Pulled Back Again

by Danielle Bannister

  PULLED

  BACK

  AGAIN

  BOOK THREE:

  THE FINAL FLAME

  DANIELLE

  BANNISTER

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © September, 2013

  by Danielle Bannister

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved

  DB Books

  First Edition

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this novel, e-mail:

  daniellebannisterbooks@gmail.com

  Pulled Back Again: a novel about Twin Flames reconnecting.

  BISAC: Fiction / Romance / Suspense

  ISBN-13: 978-1490930978

  ISBN-10: 1490930973

  Cover Design by Kari’s Literary Solutions

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” | —Aristotle

  The End

  Author Bio

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I need to thank my beta readers: Kari Suderely (my first reader of anything I write), Kellee Fabre (who inspired what has become Chapter 20), Tawnya Peltonen, Jennifer LaFon, and Judith Frazee (who all suggested more insight into Hawk), Amy Miles, (for making me slow down the ride so you could breathe), Grace Davis (for making sure it worked with the teen group), Laura Anile (my indie author friend from down under who was never afraid to give it to me straight), and Jen Wendell (who inspired the character of Jenevra).

  Without their suggestions, this book would still be only 30,000 words and missing its heart, so thank you, truly. You have no idea how important beta readers are to authors!

  I also need to thank my editor, Cassie McCown over at Gathering Leaves Editing. Without her, you would be indulging in my misuse of the comma and semicolon.

  And finally, I’d like to thank my husband, Jason, and my kiddos, Tristan and Marina, who, reluctantly, allowed me the mass amounts of time needed in front of the screen so I could take this journey with you.

  “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”

  —Aristotle

  Prologue

  June 15, 2031

  Tobias

  Gazing around Ma’s living room covered in half-deflated balloons and colorful bits of torn-up pink and purple birthday paper, I can't help but smile. My baby is a year old today.

  Looking at them now, mother and daughter, snuggled up close underneath the early summer sun, you’d never know their lives had been anything but perfect. Even the afternoon sun seems to agree with me as it pours into Ma's living room. Its warmth makes everything feel calm and perfect—my own little cocoon of happiness.

  “Looks like someone had a good birthday,” I whisper to Jada. She’s sitting on Ma’s trusty old blue-and-white-checkered couch beside me. Janelle’s blond curls mirror the exact color of her mother's: sun-kissed fields of wheat.

  Aside from those weeks in the NICU, she hasn’t been sick a day since. People always marvel that she is the happiest baby they’ve ever seen, and she is.

  Ma calls her an old soul. I can’t help but agree. She just seems so at home in her brand new body. While other newborns tend to flounder with their new limbs, Janelle is like a baby Buddha, reassuring us that all is right in the world now that she is here.

  Smiling, I notice Janelle’s hand is clasped tight around a lock of her mother’s hair as she sleeps in her arms. She has on the cutest pink sundress peppered with white daisies. Her white ruffled cloth diaper pokes out from underneath, hugging her plump little legs.

  She is just getting to the age where she can tell something is “different” about her mommy, though. Jada has been worrying about what effect the terrible scar lining the side of her face would have on her daughter. Although she won’t talk about it, I know Jada is embarrassed by the permanent mark that runs from the edge of her left eye and along her jaw. When she found out she was pregnant, she convinced herself that no child would love a mother who looked as hideous as she thought she was.

  It didn’t matter how many times I told Jada how beautiful she was, in those first few months after Janelle was born, she worried that she would end up scaring her daughter. She thought of herself as a monster.

  That’s why we all held our breath the first time Janelle touched her mother’s scar. Jada gasped, but her daughter’s eyes lit up like a flame. She smiled and giggled, much to our relief. Since that day, it’s Janelle’s favorite spot to touch. She will sit in her mama’s arms and run her finger up and down the length of her scar like a zipper. She hums a soft tune to herself as she does it, almost like she’s trying to soothe away her mama’s “boo-boo.”

  We never talk about the night Jada was injured—the night her father got drunk and slashed her face open with a broken vodka bottle. We don’t talk about it simply because there are no words, no words to make the pain or the memories go away.

  But that is all in the past. Her father is dead now and can’t hurt her anymore. Only happiness lies ahead for us now.

  “Your mother spoiled her,” Jada says when I kiss Janelle’s head.

  “I heard that,” Ma says, coming in from the kitchen with an empty trash bag in one hand and her old, beat-up camera dangling off the other. “Grammies are supposed to spoil their grandchildren. It's the law.” She gives us her famous grin. Her newly dentured teeth shine bright against her black skin. Since Janelle was born, our days have been full of laughter. Some days my life seems too perfect, like I’m just waiting for that other shoe to drop.

  Kari, our neighbor and close friend of the family, dropped off an enormous stuffed bear, labeled “Little Bear,” earlier this morning. Little Bear is currently taking up half the couch. This kid is spoiled rotten.

  Ma starts picking up the bits of paper on the ground. She’s ever so careful not to crinkle the paper and wake her granddaughter as she places it in the bag. I shake my head and slide off the couch to help her. A train could run through here and Janelle wouldn’t wake up. That girl sleeps like the dead.

