Chapter 9

Dave was relaxing on his bed. Six feet wide and seven feet long, the mattress had little bounce, offered excellent support, and the bed didn't squeak at all. Its head had been positioned away from the doors leading to the walk-in-closet and the annex bathroom. When he was decorating his room, Iris told him it was supposedly bad juju to sleep with one's head towards the toilet.

If he lay on his back, this placed a window to his right and the door leading to the second floor hallway on his left. His desk had been tucked into the corner of the windowed wall and the wall separating the bedroom from the bathroom. It was designed to fit into corners, with one section against each wall. His computer was on the windowed side to prevent the sun's glare from hitting the screen, and the writing section was on the other side, with a swivel of the chair allowing the desk's user to go from the computer to the books.

At fifteen by fifteen feet, the room was the smallest one in Veronica's home. But even though the large bed stood in the middle of the room, there was still plenty of clearance around the bed. There was even plenty of clearance between the corners of the desk and the bed, making it unlikely that the person sleeping on the window's side would stub a toe in the dark if a trip to the bathroom had to be made at night. And there would be a person sleeping there, since Iris would often share his bed.

She was sharing it now, cuddled up against his left side and feeling oh so good against him. It was heaven, and he never wanted it to end. But a week from now school would start, and he'd have to sleep on a much smaller bed while sharing a room with a German and a Korean guy. He had shared before while living at his paternal grandparents' place, since they'd had only four bedrooms and his grandparents had wanted to keep at least one bedroom available for guests. But he had got used to having his own room, and he knew that going back to sharing would be a challenge.

"Hey, Davie?" Iris asked tentatively, stirring him out of his reverie.

"Hmmm?"

"Angie told me how you feel about anonymity."

Dave felt a flash of annoyance at his mother's meddling in his relationship, but he quickly suppressed it. This sort of meddling was inevitable due to the nature of his relationship with Iris. If everything went well, her older sister was going to be her mother-in-law.

"So what do you think?"

"I think you showed great foresight. I hadn't thought that far ahead."

Normally he would have been pleased to find that he was a step ahead of Iris for a change, but this time he had really been hoping that she had a plan.

"Oh."

"But I've given it some thought since, and I could always side-step into publishing or editing or other behind the scenes type of work."

"That's not your first choice, is it?"

"You're my first choice, Dave. No glorious achievement would mean anything if you weren't around for me to share it with. I'd rather have you than any journalism awards."

Dave shook his head. "You're saying that now, but you're only sixteen and a half. No matter how mature you are, your teenaged blood-chemistry prevents you from thinking straight. How could you possibly know that you won't resent me for it later, when you see someone you know from college get such an award?" he probed further, playing devil's advocate.

Iris raised an eyebrow. "You didn't think of these questions yourself, did you?"

"No," Dave said, as the guilty flush he had been unable to suppress made denial an exercise in futility. Besides ... Iris could sense his surface thoughts anyway. "I asked Mom and Dad to help me prepare."

"Yeah, that teenaged blood-chemistry thing was a dead giveaway. And I guess I really can't be sure about how I'll feel a few years down the road. So let's take it step by step. Let's start with our new schools. What do I tell my classmates when they ask where I know you from when we meet for our schools' joint outings?"

Dave thought about Clark and Lunaria's advice. Like Dave and Iris, they had different surnames, so awkward questions weren't immediately raised. "Tell them the truth, but not too much of it. We've known each other since we were kids. Then you moved away, and I moved away, and now we've found each other again."

"And what if this all works out and we get married? Will we invite the friends we've made along the way to our wedding?"

"We could avoid that by holding a small wedding."

"But what if it turns out to be a really good friend we couldn't possibly leave off the smallest of guest lists?"

"I know," Dave said, before heaving a weary sigh. He had thought about this a lot. Circumstances in his life had been such that he had never made any close friends. Either his friends moved before they could become best buddies, or he had. But perhaps he would bump into a kindred spirit whose path in life kept him close by. "I guess we have to carefully find out what they think about cousin couples before we let them get too close."

He wasn't really comfortable with that tactic, since it reminded him of the things he had read on the behaviour of those weird sects. But he didn't think they had any choice, and he watched Iris' expression carefully to gauge her reaction.

"I'm as uncomfortable as you are about that, and I also agree with you. We really have no choice. I guess we'll be like many other people hiding other non-illegal secrets for whatever reason," Iris said.

"Right," Dave said, just as a heavy fist knocked on the door to his room. The way the door resonated told Dave it was his youngest brother.

