Home > Work > Atlantis Rising (Atlantis Rising, #1)
1 " Ian was too Captain America for my taste. "
― , Atlantis Rising (Atlantis Rising, #1)
2 " Sorry," Ian said with a sympathetic wince of his own.It was the sting, not the apology, that irritated me, but I took it out on him anyway. "You've said sorry like...four times now," I growled. "Stop repeating yourself.""Sorry," he replied automatically.When the absurdity of his fifth apology occurred to me, I couldn't hold the laughter back. It burst out of me and rang off the walls. Ian joined in. That's when I saw the full force of his smile coupled with a laugh, and my breath caught in my throat. It was beautiful. He was beautiful."I don't see what you two think is so funny," Paula interjected. "
3 " Why are you still wearing those ridiculous glasses?" he asked. "Could you have picked an uglier pair, by the way?""The point was to make myself as uninteresting as possible.""No matter how hard you try, you could never be uninteresting," he said.I'm sure I had a silly grin on my face for hours after that. "
4 " So you knew Jack growing up?”“I had a bit of a crush on him through the years, but there was nothing between us until much later when I ran into him at Stanford. I was getting my master’s degree in art history there, and he was working at a teaching hospital. As destiny would have it, I broke my sternum in a fall from a horse. My human friends insisted I go to the emergency room to get checked out. Of course I knew it would heal on its own, but I humored them anyway. Jack was my doctor that day.”“So you began dating and got likenessed, or whatever?”“The dating part followed the getting-likenessed part,” she explained. “He walked in, looked up from his clipboard, and there was a complete…mental connection. That’s the only way I can explain it. Likeness is a melding of minds and once it happens it can never be undone.”Doing a quick rewind of what happened between Ian and myself during lunch, I cried out. “Oh, no! No!”What? Brandy asked, mirroring my alarm.“I think that mental connection, likeness thing, happened to me and Ian this afternoon,” I replied in a panic.She pulled to the side of the road. “Calm down,” she said. “I would have sensed it if it had. Hang on—I did sense something.”I couldn’t catch my breath. I was started to see stars.“It wasn’t likeness, though,” she stated with certainty. “Explain exactly what happened.”“Ian used his joining on me during lunch. It was supposed to be a shortcut to show me how joinings work. Things started out fine, everything was all business, but then it took a turn.”“So what’s the problem?” she asked.“The problem is…it turned into some kind of weird mind-kissing thing. That sounds crazy, but there is nothing else I can compare it to. "
5 " We project energy when we use our joining, and it comes back at us like the flick of a rubber band. You’ve got to learn to buffer yourself from the rebound.”“You’re not making a lot of sense,” I said wearily.“Pay super-close attention then.” He put an arm across my shoulders. “You have to buffer yourself after you use your joining. Kind of like tightening your stomach muscles so it won’t hurt when you get punched in the gut.”I shook his arm off, shuffled things around in my locker, closed the door, and spun the lock. “I’ve never been punched in the gut, so that analogy doesn’t mean much to me. I promise to think it through tomorrow. Maybe after I’ve slept eighteen hours I’ll understand what you’re talking about.”He smiled and put an arm around my waist. “I give good massages,” he said with teasing eyes. “I think you could use one.”“You need to work on your smolder,” I said. “Maybe lift an eyebrow or something.”He laughed. “I’m only giving it 50 percent right now. When I give it all I’ve got, it will work so well you won’t remember your own name.”“Is there an end to your ego?”“If there is, I haven’t found it yet,” he said without shame. "
6 " Ian’s hygiene products didn’t include hair conditioner, so I was left with a tangled mess to comb out afterward. I found a flimsy-looking black comb in his shaving kit and did the best I could with it. The poor thing bent and lost a few teeth as I ran it through my snarls. By the time I was finished, the comb was ruined. I said a few words of respect and then buried it in the trash can.After getting dressed again, I opened the bathroom door and found Ian lying on the air mattress with his arm over his eyes.“Nice shower?” he asked in a weary voice.“Yes. I’ll have to buy you a new comb, though. I killed the one from your shaving bag.”He moved his arm to look at me. “You’d better. "
