“I’m fine,” I assured him. “You don’t have to babysit me. I’m just going to rest for today, anyway.”
He didn’t move his gaze from the reader while he spoke. “I know you’re fine.”
“So why are you doing this?”
“Because I can’tnotbe here.” His voice was soft, like he hated having to say that aloud. “I tried to leave, but I keep thinking that if I turn my back, Corsa will find another way to link with you.” A tremble started in his voice, one totally at odds with the man I’d grown used to.
I pushed myself up to sitting so I could look him in the face. “You aren’t at fault for this, you know that, right?”
His tensed jaw suggested he didn’t agree. “I should have realized it was happening sooner. You’ve been with us for months now, and that entire time, I didn’t know.”
“No one knew. I didn’t even know.”
“But Ishouldhave. This is my skill set, my expertise. I should have realized it and stopped it sooner. Even when I figured it out, I couldn’t do anything about it.” He still kept his focus on the ereader, despite it being pointless. Everything in his response said he paid all his attention to the conversation.
Then again, given both what I’d seen of him and what I’d heard about him, he rarely seemed to experience much in the way of emotions. Someone who didn’t experience that themselves probably didn’t have a lot of coping strategies when they had to confront them.
The way he sat there, the way he seemed to barely breathe, it all went to show just how unsettled he truly was.
Which was strange. I was used to him being solid, unreacting even as the others behaved like kindergarteners when their teacher left the room. Seeing him thrown now was almost endearing, even if it had no right to be.
I slid my leg over him, then rested in his lap. It forced him to hold the ereader slightly closer to him, but even still, he refused to look at me.
“You’re the reason we figured it out,” I said.
“Not soon enough.”
“Sooner than it would have been without you.” I cocked up an eyebrow.
Somehow, his upset helped me to deal with my own feelings about the whole thing. The idea thathe—Corsa, as I had now discovered—had actually been in my mind terrified me. It was a leash I hadn’t known was there, one that made me sick. Focusing on Shear instead helped, made me feel as though there was something I could do.
When he refused to look at me, I plucked the ereader from his grasp and tossed it onto the bed. It gave him nothing to use to ignore me, so he offered me a glare worthy of a teenage girl.
“What?” he asked.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t doenough.I should have been better.”
A part of me heard Mr. Yorn in the back of my head, the way he’d talked about hissubjects,including Shear.
I set my hands on his cheeks and leaned in, pressing my forehead to his. “You did enough.”
“It didn’t work.”
“That doesn’t mean you didn’t do enough. I wouldn’t have known it was real, that anything was going on, if not for you. You risked yourself, and that helped me. Just because something didn’t work doesn’t mean you didn’t do enough.”
He breathed a long, drawn-out sigh. His breath tasted of mint, and it made me realize…I hadn’t done this as much with him.
He’d never really pushed, never tried to get more, so I hadn’t realized how little focus I’d spent on him.
I also recalled what had happened between him and Ingram. The way he’d gone down on Ingram suggested they’d done that before.
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“You’re not supposed to read my mind.”
“I try not to, and when I catch stray thoughts, I try to ignore them. That isn’t how it is, though, between Ingram and myself.”
