“Shh,” he repeated, and opened his eyes for a second, winking at me before closing them again.
I exhaled a laugh, burying my face against the small hollow at the center of his chest. A sheet of sweat broke out along my neck and upper lip in the heat between us, as the rapid climb in temperature made the air damp and almost hard to breathe.
“Wow, it just got really hot,” I said, looking up to the soft pattering sound of rain. But there was no rain.
“Stay calm, okay.”
“Why do I need to stay calm?”
He didn’t answer. He just held me close, his eyes shut tight, his beautiful dark-pink lips twitching with concentration. The pattering sound around us became louder then, drowned out for a second by a flock of birds bursting through the canopy above us, coloring the sky in reds and greens. When silence fell over the island again as the birds disappeared, I saw something move from the corner of my eye. I yanked my arm back when a feathery touch brushed my skin.
“It’s okay,” David said in a low voice. “You’re safe here.”
“I know,” I said. “I just thought I felt a spider on my arm.”
“Not a spider.” He gently kissed the top of my head, tangling his fingers in my hair. “Look up.”
It took a second for my eyes to adjust, but as the blurry cloud of yellow and pale blue resolved itself into the fluttering of hundreds of tiny wings, my mouth dropped. “Oh, my God.” I watched in amazement, the butterflies filling the space around us like pastel snow. “How is this possible?”
“Anything is possible.” David smiled.
I smiled back and reached out as the glowing sun filtered down through the leaves, lighting the winged creatures in a soft, misty glow. They flitted across my skin with tiny silk kisses, forming a circle around us like we were in some magical orb of nature. But the gem-like green of David’s eyes held more beauty among the pale colors, as if he was backlit by the brightest star in the sky.
As his head turned, unlocking the hold of his gaze, he nodded to the tip of my finger, held way up into the magic. I laughed, staying ultra-still so as not to scare the blue-and-black butterfly there. It fluttered its wings once then before flying away.
“David, this is so beautiful.”
He cupped my face, pressing the tip of his nose to mine. “I know.”
The humidity made it so hard to breathe, and the closeness of David’s lips to mine made the air thick with tension, scented sweetly with his breath blowing over my tongue every time I inhaled. And I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be this close and not kiss him.
As if he read my mind, his lips skimmed across the surface of mine, so softly, so hesitantly, coming to rest just in front of my mouth as he breathed for the both of us.
The world stopped. Every sound, every brush of air disappeared until only he and I existed.
His fingers tightened on the small of my back for just a moment, my dress lifting a little with his grip, then he swept me onto my toes so our faces aligned and kissed me deeply, drawing a breath so full it stole mine. I felt the wet soil and grass beneath my toes, the sweat trickling down my back, soaking into my dress, felt everything as if this one moment brought me to life, lit everything in stark contrast—making it real; me real, him real, making the world, somehow, into a place I never knew existed.
He broke away for a single moment to slip both hands along the sides of my face, hungrily catching my bottom lip against his and drawing it in, breaking only to release and drink it in again.
I had to open my eyes—to savor this moment forever—but while the kiss felt like a reality so stark it couldn’t possibly become just a memory, when I looked up and the golden beams of sunlight shone through the cloud of butterflies, it felt more like a dream.
David gently drew my face away from his, smoothing his thumb over the moisture of his kiss. “Are you happy here?” he whispered.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I need this, Ara. I just need to see you happy before I lose you.”
“Even if I am happy, you’ll be gone soon. And then I won’t be happy anymore.”
“You will forget about me one day,” he said in his soft, deep voice. “I promise you that.”
I shook my head. “I’ll never forget you. I’ll love you for the rest of my life.”
One corner of his mouth quirked upward. “That, my love, is the length of this entire line that lies between us.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll love me for the rest of your days, but I”—he wrapped his fingers around my wrist, drawing my hand down until it rested over his heart—“I will love you until the end of time.”
