“Why are you so upset?” He asked, looking at me.
I noticed that it was the first really sunny day in weeks. The light was painting patterns onto his face, but everything seemed blurry. I reached up to my face and felt hot moisture on my cheeks. I was actually crying.
Adam wiped away the tears with his fingers. “What did I do?”
It took me a moment to get things in order in my head. And suddenly I knew it was the feeling of rejection. The tears came again, and embarrassment added to my general discomfort.
“Please, tell me.” Adam pleaded.
“Nothing,” I sobbed. And my whole body shook.
“What makes you cry, honey?” His eyes were very sincere, boring into mine, questioning.
“You don’t want me.” I sobbed.
“Why would you think that? I love you. You can’t imagine how much you mean to me.”
“But you …p..prefer our …s..staircase to seeing me un..d..dress.” The accusation sounded oddly dumb with all the stifled sobs. Adam laughed.
“What’s so funny now?” I stared at him warningly.
“You are the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen and the most wonderful person on the planet.”
“You can’t know, you haven’t met everybody…” I said stubbornly.
“Why is it that easy for you then—not touching me?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I mean …don’t you feel the desire I feel?” I hoped he wouldn’t misunderstand the question. It was hard enough talking about my feelings and sobbing my eyes red at the same moment.
“If you mean feel in the sense of perceive what you feel—I do.”
“That’s not what I mean.” This was harder than I had thought. “Am I not desirable to you? Is that why you would rather go outside?” Now it was out.
Adam sucked in a breath and paused before exhaling slowly. “Claire, you are not only the most important person to me, you are also the most desirable woman. How can you doubt that?”
“Prove it!” I demanded. The sobbing had ebbed away.
“Claire, I just wanted to give you some privacy. And the other thing…You shouldn’t do anything because you think you have to. I want it to be your choice when it happens.” He made a short pause like he was searching for the right words. “I have found you, that’s all that matters. I’ve got time…” His eyes followed the edge of the bed to the wall, up to the ceiling and back to me again.
“Why do you want to hurry so much.”
“I want to be near you, more than anything else.” My words sounded desperate, even to me.
“That doesn’t nearly describe the way I feel for you. I love you. That won’t change—your hold on me is permanent. I want to hold you in my arms and never let you go.”
“Yes,” I said. “But holding is not enough anymore. Kissing is fine, but still, I want more. Isn’t it the same for you?”
His eyes flashed and started to glow lightly again. He clenched his hands into fists like he was trying to hold himself in place. His gaze became distant and longing. He breathed deeply once and shook his head in a movement that was definitely not meant to be a no.“Don’t you think…”
“Prove it!” I interrupted him again and pressed my body against his.
His reaction was overwhelming. The softness of his lips touching mine made my head spin and my knees shaky. I was used to my body reacting that way when he touched me, but this time it was more intense. Adam felt so very real this time.
I was dazed and very alert at the same time. His hands gliding down to the small of my back were tender. They pulled me further towards him. I felt my heart accelerate to a critical speed as his kisses grew more demanding and his hands moved my moist shirt up a few inches. His hands grabbed the skin underneath the fabric and sent shivers up my spine. His breath came uneven between our kisses. I felt his tongue slide over my lips, parting them.
My hands wandered down to grab his shirt and pulled it up hurriedly. Adam loosened his hold on me and let me pull it over his head. I let it fall to the ground behind him and returned my hands to his muscular chest. I was amazed by how beautiful he was. His skin was smooth and soft. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back as my fingers traced patterns on his chest and stomach. His hands flexed and he breathed in deeply.
“I love you,” he said with a smile on his lips. And then his eyes snapped open, flashing green. A radiating white blur shot out from between his shoulders, smashing everything within reach. I was thrown to the ground by the force of it and something hard hit my head. The last thing I saw was Adam’s shape against the white radiating light that seemed to have its source inside of him.
* * *
My arms and legs were heavy as I tried to move them. The insides of my head were throbbing against my skull. I couldn’t open my eyes all at once and started blinking. It was strangely bright—more than only sun illuminating the room.
Several tries later my eyes stayed open. They adjusted to the brightness and the blurriness vanished from my vision.
I was lying on my bed. The soft quilt was wrapped around me. A pillow was supporting my head. I turned it slowly to look around. The throbbing didn’t help. It made me feel damaged.
When I looked towards the window, I saw a shining white shape crouching in the corner. I blinked again to clear my view. The shape was feathery and glowing. Long legs in worn sneakers I recognized only too well, stuck out from underneath it. Long muscular arms clung to the jeans, shaking. The white mess seemed to be part of the figure.
“Adam?” I asked into the whiteness of the room. The shape moved slightly and a bunch of black hair appeared from under the white.
“Claire,” I heard Adam’s voice. It sounded vulnerable. “Are you alright?”
“What happened, Adam?”
Silence.
“Why are you gleaming like a Christmas tree?”
Two deep breaths.
