Out Of Thin Air (Chapter Fourteen) Insert Witty Chapter Title Here
I blinked. I blinked again. But everything stayed exactly the same.
"Uh, hi," Aiden said finally. He looked... strange. Something was worrying him.
"What are you... why... how-" I stumbled over my words. Let's all remember that woke up less than a minute ago, and was attempting to make intelligent conversation. "How did you get in here?"
"Window," he muttered, pointing to the glass wall over his shoulder. A glass wall that really wasn't removable. "I took out the glass, climbed in, and then put it back," he explained, seeing I was confused.
He had used his power. Duh. Once again, not firing on all cylinders at the moment.
"This is the tenth floor," I tried to emphasize.
"Yeah... I climbed," he mumbled. I shot him another ridiculously confused look. "With mountain climbing gear," he clarified quickly.
I wasn't even going to try to figure out how he had gotten mountain climbing gear, and something told me I didn't want to know.
"So... what do you want?" I hadn't noticed how awkwardly I was sprawled across the bed. I had fallen asleep in my clothes (as if I had anything else to fall asleep in), shoes and all. I sat up on the foot of the bed, kicking them off.
Aiden didn't say anything, just sat down next to me. Being so close to him reminded me of how much I had hated him the last time I saw him. But now... there was something the matter with him, and I couldn't still hate him. He was like a guilty puppy. It was impossible to stay mad.
"What's wrong?" I asked him. This wasn't him. The Aiden I knew was either smile for some unknown reason or stare creepily. Neither of which he was doing tonight. I briefly glanced at the clock- 1:40 am. So scratch that, this morning.
"Look at me," I told him. He did, and his eyes were just... wrong. "What's wrong?"
He sighed, and I almost wanted him to look away again. I could hardly look at him like that. "My dad is totally going to kill me," he said, with bitter laughter in his voice. "He wanted me to kidnap you. I said I wasn't going to do it."
Great. So now Oliver was turning people against me. "So then why are you here?" I tried to keep a hold on his eyes with mine, like I had seen him do, but it wasn't working. "Aiden, please, look at me."
What was happening to me? A few days ago I was doing everything I could to avoid his stare, and now I was telling him to look at me. I swear, I was possessed or something.
"I'm here because I think you should just go with him," he said. I tried to hold in a sigh of frustration. "But I'm not going to kidnap you. I think you should chose. Oliver doesn't."
"Explain." And I was going to listen. I wasn't going to get angry at him. Yet.
"It hasn't always been just me, Oliver, Sara, and Tori," He was finally looking at me, getting into story mode. "About a year ago, there was another boy, Christopher. His power was strength, like lift-really-heavy-things strength. But the thing was, he mistook it for immortality. He stayed with us for a while, but Oliver never managed to get his power under control. He killed himself trying to lift a bus.
"Oliver's never really been the same after that. None of us have. I guess we naturally think we're a cut above the rest, just a little bit better, but then something like that happens and... it's a smack in the face. Take Tori for example. She and Chris had a thing, and after she found him lying dead under a bus... she locked herself in her room for a week. Believe it or not, she used to be as girly as Sara."
I tried to take it all in, put together the puzzle. "So Oliver's worried that I'll go power mad? How can I kill myself by stopping time?" It seemed to me as if Oliver was becoming more and more controlling, or maybe it was just because I had a word for what he was doing now.
"I'm sure he'd make something up," Aiden rolled his eyes, "Like you managed to cut off your fingers after stopping time, and bled to death before you could start it back up."
Hm. It made for an interesting scenario. If I died after stopping time, would it just stay stopped? Would they even find my body? It almost made me want to experiment. Almost.
"But," Aiden said, snapping me out of my twisted fantasy, "I really don't want you to get hurt." I thought of what it would do to Aiden to lose me. Would he turn into a Tori? I couldn't see him like that. But was he really that close to me? Was this a "thing"?
"I'm not going to hurt myself. I'll be careful, I promise," I explained. Aiden looked deeper into my eyes, and suddenly, they turned back on. As if someone had flicked on a light switch in his eye sockets.
"Please?" He cracked a small smile, the first I had seen from him since the second after we kissed. I tried hard not to think about that. "You'll be safer with us."
What the hey, I thought. It wouldn't kill me, would it? I had already run away from home. I had already disappeared. I could simply join his family and move on.
But then why had I come all this way? I knew I had a purpose here in Chicago, I just didn't know what it was yet. But I knew it wasn't just to give into Aiden's sad-puppy argument. Luna Card was persistent. Luna Card was not a giver-upper.
"I just can't-" I started to say, but Aiden cut me off.
Because frankly, it's pretty hard to talk when someone's kissing you.