Chapter Twenty One

“I think I always knew!” she cried, screaming at a pitch she’d never achieved before.

Harrison plugged his ear closest to her.

“I knew deep down that if you knew me, really knew me, you couldn’t be in love with me. I trespassed on your property. I stole your father’s life’s work and when I first met you…” She just kept going on like that.

It hadn’t made much sense, but she didn’t make more sense as she went on.

To say that it had been difficult to calm her down after fishing her out of his father’s lab was an understatement. She was hysterical. He had to agree that the whole thing was pretty creepy, but the last thing in the world he wanted was for his house to become the world headquarters of M.T.N. instead of a place to go for helocarrier tours. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to take her to the hospital. The truth was that he had early M.T.N. testing every time he went to the hospital to see his parents. He'd done it so many times, he knew the drill as well as the nurses at the hospital. From what he knew, it was obvious when someone contracted it. Their saliva turned yellow almost instantly. So, Harrison gave Paige the PH test a few more times only to comfort her. He knew she didn’t have it.

Harrison rubbed his eyes. He had just finished putting Paige to bed. It had not been anywhere near as thrilling as it ought to have been. She was stressed out, guilt-ridden, and demented with fright.

Now he had the unfortunate job of going down to his father’s lab to see for himself what was there. There were two biohazard suits in the back of his chocker and he put one on before going down. He wasn’t sure if it was completely necessary to gird up his loins like that, but he planned to touch things and snoop, so better safe than sorry.

He stepped inside the hangar and opened all the trap doors and hatches.

In his father’s lab, he turned on his flashlight and looked at the ruptors all lined up in their little boxes. They looked creepy as hell to him, but he couldn’t ignore them. This was what Zaphier and Armand wanted.

Harrison ditched the science fair projects and went to the computer, which was still plugged in, and booted it up. He had some trouble accessing the files, but hacking his father’s brain for a password wasn’t as difficult for him as he guessed it would have been for Armand. Their father was a mechanical engineer. Harrison punched in the serial code from his father’s first chocker and gained complete access. From there, he tried to use his phone to upload as much information as he could but there wasn’t enough room. In the end, he had to use the pocket watch Sleeping Beauty Inc. had given him to upload the earlier files.

Once that was done, he shut everything back down, locked everything up, and returned to the land of the living. On the way out, he changed the password to the door that protected Excalibur to a five-digit number. He didn’t want anybody else getting access to Excalibur or his father’s third basement lab.

Back at the house, Paige was out of bed and sitting on the lip of the tub reading a pamphlet on M.T.N. that came with the first aid kit that they kept in the bathroom.

Harrison sighed when he saw her out of bed. “You still don’t believe me that you’re clean?”

“No. I believe you. I just can’t relax and I thought that reading this would make me feel better.”

Harrison sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I just—”

Paige tensed up and interrupted. “I guess you know that photoshoot was all a pretense for those guys to come here.”

“It was weird from the beginning.”

She brushed off his hand. “I want you to know that I never slept with Zaphier.”

Harrison was relieved, but didn’t have the nerve to say more than, “No?”

“Yeah, but I was such a fool. I can’t stand it and who knows, one of the ruptors I stole might have been the one that infected Princess Elizabella.”

“Even so, you probably couldn’t have helped that. I mean, you didn't get infected with M.T.N., so it's clear you managed to transport them safely. If she got infected after, how is that your fault?”

“I don’t know. I just feel sick.”

“You should sleep,” he suggested calmly.

Paige got up and started pacing. “No. I can’t stand it. Knowing all this stuff is too hard. I can’t stand to be in my own skin. All the things I did—I don’t want to know about them. Can’t we go and get my memory wiped again?”

Harrison was appalled. “No! Tough it out! If you got your memory wiped now, you’d lose all the time that we had together too.”

Paige let her head fall forward in dismay. "Sorry. I didn't think of that."

"Come here," he said, "let's go to bed."

"I thought you said I wasn't allowed to sleep with you a second time if we weren't going to get all hot and heavy?" she asked, her guard up.

He bobbed his head in agreement. "Yeah, I know I said that, but this is different. You're distraught. You need to sleep. I'll hold you until you fall asleep."

She stood up. “You aren’t going to love me when you hear what I remember.”

“What do you remember?”

“I remember falling out of love with Zaphier and falling in love with Armand.”

Harrison paused. He looked at the bathroom floor, then at the mirror, and then at the door. It was hard for him to turn back to Paige and ask, “How did that end?”

“He was the one who wiped my memory and stole all that money. I was lucky though because he convinced Zaphier not to kill me… after he failed to kill me when he shoved me off a cliff,” Paige said slowly like she couldn’t believe the sequence of words she was using.

“Still feeling the love?”

“N-no,” Paige stuttered. “He didn’t exactly break my heart… more like I realized how little I meant to him. I was thrown away and frozen…” Paige did not tell him how agonizing Armand’s betrayal felt. After all, how could she explain how Armand’s rough chin had felt like love? She believed it was the only thing that could keep her alive after her contract ended. Harrison only needed to understand one thing, so she said, “I think I blamed you for what he did to me. You were familiar, like him, and I didn’t want him, so I pushed you away.”