We stood together then in our timeless embrace and watched the miracle of life swarm around us for a while. But all it did to feel him so close was make me fall so much deeper in love with him. So much that I wasn’t sure I could live after he went away.
13
My fork scraped the plate where the absence of a potato mound left the china bare. Even though I’d managed to create something worthy of special mention in Art Weekly Magazine, I couldn’t lift the heavy weight I’d carried to the dinner table with me. I was losing David. He’d be gone by winter and there was nothing I could do about it. Not even a magical first kiss could save our happy ever after.
Our dreamy afternoon was followed by an intensely silent drive home, with me trying so hard not to burst into a sniveling mess. And when I walked through the front door and readied myself to run upstairs and sob my heart out, Vicki called on me to help with dinner, forcing me to swallow my grief like a hard wedge of cheese. It was just about ready to catapult out of me at the smallest trigger.
“Ara?”
I looked up from my plate. “Hm?”
“How was practice this afternoon?” Dad asked.
“Practice?”
“With David.”
“Oh right—the reason I left class,” I said, fumbling over my own words. “Um. Good. I’m gonna perform a piece of music from a movie.”
“You mean going to not gonna,” Dad said sternly.
I shrugged.
“And you have your friends coming over this weekend, don’t you? Emily and Alana?” Vicki asked, taking the salt from Dad.
I nodded.
“How’s your mythology paper coming along?” Dad asked.
“Good.” But it wasn’t good. I hadn’t even started it.
They all sat silently then, the feel of their stares burning into my face until Sam started laughing.
Dad looked at him with a raised brow. “Something funny, son?”
“Ara’s in love,” he teased.
I sat up straight. “I am not.”
“Yes, you are. You wanna marry David.” He laughed, poking his fingers in the air at me.
Dad looked at Vicki and a smile crept up under her lips. “I think you’re right, Samuel. I’ve seen that look before,” she said.
I waited for my father to jump in and stand up for his only daughter, but he broke into laughter too. Traitor.
“I’m sorry, honey.” He wiped the napkin across his mouth. “But I think your brother may be right.”
“I wondered why you were suddenly so eager to go to school,” Vicki added.
“Well, I guess we’d better have young David over for dinner—discuss the dowry,” Dad joked.
“Dad?” I moaned, hiding my face in my hands.
“So, he’s taking you to the Fall Masquerade then?” Dad asked.
I looked up. “The what?”
“Oh, that’s right.” Vicki heaped a spoonful of potato salad onto her plate. “Ara’s never been to a masquerade, has she?”
Dad’s eyes lit up. “No, she hasn’t. Well, this’ll be exciting then.”
“Wait, what’s the Fall Masquerade?” I asked, confused.
“Every year during fall, the town holds a masquerade for seniors, like a school ball, but for the whole town,” Sam said. “You have to wear a mask and a giant dress—totally
lame.”
“And you know what that means?” Vicki squeaked. “We get to go shopping.”
“Well, David hasn’t asked me yet.” And likely wouldn’t be here. “When is it?”
“They’ll put posters up soon. It’s usually held in early autumn,” Dad added.
I smiled, thinking about the last ball I went to, which wasn’t really a ball at all. It was an end of year dance and my ‘date’ was my best friend, whom my mom actually had to pay to take me, because he thought that wearing a penguin suit was an indication that you wanted to mate with an arctic bird. And since he didn’t want to mate with me, he’d told my mom, it was going to cost her. Mike and I had fun though, but the dance was no masquerade.
Then, almost as if Dad read my mind, he asked, “When’s Mike coming?”
“Oh, um… his interview is next Monday, so he’ll be here on the Tuesday some time.”
“How does David feel about that?” Vicki asked in a provocative, feather-ruffling tone.
My shoulders dropped. “David? Why would he care about my best friend coming to stay?”
Vicki’s expression suggested the obvious. She didn’t even have to speak.
My lip curled. “David doesn’t see it like that. He knows Mike’s my friend.”
