Cursed Blood |Lesbian Story| - Chapter 18: Chapter 18

After that day, everybody at school started giving me curious stares, as if I had inherited a wrong DNA or some rare diseases. Usually, the Ultara girls don't notice anyone other than their obsessive genius-driven world, but now their conversations seemed to be all about me and Octavia.
The good thing was that every time I looked back at them, they would stumble away like a herd of freaked chickens. Maybe that was the only thing I liked about being half-human. You can act all misanthropic as you like.
So I had become a public scorn who bailed on her own best friends. But the worst thing of all, they thought I did that because I wanted to be with the most beautiful and most desired girl in our school. That was absolutely not true! But even it was insulting for me, it was still impossible to shut off all those rumors.
I had to spend most of my time with Octavia at the library as well as in the Lunch Hall, though. She didn't seem to mind about all those silly opinions hanging around us at all.
Cammie and Alyssa had stopped waiting for me anymore. Not that I expected it, but it still gave me a raw feeling. I switched place with the other girls in every class I had with them. And I had also quit Karate, and that was for my own good because if you consider Cammie's undefeatable martial art and the aftertaste of our fight, she might probably use me as her favorite punching bag.
As I sat on the library floor this evening, I kept asking Octavia a lot of crazy questions. We were on our quest browsing through dusty old books, but still no sight of the last diary. Instead, I found a few books about vampires, which I guess were the ones Cammie had told us about. I just wanted to distract myself from all the madness, so I started skimming through them.
"How could you not be tempted while being around humans?" I asked Octavia, who was leaning her back on the shelf, reading a black leather-covered book. I had noticed she wasn't so touchy with me like before. She seemed to be a bit more...bearable.
"Well, I liked to think of myself as an ascetic," she said.
"An ascetic?" I looked up from my book with a raised eyebrow. "Like those Indian gurus who starve themselves to free their souls?"
"Something like that," she just shrugged.
"Maybe I should be an anorexic vampire then," I murmured to myself. Octavia muffled a laugh.
"We're half-blood," she said, "We don't feed off humans."
"Doesn't come naturally to me," I said. "Didn't you just say I'm quite different?"
"Viv, you're a vegetarian" Octavia reminded, then walked up and sat down beside me, "The first time I saw you, even in your human state, you just radiated power and strong attraction. I could only imagine how hard it must be for you to restrain yourself. Considering you're also a vegetarian, I admire you more. I'm only more tolerant of bloodlust because I'm much older than you."
"Oh!" I suddenly became hyper-interested. I still didn't know about Octavia's age. "How old are you?"
I started eyeing her up and down, but no matter how closely I examined her face, Octavia still looked as young as a seventeen-year-old girl to me. Or maybe she just looked young.
"I'm nineteen," she answered at last.
"Only nineteen?"
"I graduated with a Master degree from Italy last year."
"Really? And...and how long have you been nineteen?" I said. She chuckled at me when she saw my disappointed face.
"What do you expect me to be? A hundred and two?" she said.
This brought another round of questions into my mind.
"But do we physically...age?" I asked.
"Why not?" she casually said. "Just like everything else in the world, we do age and change over time, but unlike humans, our longevity goes extremely slow."
"How slow is extremely slow?"
"It will take you about ten years to appear one year older."
"Ten years?" I cried, unable to keep my voice low. That couldn't be true, not in a million years. It wasn't just abnormal, but it was out of the world abnormal. What if people notice that I hardly age? Saying that I'm a vegetarian isn't a good lie either. Gosh, this is a pure nightmare.
~*~
I had been avoiding Cammie and Alyssa for a whole week now. It was better for me not to see them. I had taken my paranormal ability for granted, so their attempts to confront me again achieved no success. After a while, they seemed to give up, probably because they couldn't find me anywhere in the school. Thanks to my ungodly extraordinary senses. But I just realized that Octavia and I shared extrasensory, some kind of a vampy-link as if we had this built-in GPS in our brains. No wonder why she always gives me the chills. But Octavia said I should work on it if I want to extend my radar.
I took Chemistry class as a replacement of self-defense, besides chemistry and biology are somewhat related, so I didn't have to be seen with Octavia all the time. My chemistry lab partner was Vida, a skinny girl with thick glasses. The first time I met her, she looked like she wanted to cry, but after I assured her saying that I wasn't going to bite, she seemed to relax a little. I guess it was because of my negative mood radiating from me way too much lately. Our chemistry professor, Mrs. Coppin, could mix any chemicals and cause them to explode like a witch.
