by V. K. Ludwig
For a second, I thought I saw agony in her eyes, and as sick as that sounds, I loved it. Because shit like that shouldn’t have bothered her — unless she had missed me and had thought of me.
Somehow she punished me with awkward small talk. Or perhaps we punished each other. But it wasn’t until I asked her what was new with her that my warning bells went off blaring inside my head.
Gazes drifted. Bodies tensed. Uncle Peter stared at the ground like the frail kid during physical education, hoping he’d be the odd number for dodgeball. There was something nobody cared to tell me. And that something dumped a boulder onto my guts.
After Rowan disappeared with Ruth and Oriel inside the longhouse, the air out front turned lighter and breathable once more.
“Hazel left?”
Max smacked his lips. “Sorry for telling you but you missed her by two days. She should have arrived there today if all went as planned. I took over the clinic a week ago.”
“I figured she would have left by now.” As soon as I said the words, the fact that I’d be going home to an empty house tonight settled down on me. Sure, I’d have Jack and Kim with me, but it wasn’t the same. Not with my sister gone. Not without Ruth.
“We adopted Silas,” River said. “And Autumn won’t be pregnant for much longer now.”
Max carried a massive smile on his face. “Labor usually starts earlier with twins so… yeah… we’re getting ready.”
“Shit, guys. Seems like plenty has happened while I was gone,” I said, stretching the pause as I stared one after another straight in the face. “Anything else I should hear?”
“Nope,” River said.
Max joined with an “uh-uh.”
Uncle Peter tugged on his long-sleeve.
Yep, something was up.
I turned toward by bike, opened the saddlebag, and threw a bunch of stuff to the ground. Then I slowly retrieved the red plastic box and handed it to Max. “Sorry it took me so long but… well, he’s here now.”
Max hesitated for a moment, staring at the container from eyes which turned from tired to torn. His hands shook when he released me from the weight of it. The physical and the emotional one. “They cremated him?”
Him and others. “Their soil is like concrete, and there’s no digging unless they get the excavator out. So… yeah, they usually cremate the bodies. Was that like… against his religion?”
“I don’t think so.” Max shook his head and stood there in silence for a long time before he went on, asking about those details I hoped he had no interest in knowing. “Did they tell you how? Did he suffer?”
I exchanged a quick glance with Jack, who lowered his head with the hint of a nod. Kim leaned back against my bike, hands wrapped around her body in this new-to-her environment that would change her life.
“From what we understand, the council issued a cleansing of the, um… the Drainpipes? Apparently, that’s an area —”
“I know what it is,” Max said, waving his hand to skip to the crunch.
“He had been in business with Bird, a guy from the Ash Zones, who agreed to help him to get everyone out.”
“But it didn’t work out that way, did it?”
My gaze sunk to the ground along with my heart, or perhaps even deeper than that. Three months inside the Ash Zones was like building a puzzle, clicking the pieces together to create a picture of the true world we lived in. It wasn’t pretty. Not even along the edges.
“The council found out and caught them before Bird was able to reach them. When your dad realized it was over he... It was a favor, really, Max. Your dad… he… he —”
“He took a gun and shot as many kids in the head as possible,” Jack blurted with not a trace of compassion in his voice. “They surrounded the rest, corralled them up like a herd of wild horses and burned them alive.”
“My dad shot children in the head?”
“Around twenty,” Jack added, making me swing around.
“For heaven’s sake, man, just keep your damn mouth shut, would you?”
He shrugged and lit himself a hand-stuffed cigarette. “Nobody ever told me clansmen can’t handle the truth. He did those kids a favor.”
I took a sharp breath and placed my hands on Max’s shoulders, which vibrated underneath his constraint. “Those who survived said they tied him to a tree, rammed a metal rod into his stomach and made him watch as he bled out. Bird took his body down and brought him to the Ash Zones.”
Max stared at the red container for a while, probably picturing how his dad tried to save his people and ended up sending bullets into handfuls of brain. No matter how heroic it was, I got it — it sounded anything but.
“Well.” I turned toward Jack and Kim. “I better get you inside. Maybe we can catch a couple of hours of sleep before —”
“Before you plan the wedding?” Jack blurted, not even trying to hide that smirk on his face.
“Whatever. Grab your shit and get walking. The bikes won’t make it up there in the mud.”
The group dissolved, and I would have guessed most went back to bed, but that wasn’t what I planned for myself.
One hour later, I had Kim situated in my sister’s old room, and I had put Jack up where Ruth used to sleep. I grabbed a flashlight, my jacket, and walked over to Oriel’s place.
The plan was simple. Regardless of how Ruth felt, I sure as hell wouldn’t marry Kim — so someone else had to.
It took him forever to open up, and when he did, he knocked his forehead against the frame of his door. “Fuck, I had a feeling you’d show up here.”
“Glad to see you too. We gotta talk.”
I ignored how he barely braced his shoulder against me and stepped right inside, gazing around his living room to make sure Ruth wasn’t around.
