She’d tried to argue with me and go home the night before. Wasn’t happening. Not while she was afraid. Not after I’d taken her virginity. She was staying in my bed whether she liked it or not.
I’d promised her I would wake her long before Logan got up. She was worried about him catching us in bed together. I nudged her awake after I spent fifteen minutes just staring at her, admiring her, feeling her under my arm, smelling her hair in my face. Every sensation, every smell, every sound, every little detail of how she looked—I burned all of it on the hard drive in my brain. I wanted to be able to recall it instantly, even fifty years from then.
This could be your life if you win.
Cora glared when she first opened her eyes, like she wanted to murder anything in sight. I knew she wasn’t a morning person, but damn. I smiled at her scowl anyway. I loved her whether she was frowning, crying, smiling, or laughing. I wanted every one of her looks every fucking day of the year. As soon as her brain registered where she was, who she was with, her lips curled into that smile that only she could smile, and she stretched her feline arms up over her head and yawned.
I spent the next thirty minutes kissing her, touching her, holding her—until she finally pried herself away and got dressed. Her face tightened when she stood, and despite my plea for her to steal a pair of my sweat pants, she found a way to get her jeans on. I made her coffee to go, and she gave me a kiss, and took off to her house before the sun came up to get ready for work.
I WALKED OUT THE FRONT door with Joe. It was late morning and we were the only two at the house. Joe and I climbed into my ride to head to the gym. Something was off about him. The past four days had been very tense and high-strung.
I stared at the mountains. “We need to have a discussion.”
Joe sighed. “Affirmative, asshole. Soon.”
I tried to make small talk. “They let you off the island at all? Other than for missions?”
“Not once. Missions are hard to come by these days too.”
“What? Doesn’t someone always need to die somewhere?”
Joe glanced over. “Yeah, asshole. But they have gadgets that do that shit now. Don’t you watch the news? We’re outsourced like factory workers to China.” He paused. “I’m using analogy to equate it to something you can relate to.”
“Thanks.” I grinned. “And no. I don’t watch the news.”
“Forget everything, huh?”
“We should have the conversation now.”
“Goddamn right.”
I whipped a u-turn at the end of the driveway and headed straight back up it toward the house. “We’ll train here, and you’ll get answers. Better that way anyway. Kill two birds with one stone.”
“Who the fuck says that shit?”
“Says what?”
“Kill two birds with a stone. Just shoot them with a fucking shotgun. I’ve killed ten before with one shell. Why would you throw stones at a bird?”
I shook my head and stared at him. He made me feel more like a human being.
“I don’t know if you’re ready for this conversation.”
I knew exactly what the conversation he wanted to have entailed. It’s how we worked out grievances on the island.
I threw on the brakes. “Get out.”
“You too.”
I stepped out of the car and took my shirt off. Joe did the same.
“We only had each other, you know?” His feet pounded the gravel and powdered dust shivered off toward the grass.
I glared at him. “We didn’t have shit. Nothing but orders.”
“You’ll have them again soon.” He circled the car and threw a punch at my face. “If you’re still breathing.”
I side stepped his fist, barely. “You on his side?” I faked with a right and threw a left hook. He wasn’t fooled. I didn’t expect him to be. This was just loosening up.
“I’m on my side.” He dropped his guard.
It was a taunt.
“You even remember how to hit someone? A couple days of training and you bled like a bitch. Then you ran off with one and cut your ass whipping short.”
My face went hot. Joe smiled. It wasn’t a personal insult. He was goading me into expelling energy by manipulating my emotions. Every person has energy stored in their body. Potential energy. We convert it and burn it off in certain ways. To be extremely efficient and exact maximum damage, you have to transfer as much of that energy into your opponent as possible. When you get angry, muscles tense, and your body burns it off, fatigue sets in rapidly. You grow tired.
It was fighting 101. Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope. Let the other guy wear themselves out, and then assault them in their weakened state. He was right. I had a lot of work to do. I was rusty.
I relaxed and settled in on my feet. Wouldn’t let his words get to me. Instead of anticipating his moves, I looked for tells in advance. He threw a roundhouse followed with two punches. I dodged them all easily. But he was going slow right now. Another trick if you’re far more advanced than your opponent.
Start slow to accustom them to a certain speed. Their brain and eyes get used to it. Then neutralize them with a burst. It’s like holding something heavy in your hand for a long time. You pick up something lighter immediately after and it feels like a feather. The burst was coming soon.
We circled up in the yard a few more times and he hit me before I knew it was coming. He maneuvered me right to where the sun landed in my face. Timed it perfectly.
Four headshots and a kick to the chest. The whole world went black. I thought I was dead, but I could still smell the Montana air and hear Joe’s voice faintly like I was submerged in water.
“Fuck you for leaving me there alone.” He paused for a moment and then held his hand out. “I forgive you, asshole.”
I took his hand and that was that. Problem solved.
JANET SHOWED BACK UP AND walked through the door. I stood there with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of ice plastered to my face. Joe sat on the couch watching a movie. Some old western. I noticed John Wayne on the screen.
