by A. B. Bloom
My heart quickened a beat when I remembered Nick was waiting downstairs for me. I also knew there would be many others—I knew we wouldn't be alone. Hell, we probably weren't allowed to be alone due to some council, the punishment they were intent on, and all sorts of destiny crap. The war was still raging and I knew I should care, but all I could focus on was him—he filled my vision until I couldn't see anything else. I didn't know what I would do if they made him leave again. What sort of effect it would have on me, God only knew? What I had realised was that no one thought I’d react this way to our connection. Something had changed. I didn't know what, and neither it seemed, did anyone else.
I was expecting the house to still be teeming but it was empty. The lounge held no echo of voices, and I couldn’t see Kesh or Kale anywhere. Where were they all?
I found Nick standing at the kitchen island, his focus intent on the stove.
“I thought you said you would be outside?” I asked. Swallowing, I walked up to him and wrapped my arms tight around his middle. I rested my face against his back and inhaled, filling my head and chest with the scent of earthy moor that clung to him.
He leaned back a little into my embrace, and for a moment, I could almost forget that he was a Star, not a normal boyfriend. That we were in the middle of a war where my pretend step dad wanted to kill me. “I figured you might be hungry?”
Hungry? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even considered eating. I don’t know if my lack of appetite was a gift from the Star Energy that ran through my veins or a curse. I really missed a cheeseburger but the thought of one no longer appealed.
“Hm.” He said and the sound made his chest rumble like the purr of a cat. I gave a little squeeze before relinquishing my hold of his firm body, just in case another resident came wandering through. Mainly my real dad. “That’s what I thought.”
“What?” It was all too easy to get confused with the thoughts I knew he was reading in my head. I needed to learn to block him, sooner rather than later.
He turned and smiled and I glimpsed what looked like an omelette as I peered around his shoulder. “Firstly, I figured that you wouldn’t have been made to eat. You are still half human, Bron. We need to look after that side of you.” He crouched down to my short in stature level and laughed as he pulled on the end of my nose, which made it itch. I crinkled it like a rabbit to get rid of a looming sneeze. “Secondly, I’ve cooked for you before, back in the days when I could just be a normal boyfriend. No matter how temporary.” His eyes flickered but he kept his lips curved in a smile. “And thirdly.” He raised an eyebrow and leant in. “You can hold onto me for as long as you like. We are alone.” Another flash of violet. “For now.”
“Alone?” He offered me a piece of toast but I shook my head. My throat was too dry to contemplate eating scorched bread. His lips curved further.
“Okay, today you are teaching me how to block you reading my thoughts.”
He snickered a little. “And where would be the fun in that?”
“Oh, it will be fun for me, I assure you.” I hesitated. "So, they aren't making you leave again?"
He flashed me a heart stopping, oxygen necessitating smile. "Not right now, no."
I stepped away slightly, and discreetly surveyed him out of the corner of my eye. He looked amazing in all kinds of ways that before the events of the moor I truly hadn’t allowed myself to notice. Not really. His black hoodie scrunched up at the sleeves, bunching around his elbows. Defined but slender muscles hinted at their existence under his tanned skin. His black jeans hung off slim hips, where his tall frame balanced power with a perfect grace. And, and . . .he didn’t have shoes on. I don’t think I’d ever seen him wearing just socks before—stripy ones at that. It was totally endearing and I felt my heart thud a little faster, and harder.
All over a pair of socks? Was I crazy?
“They are cool socks.” He smirked.
“Okay, really, you need to stop that now.”
He laughed and slid the omelette out onto the plate. “But it’s so much fun.”
“It’s so much embarrassment, you mean.”
Shrugging, he glinted a smile. “Not for me.”
“Thanks.” I watched the plate as he pushed it towards me. I really didn’t want to eat. Not at all. I noticed his frown though, so I picked up a fork and twirled it as I contemplated which bit to shove in my mouth.
“Question.” I stated.
Nick rolled his eyes. “And you’ve only been awake for a whole five minutes.”
“Meh, I can’t help it.”
“Okay, shoot, but you can only ask questions if you eat.”
I shoved a mouthful of egg into my mouth, pleasantly surprised by the soft cheesy ooze it provided. It didn’t taste all bad.
The eyes rolled again but he didn’t comment on my thoughts. “And?” he prompted.
“In our previous lives, I was all human, right?”
The violets flickered again and more than anything I wished I knew what he was thinking. What he knew. “Yep.”
“So.” I pushed some omelette around the plate. “My question is, how did you never eat in front of me? Stars don’t eat, right? Connor went green when he tried to throw salad down his throat the other day. So how did you go through all these lifetimes and never eat?”
A frown flickered across his face but he cleared it as fast as it arrived. “I was full of excuses.”
“Really? You always had an excuse? Blimey, I must have been very unobservant.”
Nick laughed. "You were always blinded by my good looks and sparky conversation."
I raised an eyebrow.
He chuckled and pecked a kiss onto my cheek. I had to stop myself from purring like a cat. “Not at all. I’m just practiced at being convincing.”