“Adam?”
“I don’t know.” His head lifted further and I could see his face. His eyes were gleaming bright green, challenging the sun. The light was radiating from his chest, from his arms, from his fingers. His face seemed luminescent—I could barely make out his features.
My heart missed a beat and my head started to sear in pain. I wondered if I was dreaming and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, Adam had gotten to his feet. He was standing beside the bed looking down at me. A pair of wings stuck out from between his shoulders. Each of them was weirdly half-folded, like they were broken.
“Claire, I’m scared.” He said quietly.
I was speechless. I knew that I should be scared too. I was surprised. But I wasn’t scared. For some odd reason it made sense. He had been my personal angel for quite a while now, why should it be strange that he turned out to have wings? I was more surprised that he hadn’t told me before. I knew so many weird things about him already—in fact, a pair of wings wouldn’t have made it worse.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
He shifted. The feathers in his wings made a shuffling noise, so quiet it could only be heard in the silence of the room. The gleaming faded a little and I could see his features more clearly. He looked worried and frightened.
“I didn’t know—,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s happening.” His gaze dropped to the floor. “One second all I could feel was joy, and …you.” I was not sure if I imagined a blush. “And then I felt like I was struck by lightning. My shoulders hurt for a second and then I saw the white around me and I saw you being thrown to the floor. Are you hurt?”
My head still throbbed a little, but I had almost forgotten about it because it was my least important concern at the moment. I shook my head no. “Are you?”
He looked at me disbelievingly.
“You all but exploded in front of my eyes. And now your radiance competes with the sun’s …don’t you think I might worry more about you than I do about myself?”
“I’m fine,” he said, startled. “Except f
or those feathery things sticking out of my back.” His lips almost curled into a smile.
“Can you make them disappear?”
Adam shook his head once. “No idea.” There it was again—the vulnerability in his voice.
I heaved myself up and went to stand beside him. My hand touched his face. Light streamed out from the gaps between my fingers touching his skin. His body shook and his wings flexed, smashing the chair into my desk.
“Sorry,” he gasped.
“Never mind. Are you hurt?” I slowly took a few steps and hesitantly reached out to touch the white feathers of his wings.
“Can you control their movement?” I asked before touching them.
He shook his head again. So I slowly stretched my fingers until their tips made contact with the soft white surface of the enormous wing in front of me. It twitched and nearly threw me to the floor again as it flapped into a neatly folded position close to Adam’s right shoulder. He flinched involuntarily.
I couldn’t believe what was happening right in front of me.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“What?” Adam answered, a strained expression on his face.
“Fold it.”
“I think it was a reflex to your touch.”
“Great—so you recoil from my touch now—”
“Not at all,” Adam interrupted, “but I’m sure the wing is not used to being touched …so maybe it was a bit scary, suddenly feeling a touch outside the areas of my body I know.” The radiating ceased a little. “You know, until today I was sure I had only arms and legs for extremities …and now it turns out I have two feathery things sprouting from my back.” His voice was disgusted.
“I think they’re pretty.”
He looked at me disbelievingly.
“Yeah, I really think so. They look like they belong to you.”
It was true. Adam’s wings looked exactly right on him—freaky, but right, still.
“Try to move the other one.” I encouraged him.
Adam closed his eyes and fell so silent for a moment that I wasn’t sure if he was even breathing. Then the tip of the outstretched wing twitched a few inches.
“Did you do this?” I asked, and he nodded silently. The radiating was almost gone from his body. The eyes were the only thing that remained glowing and gleaming in an alien shade of light green.
“Try again.”
His features twisted with the effort he put into it and I watched silently for a while. The outstretched wing started to move slowly. First it went up and down a few inches and then it suddenly flexed and slowly folded itself against Adam’s back to mirror the position of the other wing.
I gazed at him in awe. It was unbelievable. A few seconds had passed by when suddenly, with a short flapping noise, the two wings disappeared into white mist which faded into nothing.
“They’re gone.” I said, almost as shocked as I had been when they had appeared.
Adam’s eyes snapped open as his head turned to look over his shoulder. Nothing but smooth skin stretched over his shoulder blades and his spine. His expression was confused and relieved, both at the same time.
“How did you do it?” I asked. “How did you make them vanish?”
“I have no idea.” He paused to look into the mirror. “I didn’t intend to.”
“What do we do now?”
His face showed the discomfort he felt.
“I don’t know.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe figure out why they appeared in the first place, and then figure out how to control them.” I suggested. “I’ve always known you’re special, this only proves I’ve been right about that.”
“Claire, don’t be upset with me,” he pleaded. “I have to go.”
“Why?”
His face was very dark compared to the gleaming features he had shown a minute before. He darted from the room without looking at me.
“When will you come back?” I called after him. The sound that erupted from his throat sounded like “When I know”, but it was so low I wasn’t sure if it didn’t mean something like “never”.
