Hi guys, here are the next two chapters. Hope you dig them.
I am really, really grateful and pleasantly surprised by your reviews. Seeing that there are a few Bo/Lauren fanfic writers amongst you makes me realise how much I need to get off my ass and start reviewing, because I'm so slack. A lot of this story has already been done but the reviews make me want to do a good job, and hence I end up editing more than I thought I was going to! So thanks.
Chapter Five
"You've seen them lately, haven't you?" Ava said, trailing a finger down Lauren's collarbone. She still had a long leg thrown over Lauren, and the sheets were wrapped around their bodies.
"Huh?" Lauren asked. The meaning of Ava's sentence had registered exactly in the moment that she had asked for it to be explained. I still care about you. It had been echoing in her head for days. Bo was so free in the way she gave every kind of love that she was bursting with it; she might have said the exact same thing to Kenzi. It didn't stop Lauren from repeating it over and over again, hoping that it meant something more.
"The person you're yearning for. You're more distracted than usual, and I can taste it," Ava explained bluntly.
Lauren rolled away, shaken. It had always been easy for Lauren to understand fae behaviour; it was just a matter of being aware of where they positioned humans in their world. Nonetheless it was confronting to hear her deepest, most private feelings spoken about as though they were food.
"There's no need to be embarrassed. I just want to know who you're thinking about when you're with me. Don't I deserve to know?" Ava said.
Lauren pulled the pillow under her head to try to get comfortable, unsure of how to respond to the question. Perhaps Ava was right; she had given herself over willingly to be fed on after all. And she wondered if it meant something to Ava from a feeding standpoint. Did she want to know for only selfish reasons? Did she really care? She wished that Ava had just left afterwards, as she often did. It kept everything simple.
Lauren changed her mind 1000 times a day about this situation. She would decide that this arrangement wasn't for her, and then in the next moment she would determine that one more time wouldn't hurt. Intimacy was important – even if this wasn't what she'd ever be able to bring herself to think of as the right kind of intimacy. Ava had moved towards her and had a hand on her shoulder.
"I'm sorry if I've upset you. I'm trying to be sensitive in my own way," Ava laughed in a self-deprecating way. "I think I know who it is, I just thought you might want to talk about it."
"You do?" Lauren said dully. She'd suspected that Ava knew that day at the lab; only she'd hoped she were wrong.
"It's Bo, isn't it? At first I thought it was Dyson, can you imagine? There's a kind of passion between you two, I had to look twice to see that it's dislike. He doesn't speak about you very nicely."
Ava was running her fingers through Lauren's hair, while she lay silent. "But it's her, isn't it? I knew it for sure when we were all in the same room. I was experimenting to see who reacted."
Lauren sighed, closing her eyes. She didn't feel like opening herself up to Ava, and yet without Bo to talk to she really had nobody. Maybe it would just be a relief to talk about it.
"Okay yes, it's her," Lauren confessed.
"I knew it," Ava said. "I'm never wrong. Were you ever together?"
Lauren paused, because to say not really did not do it justice. Yet they'd only slept together once, only kissed that one night. It was the only time they'd dropped the pretence that the relationship was purely professional. There was no logical way to describe the connection that she felt with Bo. There was no way to explain how she'd managed to fall so hard for someone that she should have never fallen for.
It had just been there, right from the start. She hadn't been able to get Bo out of her mind after their first meeting. It somehow had everything and nothing to do with her being a succubus. Despite her species she had proven to be the most "human" fae she'd ever met, and in fact her capacity for caring made her seem more human than most people she'd known.
It wasn't long before she had what she'd thought of as a huge crush on Bo. The kind that gave you butterflies, the kind that she remembered from being a teenager that she had thought never came again once you grew older. It had made her blood run faster every time Bo walked into the room. A hyper-awareness had sprung up; she found that if Bo was in the same room she could think of nothing else, and she hoarded every detail of every encounter.
So Lauren started taking more care with her appearance, lingering over her hair in the mornings or spending way too long debating about what shirt to wear. She rehearsed conversations in her head and found herself marking time before she would get to see Bo again.
But all of that was just for her, she didn't want to share it.
"No. We weren't. I just care about her a lot, that's all," Lauren said finally.
"It's more than that. You're close to being in love with her, if you're not already," Ava softly insisted. "And you're not in her thrall, because that's not real love. I'd be able to sense that."
There was no point denying it to herself any more. Hearing Ava say it out loud made it true, and she suddenly felt unbearably sad. Lauren closed her eyes against the ache.
"You must know better than anyone that people can't help who they fall in love with. She doesn't feel the same way. I'm trying to let it go," Lauren said.
"Haha," Ava laughed, seeming genuinely amused by her statement.
"You're laughing at me," Lauren said, injured. She'd thought for a moment that Ava might be really trying to help; that she really wanted to listen. This was exactly why she'd hesitated to talk about it. It made her feel foolish, childish. Ava obviously thought so too.
"No, wait. Is that what you really think?" Lauren could feel Ava leaning over her. "She loves you too. You don't know how often this happens, I see it all of the time. It really keeps me well stocked for feeding, I have to say," Ava said.
Lauren looked back over at her shoulder at Ava. "What are you talking about?"
"I can see that it runs both ways. I can see love as clearly as you can see smoke or fire. And you should really be careful. This sort of thing?" Ava said, pointing back and forth between the two of them. "This is how it works. This is what passes for okay as far as the human-fae thing goes. But you can't be in a relationship with someone who is fae, even an unaligned one. You'll be punished for it, one way or another."
