Earth Angel

by Siri Caldwell

  “I want to be with you, Gwynnosaurus. I know I should have more pride and not put that out there, but what the hell. If I’m going to off myself, I might as well.”

  Gwynne sucked in some air. “You are not going to kill yourself, damn you.”

  “Yeah, that’s not the point.”

  She didn’t think Abby really meant her death threat, but really, how was she supposed to respond? And anyway it was easier than figuring out what to say to I want to be with you. The only response she could think of was to kiss her again. Abby welcomed her and pressed her curves into her with intoxicating surrender until they came to their senses and broke it off. They separated and she immediately felt the aching loss of not having her in her arms. She snatched her back.

  Abby’s chest rose and fell with quick, shallow breaths. She smoothed a lock of Gwynne’s choppy hair. “Don’t kiss me like that and then tell me you want to be friends.”

  “I don’t want to be friends.”

  “You’d better not be saying that just because you’re turned on.”

  Harsh. She deserved it, though. It wasn’t fair to kiss her, or even to flirt with her the way she had, and then run away. She wouldn’t do that anymore. She should have known she couldn’t stay away.

  An angel fluttered in and immediately winked back out, giving them privacy. Good. They needed privacy.

  “I haven’t been fair,” Gwynne said, “and I’m sorry.”

  “You weren’t being unfair on purpose,” Abby said, giving her the benefit of the doubt, which made her feel even guiltier. “You were confused.”

  “I was…conflicted.”

  “And now you’re not?”

  “I’d be happier if you forgot about Elle and her scheme, but…”

  Abby’s hand slid from her hair and landed on her shoulder. Her fingers tightened on her shirt. “I tried to fix their bridge,” she blurted out.

  Gwynne became very still. “Without killing yourself, I take it.”

  Abby’s grip tightened on the shirt and Gwynne felt the fabric pull across her back. “I wanted to see if there was another way. It didn’t work.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I…I was on the bridge. And it was beautiful, Gwynne, you can’t imagine. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  A knock sounded at the door.

  “Gwynne?” Dara turned the knob and cracked the unlocked door but didn’t push it open. “You’re needed.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Gwynne kept her eyes fixed on Abby and spoke over her shoulder in the direction of the door. Without waiting for Dara to leave, she gently brushed Abby’s arm, trying to convey everything she was feeling through that one, simple gesture.

  “We’ll talk later,” she told Abby. “Don’t go home without talking to me, okay?”

  * * *

  It was hard to spend the rest of the day listening to Gwynne chat with clients and be reminded each time of how easy it was for Gwynne’s unmistakable voice to kick-start her imagination. Even playing complicated tunes that she didn’t have completely memorized—which should have forced her to concentrate—didn’t stop her vivid, enthusiastic, depraved imagination. It felt like the end of the day would never come.

  When it finally was time to leave, they walked to the dark parking lot together and Gwynne helped her slide her harp into the back of her ancient minivan. Abby made sure her harp was secure, then closed the hatch.

  “You should ask me to drive you to work. I’d be happy to do it,” Gwynne said.

  “Thanks,” Abby said, even though she had no intention of taking her up on the offer. She knew she shouldn’t be driving, but she didn’t want to impose on Gwynne for a ride in her own vehicle, and her harp was too big to fit in a taxi or on the useless bus that didn’t go anywhere but up and down the shore to shuttle tourists.

  Gwynne ground the heel of her hand into her forehead as if she could hear the excuses churning in Abby’s head. “I mean it.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Now about what happened on the bridge…”

  What Abby really wanted to discuss was that thing about not wanting to be just friends, but it seemed Gwynne had other priorities and that conversation was going to have to wait. This was what she got for letting those words—I tried to fix their bridge—fly out of her mouth unchecked. But she could live with that, because she couldn’t not tell her. Especially if Gwynne was serious about a relationship.

  Gwynne plowed ahead. “Now that you did what they wanted, are they going to leave you alone?”

  Probably not. And Abby didn’t want them to. She knew how deeply the angels loved her—she’d felt it in that momentary link, and felt an answering love in her own heart—and she couldn’t let them die falling off an unsafe bridge. Elle was right—Abby was one of them. She couldn’t abandon them.

  “I didn’t fix the bridge,” Abby said. “It didn’t work.”

  “They’re going to keep after you.”

  She understood why Gwynne was unhappy, but the truth was, she wasn’t angry at Elle anymore. “Elle saved my life up there. She caught me when I almost fell off.”

  “You what?”

  “Forget I said that.”

  “Okay,” Gwynne said, humoring her for one-point-five seconds. “She did what?”

  “She caught me.”

  Gwynne made a noise that sounded like a laugh, but wasn’t. “She knew it wasn’t safe. If she hadn’t taken you there in the first place, she wouldn’t have had to save you.”

  “Did you ever try to fly when you were a little kid?” Abby said, hoping the question wouldn’t remind her of her sister’s fatal jump. “Leap off the furniture and flap your arms like crazy?”