Books
Christmas was particularly uneventful. I stayed in my room most of the time, weeping my eyes out about Adam. From another, more objective point of view I would have been pathetic. I had spent a whole week on the telephone trying to reach Adam, unsuccessfully. Neither Jenna nor Chris nor Ben were able to tell me where he was—or they didn’t want to.
Christmas dragged, and still time was speeding too fast. New Year’s Day seemed to flicker by like twenty-four hours were too much to ask for. I had been hoping to spend this day with Adam, but instead I was sitting in my room trying to understand what had happened.
So, my boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend, I wasn’t sure—had wings. Excellent. Memories of the white feathery blur flashed through my mind in an endlessly replaying sequence. Pictures of the expression in his gleaming eyes crept in between the others. Had he really not known about it? Why him? Was he the only one or were there more like him? And even more interesting—what did this mean for our relationship?
Question after question. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find answers to them, to make it bearable that Adam had neither called or gotten in touch with me in any other way made me restless. Every inch of my room reminded me of him, even after I had cleaned up the broken things he had smashed with his wings.
I watched the days go by without any enthusiasm, pacing my room, one day after the other until the holidays were over and I had to go back to school.
“Don’t worry,” Lydia said, “he always reappears somewhere. He is going to show up this time—just like he did the other times.”
Lydia was kind. She wanted me to feel better, even if it was only a little bit. Amber on the other hand tried to discourage me even more than I already was.
“I told you,” she said in a triumphant voice. “I told you he’s not good for you.”
Gregory was especially cheerful. He nearly celebrated Adam’s disappearance from my life. I couldn’t share his feeling of joy; it was more like a dark cloud pressed down on my heart, that seemed to start raining every time my head thought of Adam. It was good though, feeling how much he meant to me—missing him just a little too much to be patient.
So my friends weren’t much help at the moment. I couldn’t talk to them about what really had happened. They wouldn’t understand—I didn’t understand myself.
After these past few weeks since he had left me, I couldn’t trust myself as far as my sanity was concerned. I wasn’t sure anymore if Adam hadn’t been a beautiful creature springing from my imagination. I still called the Gallagers’ place a few times per week to be sure it hadn’t been a dream. Every time I called I felt—if only for a moment—sure that he had been real. They neither seemed worried, nor did they share my irritation about his long absence.
* * *
“Take care, will you?” Sophie smiled wearily. “I’ll call you every day and tell you what’s going on”
“Bye.” I said into her shoulder. Ian carried her luggage to his car. He drove her to the train station.
It was the first week of school after the holidays. Sophie was leaving for her internship.
I thought back to the conversation the day she had told me about the offer. It had been the first week after Adam had disappeared…
The sound of Sophie’s spoon hitting the rim of her teacup had torn me from my thoughts. We had been sitting at Noel’s, both of us staring at the table, not taking much notice of our surroundings. Sophie had picked me up from school and dragged me there to talk. She told me that she had been offered a three months internship at the Indianapolis City Hospital. It was a great opportunity for her. Ian had known about it and he had wanted to support her as much as possible, good person that he was.
For me this meant three months of loneliness.
“Starting when?” I had asked into the silence.
“Beginning of January,” she had said. “I have decided to g
o. It’s the best opportunity I can get. And we could really use the money.”
“Okay” I had known what this would mean. Long days and nights alone. A few months ago I would have celebrated my freedom and gone out every evening. But not now…I had more important matters to deal with. A week had passed without any sign of Adam and I had to find out why he had vanished. More and more, the suspicion had been growing inside me that he was just avoiding me. His family would have had been in panic if he really had disappeared from them without a word, like he had from my life. But they obviously weren’t, so they had to know something I didn’t. I had had to find out what it was.
Redirecting my thoughts towards the coffee shop I had watched Sophie take a sip from her cup.
“Go,” I had said with a feeling of relief. “I will have to study a lot in the upcoming months, so don’t worry about me.” I had smiled at her and she had smiled back, mirroring the expression of relief I had felt spreading on my own face.
Sophie’s internship had been great news to everybody. We had even organized a small party the day before her departure. Ian and his brother had been there. And so was, of course, Lydia, as she was inseparable from Richard these days. Amber had come to provide me with moral support.
* * *
It was the morning after the party—five o’clock, and we were saying goodbye on the threshold. I hated goodbyes. I thought it easier to just do it once and quickly, than to stand around at the train station or the airport, waiting for the traveller to finally depart.
Sophie hugged me quickly and stroked my hair in a motherly way before she got in the car with Ian and they sped off into the still dark morning.
When the car turned the corner I waved once and went back into the house. It was empty, and thoughts about Adam filled my head instantly as I went up to my room.
I would have to make a plan. I had to talk to him and know if he was alright. I had to confirm that I hadn’t had hallucinations when I’d seen his wings. But first I had to know everything about winged creatures. Every myth and legend, every good and bad thing and everything necessary to help him if he needed me.
White (The Wings Trilogy Book 1) Page 16