“Ruth asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“I figured.” I planted my ass by the dining table and waved him over. “She was never an early bird.”
Oriel walked over and slouched over the backrest of the chair, pinching the bridge of his nose as if I was bad news. Well, he was in for a treat.
“Look…” I said and fanned my hands out in front of him. “That girl isn’t my fiancee. She wanted out of there, and the only way was for me to promise she would get married.”
“To which you happily agreed.”
“Not really. Kind of. Only to get her out but that’s not the point. The point is that I won’t marry her.”
“And you had to wake me at four-thirty to tell me that?” He raised a brow at me, his eyelids heavy and his demeanor… dismissive?
“If she doesn’t get married, that guy, Jack, will drag her back home with him. I won’t let that happen to her.”
“Guess you’ll marry her then after all.”
He got up and pushed his chair back underneath the table.
“You’ll have to marry her.”
Oriel froze, his hand still sitting on the backrest, clenching his fingers around the spindly wood more and more at each breath.
“I don’t have to do shit,” came back short and square.
I leaned over the table. “You serious? We’re talking about a wife here. To marry. Something everyone wants. I’m doing you a favor here, man.”
He swung around and cracked his fists against the tabletop, his forehead lined with popped veins. “Why does everyone think dumping wives at my doorstep is a favor?”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
By the way he sucked in his cheeks and bit his lips, I could tell he had something nasty sitting on his tongue. My best guess? He was about to spit out what everyone else had held back.
“Just let me hear it. What’s going on here?”
His eyes darted toward his closed bedroom door, then they stared me down. “Look, things changed while you were gone, okay?”
“Okay…”
“You left a damn mess behind I can tell you that and… Anyway, I promised Ruth not to say anything, but it’s not like you’re giving me a
choice here. Ruth and I are engaged. We’re getting married next week.”
My heart slammed straight out of my chest. “Married like… husband and wife married?”
“What else does married mean to you?”
I ignored the way my lungs stalled at every other breath. Ignored how burning heat built up behind my eyes. What I couldn’t ignore was the chorus of my childhood blasting through my brain.
Not good enough.
Not good enough.
Screech!
I pushed the table away from me and sent Oriel slamming against the window behind him. Then I jumped up, got my boots all tangled in the chair, and solved it by kicking it across the room.
“Calm the fuck down!” Oriel shouted, but the way he stood there so fucking better than me had me everything else but calm.
“What’s going on here?”
I swung around, my chest heaving and my arms ready to punch a wall, only to find Ruth standing with her hands holding her stomach.
I took an angry step toward her and pointed at Oriel. “Is it true? You’re going to marry him?”
“It’s not what you think, man,” came from behind me but I would have none of it.
“What makes him so much better than me?” Tears pushed out from behind my eyes, each one of them rolling down my cheeks and telling me I wasn’t over her. At all. I was all in, and it burned my soul. “What does he have that I don’t? Why can you love him, but you couldn’t love me?”
She inched toward me, her hands opening up into the sweetest embrace but I knew if I’d touched her, I’d fucking burst into flames. “No, no… it’s not like that, Adair, we —”
“What is it about me that is so wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong about you, Adair.” Oriel approached me from the side and grabbed for my arm, but I just pulled away and took another step toward the flame that threatened to engulf me at any moment now.
Ruth stumbled a few steps back, her posture haunched, and her hands clasping her stomach. Half a second later, Oriel grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back. “Get in your room, Ruth. This isn’t good for the baby.”
Baby…
Baby…
What he had said made no sense. Then it did. Then it didn’t. The world around me twisted like a sick joke, and I searched for Ruth’s eyes. They had filled with tears, and her lips had turned from sleepy-pink to bloodless-blue.
I thought and thought and thought about what to say next.
“You’re pregnant?”
What came out was… stupid. Of course, she was pregnant. That’s why he had said what he had said.
Her head gave a stiff nod, then she opened her mouth to speak. “But it’s not the way you think —”
“You are fucking pregnant?” I repeated as if I had to hear it again to make sense of it. To believe this was really happening. “Huh…” was all I could say, and a few breaths later, “pregnant and about to get married. Bet you didn’t see that one coming either.”
I turned around and dragged my feet toward the door, shaking my head at every but and wait and explain she blurted out under tears.
“Adair…” Oriel had caught up with me and pulled the door handle from underneath my grasp. “She’s trying to explain so why wouldn’t you just wait and listen to her?”
“Fuck off,” were the last words I could mumble. Along with a desperate confession about how I had loved her… and how I hated myself for still loving her.
I stepped outside, only to fall into a sprint as soon as my boots hit the moss underfoot.
Low-hanging branches whipped my face while thorny shrubs clung to my pants. I ignored the lashes and the pokes. Stomping through the forest. Ignoring Ruth’s shouts behind me.
There was nothing to explain. Really. I myself had asked Rowan to assign Oriel as her new guard. Turned out, he was the better man. Now he’d marry the woman I wanted. The woman I loved. The woman who had made me feel better than I really was — even if only for a little while. And now they had a child on the way, creating that family I’d never have. Ever.