  I grab the bag from my mother’s hand and take over the cleanup. Instead of sitting down to rest, like I’d intended her to do, she picks up her camera. It's the old digital kind. They don’t even make them anymore. She refuses to go to the cardless models that sync up with your e-ports. She says she likes to print out the hard copies and frame them, in a real frame, like they used to in her day. I can only shake my head at her stubbornness only because I know I’ve got a good dose of it myself.

  “Tobias, go sit with your family so I can take your picture,” Ma says, looking over her glasses to find the “on” switch she can’t seem to ever locate.

  I put down the trash bag and sit beside Jada and drape my arm across her again. The two of them smell like freshly washed laundry that’s been line-dried all morning. They smell like home.

  A few snaps go off before Ma seems satisfied. She beams at us and places her hand over her heart before she walks over to her photo printer that sits on her writing desk to make her precious copies.

  Jada chuckles softly beside me at my mother’s antics. I nuzzle my nose into her hair and breathe in her healing energy. I haven't felt this alive in years, and it's all thanks to these two in my arms. I owe my life to my family. They make me stronger, so strong that I haven’t even needed my inhaler for several months now. The doctors are baffled by my recovery, but I’m not. I know Jada and Janelle have cured me. I can’t explain how, except that I
just can feel it.

  Across the room, the printer spits out her first picture. Ma coos over her handiwork, no doubt thinking about where she’s going to hang this latest photo. Just about every inch of her house is covered with wall-to-wall picture frames. Soon she’ll have to start adding on just to have more wall space to hang more pictures!

  “Oh, he's gonna love this one,” she whispers to the photo, hugging it to her chest.

  The sentence is so hushed that I almost don’t register what she just said.

  “Who is going to love it?” I sit up, suddenly tense.

  Ma’s shoulders freeze, just for a second, but it’s just the sign I need to know she’s hiding something.

  “Um, no one, honey.” She turns quickly away from me, stepping over a small pile of Janelle’s gifts, and heads into the kitchen.

  Something in my gut tells me to press her on this, so I unwrap myself from my girls and follow after her.

  I push into the kitchen, temporarily blinded by the sun that pours into the room at this hour of the day. Once my eyes adjust to the change, though, I can tell she’s going out of her way to avoid eye contact with me. She’s scurrying around the kitchen for something, anything, to busy herself with. She starts picking up the paper plates from the kitchen table that have bits of angel food cake still on them. Pink frosting smudges across her dark fingers as she piles them up in a leaning tower. Without looking up, she flies across the room and throws them in the trash, clearly not wanting to talk to me.

  “Ma,” I say as though I’m approaching a scared animal. “What are you not telling me? Who is going to love that picture?”

  She puts her hands on her wide hips, the way she does when she feels like she's being attacked. The fabric of her shirt is pulled taught as her shoulders straighten themselves to full height of 5’4”.

  “Not that it's any of your business, but I’m giving this picture to Hawk. I've been writing to him this past year.”

  My mouth drops open, but no words come out. I think my brain has gone into shock.

  She brushes past me to the sink and washes the pink off of her hands

  “You what? Ma, how could you?” I stand there, awestruck, as she methodically dries her hands, as though gearing up for a fight. She has no idea how angry I am with her right now. Then again, how could she? She doesn’t know the real Hawk. Jada never told Ma about how Hawk had taken advantage of her, or even that Hawk is actually Janelle’s real father.

  Ma still thinks of Hawk as the boy who used to be my best friend, the boy that grew up in her house, who she practically raised herself cause his folks were never around. She has no idea about the way he changed when he met Jada.

  “Now don't get all upset,” she begins. Her eyes don’t meet mine, so I can tell she feels guilty about not telling me sooner. “I feel bad for him, Tobias.” She drapes the towel over her shoulder. “No one goes to see him. Not even his parents.” She raises her hand to stop me from talking. “Now, I know that he killed Jada's father,” she whispers so Jada won’t hear, “but you and I both know that he only did that to protect her.” She shakes her head sadly. “If he hadn’t stepped in, Jada’s father may have killed her.”

  I bite my tongue. I want to tell her so bad about just how brutally Jada’s father was slaughtered at Hawk’s hands, but I don’t. It’s not an image I want to replay in my head and I know it wouldn’t change what Ma has already done.

  Ma places her hand on my shoulder.

  “Someone needs to let that boy know that he hasn't been forgotten about. And if his best friend won’t trouble himself to even write to him, then I will.” She pushes past me again, this time to grab a broom from the closet.

  My heart thrums in my chest at what I’m about to ask.

  “Ma, does Hawk know about Janelle?”

  She looks at me as if I’ve grown a second head.

  “Well, of course he does! Like I'm not gonna brag about my beautiful grandbaby! He’s always asking about her, too. I send him pictures of you all every week. And don't you sass me about it. That boy ain't got nothing to look forward to locked away in that cell.” Her eyes tear up and I just now realize how much his being in prison has affected her. He was like a son to her. A healthy son. “Tobias, he says he just lives for the pictures of little Janelle.”