“Well, we’ll just see, won’t we?” She rolled her head to the side. “Ara, sometimes a girl as young as you can misinterpret things, see them as more innocent than they really are. Mike’s a fully-grown man”—she placed the salad back on the table—“maybe he feels differently about you than you do about him.”
I looked at Dad. He knew the deal with Mike and me, so why wasn’t he correcting her? I mean, he didn’t know that I’d confessed my feelings for Mike and been rejected but he knew our past; knew we could never be anything more than friends.
“Ara,” Dad started in that preachy tone, and I buried my face in my hands, shutting out his voice. At this point, with the grief of losing David, the lump in my throat building all afternoon, and the memories of what happened between Mike and me the night my mom died, I just couldn’t handle their accusations. Mike would never love me, never see me as anything but his little baby girl. They had no idea what they were talking about!
I threw my napkin down and stood up. “Mike and I are friends. That’s all it’s ever been!”
“Ara, sit back down. Vicki knows that,” Dad said.
“No, Dad! I’m tired of it. People always ask—just because Mike’s a boy and I’m a girl. Don’t you guys get it?” I said, my voice high. “Don’t you understand what David means to me?”
“Honey, you barely know him,” Dad reminded me.
“Yeah, and one smile was enough to make me fall in love with him,” I retorted. “But seventeen years didn’t work for Mike? So what’s gonna change now?”
“She’s got a point.” Sam shrugged.
I looked at Dad and he looked at Vicki. “Ara, you’re so young,” she said. “This thing with David… it’s just an infatuation. You can’t know what love is yet.”
“How can you say that?” I leaned forward slightly. “You don’t know what I feel. None of you do.”
“Honey, you can’t feel that kind of love at your age.”
“How would you know? I’m sorry, are you the all-experienced love gurus because you’ve both had a failed marriage?” I waved my hands around at the word gurus, and then dropped them onto my hips.
“Yes, because we know that it can sometimes look like love when it’s not.”
“So, just because I’m under eighteen means I don’t know how to feel?”
“We’re just saying that love is complicated,” Dad said and held his hand up to Vicki, silencing her. “It takes a long time to figure it—”
“Don’t tell me I don’t know my own heart. ’Cause I can tell you I do, Dad, and it hurts.” My voice broke under the strain. “It hurts all the time. It hurts for Mom and Harry. And I loved them. And I love you”—the tears burst past the strain—“so you can’t tell me I don’t know what love is because I think, of all the people in this room, I’m the most qualified to say what my heart is capable of.”
Dad’s jaw fell open and Vicki looked at her salad. Sam hovered between standing and sitting.
“Well, Ara”—Vicki placed her fork on her plate and folded her fingers in front of her chin—“do you feel better now you’ve effectively displayed your maturity in front of your fourteen-year-old brother?”
My arms fell to my sides. I just couldn’t believe it. I’d had enough—just about all a girl could take. They all watched, waiting for me to respond. But I had no response. Of course I didn’t feel better. What a stupid question to ask. And this is why I hated her so much. This is why, no matter how nice she tried to be, I would never love her like a mother.
“How do you think I feel, Vicki?” My chair fell over and hit the wall as I pushed it out with the backs of my legs and ran from the room.
“Let her go,” Dad said calmly as I ran up the stairs, holding my forearm across the ache in my gut. I couldn’t stop it. It all wanted to come out: all the fear, the heartbreak, the grief. I knew too well what I felt for David; knew no one could understand it; knew it was crazy. And I knew, if losing everyone I loved so far hadn’t killed me, saying goodbye to David would.
I slammed my bedroom door unintentionally hard, sending vibrations through the house and making my open window rattle. I couldn’t breathe—couldn’t even find a good enough reason to breathe. I wanted to go home. Just wanted to go back and make it all okay again. But I couldn’t, and I was so tired of losing people, so tired of hurting to the point where crying just seemed pointless. It never helped. Tears or none, nothing ever changed.