I fired my next question at him before he could expect it. “What’s the longest time we’ve spent together?”
His eyes widened in surprise before filling with a dark torment that turned his lips down. “It’s irrelevant.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what we have here and now that matters.”
I glanced around the empty house and pursed my lips. “What we have here is a war. The end of humanity, or the stars for that matter, and no sign of a fix all solution. I’m a little unclear about what I should actually be doing.”
He pointed at the plate. “Eating.”
I shoved the plate away, ignoring his sigh. “What’s the shortest we’ve been together?” I was pushing, and I knew he was getting cross. I needed answers. I needed to know something. Anything.
His shoulders stiffened, pulling high, his back straightening. “That, I never want to talk about.”
“Okay.” I stepped back. “Okay.” His refusal to share our past stung, and the agitation I used to feel around Aaron when he over-parented bubbled to the surface. “Where is everyone?” Changing the subject seemed better than embarking on a row.
“Out.” Stalking away, he threw the skillet into the sink and squirted it with washing up liquid.
“Doing what?” I pressed.
“Planning.” I realised he was refusing to make eye contact with me. His back firmly set.
“Why won't you tell me what we used to be?” I stared at his turned shoulders.
“Because I can't.” His tone softened but it was too late. He spun for me as I stormed for the french doors into the garden. “Sixty years,” he called after me.
“Pardon?” My hand paused on the brass door handle.
“Sixty years, that was the longest we had together.” He spun back around, his face setting into an unreadable mask, and I continued to walk outside. What I wanted to do was to grab him in my arms, place my lips against his and beg him to tell me every moment of the sixty years we’d shared. As I pulled the kitchen door shut behind me, I watched him sag onto the kitchen counter. His head rested in his hands and it hurt my chest. The chain between us tested the connection, yanking and tugging. I ignored it and wa
lked out into the garden.
He knew one thing for sure. There was no normal for them. Not then, and not now. What he didn’t know was why. This was harder than he ever thought it would be. When he’d been suspended, dissipated across the night sky, he’d thought finding her would be the hard bit. That had been easy. He was learning fast that keeping her would be the most difficult task he’d face.
Thousands of years searching for her. Finding her and loving her. She’d thrown more questions at him while eating half a cheese omelette then she’d done in all that time.
She couldn’t know. She couldn’t know how deep his selfishness went. If she did, it would be over. They would be over. It was a reality he couldn’t comprehend.
It was ironic really. He’d spent sixteen years trying to stay away from her. Now, when it looked like he had been offered some small break by fate’s twisted fortune, he no longer knew how to act.
It used to be so easy.
Rinsing the bubbles off the pan and refusing to look for her, he cast his mind back to a different time. A time that seemed surrounded in a comforting haze of familiarity. She’d grinned at him, her eyes wide, as she saw the yellow flash of the school bus skim by her shoulder. He’d watched as her eyes flickered with the deep recessed memory that she should know him. It was the same every time. Over and over again. She’d look at him with adoration as she scrambled to know where she recognised him from. Never knowing she’d known him forever.
This time was different. She knew too much, was sailing too close to the truth in a force wind he couldn’t control. For the first time, ever, the scales were more evenly balanced between them.
She was never supposed to be a star. Not even half a star. It wasn’t part of the deal, part of the punishment.
What had changed?
It gripped him, deep and low in his stomach, that in this life he was incapable of talking to her. They’d always talked for hours, days, weeks, months, sometimes years. The connection running between them so strong there was never a bad word said. He snorted when he thought of how many cross words they’d clashed over already in just a few short weeks. Maybe fate was changing the game.
It wasn’t helping that Connor was having his time with her running through his head on a constant loop. Nick felt a burning rage when he thought of Connor having days alone with her. From inside Connor’s memories, he could see Bronte slipping into his car, soaked to the skin, laughing as she tried to be gracious.
Had she smiled at him yet in this lifetime? He wasn’t sure.
He wanted to stalk out the glass door, grab hold of her, show her who he really was, how much he could love, how good they were together. But this time was different, and the fear of the unknown was rooting him to the spot.
He’d found her. He’d protect her from anything. But could he make her love him? He no longer knew what was possible.
“How’s it, Bro?” Celeste glided into the room, her ballerina grace waltzing her across the shiny floor tiles. She glanced around. “Where’s Bron? I thought you wanted time with her.” She sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose.
“Please don’t start with the street talk, you know you can’t pull it off.” He felt like a cliched bear with a sore head.
Celeste slid onto the tall stool and spun an orange from the fruit bowl like it was an orbiting planet. “What’s happened?”
“You. You need to stop telling her stuff.” He could barely contain his frustration.
Celeste gave him one of her dainty snorts. It reminded him of Lauren, Bronte’s best friend, and he felt a pang of annoyance at the decisions that had been made once he left the earth. He’d known at the time it was a gamble, that he couldn’t predict the result. Somehow, even though he’d survived and she’d lived, which is all he'd wanted, it still didn’t feel like he’d succeeded. “You need to tell her more. She’s so confused,” she said.