The Adams family, and Dave's dad in particular, had been surprised when they picked their youngest member up from the airport. Frank had always been a fast healer when it came to both injuries and disease. When the three Adams brothers got chicken pox, it took Dave and Ed about seven to eight days for all their blisters to form scabs. But Frank only had one wave of blisters, and they had all scabbed over in a mere three days.

His wounds had also always regenerated far more quickly than average, but some of the bruises he received from the steel-toed boots of his assailants had been of the ugly kind people usually got from car accidents and took months to heal. When he removed his shirt, however, all his family could see were some thin scars where he had been stitched up, and yellowed patches of skin where there had been some fairly severe bruises. Granted, he had stayed at Bryan and Michelle's place for almost a month, but there was no way a normal person could have healed so well in so little time.

Frank had been really moody and irritable after his return home, causing Dave to wonder how much he had been spoiled and coddled by Erica. His hosts might have allowed him to stay longer if he hadn't been eating them out of house and home. Dave smiled as he remembered a call from his uncle, asking just how much Frank ate. Frank had always eaten for three as a child, forcing his mother to research alternative diets. She eventually settled upon a diet that could feed two endurance athletes in training. Any other person eating so much high energy food would have been morbidly obese by now, but Frank's body easily burned that fuel.

"What is it, Frank?"

"Is Iris decent? Can I come in?" Frank's muffled voice came back.

"Sure, sweetie," Iris said warmly. Being three years older, she had always mothered him a bit.

Frank opened the door and slid into the room. The look on his face suggested that something was seriously bothering him.

"What's eating you?" Dave asked, as Frank closed the door behind him

"I ... I've got a problem." He paused and swallowed, looking just about ready to cry. "I cheated on Erica, and Dahlia is blackmailing me."

Dave didn't understand Frank's confession. When could he possibly have found time to cheat on Erica, and with whom? It just didn't make sense!

"Why would you cheat on Erica?"

"I don't know!" Frank said desperately, with cracking voice. "It just happened. When I was staying at Uncle Bryan and Aunt Michelle's, Dahlia came into my room at night and sucked me off ... and I enjoyed it. I got hard and I squirted, and she said she'd tell Erica if I didn't let her go whenever Dahlia needed her for something."

"What?" Iris hissed in a menacing voice. Her face had flushed a deep red, and her lips quivered and nostril's flared. Dave had never seen Iris this angry, and even the normally fearless Frank shrank back.

"I'm really sorry," he pleaded, too innocent to realise that her rage wasn't directed at him.

"I'm not angry at you. Any boy your age would get hard and come if a gorgeous girl started sucking him. But Dahlia—aaargh!" Iris roared instead of finishing the sentence, and rolled off the bed before darting to the door. Dave immediately went after her, and if she hadn't had to stop and open the door, he probably wouldn't have caught her. It took a lot of his strength to restrain her and drag her struggling body back to the bed.

"Let me go... let me go, Dave," she growled as she struggled to free herself from his grasp. "That evil bitch needs to be taught a lesson!"

"And what were you planning to do?" Dave grunted, struggling to keep her restrained.

"End her dream of becoming a supermodel by rearranging her face! How could she? Her little sister looks up to her, and this could crush her!"

"And beating Dahlia up will certainly make her ask some questions you don't want to answer," Dave countered.

That seemed to get through to Iris, because her struggling stopped. But she was still trembling with rage, so Dave decided not to let her go just yet.

"So what do you propose we do?"

"Find out why she did it, for starters."

"Didn't you hear Frank? The bitch queen didn't want to lose her handmaiden. When I visited them in the March break I noticed that Erica waits on Dahlia hand and foot, but she must have spent a lot of time tending to Frank when he was hurt. Dahlia sucked him off to make him feel guilty, and to use that for leverage against him. To force him to insist that he wanted Erica to be her personal slave first and foremost, whenever the need arose."

"I agree that she was being a self-centred bitch, but that might just be in her defence," Ed's voice came pragmatically from the door opening.

"Oh shit!" Frank muttered as his face drained of colour, even though Ed was physically no match for him and he didn't have anything to fear. But his dismay at being found out reinforced how much of a kind soul he really was, in spite of the occasional bout of bratty behaviour.

"Relax, junior sibling. I know you didn't seek out Dahlia's blowjob," Ed said, before turning his attention back to Iris and continuing. "Dahlia might be a bitch, but she loves Erica very much and wouldn't intentionally do anything to hurt her. I know she won't carry out her threat to tell Erica. She was just jealous that Frank was getting the attention she usually got. Those preening sessions are a very important bonding ritual to her. Besides, Erica likes doing Dahlia's hair as much as Dahlia likes Erica doing her hair. Or didn't you know that she wants to be a hairdresser?"