Adam pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not your fault, Haz,” he said with a sigh. “This is my problem, and I already know how to deal with it.”
“How?” Harry said.
“There will be rules. We’ll both follow them.”
“What sort of rules?”
“We’ll be friends like Jake and I are friends.”
He could almost hear Harry frown. It was a little disturbing how vividly he could imagine it.
“But—but,” Harry stammered, sounding positively crushed.
“Harry,” Adam said, closing his eyes. “Please don’t make it harder.”
Harry was silent for a long time.
At last, he said, sounding absolutely deflated, “Okay. If that’s what you want.” Adam heard him get up and go to his own bedroom, the door shutting quietly after him.
“Want,” Adam repeated before laughing, the sound harsh and ugly in the silence of the room. No, that wasn’t what he wanted. But it hardly mattered.
CHAPTER 6
“Adam is attracted to me,” Harry said.
Samantha stopped wiping the counter and lifted her head. “And?”
Harry frowned, not understanding why she wasn’t surprised. “That’s it. Adam is attracted to me.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Is that supposed to be news to me? Why do you think I’ve been calling him your boyfriend? He looks at you like you’re his personal sun.”
Harry’s frown deepened. She was wrong. Adam didn’t look at him that way. He felt like Adam barely looked at him lately.
Harry shook his head. “As I understand it, it’s just physical attraction. He’s gay and he considers me physically attractive.” Not that he understood the concept of physical attraction all that well. At times like this, Harry felt more acutely than ever that he didn’t belong to this world.
Samantha rolled her eyes. “Sure, and I’m the Queen. What’s the problem, Hazza? The guy’s insanely attractive and hot, well off, nice, not without sense of humor, and he adores you. I’m practically green with envy.” She smirked. “I bet he’s great in bed. He looks like he’s great in bed.”
Rubbing behind his neck, Harry chuckled. “Don’t be ridiculous. Adam is my friend, not a...” He blushed at the thought of physical intimacy outside a marriage bond. Humans’ casual attitude toward sex still baffled him a little. When he had found out that humans could have sex as early as twelve, he had been absolutely flabbergasted. Back home most people didn’t have sex before their bonding ceremony at the age of twenty-five. Sex outside of a bond was such a taboo back home that he felt embarrassed even thinking about it. It wasn’t that Calluvians were prudish about sex. It was just…until the bonding ceremony, Calluvians weren’t supposed to be interested in sex. There were rumors that sometimes, when the childhood bond was weak, it was possible to feel sexual attraction to someone other than one’s bondmate, but Harry wasn’t sure how truthful those rumors were. His own childhood bond had always been perfectly strong and he’d never felt even a flicker of sexual attraction toward anyone. It had never bothered him. He’d had no reason to feel bothered about something he was incapable of feeling—yet.
But now he was curious. He wanted to understand Adam. For the first time ever, Harry wondered if he was missing something because of the bond.
It had been over four thousand years since Calluvians had started practicing childhood bonds. The practice had been put in place for a reason.
It all had started when a minor member of the First Grand Clan kidnapped the queen of the Third Grand Clan and forced an archaic, unbreakable bond on her. Although there had been precedents of forced bonds in the past, no one had ever tried to force an unbreakable bond on the ruler of a grand clan. The uproar had been enormous. That type of bond had become obsolete for a reason—it was impossible to dissolve—so a mind rapist effectively became a royal consort despite best mind adepts’ efforts to break the bond. Eventually, the queen had to step down in favor of her brother. To make matters worse, the First Grand Clan refused to be held responsible for its member’s harmful actions against the Third Royal House, even though it was legally obligated to do so. As a result, the political scandal turned into a military conflict, eventually involving all of the grand clans in the greatest planet-wide war in the Calluvian history that nearly wiped out the entire population when the biological weapons used in the war affected the population’s health and reproductive ability.
The Great War ended years later when everyone realized how close to extinction they had come. It took decades to recover from that devastating war and its consequences.
To prevent something like that from happening again, the Council of the Grand Clans had come up with the way to bond children’s telepathic cores from early age. A childhood bond worked differently from any other telepathic bond, digging itself deep into the child’s psyche and making it impossible for someone to force a marriage bond. Any other time such a proposal would have likely led to a debate on consent issues, since children couldn’t give their consent, but after years of bloodshed and decades of rebuilding, no one wanted something like that to happen again and pretty much everyone had just been relieved by the solution. Well, not everyone. Some people had refused to follow the law and left their grand clans, but it wasn’t appropriate to acknowledge their existence in polite company. Renegades, they were called in whispers. Renegades didn’t acknowledge any grand clan’s authority. They were effectively wanted outlaws, but no one knew where they lived. Some said that they lived somewhere high up in the Great Mountains, but Harry didn’t think it was true. Wouldn’t modern technology find them if that were the case?