With a wailing breath, I slid down the door and sat on the ground, hugging my knees to my chest. Outside, the sunlight turned orange and the soft yellow glow that filled my room earlier slipped away with an empty blackness. My nose went cold and my cheeks numb and, after a while, an eerie rumble of thunder growled, a flash of white scorching the sky for a split second.
I stayed motionless in my nightmare life, listening to the quiet patter of rainfall that crept into my world under the cover of night, afraid to move, afraid to cry anymore in case the brooding storm should find me here.
After a while, the familiar sound of doors being locked into place and lights flicked off around the house filled the wordless evening with noise. My parents’ footsteps thudded up the stairs and, while the lighter ones continued down the hall, the heavy ones stopped by my door. I sunk my face into crossed arms, holding my breath, praying my dad wouldn’t come in. I’d be embarrassed to be found sitting here on the floor. I’d then be forced to explain my emotions, my pain. And there was no explaining it. I was hurt and sad and, after knowing this boy for such a short time, I probably didn’t really have a right to be so upset over him leaving. I knew that. I wasn’t totally crazy. But my heart was. And my heart just wouldn’t stop bleeding inside.
“I’m sure she’s sleeping,” Vicki whispered.
“I know. I just…”
“I know,” Vicki said softly.
The footsteps faded to the other end of the house, and silence swept over the night once more as Dad’s bedroom door closed. My real mom would’ve told him to check on me—to open the door anyway and make sure I was all right. She would’ve followed him in, warming the sudden unwelcome chill in here, and she would’ve told me not to be silly. Told me to get up off the floor and get into bed; that when I woke in the morning, everything would seem clear again. And a part of me knew that, but not having her here to say it made the pain, made missing her, so much worse.
As I lifted my head and considered climbing into bed, a low rumble rolled across the roof like a hundred horses running past on hard ground, the noise electrifying the skies with silver forks. It was almost as if the storm had lain dormant, building, waiting for my family to go to bed. I covered my head again, whimpering into my knees. I had nowhere to hide. No one to cuddle up safely beside.
I was too old to climb into bed with Dad and Vicki now, and too far away from the phone on the other side of the room, in front of my open window, to call Mike.
I counted the seconds between the thunder, sliding my hands up the wood of the door to edge stiffly to my feet. It struck hard and loud, making me squeal, and as soon as it grew silent again I ran, wedged my fingers onto the top of the window frame and slammed it shut, drawing the curtains together before the next strike of lightning. It hit as I turned away, and I tripped all over myself to get away from the window, falling onto the stool in front of my dresser.
Sitting on it, with my head in my hands, I took some slow, deep breaths.
With the curtains closed, the darkness of my room swallowed up my reflection, mirroring back only the outline of my head, shoulders and, as the lightning flashed again, the image of my mother smiling down at the tiny baby in her arms. I lifted the photo frame and kissed them both, then wiped away the smudge my lips left on the glass. This was my favorite photo. My only photo. And I so clearly remembered the day I took it: Harry, who was about two months old, had just been bathed, and my mom—I ran my fingers over her face—wrapped him safely in a towel. Then, when she looked down at him again, I took the shot, capturing the exact moment she saw her baby’s first real smile. This was how I wanted to remember them. But, at night, when I closed my eyes, it was the last seconds I ever saw them that flashed into my dreams, making the smiles and the sunlight fade from nearly every memory.
Cold now and exhausted from all the crying, I dropped my head between my hands and let the warm, salty tears fall over my nose and drip away. “I’m so sorry, Mom,” I whispered to nothing. “I’m so so sorry.”
* * *
My crystals lashed against the window frame as the gloomy sky shoved its way into my morning, blowing papers around in the remains of the tsunami that hit my desk last night. I sat up on my elbows and looked down at the quilt, covering my still-fully dressed self, then over at the shoes placed neatly by my bedroom door as if I’d entered a dojo.
Great, I thought, flopping back and pulling the blankets over my head. So I’ve finally gone insane enough to put things away neatly while sleepwalking myself into bed.
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 23