Reviewing events from their past, it all rang true to Harrison who felt like he was fighting something inside her that he couldn’t see.

“I’m not my brother. I don’t even know him. Yes, I probably do sound like him, and from what Osric has shown me of him, your apprehension makes sense, but you’re wrong if you think I consider you damaged goods because of what he did. I knew something was hurting you and now we know what. We’re getting closer to setting this all straight.”

“You’re too good to me,” she sobbed.

He put his arm around her and clucked his tongue gently. He had been planning to put her in the spare room bed, where she had been sleeping recently, but if she slept fitfully, then it wouldn't matter if he'd comforted her the first time. "Get in my bed. It's more comfortable than the spare room and if you wake up, I'll be there if you need me."

Paige fell on him and cried.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say something about how much she must love him for her to act like that, but he didn't. He didn't want to pressure her for an answer on a night when she was stressed.

He followed her into the bedroom and put her in his bed with his covers up to her chin and suddenly made a decision. He decided to give her the whole show. On a night like that night, the whole show was not much, but it was what he would have done if she had not been there.

He sat on the edge of the bed and undid the laces on his boots. He peeled off his socks and threw them in the laundry bin (something he hadn't done before Paige started living with him). He got up and turned to face her, steadily undoing the buttons on his work shirt. He revealed the white t-shirt he wore under everything. The work shirt went into the laundry too. Then he started pulling on his belt and a warm color spread across Paige's cheeks. Harrison was glad of it as he dropped his pants and gave her a good view of his underwear. He put the pants aside and pulled a pair of flannel pajama bottoms out of his drawer.

"That's the end of the striptease?" she joked.

He smiled and sucked in this breath in a disapproving way. "I know you were hoping for more, but I wouldn't want to expose my slave to anything she couldn't unsee."

Her expression fell.

He got into bed next to her and settled her in the crook of his arm. It was tense for a moment, with their bodies pressed up against each other.

Harrison broke the discomfort by saying, "If I had a dog, I'd let you cuddle up to him instead of me."

"I like cats," she replied.

Harrison made a delightful purring sound and Paige suddenly shrieked with laughter.

"Do it again!" she begged.

Harrison shook his head, not because he didn't want to do it a second time, but because he was laughing too hard to do it again. "Go to sleep."

“It’s hard to stop thinking.”

“Put your head right here and listen to my heart.”

She obeyed and after a few minutes, commented on how good he smelled.

Once Paige was asleep, he turned on his phone and got to work reading his father’s documents. He had to figure out exactly what had happened in the lab, what if his father had learned in the experiment that went right? Was it possible to reproduce it? Either way, both he and Paige were going to get chased down by Rawson mafia lords.

***

Paige rolled over in bed and the scent of a good man filled her nose. Harrison smelled so good, she felt her body melt before she opened her eyes in the semi-darkness to see she had woken up with her nose in his armpit. She liked him so much, even his armpit was amazing.

Paige took a more comfortable position and tried to go back to sleep, but even with Harrison beside her, she couldn't go back to sleep and the hours of darkness ticked away.

She thought about the nights she endured after Zaphier cut her loose. Alone in her apartment, she was like a corpse. Home decorating? She didn’t have any interest back then. Her place had white walls; one white sofa in the living room. There wasn’t a speck of dust or the length of a single hair to break the monotony. Since she'd been living with Harrison, she found that she loved decorating, renovating, changing out the old for the new. Why hadn't she thought to make her apartment as personal as the space she lived in now? Her apartment had been a good deal nicer than Harrison's house. She could have done a lot on her own, but she only thought about Armand.

Her hair was long when she awoke at Sleeping Beauty inc. not because her hair grew in cryostasis, but because she didn't have time to cut it when she worked for Zaphier. After her contract ended, she didn’t even style it. It just hung down her back, limp… like her.

Life with Harrison wasn’t like that. With Harrison, there was always something else that had to be done. She was important—vital. She couldn’t even imagine how lonely Harrison’s life must have been before she came. When they were together, he always worked so hard. She enjoyed working with him and even if they were taking the day off, she enjoyed being with him. They laughed together. Food tasted better. Everything was better.

Suddenly, she never wanted to leave.

She put her arms around the man next to her and promised herself she would give him everything he wanted because he was everything she wanted.

***

Eventually, Paige fell back asleep, which made her sleep late. When she finally did wake up, Harrison was gone. In the place in the bed where he had been sleeping were all the clothes he had been wearing. Peeking inside the pajama bottoms, she saw his underwear was in there too.

She smiled. Wake-up notes were dumb. He was hilarious.

She got up, searching the rest of the house for him, and finally concluded he must be in the hangar. In the kitchen, she picked up a few things to take Harrison for breakfast.