He growled and clenched his fists. “You have not helped with that.”
Celeste sighed and leaned forward, her pale blue eyes trying to hold his. “This is messed up, it’s not the same it’s always been. You can’t be the same you’ve always been.”
“I know.” The words sounded hollow.
“You’d give your life to protect her but you won’t tell her why.”
A sharp slither pierced his heart, as if the point of the finest sun beam was cutting him in two. “How can I tell her what I did?”
Celeste shrugged. “How can you not? It may be the only way.”
“The only way to what?”
Celeste regarded him with the same affection she’d reserved for him their entire existence. “Save your souls.”
He let out a pfft of air and shook his head before evaluating his sister and watching her expression as he asked his next question. “Do you regret the choice you made?”
“No.” She shook her head vehemently. “Do you?”
He lifted his shoulders in response.
“Shut up, Nick. Go find her and tell her you are sorry for being such an oration nightmare.”
He had to laugh. It felt strained. “I don’t know if she wants me.”
Celeste raised her eyes to the heavens. “Sure she does. But she wants you to be you. Own her, own the past, the present and maybe you can gain the future you’ve been waiting so long for.”
“And Connor?”
It was still unspoken. Connor had backed off. But Nick was under no illusion. If he hadn’t forced his fall and found Bronte when he did, Connor would have pulled out every stop to make Bronte his.
“There’s another star child now. Destiny is being rewritten.”
Nick nodded slowly. It was being rewritten. Why was he still hankering by the rules of the past? What was he doing? “I’ve got to go find her.” He marched for the door.
“Talk!” Celeste hollered after him but he waved his hand at her.
Talking, kissing, truth telling, he would try and do it all. For the first time in history he would give her everything. Even if it meant telling her all the things he’d done wrong.
“Oh,” I stumbled around the Laurel hedge. “What are you doing here?” Connor had his legs stretched out in front of the faded blue garden bench. From its spot you could see the sea, not that you could see much, not through the constant rain and mist.
“Enjoying the peace,” he said, his eyes focused out in the distance.
“Oh.” I waited, caught in a moment of uncertainty. Connor acted like an idiot, there was no doubt about it. But I couldn't believe he was all that bad? He'd been given a bum deal, that was all.
On the spur of the moment, I sat and perched on the edge of the bench. Wrapping my arms tight around my middle to ward off the chill from the damp air, I waited for him to speak.
He didn’t.
“So what happens now?” I asked eventually because I was seeing time stretch before me in an infinite wave of nothing.
He turned slightly. “What do you mean?”
“To you? What happens now. I mean, you’re destined to be with the last star child—turns out there’s two of us.” I didn’t know how I felt about Eleanor, my head couldn’t even process the enormity of her being my twin. “Is it a case of eenie meenie, minie mo?”
He sniggered and his ears tinged pink. “Who knows?”
“But you can finally admit that you don’t fancy me?” I couldn’t help but tease.
“Who says?”
I raised an eyebrow and he smiled, his whole body relaxing. “Are you cold?”
I feigned shock. “He cares? Please don’t offer me your jacket, I don’t want you and Nick having another smack down.”
This made him laugh, it wasn’t a happy sound. “He deserved that beating.” Raising a hand, he held it palm up to the sky. The mist cleared around us and the air warmed. I stared in wonder.
“Wow.”
“Yep. That’s what all the girls say.”
I chuckled and wiggled my bum back from the edge of the bench. “Sure they do.’
&
nbsp; “Want to find out?”
“No!” I groaned with my words before allowing worry and stress to pull my face into a frown. “Seriously, what happens now?”
Connor’s eyes cast back into the distance again. “He loves you. He would have died for you on the moor. Jeez, he nearly did.”
“And?”
I knew this. What I wanted to know was why it was important to Connor. His blue eyes flicked over at me and stormed like the sea in the distance. “I should never have made him stay away from you. I knew it was killing him, hurting him, but I was determined to make him pay.”
“Pay for what?” I sat up a little straighter. Was someone finally about to talk?
“You’d need to ask him.”
No. Apparently they weren’t.
“But wasn’t I your destiny?” I asked.
His eyes steadied back on my face. “You’ve been his far longer.”
“How long?” I wished someone would just tell me something, anything.
He shrugged and I knew I wouldn't get anywhere.
“So what happens now? Are we expecting it to get dark again?”
Connor's lips settled down-turned at the corners. “Look at the sky, Bronte. Open your eyes, use the skills you’ve got.”
Lifting my eyes, I looked at the low cloud cover—in truth, it looked much like any other rainy day in England. Connor tutted. “Through the cloud, Bronte, through the cloud.”
I stared at the sky; when I was a child I used to love finding animal shapes in fluffy pillows of white dense cloud. Sometimes I could define an entire kingdom up there.
Now I just saw cloud.
“Oh my god, you truly know nothing.” Connor snapped his words. “You changed your appearance once, right? Use that same focus, sense rather than see. Demand rather than ask.”