by Robin Roseau
“You just sniffed my hair?” I asked. With a screech.
She chuckled. “Your hair smells good,” she said. “Shower and change. We’ll go hit the scuba shop and then have dinner.”
I hurried.
* * * *
Twenty minutes later, we stepped out of my apartment building and together, turned to the small parking lot. Elisabeth came to a stop, and I was two steps past her before I halted and turned towards her. “What’s wrong?”
She was shaking her head. “That.” She pointed into the parking lot. I turned and saw a small SUV.
“Yes?”
“That’s Michaela’s.” She laughed. “They left me Michaela’s car, and you know whose idea that was.”
I smiled. “Got a key?”
“Yes.”
“So no problem. At least they left you a car. I don’t have to drive you home.”
“No, no problem.” She chuckled again. Then she stepped forward, grabbed my arm, and escorted me to the passenger door of Michaela’s car.
I arranged myself as Elisabeth walked to the other side, then sat calmly while she climbed in. She couldn’t help but notice my legs, which amused me greatly. She stared at them for a moment then shook herself and started the car.
“I could have sworn that skirt was longer.”
“It seems to have shrunk,” I replied.
We turned to each other. “You’ve been turning me down,” she observed. She gestured at my legs. “What is this?”
I glanced down at my legs. “Did you want me to pull the skirt back down?”
“No. I want to know what’s going on. We were doing so well-”
“Before.”
“Yeah. Before.” She looked away. “It wasn’t an act, Zoe.”
“I’m going to ask a question, Elisabeth, and I want an honest answer.”
“I can’t promise that, Zoe.”
“If you lie to me, and I ever find out you lied, I won’t betray pack secrets, but I will do everything in my power to hurt you.”
She snapped her head back, scowling. “Do not threaten me.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I deserve an honest answer.”
“What?” she snapped.
“Is my apartment bugged?”
“Not by the pack,” she replied. “And Gia says it’s clean; no one else is bugging it.”
We stared at each other for a good thirty seconds. Then I asked, “You promise?”
“I promise.”
She continued to scowl at me. I studied her face. I couldn’t tell if she was lying, but I decided I was done distrusting anyone. I smiled then looked away and down at my legs. Then, very deliberately, I pulled the skirt up another half inch.
She didn’t move, and I didn’t look at her. Instead, I sat sweetly with my hands in my lap. I’d made my move, and now I would wait.
“My turn,” she said.
I turned back to her, still smiling softly. “Yes?”
“What would you have done if I’d said ‘Yes, it is’?”
My smile faded while I thought about it. Elisabeth watched me carefully. Then the smile returned. “I would have adjusted my skirt and thanked you for telling me the truth, but I would keep it in mind if I ever decided I wanted an overnight guest.”
“You haven’t answered my question. What’s going on?”
“You asked me on a date. I said ‘yes’. Or is this just dinner between friends? I can pull my skirt back down.”
“I like your skirt just the way it is,” she said, glancing at my legs.
And so I set my hands back in my lap, relaxed, and looked out the window.
Neither of us said anything for a minute. Once we were on the road, I said, “I want to ask you something.”
“Of course you do.”
“Did Michaela engineer all of that just to get us together?”
Elisabeth barked a short laugh. “Not literally all of it. She wouldn’t need to be that convoluted just to get us in the same room. But from the moment she got in her car? Yes, probably. But with her, there’s oftentimes more than one thing going on at once.”
By this time, I was watching her. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed watching her. She glanced at me.
“It doesn’t do you any good to try to outguess the fox.”
“Clever as a fox?”
“Yeah.” She smiled.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. She just keeps all of us guessing. She has since the very beginning. Did you see her stand up to me today?”
“Yes, I did.” I paused. “You like her.”
“I admire her a great deal,” Elisabeth said. “I’ve never seen anyone bounce back the way she does. The things she’s been through.” She looked over at me. “It drives all of us crazy when she does what she did today. You didn’t notice, but I aired your apartment out while you were showering.”
“Was my fear scent that overpowering?”
“It was masked by the fear scent wafting off the rest of us.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “I suppose not all of us. Portia always remains cool, and Eric was awfully cavalier. But Serena was terrified, and I was pretty worked up. Angel was biting her nails, something she hasn’t done since she was thirteen. And Rory kept screaming at us to drive faster.”
“So the tension I felt wasn’t imagined.”
“No.” She looked over. “Thank you for not fighting me when I told you to sit.”
I scoffed. “Fighting you? Are you serious?” I paused. “Does Michaela know all of you were that upset?”
“Of course she does.”
“How do you know that she knows?”
Elisabeth didn’t answer.
“Maybe you should tell her,” I suggested quietly. “And maybe when she says she needs to go for a walk by herself, you should treat her like an adult.”
At that, Elisabeth snapped her head to me. “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
I held my hands up defensively. She returned her gaze to the road.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a minute. “Clearly I’m still a little stressed from this.”
“Did you need a shower, too?”
“Probably. Or a beer.”
“Forgiven. Are you going to think about what I said?”
