Read The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage for Free Online Page B

sounded like a mother scolding a child. Not my mother, exactly, thank fucking god.
    “It’s not like that.” I never liked the sound of my own voice when I whined. I reined it in. “Look. I know you’re…not ready. I…I respect that.” She shifted her weight, and her eyes widened in protest. “I do, Lina. I do.”
    “So?”
    I shook my head. “I…lost myself. I couldn’t…it’s like I couldn’t think.”
    Once I’d said it, it was a lot scarier. I guess she sensed that. She sat down next to me. Not touching, but next to me.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Like I was more…whatever that part of me that’s…like it is.”
    I thought of my father, his beard tangled with leaves and mud and dried blood, wild-eyed and grinning while he used his filthy toenails to rip the intestines out of a guy named Earl Pratt.
    “Like…him.”
    Lina was emphatic. “You’re not him, Nate. Not even.”
    “I’ve got his genes.”
    “But that’s not your whole deal,” she said. “You know how it works.”
    “Sure.” It took two sets of DNA to make a kid. Birds and the bees and whatever. But half the DNA that made me was…fucked up. Augmented. “But sometimes…I don’t know. I just get…submerged. I don’t know.”
    Lina studied me. “Submerged.”
    I nodded. “It’s stupid stuff, too. Like, my mother will ask me to do some chore or something, and all of a sudden I just feel so…angry.” I frowned and shook my head. “Like I just want to break shit. Tear into something.”
    Lina nodded slowly. She seemed less angry now. Her heartbeat had slowed, and her skin was cooler, drier. “So that’s how you felt with me.”
    Her voice was perfectly flat.
    “Like you wanted to…break me.”
    “No!” I wanted to touch her; I reached out my hand and stopped short of her arm. “Not…exactly.”
    She sat back, which put her a little farther away from me.
    “I think I get it,” she said.
    We sat there. I stared at nothing.
    “Lina.”
    “Yep.”
    I didn’t want to ask. I couldn’t not ask.
    “Why don’t you want to make love with me?”
    She let her head fall to rest on the couch back and closed her eyes. “I’m just not…I’m not there yet. I told you before.”
    “Not there.” I pushed through swirling, irritated jealousy. “Not there with me, you mean? Right?”
    She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.
    “Why don’t you ask what you want to ask, Nate.”
    Fine.
    “You’ve done it before. You’re not a virgin. Why not with me? What’s different about—Lina, c’mon. Look at me.”
    She turned her head to me.
    “Why not me?”
    She sighed. “I’m not a virgin. You’re right. I’ve had sex exactly one time. It was…I don’t know. It probably shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t…” She huffed. “How much of this do you want to know? I mean, really? You should think about it.”
    I swallowed. “It was Car.”
    “Yes, it was Car.”
    It hurt to hear it out loud, but I’d half believed it for so long it didn’t hit me like I guess I’d thought it would.
    “Okay.”
    Now she reached for my hand, and I let her take it. “It was right after his folks died. He was a mess. So was I. It just…it was like…comfort. It wasn’t a love thing. It wasn’t even a lust thing. It was…I don’t know. It was what happened.”
    I’d managed to put this information into some safe zone in my head. I felt a little numb.
    “So…but…you and I…it is a love thing. And it’s a lust thing. Isn’t that…” I shrugged and realized I sounded a little silly. I smiled ruefully. “Isn’t that all the right stuff?”
    She smiled back. We were a notch closer to having a nearly normal conversation, like two people who could and should be able to talk about anything together.
    “It should be, yeah,” she said. “I wish it was.”
    Something occurred to me.
    “You said you were a mess, too. But it wasn’t because of Car’s parents.”
    She glanced to one side and bit her lip. “No.”
    I