In the hangar, she found Excalibur had been brought up to the main level and Harrison was on top of it installing the propeller blades.

“Good morning,” she said, her voice echoing through the expanse of the hangar. “What’s going on?”

He stopped what he was doing and turned to face her. Then, leaning on his elbow, he said, “After you fell asleep last night, I found out that I’m not as bad at mechanical engineering as I thought.”

“Huh?”

Harrison dropped himself down on the floor. “I always thought that I was bad at this—especially compared to my father. I worked on building Excalibur from a plan my dad left in the workshop. Certain things didn’t line up and I always thought the building was so slow going because I wasn’t as good as my dad. Turns out—I may not be my dad, but I’m not dumb as a sack of hammers. The problem with the plans was that they were incomplete. Look at this.” He led Paige to the back of Excalibur and showed her where the gas tank was. Paige saw a glass box containing a ruptor. “As you can see, Excalibur was designed to be powered by a ruptor and not by fuel. I put in an electric battery because I couldn’t figure out what the old man was talking about, but it turns out that it wasn’t supposed to need one.”

“Wow!” Paige exclaimed, but she wasn’t sure if that meant that it worked. “But I thought Armand had the only working ruptor in the world?”

Harrison smiled. “Yeah, he has the only one that works the way my dad hoped, but all of these failed experiments still have a little juice in them. The problem now is that if I take Excalibur into the air and power it with only a ruptor, it will fall out of the sky like a stone when it runs out of power. A helocarrier doesn’t glide. I may have inadvertently solved the problem when I put in an electric battery. If it works the way I hope it can, I can use a ruptor until it dies and then my battery system will take over providing the power mid-flight.”

“Can you do that?” Paige exclaimed.

“Who knows? It might be a disaster, but…” He trailed off as he noticed the things she was carrying in her hands from the house. “Did you bring me food?”

“Yeah.” She blushed.

“Thanks. Are you feeling any better this morning?”

“I am a little surprised to see you all dressed this morning after finding all your clothes in the bed.”

"Just trying to open your eyes," he said, opening a water bottle with a tug.

"Open my eyes to what?"

"To how great it would be if we got together. You know, if we really got together."

She felt Harrison’s eyes on her as she peeled the wrapper off a muffin. “I keep rolling it around in my head and I don’t know why you’d want to be with me. I’m a mess.”

“Aw. Well, who isn’t?”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to act like that. I…”

He waited.

Which was a pity, because she was waiting for him to jump in at that moment and ask her to marry him with a fresh proposal. But he didn’t. He just waited for her to finish her thought, and she couldn’t think of what she should say because her tongue was tied in three knots and lodged in her throat.

Then abruptly, he took her hand and pulled her close to him. Paige jumped a little. It was a hug. His other hand was on her back and she was squeezed close to him before he let her go and smiled.

“Thanks for bringing me breakfast. I’ve been up for hours and I’m starving.” Then he changed the topic. “Last night, when I started reading my dad’s notes, the first thing I found out is that ruptors are made from the hearts of fetal bulls.”

“What?” Paige was astonished.

“It looks like a heart inside the box, right?”

“U-huh.”

“A full-sized bull heart is much much bigger. The ones used for ruptors are closer to the size of an adult human’s.”

“Why? How is that possible? I thought experimentation on animals has been illegal for almost a hundred years.”

“It has been. Even eating beef has been illegal for almost fifteen years. I don’t know about you, but before this came up, I didn’t even question why it is illegal to eat beef. All the animal rights activists convinced me it was because cows are too smart to eat.”

Paige had never eaten beef.

Harrison took another drink before he cleared his throat and said, “I read that a fetal bull has a chemical in its circulatory system that is highly concentrated in its hearts—cows have two. The chemical is called Ql. When the M.T.N. virus is exposed to it, the Ql and the virus create a kind of a symbiotic relationship, but that’s not it exactly since Ql is a molecule and not a living thing. It’s more like the Ql both feeds the virus, allowing it to grow and live, and at the same time kills it, so that the virus is unable to spread. It’s weird. The lifecycle of the virus moves so fast that it creates energy.”

Paige was aghast. “Really? It creates so much energy that it can power a chocker?”

“Each transparent box in my dad’s lab was an experiment. All of them have one heart of a baby bull that was infected with M.T.N. inside. Some of them have succeeded and made an ecosystem of sorts, but don’t get me wrong. None of them have a perfect system and eventually, they’ll all run out of power. Only the one Armand took worked properly.” Harrison paused. “Do you remember what you stole out of there?”

“I’m not sure. I think I took the two best ruptors, but I don’t know. At the time, I was just trying to finish and get out.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure Armand hasn’t figured out the answer to the last problem our dad faced.”

“Which was?” Paige asked curiously.

“What organism, or bacteria, or substance to add to the ruptor to make it go on forever. If he had that nailed, neither he nor Zaphier would have come here. We have to figure out how to get them to lay off, but before that, I really want to give this ruptor a try in Excalibur. Whoowee! My dad would have been proud!”