  Of course he does.

  Ma seems blind to the fact that her granddaughter has the exact same unique pale-blue eye color as Hawk. I don’t know how it’s never dawned on her that he is Janelle’s father and not me. But you can bet your ass Hawk has it figured out.

  I've been praying every day for Janelle’s eyes to change color. Her pediatrician tells us coloring like hers usually darkens after the first few years, but now that Hawk has seen her coloring, we'll never be able to pawn Janelle off as mine.

  I have no doubt that he’ll come for his daughter. Maybe for Jada, too, and that is something I can’t allow. I’m lost in a million worst case scenarios as Ma gives my shoulders a squeeze before she leaves me in the kitchen, completely unaware of the danger she’s just put us all in.

  There is only one choice now. We have to run. Before he gets out of prison and tracks us all down.

  Chapter One

  Jada

  Janelle stirs a bit in my arms when her papa goes into the kitchen, but she doesn’t wake up. I watch his lean frame slip into the kitchen, his dark curls contained only by his short haircut. I absolutely adore that man. I never thought a love like ours would be possible. Of course, I’d never believed in Twin Flames before I met Tobias, either. Every hair on my body pulls me to be near him, even after all this time. It’s taken quite a bit of discipline on both of our parts to keep our hands off of each other; it’s not even a sexual need—well, not all the time—that I crave. It’s just him. His touch is enough. Just being next to him, I know things are right with the world. Now that we’re together, I know I would have waited an eternity to be with him. He is my other half.

  How is it possible that I’ve also been blessed with Janelle? Tobias would have been more than enough to make me happy for the rest of my days, but now that she’s here, I know complete and utter happiness.

  I press her against my chest and feel her soft, silky skin. My lips touch her tufts of curls. I close my eyes and breathe in her strawberry-scented shampoo. My summer baby. It’s hard for me to fathom that we almost lost her. Even though I carried her to term, she presented breach and she was deprived of oxygen for so long the doctors were afraid that even if she did make it, she’d be mentally impaired. The weeks spent in the NICU with test after test coming back with negative results didn’t make the experience any less daunting.

  I began to question my faith during those weeks. I kept asking myself why God was doing this to me. Hadn’t I been punished enough? Hadn’t living with the abusive father He’d given me earned me the right to have a healthy baby girl? Could He really be that cruel?

  Of course, during that time, other dark thoughts started to creep back in. Secretly, I started wondering if God would take her away from me because He knew I was broken, not just on the outside with all my visible scars, but on the inside as well. After all, I had serious doubts about my ability to parent. It’s not like I had a mother of my own to model from. How would I possibly have any idea what to do? My father wasn’t exactly the best role model in the world. What if I lost my temper with her? Would I raise my hand to her as my father had done to me countless times? Had my father somehow taught me a way of parenting that couldn’t be untaught?

  I’ll admit those were not my best moments. I was weak and scared. In fact, I never even told Tobias about my doubts. I didn’t want to let him know that my father could still torment me, even after his death. I didn’t mention it because he’d want to try and fix it, and there are some hurts that just can’t be healed. Not even with time.

  As bad as those weeks in the NICU were, though, they weren’t the worst thoughts I’d ever had. Those, Tobias did know about. He knew all about my most shameful m
emories. He listened, without judgment, as I told him of the years I spent carving out my name into my arm as a way of remembering that I wasn’t my dead mother, a fact my father would often forget when he drank. For years, my father took his anger with God for claiming his wife during childbirth out on me. It didn’t help matters that I looked just like her. Or, at least, he said I did in the moments before he’d hit me. Most days I’m glad he’s dead, but then other days I wonder if he could have changed, if we could have become a real family.

  Tobias is my family now. He’s never thought badly of me, even when I told him about all of the times that I used to rely on pills to escape the torment of growing up in such a cruel house. He stuck with me through it all because he loved me. Me. Broken and unlovable me. Realizing that one truth made me realize God wasn’t punishing me; instead, He had actually blessed me. After that revelation in the NICU, the docs told me that Janelle could go home. Things were finally looking up for me. I had paid my dues and now I was being rewarded for not taking the easy way out.

  Smiling, I close my eyes in wonder. How did I ever think I wouldn't be able to love her? Or that she couldn't love me? I’d never been more wrong about anything. Between my daughter and Tobias, I’ve never felt so wanted and cherished in my life.

  Just then, Tobias’s mom rushes out of the kitchen and whispers that she’s off to check the mail. I give her a small nod and hug my daughter just a bit tighter.

  As she sleeps, Janelle’s tiny fingers thread inside my long tendrils of hair, holding on to me even in her sleep. I’m probably breaking all the Mommy Rules by indulging her with constant cuddling, but her need is my need. I crave her touch as much as she seems to crave mine. The velvety soft skin of her irresistibly perfect cheek rests against my chest. Her face rises and falls with my breath, and I sigh, contented.

  Tobias and I have even started talking about marriage. Well, “started” is an understatement. He’s been asking me to marry him on an almost daily basis ever since that night in the hospital—the night I tried to kill myself. Not my proudest moment.