“Count on it. Thank you.”
We drove quietly for a few minutes. Then Elisabeth chuckled. “So she roped you into scuba diving, and she roped me into paying for it.”
“She didn’t have to work very hard to entice me, and you’re not paying for a thing. She already did.”
“Oh?”
“She bought a few of my pictures. I have no idea how much I’m spending today, but she said it was enough to get started.” But I looked out the window, embarrassed, and didn’t say anything further. Michaela was a schoolteacher, and she had bought my pictures so I would have money.
“What’s wrong?” Elisabeth asked me after a quiet minute had gone by.
“Nothing.”
“Zoe…”
“I’m embarrassed. Don’t worry about it. When she told me to check my sales today, I was thinking about her as the pack alpha, and I have a vision of her being very rich. But it just occurred to me she’s a schoolteacher. She can’t afford to be paying for this.”
“I’m not going to talk to you about Michaela’s finances,” Elisabeth said. “Did she ask for anything special with the photos?”
“My largest size printed on canvas, numbered, framed, and signed. They come specially boxed so they present well as gifts. She bought six. I only offer printing on canvas of my very best photos, and I charge accordingly. I sell about two a year. They’re my ‘you’ve got more money than sense’ product. Where is she going to put them?”
“She’s probably going to give them away to some of the more important members of the pack. Christmas is coming, and she does a lot of shopping.” Elisabeth paused. “I don’t believe you should be embarrassed. Your photos are coveted. Gifts fro
m Michaela are also coveted. The people who receive those will value them. It wasn’t charity, Zoe.”
I looked back at her. She wasn’t watching me; she had her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road.
“Thank you.”
After that, we made small talk for the rest of the drive. We pulled into a strip mall parking lot, coming to a stop at the end in front of a shop called “Blue Water Divers.” I recognized the red and white dive flags on either side of their name. I was about to get out, but Elisabeth said, “Zoe…”
I turned to her.
“Are you afraid of me?”
I looked down. I found myself doing that a lot with her. “A little,” I said in a small voice. “I’m sorry.”
“I would never hurt you.”
I didn’t say anything. She reached out and clasped my chin, raising my eyes towards hers.
“You believe that, don’t you? I would never hurt you.”
“I have nightmares, Elisabeth,” I said. “We shouldn’t talk about this.”
“If you’re so afraid of me, what are you doing here with me?”
“I didn’t say I was ‘so afraid’. I said I was a little afraid. And for the record, it’s not because of what you are.”
“Then why?”
I closed my eyes. I wanted to pull away from her clasp, but I didn’t.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” she said again.
“I’m here with you,” I said. “I dressed for you. I pulled my skirt up for you. For now, isn’t that enough?”
“I need to know why you’re afraid.”
“Do I smell bad?”
“Not right now, no. Just tell me. I can’t fix it if you don’t tell me.”
“I have nightmares,” I said in a small voice. “Please, Elisabeth, I don’t want to think about this.”
“Nothing from your nightmares is going to come true.”
I opened my eyes and looked into hers. “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? They already have. I wonder what I might be dreaming about. Figure it out for yourself.”
And then I pulled away and opened the car door. Elisabeth reached for me, but I slipped out of the car before she could grab me. However, she climbed out her side and met me at the front of the car before I could make it more than a few steps. She grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to face her.
“What dreams?” she asked. “Tell me.”
“If I talk about it, I’m going to start to smell again. Can we talk about this some other time?”
“What dreams?”
I huffed at her. “Everything from that week, especially Karen and her damned wire around my neck. But all of it. Do you really need details? I can give you details. They’re lovely. I can tell you how sure I was that I was going to die. Every time the door to that cell opened, I was sure it was going to be someone coming in to tell me I was going to be executed. Murdered. While I was there, I wondered how you would do it. Would it be Karen and her wire? Would you do it yourself? Maybe Lara would handle it. The most frequent thought was that you’d take me from the cell, and every wolf in the pack would be waiting. You’d tell me to ‘run’. Runner up was Karen and her wire. Do you know I haven’t worn a necklace since? I can’t stand anything around my neck. I was feeling a little butch one day and tried to put on a tie, and I had a panic attack.”
I pulled away from her hands. Just thinking about it all had my heart pounding in my chest.
“Of course, there were other ways you could kill me. You could snap my neck. Or beat me to death. Sometimes it was a bullet in the back of my head while I knelt in front of you, sobbing. I spent a week sure you were going to kill me, so I had plenty of time to come up with no end of ways you might do it.”
I shook my head, trying to clear the dark thoughts, but others intruded.
“In some of the dreams, you bring me a big steak, bloody rare, and force me to eat it. So I guess not everything from the dreams themselves happened. In other dreams, you never let me out. In the dreams, the cell gets smaller and smaller, and you brick it off. I wake up with my hands curled into claws, because I was dreaming I was scratching at the concrete walls, trying to dig my way out.”
I shook myself. “So if I tell you I’m only a ‘little afraid’, I think that’s a pretty big step up, don’t you?”