Obviously, I didn't turn out to be a natural chemist, especially after I broke a vial of a blue chemical by accident, and it spilled on Vida's completed experimental compound. The whole stuff blew up into a mini-mushroom cloud on our lap table. The next thing I knew, Vida's face was covered in blue dust, and the whole class laughed at us. Well, that was just another doomed day of my life.
I made my way through the hallways as usual. Other students stared at me as usual. I started to wonder if they ever got tired of staring at me. While I sat at my lab table in biology this evening, there were some students talking randomly, but something caught my attention. I started tuning into their conversation, just to get updates on what was going on in the school and also unconsciously hoped to hear something from my ex-best friends.
"Does she go into a coma or something?" Serena asked. She was one of the science nerds I knew who took biology just for fun. The other kids whispered cautiously to each other. I scowled with a fresh curiosity.
"No, just hospitalized for extreme exhaustion," a girl replied. I recognized her as a math whiz named Taylor.
"What has happened to her?" someone asked. "She was perfectly healthy yesterday."
"No one knows," another kid said, "There was also a girl collapsed in the gym last few nights and when she woke up, she didn't remember anything, not even how or why she got to the gym in the first place."
I felt like I had just come back from a dinosaur time. Since when did all these stuff happen? For one thing, things like that rarely occurred in the Ultara Academy. For another, each of us got at least A- in PE and Health Education, even Alyssa could pull through in Karate. The lunch hall serves the finest nutritious foods from all five groups of the pyramid chart. There was no reason for us to go around passing out on random tiredness. But what caused these mysterious collapses in the Ultara Academy?
Besides the threat of my existence posed to everyone in the school, there was another puzzle box about a sudden plague of students losing conscious. It made some of us came to different ridiculous conclusions. A) Maybe someone played a voodoo doll in Culture class. B). There must be some Ultara students who had invented a radioactive chemical that could knock people out. C) well...there was no other explanation. But if I really wanted to be more logic about that, I would choose to believe none of the above.
But these were the best things the Ultara geniuses could think of right now. All faculty members were very busy finding out the cause of this health problem. There was no food poisoning, no environmental pollution, and definitely no evil scientists here. These left me as well as every curious head feeling like a blank slate. That posted another crisis because the Ultara students had never been incapable of solving anything before.
As I walked with Octavia into the Ancient Hall this morning, I overheard some students discussing the fallen geniuses like they were trying to master a new math formula. But then there was something came into my sight.
On the other side of the hallway, Cammie and Alyssa were walking with someone. And there was no other than Jacqueline Deveraux.
When I saw them walking together, my heart dropped to the bottom of my stomach. Half of me wanted to turn around and flee the hall, but another half of me wanted to shoot out and yank both of my best friends away from Jacques. But it might be too cowardice to run and too selfish to do that latter. Cammie and Alyssa were not my best friends anymore.
Everyone was watching us as if they were seeing two trains from opposite directions about to bump into each other, but I kept walking with my face a mask. I could feel their eyes looking at me. I could tell Cammie and Alyssa were having a hard time seeing me, but I had to wall off my emotions and also shield myself from theirs. Emotions are traitors; they weight you down, muddle your thoughts and in my case: threaten the ones I love.
Jacques also glanced sideways in my direction and when she saw Octavia, her face twitched with a mysterious interest again, but the way she stared at us made me shiver, all charismatic and powerful, and something in the back of my head told me that this girl was strange, not that kind of genius-freak variety, but just plain strange. Finally, I escaped from the whirling current of students with Octavia.
At lunchtime, the world had changed completely before my eyes, Cammie and Alyssa were eating with Jacques in the hall at our table. And she sat exactly where I used to sit. It shocked me, even more, to see my best friends laughing again, with me out of the picture. Good, they had forgotten about me.
I sat slumped over the table at the corner with Octavia.
"Are you okay?" she asked cautiously like she was afraid that some parts of me would break with her question.
"It doesn't matter," I exhaled with a hint of vibrated angst in my chest. "At least, they end up with a human."
Octavia reached over the table and touched my hand, that's when I realized I was gripping my silver fork really hard, it started to bend out of shape. I dropped the fork as if it shocked me.
