Within the embrace of the solitude and against the backdrop of the quiet sound of the water's spray, she unleashed her bad side for a good purpose: In a great rush, her symphath instincts dove into John, penetrating through his physical territory and going deep into his mind and his recollections.
As he lifted his head and looked up at her in shock, everything went red and two-dimensional, the tile becoming a blush pink, John's dark, damp hair changing to the color of blood, the water twinkling like rose champagne.
The images she got were drawn with a quill of terror and shame: a dark stairway in an apartment building not unlike the one he'd taken her to; him a small pretrans being forced by a fetid human male. . .
Oh. God.
No.
Xhex's knees gave out and she wobbled--then just let herself go to the ground, landing on the slick tile so hard her bones rattled and her teeth clapped together.
No. . . not John, she thought. Not when he was defenseless and innocent and so very alone. Not when he was lost in the human world, scrounging to survive.
Not him. Not like that.
With her symphath side out and her eyes undoubtedly glowing red, they sat there staring at each other. He knew she'd read him and he hated her knowledge with such a fury she wisely kept any sorrow or commiseration to herself. He didn't appear to resent that she'd invaded him, though. It was more like he wished like fuck he didn't have that to share with anybody.
"What does Lash have to do with it," she said roughly. "Because he's all over your mind. "
John's eyes shifted to the drain in the center and she got the impression he was seeing blood pooling around the stainless-steel cap. Lash's.
Xhex narrowed her eyes, the backstory becoming pretty damned guess-able: Lash had found out about John's secret. Somehow. And she didn't need her symphath side to tell her what the fucker would have done with information like that.
A baseball announcer would seek less of an audience.
As John's stare came back to her, she felt a shattering communion with him. No barriers, no worries about being vulnerable. Even though they were both fully clothed, each was naked before the other.
She knew damn well she was never going to find this with any other male. Or any other person. He knew without words all she had been through and everything that those kind of experiences spawned when they were triggered. And she knew the same for him.
And maybe that shadow on his emotional grid was a kind of bifurcation of his psyche caused by the trauma he'd been through. Maybe his mind and his soul had gotten together and agreed to cut the past out and put it toward the back of his mental and emotional attic. Maybe that was why these two parts of him were so vividly animated.
Made sense. And so did the vengeance he was feeling. After all, Lash had been intimately involved in both sets of wrongs, his and hers.
Information like John's in the wrong hands? Almost as bad as the horror that had actually happened because you relived that shit every time someone else learned of the story. Which was why she never talked about her time up in the colony with her father, or that shit in the human medical clinic. . . or. . . yeah. . .
John raised his forefinger and tapped beside his eye.
"Mine are red?" she murmured. When he nodded, she rubbed her face. "Sorry. I'm probably going to need to get another pair of cilices. "
As he shut the water off, she dropped her hands. "Who else knows. About you. "
John frowned. Then mouthed, Blay, Qhuinn. Zsadist. Havers. A therapist. When he shook his head, she took that to mean it was the end of the list.
"I'm not going to say anything to anyone. "
Her eyes went over his huge body from those shoulders to his powerful biceps and his tremendous thighs--and she found herself wishing he'd been this size back in that grungy stairwell. At least he wasn't as he'd been when he'd been hurt anymore--although that was true only on the outside. Inside, he was all the ages he'd ever lived through, the infant who'd been abandoned, the child who'd been unwanted, the pretrans who'd been out in the world on his own. . . and now the grown male.
Who was an ass-kicker in the field and a loyal friend and, going by what he'd done to that lesser in the brownstone and what he undoubtedly wanted to do to Lash, a very nasty enemy.
And didn't this add up to a problem: As far as she was concerned, the son of the Omega was hers to murder.
Not that they needed to cover that right now.
As the dampness from the tile sneaked into the seat of her scrubs, and water dripped off of John, she was surprised by what she wanted to do.
On a lot of levels, it didn't make sense and it certainly wasn't a hot idea. But logic wasn't a big player in this moment between them.
Xhex shifted forward and put her palms on the slick shower floor. Moving slowly, going hand, knee, hand, knee, she went toward him.