I’d stopped watching her, so I didn’t see her expression while I ranted at her, but I looked up and she had a look of such sorrow.
“I’m so sorry, Zoe. You don’t know how sorry I am.”
“Every time Michaela makes me attend an event, I wonder if I’ll be going home afterwards. Every time I come home from one of my own tasks, I wonder if I’ll find a squad of enforcers waiting in my apartment for me. At night, if there are any loud noises, I wonder if someone is breaking in to assassinate me in the night. When Michaela showed up at my door today, I was sure it was going to be you, come to take me into custody.”
“Oh Zoe,” she said. “None of that is going to happen. I swear. Absolutely nothing bad is going to happen to you.”
“Maybe,” I said, “just maybe I am starting to actually believe that.” I turned away, staring off into space and trying to calm my heart down. Elisabeth moved closer, and then her hands were on my shoulders. I didn’t pull away.
“Do you hate me?”
“No.”
“Will you let me hold you?”
I thought about it and nodded. Carefully, gently, she wrapped her arms around me from behind, and I leaned backwards against her, clutching her arm to my chest.
In spite of everything, it felt good. I didn’t understand that.
“This shouldn’t feel good.”
“Why not?”
“Because… of what you are. Of what all of you did. This shouldn’t feel good. I should be gibbering in fear.”
“Maybe deep down you recognize something.”
“What?”
“I’m a protector.”
I let that sink in. “Hold me tighter.”
And she did.
Neither of us said anything, and slowly I calmed down. Then I began to chuckle.
“What?”
“I always wanted a guard dog.”
She immediately began laughing.
“Do you think you’d like to sleep on my bed, curled up, with your ears alert for any dangers?”
She chuckled a little longer.
“Did I offend you?”
“No. I’m not sure you want to repeat that around anyone else though.” She paused. “That’s a pretty good similarity though, Zoe.”
I leaned more heavily against her.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go spend Michaela’s money.”
Elisabeth chuckled and slowly released me.
* * * *
The store was intimidating. I wandered around for a minute, looking at the gear and wincing at the prices. While I’d never been diving, I had a pretty good idea what the main gear was, and I knew it was expensive, but I had no idea it was all this expensive. Eventually I looked over at Elisabeth, who was standing to the side, watching me. Something in my expression must have conveyed my worry, as she immediately stepped up to me.
“I can’t afford all this,” I said. It came out like a whine. “And I don’t want you to buy it, either. Let’s just go.”
She shook her head. “You don’t need all this. You need a mask, fins and snorkel.”
“That’s all? But what about air tanks and…”
“Michaela said mask, fins and snorkel. You’ll borrow the rest. If you decide you really like it and want your own gear, we’ll find a way for you to pay for it. Do you have a swim suit?”
I nodded.
“All right then. Let’s see if one of these nice people can help us out.” She straightened up and looked around, and just a moment later, an athletic-looking woman stepped over to us. “Did you need some help with BCDs?”
“Actually,” Elisabeth said, “we have a brand new student who needs just the basics today.
”
“Ah,” said the woman. “I thought I recognized that look of panic. Don’t worry. I’m Darla. I’ll take good care of you.” She held out her hand.
“Zoe,” I replied, shaking her hand. “This is Elisabeth.”
“Hello, Zoe and Elisabeth.” She looked at Elisabeth. “Mask, fins and snorkel? And for you as well?”
“I’m covered. Yes. She’s price conscious.”
“Of course. Everything we have is good quality, so prices are going to be higher than if you pick up something at Target, but we don’t dive with cheap equipment. Right this way.”
We started with masks. Darla explained that all their masks were high quality, and so any would serve me quite well as a beginning diver. The most important aspect was the proper fit.
Then she had me try on a bunch of the masks. It didn’t take long to narrow it down to four that fit well. In the end, I let price and color make my choice. “I want the purple one.”
Darla had me try it again before she’d let my choice be final, but she declared it, “Perfect.”
She handed my new mask, in its box, to Elisabeth to hold.
“Snorkels next,” she said. “They are here.” We moved down the wall about ten feet.
“If I have an air tank, why do I need a snorkel?”
“Two reasons. First, scuba divers also tend to go snorkeling in shallow water. But more importantly, if you have to spend time on the surface, you don’t want to waste your air.” Darla proceeded to show me the range of snorkels. The price range was narrow, from $20 to only $40. I asked if there was any reason to spend the extra money.
“I use this one,” Darla said, waving one of the inexpensive snorkels. And they even had one in purple to match my mask. Elisabeth grinned when Darla handed it to her to hold.
“Now, I’m afraid the prices on fins may be a little daunting.” We moved to the other side of the shop, and Darla spent a good ten minutes describing the different basic types of fins. In the end, “fins” didn’t just mean fins. I had to buy a pair of neoprene booties, too. I wanted to buy the cheapest choice, but the two of them tag teamed to talk me up quite a bit.
“This choice matters,” Darla said.
In the end, I bought what Darla and Elisabeth together agreed was the best choice.
And they came in purple, too, which mollified me a little bit.