"Viv, bad times always pass," she coaxed,"Once you're getting better with control. You guys can come back around."
"Well, I'm not so sure about that now," I said.
"Then we still have each other," Octavia looked into my eyes. I gazed back, not saying anything else.
~*~
There was still no progress in the library. The books were impossible. We had looked through thick and thin for days, but not even a glimpse of that last diary appeared. I sat on the floor reading a pile of books next to me whereas Octavia was standing against the shelf flipping through pages of another manuscript.
Yet, our finding was gradually zeroing in day after day. And we came into another doubt that either the diary was there or it wasn't. After I finished checking another book, I closed its cover and stacked it on top of the others.
I got to my feet and stretched my arm over to retrieve some other books, but they were too high that I had to stand tiptoes. My fingertips could barely touch the spines. I decided to climb lightly on the lower shelf but when I was almost there, I lost my footing. And then I fell over to the side, knocking a row of books with me in the process, but before I hit the floor, my body was scooped up by a pair of arms.
Octavia bent herself over, shielding me from a rain of books falling from the shelf. Finally, it left only a plume of white dust forming around the area. We waited for a little to make sure that the giant shelf wouldn't start collapsing. And it didn't, which was very lucky, otherwise, it would cause a domino effect to the others in the library, and I could guarantee that we would be the next persons to be banned from this place.
"Octavia, are you okay? Did you get hurt?" I said, opening one eye to peek at her. Then I realized we were in a tango position. I was already halfway to the floor.
"That should be my question," she simply replied, but still kept me in her embrace.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"That's okay,"
"And...would you...um... mind?" I gestured pathetically to her hands that were still holding me.
"Oh, right," Octavia breathed and quickly stood me up again. We both cast a slightly nervous glance toward each other. Wow, that was weird. Octavia never looked nervous. I started giggling awkwardly, brushing off the dust on my clothes.
"Hey, you have that smudge on your face," Octavia said, reaching her delicate hand to my cheek. I froze. She brushed her thumb lightly over my skin. Electric sparks burst from her touch. Octavia leaned in closer until our faces were barely apart. Then she took a plunge and brought her nose to my neck, inhaling my scent. My heart fluttered. My body shivered from head to toes.
"Oct...Octavia, we're in the library," I tried to speak, but I sounded as if I was trying to convince myself. I swallowed again as the heat between my thighs started to rise.
"I know where we are," Octavia whispered as she slowly nibbled on my neck, going around my collar and down my chest. Her hands wounded around my body and roamed inside my blouse. Her soft cold hands against my skin caused my breath to hitch.
"Octavia, don't," I gasped as she kept nuzzled my neck. Then she lifted my thigh up to her waist. I half-heartedly pushed her shoulders away. Part of me wanted it so bad, but another part of me still didn't want to give in to lust so easily, but something in her stirred up something in me. And that's how I got miserably hot and bothered with every moan. Octavia found my lips again and that lukewarm sleek tongue slipped in and took its place alongside mine.
I wasn't sure if I could resist not to let her take me. The feeling of leaking sensation from my heated walls made my body scream ready. Her hips bumped into me as she got between my legs. The bookshelf shook a little with our synergized force when our bodies moved feverishly. Octavia's golden eyes blazed while she was tonguing inside my startled but over-joyful mouth. We moaned at the heat of our fierce embrace.
Suddenly, my eyes caught a glimpse of a golden spine of an antique-looking book. It was placed behind the other books and at the far back of the shelf. I had a strange feeling tugged inside me as I turned my focus on it.
"Octa...Octavia, wait," I tried to break away from the frenzy kisser, who was in the process of unbuttoning my shirt. "Stop..."
"But why?" she whispered back, still running her lips all over me.
"I think I see something," I said and just slipped myself out of her arms. Octavia gave a low groan, but I ignored her and quickly went over to get the book. If I hadn't knocked over a row of books when I fell, I wouldn't have seen it.
"This one got my attention," I said and handed it over to Octavia. Instantly, Octavia's eyes shone as she opened the cover that almost fell apart. Its pages were yellowed with crumbled edges. The cover was also frayed and the leather binding was unraveling, but it seemed to her like it was a priceless possession. Octavia looked at me again.
"Vivienne, it's her diary."