sassy in her own right. But she had a way of knowing when one of us just needed a moment.

  I searched the faces around me wai
ting for my decision. “I am fine. Thank you.” I returned to my seat scooting the farthest away from him I possibly could. He acted as normal as a teenage guy could be the rest of the class. When the bell rang, I sprang up and out before he could do any more damage to my already head case psyche.

  AMES

  The rest of the tables around us were already writing when we entered so I followed suit and so did she. In all my years, I could blend in when needed. I could also make a statement when needed. This was not one of those make a statement kind of times.

  All I could think of was her.

  At last second I scribbled out a separate message daring myself to give her a taste of what she might know all too soon. A sliver of truth.

  She looked around anywhere but at me to see that everyone else had traded notebooks and I cased mine through the air before she could do the scent thing again and make me freeze up in front of her.

  She had the voice of an angel every time she read the words on my paper. I should know. I’ve met some who wouldn’t have anything to do with me. This girl was all pure golden innocence. And I loved and lapped up every single second of it. Genuinely smiling over to her in this small list of revelations, I saw her for the first time in a different light. She really wasn’t being malicious or cruel, but truly in a state of shock at my behaviors. She peered out from behind the board straight color of the sunshine hair at the room and searched for something. I didn’t know what for but I suddenly wanted to know what she was thinking. Everything she was thinking.

  Showing she had many sides to her character, she asked why I was here like it was a directive, blunt and to the point. She still tapped wildly with that stinking pencil almost to the beat of music I couldn’t hear.