“Okay, it was pretty bad,” Abby admitted. Who’d want to kiss again after an electric shock? She certainly didn’t. Except it could have been so good. She moistened her lips. Maybe if their lips weren’t dry…“Want to try again?”
Gwynne’s expression softened. “You’re fearless.” She smiled, angling her head. “I like that about you.”
Abby went for it. Gwynne moaned, and Abby decided that kissing her again was a really, really good idea. She smelled like sunshine and kissed like a goddess and being with her made her feel less alien than with anyone else. Their bodies strained against each other, joining everywhere, and her nerves lit up from the contact, dancing with sensory overload.
Gwynne tugged on Abby’s sweater and pushed it up like she had every intention of undressing her, mere moments into their first kiss. Second kiss. Whatever.
“Not here.” Hazy with desire but still able to remember where she was, Abby grabbed her hands. Her grandmother had probably returned to the kitchen, but the attic’s floorboards were squeaky and the trapdoor was wide open. “Grams might hear us.”
She twined their fingers together and raised their arms overhead, safely away from the hem of her clothing, creating a gap between their bodies that Gwynne immediately closed.
“Gwynne!”
“I’m no good with rules.”
“Neither am I, but—”
“Perfect.” Gwynne leaned forward so their foreheads touched, too charming for her own good.
Abby’s heart thumped. This was how Gwynne would sound when she made love, like she was laughing inside and having fun, right up until the point where her breathing would become erratic and her voice would drop and that sexy voice would crack with a harsh cry. Abby desperately wanted to hear that.
Gwynne’s gaze heated as if she sensed what she was thinking, and she kissed her, sweetly and not particularly apologetically. Abby melted into her and kissed her back because it was too wonderful a kiss not to. And it was no longer just her heart that ached, but lower, everywhere, because Gwynne’s desire threw sparks that lodged in her core and burned inward and upward through to the filaments of her unprotected soul. She wasn’t going to be able to walk away from this unscathed, and she didn’t want to.
But Grams would never recover if she heard her granddaughter groaning and figured out it was not from lifting heavy boxes, so she reluctantly drew back an inch and tried to catch her breath. “Grams still has her hearing.”
Gwynne lowered their joined hands and brought her elbows behind her own back, drawing Abby’s arms forward to wrap around her waist. “We’re being quiet.”
“Not really.”
Gwynne kissed her again. “Yes, really,” she mumbled against her mouth between kisses, gentle but determined. “Unless you’re planning to have sex with me up here. That might get loud.” She pressed her lips to hers in another brief, addictive kiss. “I tend to scream.”
Abby’s mouth opened wider at Gwynne’s confidence and Gwynne pressed her advantage, meeting her lips mid-gasp and deepening the kiss.
Abby finally came up for air to say, “That’s very optimistic of you.”
“You don’t think you’d make me scream?” Gwynne said seriously. “You totally would.”
Abby flushed. “What I meant was, it’s very optimistic of you to think we might, you know…” She lowered her voice and hissed, because her grandmother taught her to be a good girl and she could barely say the words out loud, especially in this house, “…have sex…”—she returned to her normal volume—“…in the attic.”
“You’re right. That was more like wishful thinking.”
“Be serious.”
“I am.” She curled her fingers around Abby’s triceps and caressed her with a gentle but persuasive touch.
Abby’s legs weakened. She wasn’t that good a girl. “We have to stop.”
Gwynne’s fingers trailed down her arms and clasped her hands. “Because of Grams?”
“Yes.”
Gwynne squeezed her hands and let go. “I can wait.”
Abby shook her head. She’d been the one insisting they stop, but…Gwynne didn’t have to sound so calm and reasonable about it.
Gwynne could wait? Good thing one of them could.
* * *
The icy clouds below were thin and wispy, as if the winds at this nosebleed altitude high above Baltimore had screamed through and torn the clouds apart in their wake.
Don’t look down, Elle admonished herself as she unfurled her wings and soared higher. Not that she could see Abby from this height anyway, so there was no point in looking—logic that ought to work but somehow didn’t.
One of the other angels swept in on the wind and joined her. “Why did you tell her not to date Gwynne?” asked the angel.
“You know why,” Elle said.
“She’s not going to listen to you.”
“Probably not. Does she listen to me about anything?”
“She used to.”
“Did she?” Elle’s heart ached for the friendship she and Abigail had put on hold thirty-one years earlier. Abigail never listened to her, but Elle loved her anyway. It was the acting like they’d never met that hurt, even though it was unavoidable.
And Gwynne…
Not unexpected. Abigail had a weakness for smart, psychic women. Always had. Once Gwynne showed her her heart, it would be impossible for Abigail to resist her.
She’d be happy for them except, well…Gwynne saw too much. Which was also not unexpected.
Elle let the wind carry her higher, away from the city and the two women searching through boxes in the attic. Leave it to those two to have found each other.