“Wait!” Ruth’s voice hollered behind me.
I ignored it. But only until she screamed, the thump of her body tumbling to the ground a torture to my eardrums. No matter how much my insides churned, she needed help, and so did her child. I forced my legs to turn around and sprinted to her side.
“Are you bleeding?”
“No,” she said, her voice strained from chasing me down.
“Think you broke something? Twisted an ankle?”
“I’m fine, it’s just —”
“Something’s with the baby?”
Her eyes shot up at me, those beautiful eyes I knew were nothing but ordinary brown in the daylight yet had so much comfort to give. “I waited so long for you to come back, Adair. There was so much I needed to tell you.”
I suppressed the curiosity inside me and skipped the what. The last thing I needed, we needed, was talk of things of a past which would never return.
But then she went on. “I was wrong to turn you down. I was scared because I didn’t know what marriage means and I didn’t know if I could be the wife you deserve and… and” She took a deep breath and gazed over the black horizon behind the last line of trees. All the while, everything inside me convulsed, like your stomach does on a piece of stale bread after you hadn’t eaten anything in five days.
“I waited for you to come back so I could tell you the truth,” she continued, her voice choked with tears of her own. “I loved you. Loved you so much each second without you tore me apart. But you never came back.”
I knew I had kneeled beside her so I couldn’t say how it happened, but suddenly the moisture of the forest ground soaked through to my ass. Then I sat there, mute on the outside and numb on the inside. She had said everything I wanted to hear — three months too late.
“But… the message you gave Arizona. He told me you’re sorry and that I shouldn’t hurry to get back.”
She sobbed. “No, I told him that I needed to talk to you, but I didn’t want you to rush and put yourself in danger.”
Guess he banged his head hard when his truck flipped in the storm…
For a moment, my mind went back to those four twisting columns, and the whispers pushing through from the other side. I picked Ruth up and carried her back bridal-style, her body shivering and dressed in nothing but a damp, white nightgown. Oriel’s voice already shouted out for us from the other side. What would have happened if I would have ridden through those pillars? Perhaps I would have been carrying my wife now, with our baby growing inside her.
Chapter 26
Ruth
I watched the swirl and followed it all the way to the bottom of my mug, pieces of fennel trapped by the current as I stirred the spoon.
Oriel placed the mandatory cracker on the breakfast table beside it. “So you told him you loved him back then, but you didn’t tell him you still do? And you neither told him the child was his?”
“You heard what he said. If that girl doesn’t marry, that guy Jack will take her back to the Ash Zones.”
He took a sip of his tea, swished it through his mouth and swallowed. “He told me he doesn’t want to marry her. But you care because…?”
The truth that Adair never intended to marry her let a shudder crawl across my skin. Not the disgusting kind. The kind when emotions overwhelm you, and relief settled deep inside your core.
“Because there was a moment in my life where I stood in a dark corner, hoping some strangers would take me in. At some point in the past, not too long ago, I was like her. Depending on others to help me change my life.”
No matter how much I had altered the full truth, confessing my love to Adair had something liberating. Now he knew, and I hoped it would make him understand that he had been good enough. Perfect, even. To me. Three months ago.
Oriel sunk his head into his palm. “Please don’t ask me to marry her. I gave up my chance to find someone who loves me when I agreed to
marry you. Don’t ask me to do it again.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything.”
“But?”
“No but.” I swirled the fennel some more, taking in the comforting warmth and the herbal scent. “Except, of course, that your chances of finding love would actually be better with her than with me.”
“There it is. You just asked me without really asking.”
“Like I said, I’m not asking you to marry her. Even if you did, the thing between me and Adair is beyond saving. I only stated it as a fact. She is young, and I assume she isn’t pregnant with someone else’s child. I also doubt she is in love with someone, considering she wanted to get away from there.”
Oriel swished the final drops of tea inside his mug, his gaze losing itself in the circular motion of his hand. Then he gulped it down, rose and carried the empty mug over to the sink.
“You need to tell him, Ruth.”
His sentence contained everything I had hoped he wouldn’t ask. I had made a promise to Adair once. Promised I would marry him if I carried his child. At that time he had bound himself to the same promise. One he now couldn’t keep.
“It will make things even more complicated. You know I can’t tell him.”
“Well, I can’t raise his child without him knowing. It’ll be awkward whenever we bump into each other, and I don’t want to live with that lie for the rest of my life. Sorry, Ruth, but I won’t do it. I would have done it if he didn’t return. But now he’s back.”
“But —”
“He deserves to know for fuck’s sake. It is his child.” He immediately gave me an apologetic look and turned the faucet on to rinse out his mug. “We need to go over there and talk. The four of us. Once the truth is out, we will figure out the rest. It will be heated, but you’ll see, things will fall into place after that. I think you both owe that child at least this much.”
No matter how much I hated the fact, but Oriel was right. I owed Adair the truth, and it was the least I could do for our baby. I let my fingers trace the outline of my baby bump, which showed more and more each morning I woke up.