7 " He took a lock of my wet hair in his fingers. “It was pretty nice of me to save your life, wasn’t it? Is that why you kissed me?”There were a lot of reasons why I had kissed him, but I wasn’t going to tell him all of them. “I am grateful,” I said. “But in general, I don’t kiss guys for that reason.”“So you kiss a lot of guys?”“No, you’re the first one, but we can’t do it again.”“Ouch,” he replied.I smiled down at him. Our kiss had been a mistake. His plan to leave Vegas when we finished with Sebastian hadn’t changed. And we had other more important things to be concerned with. “I think it was probably pretty good for a first kiss,” I said, “but I don’t want to be kissing anyone right now. I don’t need or want to be distracted while I learn what you and Brandy can teach me. You should limit your distractions, too. We need to concentrate on confronting Sebastian right now.”Ian smiled wickedly. “You’re right, but when this is over, I’m going to kiss you again.”“You keep telling yourself that,” I said. "
8 " Don’t get killed,” I ordered.He hugged me tight. “That’s second on my to-do list. First on my list is to make sure you don’t get killed. "
9 " Ian had taken the desk near mine. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. Physical contact on top of an overload of energy made my head spin. To top it off, when our eyes met, I couldn’t look away. From across the room, Brandy threw a pen at us. It landed loudly on the desk in front of me, breaking the spell. She shook her head and Ian pulled his hand away.Brandy fell in step with me after class. “You’re humming,” she remarked disapprovingly. “I don’t think Ian’s parents would approve of the type of energy floating around here.”“I had to do it,” Ian said, coming up behind us. “She was paralyzed with fear.”“Too bad the side effects will make both of you useless for the rest of the day. You didn’t think about that, did you?”“Useless for what?” I asked.“Ian won’t be able to defend himself if someone should attack. His energy is too wrapped up in yours,” Brandy explained. "
10 " Without looking up, he moved his backpack from the chair next to him and waved me toward him. His blond head was bent over a book.“Are you planning to ignore me all lunch hour because you’re mad about what happened in class?” I asked.“No,” he said. “I just want to finish this book.”“How can you be absorbed in a book when Luke Stentorian is on the loose and Sebastian is on the verge of finding me? And when I say me, I mean us.”“Like Brandy said, the best course of action right now is to act normal. Besides, this is a great book.”I checked the cover. He was reading The Man in the Iron Mask. Not a light read, and he was nowhere near the end. I didn’t want to sit around twiddling my thumbs for the rest of lunch period, so I decided to practice my skills. I formed the thought I’d like to see the Eiffel Tower and wrapped it around the thoughts in Ian’s mind. The rebound made me draw a painful breath, but he looked up and into the distance.“What’s up?” I asked innocently.“It’s weird,” he said. “I was just thinking about the Eiffel Tower. I’ve seen it before—twice, actually. I wasn’t very impressed either time.”“I’m getting better and better at this.”“It was you,” he said with a grin. “Try it again.”When I accessed his mind next, I could tell he was watching for me, but I quickly wrapped I think I’ll have tofu lasagna for dinner around his thought strand. Expecting the rebound, I steadied myself before it hit.“No way!” he said. "
11 " It’s not right,” she said loudly. “He’s not like us.”Ian had been waiting to hear something from her, something that would give him an idea where to hit Sebastian. “What does that mean?” he asked.Brandy abruptly dropped to the floor. Ian ran toward Sebastian. He made it halfway across the room and then fell to his knees. Sebastian seemed surprised. “You’re strong for someone so young,” he said. “But not strong enough.”I didn’t know exactly what was happening, but Ian was in trouble. I wasn’t above hitting old men when I had to. "