Chapter Eleven
It turned out the police officer who rescued Abby when she was a baby was still on the force, and when Abby told her she was planning to visit the apartment building where she’d spent the first three years of her life, Officer Mawson offered to meet her there. Then Gwynne insisted on driving, and now here she was, standing on a glass-strewn sidewalk next to Gwynne as the smell of sewage wafted their way, and saying screw it to the socially-appropriate-for-outdoors amount of space between them and holding hands, leaning into her, staring up at a pair of eight-story buildings fronted by a circular driveway and an anemic holly tree.
She didn’t recognize the building. Somehow she’d thought that seeing it again would help her remember.
Gwynne pushed back Abby’s sleeve to check her watch. “When did she say she was coming?”
“She’s coming,” Abby said.
She let go of Gwynne and ventured onto the dirt inside the circular driveway, keeping a careful eye out for dog poop, catching herself just in time before she stepped on a tiny green luminescent fairy dancing in a patch of weeds.
And then she remembered.
There’d been more of them when she lived here—hundreds of them—and angels too. A shiny neighbor in a long, white nightgown had led her out of her apartment and out the front door of the building to play tag with her friends and race around the holly tree. It couldn’t be the same tree, could it? Maybe. She had followed the lady, leaving her mother sprawled on the bathroom floor.
“I played here the day my mother died,” she told Gwynne, disgusted with herself. She’d been so callous. She should have sat and cried about her mother, not abandoned her and let Sapphire and the others distract her with a game.
At the sound of a car slowing, she turned. A police cruiser pulled up to the entrance and parked under a “No Parking” sign. As the uniformed officer got out, Abby rushed toward her, running from what she didn’t want to see. The officer’s hand went to her gun.
“Abby!” Gwynne said sharply, but Abby had seen her movement too, and pulled up short.
“Abigail Vogel?”
“That’s me.”
“Look at you, you’re all grown up.” The officer let go of her gun and shook her hand with a motherly grip. “Jackie Mawson.”
“I’m surprised you remember me.
It was a long time ago.”
“I’ll never forget it.”
“Really? Why?” With all the crime she must deal with, an unsupervised little girl didn’t seem memorable.
Officer Mawson clasped her hands together and looked past her, into the distance. “It was the darnedest thing. I’m driving around, patrolling the neighborhood, when all of a sudden I see this female in a white nightgown jump in front of my cruiser and put her hands up for me to stop. I stop, all right. I thought I was going to flatten her.” She looked away, then down at her feet. “I did smash into her. I slammed my foot on the brake, but the way she darted into the road, there was no way I could stop in time. I’m telling you, I hit her. But the weird thing was, when I get out of my cruiser, she’s standing there like everything’s fine.”
“She must have jumped out of the way at the last minute,” Abby said.
“No, I swear I hit something. I’m telling you, I felt the impact. I couldn’t understand it until I noticed her feet weren’t touching the ground.”
Gwynne drew in a sharp breath.
“The female was floating a few inches off the pavement.” Officer Mawson cleared her throat. “I ask her if she’s okay, and she doesn’t say anything, just points to this toddler who’s about to walk into traffic. I run after the kid and grab her, and the lady disappears. I never saw her leave. She was just…gone.”
An angel. Of course there was an angel involved. Abby felt like she’d known the angels were involved even before she started searching. And her grandparents, if they knew about this, had for twenty-eight years very carefully said nothing to her.
Officer Mawson shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “You probably think I’m delusional, but you deserve to know what happened. If it weren’t for her, I never would’ve spotted you.”
“I don’t think you’re delusional,” Abby said.
“No need to sugarcoat it. Believe me, you wouldn’t be the first person to say it. I tell lots of people this story. I know how it sounds. But I know what I saw.” She nodded, emphasizing her certainty. “An angel. Never seen one before, never seen once since, but that day, I saw an angel. She saved your life.”
“You saved my life as much as she did.” It was Officer Mawson who deserved the credit, not just the angel who materialized against her windshield, not Elle, who could have stopped that angel back then and saved herself a lot of trouble all these years later. “Thank you for stopping me from running into traffic.”
“It was lucky for you that you figured out how to get out of the apartment. I guess you were old enough to know how to open a door, but if that door had had a deadbolt or a chain you couldn’t reach, you never would have been able to get out on your own. The neighbors might’ve heard you crying eventually, if you were lucky. Or you’d have starved to death in there.”
Abby didn’t tell her that she hadn’t left on her own. That she was leaning over her mother’s body on the tile floor, begging her to wake up, pushing open one eyelid—behavior that usually got her in trouble—when the shiny lady appeared and led her away. “How long do you think I was in the apartment with…you know…with…my mother…after she died?”
“Not long at all. It was like you knew right away that you needed to get out of there. That she wasn’t taking a nap. Seems to me the angels were looking out for you.”
* * *
After Officer Mawson left, Abby propped herself up against the passenger-side door of Gwynne’s car and kicked at a crumpled hamburger wrapper on the sidewalk. She cracked her knuckles, one finger at a time, going through the sequence from pinky finger to thumb and then back again, seeing if she could get any more pops out of them, while Gwynne, saint that she was, waited patiently for her to spit out what was bothering her. Being around someone she didn’t have to pretend with, who didn’t think it was weird she saw angels, was such a relief, but she was so used to dodging the topic that it was hard to switch gears.
