by Cecilia Gray
My stomach hardens into a lump of coal.
The newspaper flutters to the floor.
Vivi peeks in behind him. She settles on the edge of my bed and pulls at the hem of her pink cotton minidress, and I want to pull the covers over my head because the last time I saw Vivi, she managed to take everything I hate about myself and put it into words.
“Not having blood pouring out of you is doing wonders for your complexion.”
“Thanks.” I wipe my cheeks. “My side hurts.”
She waits five seconds. Five seconds. The exact amount of time needed for her brain to reset from my voice. She knows. Someone has told her. “Dad, can she have more pain meds?”
“Not until the nurse returns,” he says, settling a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay. I can take it for now.” I sit up in bed.
“Just a few minutes, then she needs to rest,” Porter says before leaving.
Vivi wrings her hands in her lap as we wait for the door to close.
“Sebastien?” I ask.
She gives a shrug. “We haven’t heard anything. Smacker hasn’t heard from him, either.”
“How did I get out?”
“Dad has contacts at the hospital.”
“So—does Sebastien know what happened?”
She shrugs, and I feel the bite of bitterness—because I want him to know. I want it to stand as a testimony to how much I wanted to do the right thing, even if wanting credit makes the deed less heroic. I can’t deny the feeling.
“What do you know?”
She blows out a breath. A five-second breath. “Daddy’s a CIA agent. You’re a human lie detector.” Her expression twists in confusion. “Why didn’t you tell us the truth?”
“It was a secret.”
“So was Kid Aert, but Sebastien told you.”
“It’s not the same. He didn’t want to tell me—I made it happen.” A sob tears at my throat because somewhere, somehow, I’d convinced myself way deep down where I was too scared to admit it, that maybe it was real. That he’d wanted to tell me but he hadn’t.
Nobody wanted to tell me anything. Nobody wanted me, not really, not ever.
She rolls the pink fabric between her fingers and thumb. “You know the worst part of all this? All this time, I hated my dad. I hated him for what I thought he was.” Her voice chokes. “The things I said to him sometimes.”
I want to put my arms around her but when I lean forward, she pulls back and I feel the chill in every pore in my body.
Yet despite this, I feel closer to her than ever.
She knows me.
She knows me.
With the exception of Chelsea, by virtue of knowing what I do, knowing who I am, knowing me as a person and not some test case, she knows more about me than anyone in the world. Being unknown is a bizarre feeling. Like you don’t exist. If you died, there would be no one who could attest to who you were. So having one more person who knows me is like being alive again.
Even if she never speaks to me for the rest of her life, she has a piece of me, a truth, that she’ll carry forever.
“So much makes sense now,” she says. “There are these things I remember from my life. I don’t know if they were real or they were lies. Like when we went to Euro-Disney. Was that because my dad wanted to take us? When he missed my birthday for work—which work was it? It’s like it’s not even my life,” she says. “It’s like my whole life is a lie. All those memories are lies.”
“At least you have memories of your family.”
“Cry me a river. At least your memories are real. Everything you’ve had is real. You know who Chelsea is. You know who you are. Whereas everyone around you gets some fake, screwed-up version of what they think is real.”
“How about us?” I ask bitingly. “Where we real?”
“What do you mean?”
“When we were hanging out. It seemed so surreal. Unreal. I’ve never had—” The word sticks in my throat. “I’ve never had friends before.”
“Never?”
“Not since I was a kid. People would tell me things, and then…it’s not like they blamed me for it. No one ever figured out that my voice could make them tell me their secrets. But it’s like once I knew something they didn’t want me to know, things changed between us.”
“That is kind of…”
“Screwed up?”
“Sad,” she finishes. “It’s really, really sad.”
My throat tightens because no one’s ever felt sorry for me before, and I hate it. I hate it. “I felt so weird—like everything between us was real.”
“It was to me,” she says. “That’s why I’m so mad at you.”
~~~~~
The morphine makes my skin itch but I can’t scratch it. I lay back in bed, but it’s like my skin is a straitjacket. I jump up and find the pacing relieves the tingle of irritation. I keep moving across the room.
