My kind. Those two words kept echoing in the empty space between my ears, trying to take all of this in. Who the hell was Van if he wasn’t my human bodyguard? I’d thought I hadn’t known much about him before, but it was becoming quite clear that I didn’t know shit about him.
“And all olatsma can do this? Turn into any person at will?”
“Yes.” He said, the bouncing of his knee the indication of his discomfort level. “But we can do more than that. We can shift into any living animal or person. We can’t do plants or trees. That’s more of a tythwig thing.”
My head was swimming with this information, completely skipping over the mention of another species of Orb that I wasn’t overtly familiar with. Then, like a sharp jolt to the stomach, I registered what additional information he’d just given me.
“You can turn into animals?”
“Living ones.” He corrected with a slight nod. “We can’t turn into unicorns or dragons, unfortunately.”
“Show me.” I said, gesturing toward Fawcett and Thiessen. “Turn into a cat.”
“Alistair,” He begged, an expression of exhaustion suddenly over his face.
“You want me to believe you, right?” I crossed my arms. “How the hell do I know this isn’t some sort of hallucination at forty-thousand feet?” I tilted my head toward the window, where the sky was passing by all around us. “I haven’t flown in a while.”
He rolled his eyes, and I hated how cute I thought he was. As much as I wanted to be repulsed by the fact that Van wasn’t exactly human like I’d thought he was, he was still a sweet, charming guy. One I’d had an incredible night with, one I’dbeen thinking about over and over the past few days since it’d happened. I just needed to see Van’s words in action for my brain to thoroughly be able to capture its truth.
Clearing his throat, Van rolled his shoulders again. Soon enough, that purple light was washing over his body until he inhumanly shrunk into an adorable little Scottish Fold, just like Fawcett and Thiessen. I gawked at him incredulously. Holy shit, Van had just turned into afucking cat. His coat was solid black, his eyes yellow and bold. He meowed for good measure, in a gesture that seemed to aid in my ability to grasp that this was really happening. Thiessen and Fawcett stirred in the cat carrier, eyes glued on Van’s cat form, assessing whether or not he was a threat. They both meowed back at him, a twin pair of cautious sounds as the purple light phased over the black Scottish Fold until he was enlarging into Van’s usual look.
I stared at him with my mouth slack and an empty void in my head. Van wasn’t a normal security guard. He wasn’t even a normal man. He was something else, something different and totally unheard of. It was as exciting as it was astonishing. I couldn’t believe that I’d just watched him shapeshift twice before my very eyes.
Then I thought back to that night, the one we’d shared together, and my face soured and my thoughts went on autopilot, forming words I wasn’t able to keep at bay any longer.
“So when we had sex,” I began, uncrossing my arms and looking at him with a glare. “You were lying to me then. You knew you were keeping this massive secret from me and you still slept with me like I didn’t deserve to know.”
“That’s exactly why I said I wanted to tell you that morning after.” Van stated. “I didn’t want to keep it from you any longer.”
I scoffed, re-crossing my arms. “Yeah, waiting untilafteryou fucked me.”
“Alistair, I never meant to lie to you. Or to trick you into having sex with me.” He looked frustrated that he couldn’t come over and comfort me, or touch me in general to try and soothe over his words. “Being olatsma is very difficult, but I never lied to you about anything else about me. My real nameisVanguard, and I was adopted when I was a child.” His face careened, like he hated that there was something else he’d failed to mention. “Except I wasn’t raised by human parents. The last name I gave you during my interview, Argent, is just a last name I’ve used to assimilate into human society, to have a job history. I was raised by two amazing zoudd parents that took me in and they knew I’d need a last name if I was going to wear my human illusion most of my life.”
That part actually didn’t bother me as much as it looked like Van was expecting it to. If he wasn’t human, it made sense to me that he would be raised by Orb parents. I’d imagine things would get wild if he’d been adopted by humans and shown them his true form.
“What is your true form?” I pondered aloud, my thoughts and my actual spoken words seeming to blend straight together in a line I wasn’t totally in control of. I blamed the overwhelming new information for my lack of control. “Can you show me what that looks like?”
Shaking his head, Van glared with an apology among his eyes. “Not unless you’d like for me to crash this plane.”
I kept my reaction to those words to myself. Did that mean that Van’s true form was so massive that it would literally tear the plane apart if he were to shift into it? An image of a different, otherworldly form of Van flashed before my eyes and it wasn’t disgust that was fueling those images.
It was lust.
I sighed to myself. In the end, it wasn’t actually that big of a deal to me that Van was an Orb. Did I like that he lied? No. DidI like that we’d had sex together before I found out? Also no. But after seeing his reaction, seeing the sorrow and general upset he was wearing like funeral attire at how unsettled I’d been about everything, I knew that he was still the same guy.
Harboring secrets related to your past, or just your very existence, that was something I knew too much about. So I couldn’t really fault Van for keeping some details about himself from me. I definitely hadn’t told him the horrors of my childhood, and I wasn’t planning on it. But I couldn’t exactly be upset with him without being upset with myself too.
“I get it.” I said, uncrossing my arms for the final time. “I may not like that you didn’t tell me up front or that you waited until after we slept together, but I understand not wanting to talk about things like that.” I watched as his entire demeanor changed, like he’d been holding onto all the tension in the entire universe and I was slowly calming him back down to a normal feeling. “You don’t owe me anything. And I’m sorry if I implied anything different.”
“I’m sorry for deceiving you, Alistair. Truly, I am. That’s why I was trying to tell you as soon as possible, so that I didn’t have to keep it from you any longer.”
And to his credit, he’d tried to talk to me about it more than once, but I’d been too busy with worrying about tour to entertain it. So again, I couldn’t point my finger at him without making sure I did the same in the mirror.
“It’s okay.” I smiled, trying to shift the energy surrounding us. I didn’t want this to change things between us. Even if we hadn’t exactly solidified what we were doing about the fact that, Orb or not, we’d had sex that night.
“So I’m still employed?” The corner of Van’s lips turned devilishly, that stupid handsome smirk that I liked so much.
“Yes.” I said, shaking my head at him. “You being an Orb isn’t that different from you being human. Especially with theway you look right now.” Which reminded me. “So wait, why was Xoah giving you weird looks then if you just needed to tell me this?”