“You know when I said at Penelope’s wedding that an angel asked me for help?”
“Yeah?”
“She wants me to help repair the bridge that connects earth with the Angelic Realm.”
“There’s a bridge?”
“But the catch is, the only way I can help is if I kill myself.”
Gwynne leaned next to her against the car. She looked surprisingly calm, like Abby had presented her with a complicated math problem to solve instead of a shocking, real-life demand. “That makes no sense. How helpful can you be if you’re dead?”
“Um, well, the thing is, she said I’d turn into an angel.”
Gwynne shook her head like she could shake the thought out of her mind. “And you believe her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d still be dead.”
“Not if she’s right.”
Gwynne’s eyes widened. “Please tell me you’re not seriously considering this.”
“Of course not.” She couldn’t deny there was something appealing about the idea, but she’d never do it. She wasn’t crazy.
“Good.” Gwynne didn’t look completely convinced.
“Do you think I’m hallucinating?” That was the million-dollar question, and she hated to ask it, but if she was going to bring this up with anyone, it had to be Gwynne. Anyone else would tell her she was hearing imaginary voices.
Gwynne hesitated, and Abby braced herself for a suggestion to seek professional help. But that would mean Gwynne needed help too, wouldn’t it?
“Relax.” Gwynne bumped her shoulder with a reassuring playfulness. Leave it to Gwynne to be goofy even when she was serious. “I have no doubt the angel is real. But—”
“But?”
“But that doesn’t mean you should listen to her. She has no right to ask for your life.”
“I’m not planning on giving it to her. But I do want to help if there’s some other way.”
“I’m all for being helpful, but why?”
“I followed that angel out of the apartment. She saved my life. Maybe I owe them.”
“You don’t owe them your life.”
“I do if they saved me,” Abby argued, not sure which side she was on. “A life for a life.”
“That’s not how it works. If they wanted you dead they shouldn’t have saved you when you were three. I don’t understand why they bothered.”
“Thanks for caring,” Abby huffed.
“Besides, that’s what they want you to think. They want you to think you owe them, and should therefore do whatever they ask.”
Gwynne was being unreasonable. “They saved me because they believe I’m one of them.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I thought they were your friends.”
Gwynne’s face hardened. “I don’t trust them.”
“Why not?”
Gwynne kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, not looking at her. “You saw them at the hospital, didn’t you? In my mother’s room? You must have seen them.”
“Yes,” Abby said cautiously. Ever since Megan McLaren had pulled her aside one day and warned her that Gwynne was having a rough time because her sister and her mother were dead, Abby had avoided asking her about it, but she’d love to know why she’d sent those angels away.
“The angels could have done something to save my mother,” Gwynne told her, seething. “But they didn’t. They didn’t save my sister, either.”
“It’s okay to be angry,” Abby said.
She pulled Gwynne into her arms, but Gwynne pushed away and escaped into the car. Abby followed her to the driver’s side and Gwynne actually scooted to the passenger’s side to get away from her. Abby clambered in after her, expecting Gwynne to order her out of the driver’s seat, but Gwynne only looked out the window.
“It’s okay to be angry at them,” Abby repeated.
“I’m not angry at them,” Gwynne said. “I am angry at myself.”
“For not being able to save your family yourself?”
“For deluding
myself into thinking any of this was real. Angels and energy and fixing things with my so-called abilities.”
“For failing.”
“For wasting my life on this stuff.”
The crazy thing was, Gwynne still talked to angels, still believed healing could happen through faith alone, still wanted to help the people who visited her at the spa. She could have left the healing profession completely, but she chose not to. She chose to take a job where she was surrounded by people who believed angelic healing was normal. Sure, she said she took the job as a favor for Megan, but if she’d really wanted to, she could have said no.
“I know you wanted to save their lives,” Abby said, “but psychic powers don’t make you God. You did your best.”
“The one time I really needed the angels’ help, they didn’t do a damn thing.”
“So you’re mad at them.”
“I am angry,” Gwynne ground out word by word, “at myself.”
“For believing in angels.”
The bitterness in Gwynne’s eyes was hard to watch. “Yes.”
Abby touched her shoulder. Gwynne stiffened, and Abby dropped her hand to her side. But she wanted so much to reassure her that without even thinking about it, she reached for her again.
It was a stupid move. Gwynne took her hand and peeled it off her shoulder and placed it on the steering wheel. She was gentle about it, but the rebuff was clear.
“I don’t want to do this right now,” Gwynne said.
“Okay.” Abby clenched the wheel and stared straight ahead, wishing she could disappear the way angels did. Such a great way to get out of uncomfortable situations, especially when they were caused by your own crummy timing.
Gwynne slapped her keys on the dashboard. Abby glanced at the keys but didn’t take them. She wanted Gwynne to want her to drive because she trusted her, not because she was too upset to trust herself.
“I still want to be friends,” Gwynne said.
Oh, no. No, no, no. Not that. “You’re breaking up with me already?”
“It’s not going to work out. And the sooner we realize that…”
Gwynne didn’t mean it. She was upset. They’d talk later and they’d kiss and make up. They’d…
Earth Angel Page 14