“Oh my God.” Janet dropped her keys on the table and stared at my face. “Someone put a whoopin’ on your ass.” She laughed, and her face said, it’s about time.
Joe raised his hand and smiled. “Me.” Didn’t turn away from the TV.
I didn’t have the strength to get up and look at myself in the mirror. I could barely see out of one eye. The swelling needed to go down because I clearly had a lot of work to do. The ice helped move things along.
I’d taken punches in headgear from the world’s best fighters outside of Hell’s Island, but nothing like Joe. One of his strikes would’ve killed a regular human instantly.
“Good luck getting Cora on board with that.” Janet pointed at my face.
“She’ll have to get used to it. For a while anyway.” I turned to Joe. “Payback’s a bitch.”
He did the Pac Man move with his hand like I was all talk. His eyes stayed glued to The Duke. John Wayne pulled out a revolver and capped a bad guy.
Joe’s arm shot in the air and he whooped like the cowboys on the screen. “Got ‘em!”
I couldn’t help but shake my head and chuckle. I’d missed him, a lot. I smashed the bag of ice against the cost of his forgiveness. That’s how we operated on the island. Parts of it came back to me the more he was around. There wasn’t time for quarrels and grudges. If there was a problem, we handled it with our fists and went back to normal. All was forgiven. Wouldn’t be brought up again.
It was fast and efficient.
After lunch, I could see out of my eye again. It was a perk of being genetically engineered. We were bred to heal faster. Evolution sped up thousands, if not millions of years in a petri dish. It was some world we lived in.
I walked out front with Joe.
“We have to retrain your eyes. They’re sloppy.”
“Okay.”
“Have to retrain everything.” He looked me up and down. “You’re sloppy.”
<
br /> “How do we do that?”
“Meditation.”
I hadn’t meditated in forever. “We could’ve done that while my eye healed up.”
He whipped around. “No, we couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“I was watching a movie. Now we can.” He headed off toward the woods.
I followed and shook my head. We started at a walk, that turned into a jog, that turned into a controlled sprint.
“Be aware at all times, asshole.” He pivoted and shot to the side.
I tripped right over a giant hole in the ground and collided with the dirt.
He laughed and kept running. “Idiot.”
I gritted my teeth and took off after him. Mad at myself more than anything. We ran until we came to the water. He stopped at the edge of a hill that looked out over the Clark Fork river. Cottonwood trees lined the banks. Mountains sat behind it.
“Perfect.” Joe walked over and took a seat. “You remember how to do this?”
I nodded and walked about fifty feet away and sat down. My eyes closed, and I took in everything. Focused my senses. Went to another world. It was amazing. I’d forgotten how to be totally in tune with my surroundings.
A bird sat in a nest over my left shoulder. I could hear it above. Another one joined it. It rubbed against an egg, probably to keep it warm. After ten minutes or so I could hear bugs crawling, felt the wind, smelled every scent nature had to offer. It all morphed into one giant sense of being.
“Go back.”
Joe whispered it, but I heard him. Clear as day from fifty feet away.
Crashing waves. Black beaches. I stared at Edmon in front of us. Joe and I were still kids, no older than eight.
I saw the razor wire. The Aurora Borealis undulated back and forth in waves across the moonlit sky. My face chilled from the polar wind and my feet burned hot from the volcano. The guard sat atop the watchtower, high above the razor fence. He rocked back and forth in his seat, his silhouette glancing back at us every minute or two. A Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun propped in front of him and a heat-sensing spotlight scanned the dark waters for anything human. Waves crashed on igneous rocks and ice cliffs. Lava boiled in the pit behind the barracks.
“This is your new brother.”
Another child two years younger than us stomped out to meet Edmon. He moved like a machine. His eyes were pale and lifeless.
“You.” Edmon pointed to the boy left of Joe and me. “Stand guard.”
The boy leaped to his feet and ran out to the middle. The fight lasted all of two seconds. The younger kid hammered him with his fist and the boy went down. He landed at my feet. His eyes were sunk into his face and his head rolled over. Half of it was caved in.
The younger kid stomped back to the living quarters.
Edmon’s eyes lit up red from the volcano behind us. Shadows flickered across the curves of his nose and eyes.
A hand gripped my shoulder and I snapped out of my dream state.
Joe stood in front of me. “Now, you’ve been back there.”
CHAPTER 18
Cora Chapman
I COULDN’T STOP SMILING AS I turned down the street. Then I saw her car.
My mom was at my house. She waited on the porch. I took in a deep breath. What the hell was she doing?
I turned into the driveway and parked next to her car, got out, and went up to the porch. “Hi, Mom.”
She had on a pant suit. It looked like something Hilary Clinton would wear. Her hair wouldn’t have moved in the middle of a tornado. She stood up, stiff as a board. Surely, she’d been fun at one time in her life. If she had, I would never have known.
“Everything okay with you?”
She always did that. Asked rhetorical questions. I brushed it off.
“Sure, why?”
She followed me to the door. We rarely hugged or anything in my family. It just wasn’t something we did. She played along with my answer.
“We never hear from you. Never talk to you.”