  Gwynne’s hand was again on her forehead, like this was just one more thing to add to her headache. “A lot of kids do that.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, but—”

  Abby felt a twinge of disappointment. “I loved that game. Loved it. I thought I really was flying, even if it was only for a few seconds.”

  “I see where this is going, and—”

  “When I got older, I figured it appealed to me because I had so many angel friends, and I wanted to be like them. I wanted to fly. But now, thinking back on it, there was always this feeling of rightness about it. A cellular memory. Like I knew I had done it before. Even though I could never flap my arms hard enough to stay in the air for as long as I expected, and the shock of my feet hitting the ground surprised me every time, something inside me always said This feels right. If I really am an angel, that explains that feeling. My body remembers being an angel.”

  “You were a child. You were playing. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean—”

  “I think I should listen to that feeling.”

  “Abby…”

  “It’s my decision.”

  “It’s a bad decision.”

  “If I were you, I would probably tell you the same thing.” Abby took a deep breath. “I’m not one of those people who’s ever considered…you know…escaping. I’m kind of shocked that I’d consider it at all, but I want to help them, and…I think…I think I might do it.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Please don’t.”

  It wasn’t the presence of hotel guests under a lamppost on the far side of the parking lot that prevented Gwynne from yelling at her, it was the vise around her throat. Abby was going to do something stupid, and Gwynne couldn’t stop her, and the hollowness in her heart and in her lungs and in the pit of her stomach hurt more than she thought possible.

  “I think I should do it,” Abby said.

  “No! Please no…” It was Heather all over again, chasing the angels’ treacherous lure.

  “I’m not positive, but—”

  “At least when Heather jumped off the road onto that frozen river she was high. She didn’t know what she was doing. If you can honestly consider doing something like that when you’re sober, you’re…”

&nb
sp; “I’m not insane,” Abby whispered, supplying the word Gwynne couldn’t bring herself to use.

  The metallic taste in her mouth was not pleasant. “I can’t believe you would do this!”

  “They need help. Elle wants me to do it, and she’s an angel, and they’ve always been good to me. It’s a big step, but…I see people pass away at the hospital all the time.”

  She sounded so logical. So calm. How could she be so calm?

  Gwynne tried to be calm and logical too, even though all she wanted to do was scream. Abby trusted her enough to confide in her; Gwynne’s job was to keep herself under control before she made her wish she’d never said anything.

  “I want to do this,” Abby said. “For the good of mankind and angelkind.”

  “Which is admirable. But you don’t know what Elle’s goals are. You don’t know if she knows what she’s doing.” Gwynne sucked in a deep breath through her teeth but felt no calmer. “Are you willing to trust your life to someone who admits she has no idea how the bridge really works? What if you die and it doesn’t even work?”

  Gently, she placed her hands on Abby’s shoulders, unsure of her reception, and thank God Abby leaned into her touch because she had to touch her, had to reassure herself she was still here and safe and solid and warm and not dead. She pulled her into her arms and rubbed her hands up and down her back, tracing the shape of her body the way she’d been aching to ever since the last time they’d touched. Mere hours ago, yes, but those few hours had felt like an eternity.

  Why, why, why did she have to go and fall in love with someone who was always going to want to save the world? Why couldn’t she have ended up with someone selfish? Someone who wouldn’t scare the shit out of her?

  She hated that Abby wanted to help the angels with their cockamamie plan. Hated it. But that was who Abby was—she wanted to help. Her empathy and her optimism were going to get her killed one of these days—either on this bridge project or on some other undeniably worthy cause—but those qualities were what made her who she was.

  “No one’s going to thank you for this,” Gwynne said.

  “Thank me? I’ll be happy if people even believe me when I tell them what I’ve done, but they won’t. They’ll think I live in a fantasy world. They’ll decide I’m weird, and they’ll back away. They won’t know they were ever in danger of losing their connection with angels, and if I tell them, they won’t care. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

  Gwynne couldn’t help but love her for that. But she still had to stop her. “Please don’t rush into this. Take more time to think about it.”

  “I always wanted to be an angel,” Abby said.

  “Not like this,” Gwynne said. “It’s not worth it.”

  “It might be.”

  A flock of angels appeared out of nowhere and swarmed them, making it difficult to say anything more above the cacophony of their singing. The timing of their sudden appearance combined with their deafening volume made Gwynne suspect this was not an innocent outburst of high spirits, but an attempt to prevent them from talking. To prevent her from talking. Maybe that meant she was close to talking Abby out of her suicidal plan.

  She climbed into the driver’s seat of Abby’s minivan and spoke through the open door. “Let’s get going. If we can outrun them, it’ll be quieter.”

  Abby stayed put. “If they want to follow us, they’ll follow us.”

  “Then I’ll help you get your harp home and we’ll take it from there, find somewhere they’ll leave us alone.”

  “Like where?”

  Abby was right, of course; there was no place an angel wouldn’t follow. Their only hope was to wait for their singing friends to get distracted or bored. But that didn’t mean she and Abby had to sit in the parking lot all night. Gwynne reached across the seat and opened the passenger door so Abby would get the hint and get in.

  “Come on.”

