Chapter 76: Smoke, no Fire
The smell of smoke in the middle of the night was seldom a good thing. Smoke in the dead of night meant something was burning, and more often than not, that something burning was the very place that you were sleeping in.
But ever since he had started using Ayo’s salve, the smell of smoke had come to mean something else.
Smoke to Derek, now meant a chance to rest, to unwind a bit. He had not had to swim in an effort to tire himself out ever since he had begun using the salve. Now his daily routine was quite different.
He went to work, came back to the manor, and if his mother was hosting, then Derek mingled with the guests for a time. Or simply ate his evening meal alone, it all just depended on the night.
But it was the after, that Derek now enjoyed more than anything. With all of his obligations for the day met, Derek got to slip into the shower, or as had become his custom now, soak in his standalone bathtub for an hour or two, and then when he got out and dried himself. He did not put on lotion, instead, he got salve and massaged it into his skin.
The first few times the smell of smoke had been jarring, not in a bad way, it had just taken a while for him to stop searching for something that might have caught on fire each time.
And since then, Derek had been fully enjoying the salve. It did not put him into a chemical slumber like the sleeping pills. But it did...something. And whatever that smoky something was, it allowed Derek to go on what he liked to think of as standby mode
During that time, he was not awake, but he was not asleep either. Just floating in an in-between state that usually lasted for three to four hours.
But that brief amount of time was always so restful, that Derek had quickly grown addicted to the feeling. The fact that he could not have it every day had not sat well with him, so he had gone looking for more of it in other stores, but that had not worked.
The more modern ones run by people who barely looked to be old enough to drive, did not even know what he was talking about. And the ones that belonged to the more seasoned older people took one look at him and refused to even consider helping him. No matter how much money he threw at them, they would not budge.
Realizing that he would get nowhere using that route, Derek had gone back to what he was comfortable with...science.
He had gone back to Dr Cullen’s office, and given the man a teeny, tiny, sample of the salve (even giving away that small bit had felt like a waste) but he had still done it, sacrificing for a chance at being able to have access to a synthetic form of the salve.