I fumbled with the key. This wasn’t how I wanted my evening to go. I had some work to do and I wanted to go spend time with Landon and Logan. “Just been busy with work. Sorry.”
She smirked. “You only work thirty hours a week.”
I shook my head. And she wonders why I don’t call and want to hang out. It was a hopeless cause. I wanted to say something nasty to her. Point out that she didn’t work at all. My parents were under the impression that teachers were part-time employees who only worked during school hours and had the summers off. “It keeps me busy.”
We walked into my house. It was messy. I braced for the comment.
“Do we need to get you a maid?”
“No.”
“Well, it looks like you need one.” Her head craned around the room.
“I don’t.”
“It’s pretty messy.”
I spun around and mustered up the fakest smile possible. “Do you need something, Mother?” She hated being called that.
“Are you seeing someone?”
There was the reason she came over. It was tricky. I didn’t like lying, even to my parents. And they rarely asked anything they didn’t already know the answer to. Everything was a game of gotcha.
“Yes.”
She glared.
“I see lots of people. Every day.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“You weren’t specific.”
“Is he a parent of a student?” Her lips mashed into a horizontal line.
How could she know that? I nodded.
She shook her head and took a few steps with her back to me. Then she whipped around and gritted her teeth. “I don’t care what you did in New York City. But what you do here reflects on the way you were raised.”
“It’s none of your business.”
She threw her arms in the air. “How could you do this? We didn’t raise you to be this way.”
My face heated up. I marched over and retrieved my checkbook from the drawer. I owed them five hundred dollars and I had approximately five hundred and eight in my checking account, but I didn’t care. Even a dollar would’ve made them feel like they could control my life.
I scribbled out the five hundred on a check and handed it over. “Here.” I thrust it at her.
“We don’t care about the money.”
“Sure you do. Maybe not the amount. But you care about what comes with it. Power over me.”
She scoffed. “Nobody is trying to govern you. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then what are you doing here? Why are you trying to scold me?” I folded my arms across my chest and stared.
“I’m just having a conversation. Explaining things from our point of view. Trying to keep you from making a mistake.”
“You care about how you look to people. Not my wellbeing.”
She shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“Really? Did you ask me if I was happy? If he made me happy? If I was in love with him?”
She looked away and mumbled, “Oh my God.”
“What? What is it, Mom?”
“What do you know about love?”
“What do you?” I glared.
She pointed a finger in my face. “I love your father. We’ve been together for thirty years. I’ve been by his side the whole time. You wouldn’t know a thing about that kind of commitment.”
My shirt tightened around my neck and threatened to strangle me. Nerves ripped down through my chest and straight into my stomach. I loved Landon. I loved being around him. Sure, maybe some of it was still chemicals and we hadn’t been together for all that long, but it didn’t change anything. I’d been alive long enough to know he was the one.
I took in a deep breath. I had too much to worry about without an assault on my personal space and my relationship. “Mom, I love you. We’re different. I’m not like you and Dad.” It was true. I didn’t think my parents were great parents. They were different than me, but I still loved the
m.
She looked away.
I stared at the side of her head while she seethed. “I’m not going to apologize for who I am. But I am sorry that you’re disappointed.”
There were so many mean things I could’ve said. I could’ve attacked her relationship, or the way she was. But it wouldn’t have done any good. It would’ve only driven us further apart.
“I’m not perfect. I never will be. But I love who I am right now. I haven’t felt this way in a while.”
She stood there and stared. Her hand went up and she fidgeted with the pearls on her necklace. “We just—we thought when you came back.”
I thought I might see her cry for the first time in my life. Her eyes glossed over a little. She blinked it away.
“You thought what?”
“We ran you off the first time. We thought you hated us because we pushed you so hard. We were so strict. And when you came back, you needed money. And then we didn’t see you.”
I took a step toward her. It was the closest thing to a real conversation I think we’d ever had. Usually it was her preaching and me running. I’d never stood up to her like this. Not really. I’d mouth off as a teen. But she never knew how I felt. I didn’t give her anything inside of me. I wanted to hug her, I just wasn’t sure how.
“Mom.” I settled for reaching out and touching one of her arms.
She looked down at my hand.
I couldn’t tell if she was uncomfortable with it or surprised. “I would love to have a better relationship with you and Dad. I’ve always wanted that. I just don’t know how.”
She started to speak but I cut her off.
“I get being strict and having all the rules and discipline when I was a kid. But we’re past that now. I’m an adult, okay? I need you and Dad to be my friend at this stage. But I’m not using you for anything.”
“Why’d you come back then?”
“I was scared. And I missed this place. I didn’t ever think I would. But I did.”
I heard a sniffle. Somehow, she cried without showing it. “You always hated it here before.”
“I didn’t hate it.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I mean, maybe sometimes. But I was an angsty teenager for crying out loud. And everything was so strict and controlled and structured for me, I just didn’t know how to be on my own. Or I wasn’t brave enough to learn. I was overwhelmed. Took on too much. I was teaching at a school in Queens, in a crime-ridden area. There were gangs and gunshots and I didn’t make much money. I bit off way more than I could chew.”
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