One of the drip machines connects to my arm so I tug it along on its wheels. I slip into the hall. The house is two stories, five bedrooms. A standby rented safehouse for agents between assignments or on the run. It’s as cozy as a home and it even looks like one. Cozy furniture. A ceramic rooster. Mismatched paintings…as mismatched as the people inside the house.
At the end of the hall, one of the doors is open. I tiptoe by, but peek in.
Porter lies on his back in bed reading a newspaper. Rachel perches on one side with the crossword section. Vivi lies on the couch next to the bed, listening to something on her headphones. Even apart, their heads all bow together like some circle of protection. Vivi catches my eye. She sinks further into the couch, but gives me a brief wink and a smile as she gulps in a breath.
I move farther down the hall. I’m glad they’re gonna be all right. But I don’t want to join them. Their circle was never meant to include me.
XIV
“The Lab”
DOD Research Facility, Washington, DC
In an irony of ironies, being shot forces an automatic psych eval. A de facto benching at the Lab. Life at the Lab means cerulean blue paper gowns that split up the back. The chill of metal examination tables. Stale coffee in thin paper cups that spits out of a stained spout for fifty cents. Sludge that passes for chili and hockey pucks that pass for wheat rolls. I’m back at my true home with a family of test monkeys, in my quaint circle of freaks.
How could I even have contemplated a normal life with normal friends and a normal boyfriend? Being me means being me.
It means electrodes for everyone! For me! For you! For the test monkey!
It means giggle fits. When an unsuspecting test subject tells you he likes to sniff his pee-stained underpants, you can’t hold it together—I don’t care who you are.
It means waiting and waiting. An endless amount of waiting for a flash of blond hair and a ramrod-straight spine to appear in the doorway brandishing a sword to slay a dragon and whisk you away from a hundred-year sleep.
My metaphors are all wrong.
It means being glued to news alerts for anything on Kid Aert, anything to prove he’s still alive. It means begging—endless begging and promising that I’ll be a good girl, I’ll do anything, I’ll do whatever they want if someone will tell me, assure me, promise me that he’s alive and breathing halfway across the world.
It means tests, tests, tests, and more tests, then reenactments, reenactments, reenactments, and more reenactments.
It means picking up the phone to call her and slamming it down because I’ll be damned if I’m gonna be the one to reach out when I’m the one with the bullet hole in my side.
Being shot should count for something.
I spend most of my time lying on my cot fantasizing about seeing Sebastien again. He’ll stand in the doorway, a few feet away, hands tucked into his jeans. That white V-neck tee. He’ll lean oh-so-subtly forward on his feet, like he could sprint away at a moment’s notice. I’ll tell him that I’m sorry. He’ll lift up my shirt and see the puckered skin, brush
his finger across the scar, and leave a heated trail behind.
He’ll say it’s okay. Je te souhaite.
He will look at me with that same dark-eyed intensity I remember from the first night at his bar and I will shiver with many things, none of them cold. I will tell him it wasn’t an act. That those things I said—those moments we shared—they were assignments. They were orders.
But they were still real.
~~~~~
I jerk up in bed, sweat pouring down my face, my heart jackhammering. The room is pitch black, but I see the broken frames of my dream like a movie playing against the inky dark.
The smoking rubble of a building ripped to shreds. My body lies in the center of the blast point. Shards of jagged glass slice up from my chest, arms, and feet. A team of retrieval experts in yellow hazard suits scans the perimeter with bleeping equipment and cameras. Then, I switch from floating above my body to being trapped inside it. Unable to move. Unable to speak or even blink. I look out from my eyes.
“Who’s this?” a yellow masked man asks, standing over me. He waves a metal wand over my body and it is silent.
Another yellow mask comes into view. “Nobody.”
“What did she do?”
That’s when I woke.