  Abby approached the driver’s side and leaned against the open door. She dangled her keys within Gwynne’s reach and snatched them back. “Move over,” Abby ordered.

  “I don’t mind driving.”

  “It’s not far.”

  Gwynne sighed and moved to the passenger seat as Abby got behind the wheel. “Why am I in the van if I’m not driving? I thought I was here to help you not get pulled over by the cops.”

  Abby swiveled in her seat and looked over her shoulder as she backed out of her parking space. She caught Gwynne’s eye and winked. “Is that what you thought?”

  No, she knew why she was in the van. They were going to talk, and in order to do that they were going to find a place where the angelic choir would give them some privacy, if that was possible. They drove out of the parking lot with the engine rattling. The angels followed. Big surprise. Even if there was no angelic agenda at play, Gwynne had always been popular with them and so had Abby. With the two of them spending so much time together, their odds of being mobbed by an angelic crowd doubled. And angels loved to sing.

  “The Sanctus,” Abby said. “I love this one.”

  “You know it?” Gwynne said.

  “Of course. Bach’s Mass in B Minor. All those different voices overlapping, individual but coming together like they’re all part of a single organism, guided by a single thought…when they do it right, it gives me chills.”

  “It’s okay.” She was too annoyed with the singers to buff their egos by acknowledging that the weaving of hundreds of angelic voices was unforgettably haunting.

  “It’s okay?” Abby’s voice choked with disbelief. “It’s the most beautiful piece of music ever written for voice.”

  “For human voice,” Gwynne clarified. “I know my mother said Bach wrote it to sound like angels, like heaven on earth—”

  “It is heaven on earth—”

  “If he had any idea what angel song was really like—”

  “He would have loved it,” Abby insisted.

  “I don’t think he meant it to sound like your head was cracking open.”

  Abby pulled up to a red light. “The only reason your head’s cracking is because you’re fighting it. You have to relax into the unbearable beauty of it.” She sang a few notes and sighed with happiness.

  The light turned green and Gwynne studied the look of bliss that lingered on Abby’s face even as she drove, making turn after turn through the maze of residential streets without ever really looking where she was going. Gwynne ignored whatever danger they were narrowly avoiding in the streets and kept her gaze fixed on the outline of Abby’s features in the shifting shadows, memorizing the shape of her eyebrows and her nose and her cheekbones and her lips and the fine creases that deepened at the corners of her eyes when she smiled, every line precious and perfect.

  She was going to lose Abby to the angels, wasn’t she? Abby was already half in their world. Just look at how she felt about their music. Gwynne’s stomach formed a hard knot. She hadn’t even had a chance to make love to her yet.

  * * *

  Still singing at ridiculously high volume, the angels followed Gwynne and Abby into Abby’s apartment, shrinking to perch on the curtain rods like sparrows on a roofline while Abby unpacked her harp from its protective case. When the curtain rods got too crowded, the overflow took over the windowsills, and after that, they fluttered in the folds of the double-layered drapes—airy red lace overlapping a second, more substantial fabric in subtle lemon.

  Their choir of angels didn’t want to leave them alone? Too bad, because Gwynne knew how to make them disappear.

  She cupped Abby’s face and brushed her thumb along her jaw. “They leave when we kiss,” she whispered, trusting Abby would hear her despite the singing. Angels were known to stand guard over people while they slept, but when it came to anything that hinted of sexual behavior, their sense of propriety suddenly kicked in. Well, not that one time when she and Abby got dive-bombed on the beach when they were about to kiss, but every other time she could think of. And she had no qualms about taking advantage of it. Re
ally, she should have thought of this detail sooner. “Want to try?”

  Abby nudged at her hand, encouraging her caress. Glints of silver sparkled in her pale blue-gray eyes. Looking into them was like staring into the depths of an endless, star-filled universe. Lightly, worshipfully, she touched the beautiful crinkles at the corners of her smiling eyes, then traced her cheekbones, her jaw.

  “You think I got you into my van and drove you here to talk?” Abby asked.

  “You didn’t get me into your van. I got myself in.”

  “And why did you do that, Gwynnosaurus?”

  “For this,” Gwynne admitted, leaning in to kiss her. Shooing away their angelic choir was just an excuse—she would have done this anyway. Their lips and tongues met like they belonged together and Abby kissed her back, meeting her stroke for stroke. Gwynne slipped one hand between them to cup Abby’s ample breast and Abby pressed her body into her even harder, bumping into her with a rhythm that had nothing to do with the angels’ song, which, come to think of it, had stopped.

  She had other things on her mind, mainly the underside of Abby’s breast, which was soft and full, and which felt even better when she slid her hand underneath her clothes. Thank God Abby was wearing a light sweater and blouse over a skirt rather than one of her impenetrable dresses, although she’d find her way through one of those too, if need be. She’d find her way under anything.

  She adjusted Abby’s collar to bare her shoulder, felt Abby’s hair sweep against her face, and pressed her lips to her smooth skin. She couldn’t get enough of her. God, this was why she’d snapped at her in the car for touching her, because the slightest touch, even when she didn’t want her…the slightest contact made her insane with need.