Defenders

Defenders (16)

Aiden woke up the day after I had gone to the mall with Lena. He wasn’t allowed to get out of bed or train for a whole week, and this annoyed him greatly. He nearly flipped his food tray about twice each day.

“This is boring,” he complained two days after he had woken up, and I felt like suffocating him with his pillow. “How do they expect me to get any better if I don’t train?”

I almost forced the soup-filled spoon into his mouth. It had been my turn to try to force him to eat that day. “You need to rest first,” was all I said, but this didn’t make him any happier. “You’re lucky our kind can heal faster than humans. You only have to wait a week while normal humans would probably have to wait longer.”

He pursed his lips. “That’s still too long.”

I was going to shove this spoon down his throat if it meant he was going to shut up and eat. Why was he being so difficult?

Seeming to notice something now, he looked down at my ankle. “What about you? Didn’t you hurt your ankle? You look fine.”

I did. And that was because I was. I thought that my ankle would at least hurt a little bit after I moved around on it, but it was perfectly fine. It was as if I hadn’t even broken it. And that still didn’t make any sense to me.

Before I could answer any more of Aiden’s questions, the door to the infirmary slid open and Kristie entered. Aiden pretty much forgot I was in the room then, and I knew that it was finally my time to leave.

Kristie smiled at me as I passed her, but I didn’t smile back. How could she be so bubbly when she had to deal with Aiden? I guess he really did treat her differently than he did me or our other two teammates.

“Hey.”

I jumped at the sudden voice once I was out of the infirmary and in the hallway, spinning around and expecting to see Dex. But when I saw that it was actually Anthony instead, I let out a long sigh of relief. I had been avoiding Dex ever since the incident at the mall, and I did not want to have to deal with him just yet.

“Hi,” I greeted, forcing a smile at him. It wasn’t that I was unhappy to see him; that wasn’t it at all. I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with people after having to spend time with a whining Aiden. “What’s up?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. There’s not much to do around here, you know?”

I did! I did know! I thought the exact same thing. There really wasn’t much to do around here except for sleeping and training. And that got really boring after a while. We were allowed to leave and go out to places, but there was never anywhere I wanted to go. No one I wanted to go with…

I then looked at Anthony. He was just as bored as I was. He was someone I could go with to places and it wouldn’t be completely awkward like it had been with Lena.

“Maybe we could go out or something some time?” I asked, wanting nothing more than to leave this place with someone other than Lena without having to worry about anyway following me. “Maybe we could go see a movie or something? Or get something to eat?”

Okay, let me get something straight. I was locked in a room for five years, from age eleven to sixteen. I had no idea I had technically just asked Anthony out on a date. Luckily, he was smart enough to realize I had no idea what I was talking about.

But he still nodded and said, “Yeah, that sounds like fun.”

“Ahem.”

At the sound of this new voice, I jumped, and one of the hanging lights in the hallway suddenly exploded. Dex didn’t even react to this as he continued to stare at Anthony and then back at me. I felt incredibly uncomfortable. I knew he had heard what we had just been saying.