“Were you driving?” I asked quietly, all the while scouring my memory banks for any story I might have read about a tragic accident that had thrown him on life support. When I realized I’d never seen a word about it, I could only imagine how much money the Cross family had spent to keep something like that out of the papers.
James’s eyes tightened for a second before they dropped to his lap. “Worse,” he said softly. “I was racing. A loading truck pulled out of nowhere, and I swerved to avoid it and lost control. I went over the side of a dried-up canal.”
My eyes darted down to my leg.
He followed my curious gaze. He flexed his calf involuntarily before his shoulders fell. “It took the rescue workers three hours to pry the car off me,” he said after a quiet sigh. “An hour after that, they finally airlifted me to a hospital. When I woke up in recovery, they told me I technically died for two minutes. If not for an emergency blood transfusion at the scene, that would have been it.”
That would have been it?
I was sure I would never forget the sound of his voice when he said those words. It was like something out of a nightmare, those gruesome images as playing out behind his lovely eyes that flickered with belated fear and a deep sadness he didn’t seem completely aware of himself.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, reaching out to absentmindedly take his hand. “I know you act as if it’s nothing, but seven years ago or not, something like that... Well, I’m sure it never really goes away.”
James glanced down at our hands, then cleared his face and shrugged more deliberately this time. “I really don’t remember much, just flashes of light, the heat, the pain...” Clouds brewed in his eyes for a moment before they resumed their usual radiance. “By the time I came to, the surgery was already done, and Nick had set up headquarters in my hospital room.”
“Nick? As in Nick Hunter?” I asked. It was not lost on me the way his eyes lit up when he mentioned his friend.
“The one and only,” he said with a nod, breaking into a smile.
“That wouldn’t happen to be the same Nick Hunter who escaped his own engagement party in a seaside helicopter, would it?”
James glanced up with a look of surprise, but his expression quickly morphed to one of innocence as he shook his head. “I heard about that guy. What a crazy bastard,” he said.
I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back with a grin. “Yeah? Well, I heard that that was you.”
Just like that, his innocence went right out the window. “Do me a favor,” he said, shooting me a rueful grin. “Try to stay off the internet, okay?”
My smile faded again when I lifted my hands and looked down once more at the crescent moon scar. At first glance, it wasn’t easy to see, because it was smooth and blended perfectly with the contours of his muscles. What really gave it away was the color, as it contrasted his normal complexion in some inhuman hue of white, as if someone had taken a can of paint and brushed it up the side of his knee.
“What happened after that, when you woke up?” I prodded. I was late for work, and I was obviously prying, but I couldn’t help myself. We’d spent hours upon hours talking about me, uncovering every last mindless detail and every random fact about my years on Earth. Now, I wanted to hear about him, the real James Cross—not the man in the internet articles, the jet-setting sex god of Google legend. I wanted to know about him, and I wanted to hear it from his own lips.
There was a restless shift on the sofa, and I suddenly realized he was just as uncomfortable as I was when it came to talking about himself. In a way, it made sense that he was so private. The second he stepped outside every day, he was swarmed by millions of people asking millions of questions. Over time, he’d learned to deflect. It was his defense mechanism, his way of protecting himself and keeping his stories in their own private nook in his mind, secrets he always guarded with a centerfold smile. That kind of secrecy didn’t lend itself well to whatever was going on between us, though, so he seemed okay with divulging things to me.
“I was in the hospital for five weeks, went through another surgery. I survived on take-away, because the hospital food is atrocious. I tried to escape twice in broad daylight,” he added with a wink. “Nocturnal escape attempts were a regular occurrence.”
I laughed aloud but found myself hanging on every word. There was something mesmerizing about the way he talked, something that went beyond the hypnotic rhythm of his voice. It was as if with every line, he cracked open another window, offered another fleeting glimpse at what was happening on the other side.
“Nick was with me every step of the way,” he said, his carefree smile fading as his eyes gazed back on that time almost a decade ago. “He never left, not for a single moment, even when... Well, I can’t say I always made things easy on him.” He silenced then, worlds away and seeing things I couldn’t, lost in visions of the past.
“How so?” I asked gently.
He looked up in surprise, almost as if he’d forgotten I was there.
“What do you mean, you didn’t make things easy on him?”
James paused a moment more, opened his mouth, then thought better of it and paused again. After a second, he looked up at me with a very peculiar expression, one so guarded that it had no place on his lovely face. “Why must you hear all this?”
I leaned abruptly back, caught off guard by his sudden change in tone. It wasn’t unfriendly, but it was brusque and wary, almost accusatory. I was just about to answer, but he beat me to the punch.
“I
t’s nothing flashy, nothing sexy.” His eyes cooled for a moment before he fixed them resolutely on the wall. “Certainly not one of your scandalous stories.”
Whoa there! Where the hell did that come from?!
I understood that in a lot of ways, his limitless world far more prohibitive than mine, but at the same time, I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice as I folded my arms across my chest and flattened my smile. “James, I told you about the time I fell asleep with my window open, only to be peed upon by the neighbor’s cat, my worst Tuesday ever. Why would I be after your salacious stories? I have plenty of my own, thank you very much.”
There was a heavy pause, during which the cat urine story seemed to echo around the room, till it felt like the walls themselves were laughing at me.