Lauren rolled over to look at her properly. "I'm well aware of that."
"Good. I don't much care if you two get together, although I would miss this. As you can see I'm not so hung up on protocol. But everyone else is, and that's more of a problem than you can imagine," Ava said.
"Yeah," Lauren agreed, but her mind was a million miles away from the warning. Ava seemed so sure. Could that actually be true? Bo had warmed towards her again lately but she had been trying to not read too much into it. For all she knew Ava was just saying it to wind her up, to make her feelings more intense so that she would have more to feed from. But if it were true – if it were true. It was too much to hope for. She wished again that she were alone so that she could think about it properly.
"It doesn't matter. She's with Dyson now, it's not going to happen," Lauren said to mask what she'd been really thinking.
"Whatever you say," Ava said, but she was looking at Lauren like she knew everything.
X X X
Lauren and Ava were sitting together at the bar of the Dal, drinking from the same pitcher. They'd been careful to act as though they'd come in separately and were just having a sociable drink. Ava had suggested they to go out for a beer after their afternoon in bed. It wasn't what they usually did, but their conversation had melted the ice. Lauren suspected that Ava must feel sorry for her.
They'd been trading tales about past relationships, Ava recounting to Lauren a story about one of the very few times she'd found herself in the role of the scorned lover. Ava was obviously trying to make Lauren feel better, and Lauren was touched by it.
"And I actually climbed into her window like a psychopath, only to find that she wasn't sleeping with anyone else like I thought, but she was so mad at me for not trusting her that we broke up," Ava laughed and propped her hand on her chin. "God, love really does make you do stupid things."
Lauren was laughing along with her. "And she was a mermaid too? That's fascinating. You must have had so much in common."
Ava sighed regretfully. "Yeah, it took me a long time to get over that one. Years. Do you know how hard it was to find a mermaid who was into me like I was into her? We used to have a ball, we'd spend weeks just swimming down the coast and stopping to stay little hotels on the beach."
"That sounds lovely," Lauren agreed.
"What sounds lovely?" Bo asked, appearing beside them at the bar. She was looking between Ava and Lauren's faces in a benign way, but Lauren could see the anxiety behind her expression. Lauren licked the lips of her suddenly dry mouth and took another sip of beer. It had occurred to her that Bo might be at the bar, and she'd hidden her half-hopeful and then disappointed look around the room when she'd come in. They could have just gone to any human local place, but The Dal had been Ava's suggestion.
"We were just talking about taking a trip sometime, going away to the beach or something . . ." Ava said, grinning at Bo.
"Oh . . . nice," Bo fumbled, holding up a couple of fingers towards Trick. She frowned thoughtfully while she waited for him to deposit two bottles of beer and matching shots on the bar. "Excuse me," she said, forcing a smile at them again before she left to walk over to where Kenzi was waiting for her.
"Why did you say that?" Lauren said, looking at Ava in disbelief.
Ava shrugged, picking up her drink with a shrug. "I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. She's so jealous. I love that stuff. It's like crack to me."
"I know you were trying to get a reaction out of her but that's dangerous. Weren't you just telling me that the human-fae thing was complicated? You can't talk about us so casually," Lauren said, looking furtively over her shoulder at Bo. Bo was staring at them but she looked away as soon as their eyes met.
"Oh come on, she already knows. Nobody else in here heard. And I just did you a favour, you can thank me some other time," Ava winked at her.
Lauren didn't answer, she just scoffed. As much as the idea that Bo could actually be jealous appealed to her, it wasn't right. Bo was just being protective, and Ava's provocations were starting to make Lauren wonder if she were right to be.
"My work is done here," Ava announced. "Thanks for a good afternoon, I'll see you next time."
Ava brushed a hand over Lauren's thigh and then walked away, looking cheekily over her shoulder. Lauren shook her head. Just when she was beginning to feel close to Ava, she was reminded of how much of a game this was to her. She looked down at her drink. It was still half full; but she'd never been a fan of drinking alone. She took a final sip from her glass and picked up her purse from the bar, settling the bill. Ava hadn't left any money.
As she walked out she felt Bo's eyes on her. She had considered asking to join her, but Bo was sitting with Kenzi and she felt the younger woman's eyes on her too. Kenzi had never hid her dislike of her, and it had been magnified since that night she'd slept with Bo. She didn't feel like putting herself forward for a round of Kenzi's insults, whether subtle or not.
She glanced at Bo, who looked back at her with intensity in her gaze. She felt stripped under it, naked.
Lauren felt her stomach drop at the somehow tangible feel of Bo's eyes on her, but she kept walking, offering nothing but an uncomfortable smile and a wave that felt woefully inadequate.
X X X
"If your eyes were lazers you would have burned a hole in her ass by now," Kenzi commented, wincing at the bitterness as she downed a shot.
"That's the worst metaphor I've ever heard," Bo said, her eyes trailing Lauren towards the door. When she'd seen Ava leave she'd hoped that Lauren might at least come and say hi properly.
"It's a fact," Kenzi said. "I know you don't like them hanging out but you gotta let it go."
Bo started to speak but quickly closed her mouth, because she imagined that Kenzi would just tell her she was being obsessive. She had no intention of dropping it, not when Lauren was at stake.