I almost expect to see the masked man in my DOD dorm, here in the darkness, but I’m alone on my cot. I stand and pace. I flick on the light and blink from the momentary blindness. I see my eyelashes first, flickering open and closed. Then the cot in the corner. My DOD-issued gray blanket, fallen to the floor. The institutional steel desk.
The white walls. The white door. The blank canvas.
I pick up my pencil. This time, I leave my mark.
~~~~~
Tanner residence, Marietta, GA
My mouth is so dry I have to lick my lips three times and still feel like I’m swallowing sawdust as I stare at the doorknob from the front porch of Chelsea’s house. I haven’t eaten since walking out of the facility, renting a car—thank you, emancipation, although the underage driving fee was a gouging—and heading straight here. Didn’t stop to think of the consequences, of how she’d feel about me bursting in without notice or invitation.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I open the door—unlocked—because FBI or no, in this ritzy neighborhood everyone is a neighbor.
She’s wearing khakis and her blond hair is piled on top of her head in disarray. Her eyes are the same—cool and ice blue. She starts when she sees me and drops the coffee pot on the kitchen counter. I flash back to our mornings together in this very kitchen, but shake the memories away.
“Jumpin’ Jezebel, Sasha, you about gave me a heart attack.”
I take my favorite mug with the curlicue handle from the cabinet. I hold it out.
She hesitates, then pours the cup. Her eyes shift to my hipbone. “Is it—?” She lets out a slow breath. “Does it still hurt?”
“Not really.” I pull up my shirt an inch. The skin puckers around the bullet wound and she flinches back to close her eyes.
“My, that’s a scar.”
“It’s healing.”
“Good.” She leans back against her kitchen counter.
I can see down the hall to my old room. My door is gone. A plastic curtain is tacked up in front—the kind you put up because of construction. The breath goes out of my lungs—this is it, really it. She’s remodeling my room and constructing me out of her house and life.
I swallow to make sure my voice doesn’t break. “What—putting in a shooting range?” I start walking down the hall toward the billowing plastic.
“Sasha, wait.”
I keep going and push through the plastic. She rustles behind me.
I see it all—my bed all made up with my sheets and covered in clear plastic tarp. My wall of Wonder Woman paintings. Instead of being taped up, they’ve been framed. The sink in the corner has been torn out and replaced with an updated one.
I know what I want it to mean, but it’s too much for me to say.
It’s too much for me to want.
I spin around. Her face scrunches on a sob. Her arms open and the tears run down my cheeks and the words are there but they start so soft in my mind because I can’t let them out.
She loves me she wants me she loves me she wants me she loves me she wants me she loves me she wants me SHE LOVES ME until I can’t see for all the tears.
I know that it’s too much for her, too. That we’ve both wanted something we didn’t think we could have.
“Don’t be all dramatic,” she says.
I slip against her, into her arms. So easily, so effortlessly.
Our origin story doesn't matter. The details. The way we came together. How we were assigned. Why we were torn apart. None of that matters. This is real. This is us.
This is what we do.
XV
Cecilia’s Booklist
Standalone
Drawn
The Jane Austen Academy Series
Where sassy girls, hot guys and Jane Austen collide
Fall For You: A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice
So Into You: A Modern Retelling of Sense & Sensibility
When I’m With You: A Modern Retelling of Northanger Abbey
Suddenly You: A Modern Retelling of Mansfield Park
Only With You: A Modern Retelling of Emma ~ coming 2014
Always You: A Modern Retelling of Persuasion ~ coming 2014
The Gentlemen Next Door Series (novellas)
A lady in need of love need look no further than next door
The Complete Series Available Now
A Delightful Arrangement
An Illicit Engagement
A Dangerous Expectation
A Flirtatious Rendezvous
Fallen Idols Series (novellas)
The trouble with falling in love is the long drop down
Falling
Fading
Fleeting ~ coming soon
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About Cecilia
Cecilia Gray lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she reads, writes, and breaks for food. She also pens her biographies in the third person. Like this. As if to trick you into thinking someone else wrote it because she is important. Alas, this is not the case.
She’s rather enamored of being contacted by readers and hopes you’ll oblige.
* * *
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