I sighed, relenting. “Okay. I’ll go. But can we talk about this later?”
He nodded, closing his eyes. “He didn’t want you to know yet.”
“Who?”
“David.”
“David didn’t want me to know you were in love with me?” I scoffed. “Why? It doesn’t change things. I mean, I’m sorry, that’s harsh, I know, but—”
“It’s not real love, Ara.” He turned to me, looking so defeated. “He doesn’t want you to know about the curse.”
“What curse?”
“His love…” he said sadly. “It isn’t real.”
“What?” I wanted to laugh, but I was worried now.
“He’s under a curse. Your curse. One passed down through your blood.”
“A curse?”
Brett sat down on the bed, his head in his hands. “It’s impossible to control. When it surges, I… I mean, he would do anything to have you in his arms—even lie to you.”
“Okay, wait… what curse?”
“Your grandmother Lilith had a curse placed on her centuries ago. No one knows its true origin; some say it was placed on her by angels, some say it was God, others say it was a witch she pissed off. But the fact remains: any man you come to care for is cursed to love you, and it—”
He kept talking, but I stopped listening, going over the entire past year in my head. So many guys! Cal, David, all those guys at school that lined up to date me. It all made so much sense now. But… if they were all cursed then… “So none of them really ever cared for me?”
Brett shook his head.
I covered the short burst of air escaping my lips as I cried involuntarily. “Not even David?”
“He did before you died, when he was vampire. They have no heart”—he tapped his chest—“so they don’t fall under the curse. But David’s human now.”
I whimpered loudly, like a pathetic child, burying my face in my hands.
“Come here.” He pulled me back down onto the bed and let me cry into his jacket, my cheek crushing the rose in his lapel. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way, but I need you to know that my love isn’t like David’s. I’m Lilithian. I can’t be cursed, but I feel it sometimes.”
All I thought I had just fell away, devastating me as the hope for the future drained out of me. We’d made love. We’d made a child, and none of it was real. His convictions. His passion. His desire. His commitment. None of it was real. Ever.
Brett’s hand tilted my face upward, his thumb moving over my lip from one corner to the other. He wet his own then and leaned in, holding my face as he kissed me deeper, more passionately than before. And my blood responded to it, to him. I got up on my knees beside him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, saying nothing as he slipped his hands up my dress and around my hips. And I realized he was right.
Completely right.
He did know how to manipulate me. Exactly how. And I’d fallen for it.
I jerked back and slapped him hard across the face, splitting his lip.
“Ara?” A milky voice said from the sidelines. I wheeled around to see David, shell-shocked in the doorway, his broken heart falling out onto the floor at his feet.
“David?” I got up.
“No.” He grabbed my arm and moved me aside. “Don’t say a goddamn word, Ara!”
Brett stood as David rushed for him, reaching up to catch his fist as it went for his face. “Don’t be foolish, David,” Brett said. “You’ll break your hand.”
“It’ll be worth it.” He went to punch him again, but Brett dodged it, appearing on the other side of the room.
“David, stop.” I stood in his path.
He looked past me for a moment, the rage within him dying as he clearly thought back to what he’d just seen. “Ara, I—”
“Please don’t.” My legs turned to jelly. I sat down on the bed, wondering how I could’ve let this happen. I failed him. How could I have been so weak and so stupid? I hated myself, and if I hadn’t been carrying a life, I’d have taken my own to stop the pain.
My fingers absently reached for the locket he’d given me just yesterday, a solemn reminder of everything that had been broken because of my betrayal, and his words echoed through me: it wasn’t the betrayal, it was the fact that we couldn’t forgive ourselves. History had repeated itself; would it always? Was I destined to torture him over and over again?
I didn’t deserve his love, and I was relieved when I remembered that Brett said it was just a curse. I would find a way to break that curse and I would set David free. He deserved better than me. I was a complete and utter failure as a human being.
“Do you see what you’ve done?” David said. I went to respond, reeling my words back in when I realized he was talking to Brett. “She hates herself now!”
Brett closed his eyes. “I warned her. I tried to make her leave—”
“You should have forced her to!” he screamed, spit flying from his caged teeth. “She won’t forgive herself for this and it’s not her damn fault!”
“It is,” I demanded. “I didn’t pull away, David. I wanted it. God!” I hit myself in the head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me—”
“Ara, nothing is wrong with you—”
“How can you say that! I cheated on you—”
“It’s not cheating—”
“Yes, it is! How is it anything other than cheating, David? I kissed another man!”
“It isn’t like that—”
“Why do you keep saying that? Why do you defend me? Can’t you see? Once a cheater always a cheater!”
“I convinced you that his love is a lie, Ara,” Brett said.
“He got in your head, don’t you see?” David yelled. “Don’t you understand what that does to us?”
“What do you mean ‘what it does to us’?”
“You and I are soulmates! One cannot exist without the other. He knows that.” He aimed a straight, angry finger at Brett. “He knows that if he strips me away from you, your first instinct will be to grab onto something else. Anything else, no matter what it is.”
“He can’t be to blame for my actions. I own them, David—”
“No.” He sounded defeated. “I won’t let you blame yourself for this. You’re still learning how to be—”
“A person knows from birth how not to betray their loved ones—”
“Yes, but it was a lesson you learned in your old life only by committing the crime. That’s why I couldn’t trust you in this life fully until you understood what it felt like to want someone else, to go with the desire and then regret it.” His eyes teared up. “I’m sorry, Ara, but you never were one to learn from other’s experiences—”
“Then who says I will ever learn?” I yelled, curling my hands in against my chest. “I don’t want to feel this way. Ever again. I—”
“You won’t, Ara. You’re a good girl. You pulled away from him, slapped him.” He laughed, presenting Brett. “You didn’t betray me. You had a lapse in judgement, a shock, but you pulled yourself up before it got bad.”
I looked at Brett.
“He’s right, Ara.” He nodded, his face taut with remorse. “You’re a good girl. You’re not to blame here. I’ve planned this out in my head many, many times. Every time a surge happens, I lock myself away and spend hours imagining ways I can make you mine—”
“What?”
“It’s never been this bad before. It’s like it’s more powerful now, somehow. I’m sorry.” He shook his head at the ground. “I don’t know what else to say.”
I looked at David. He didn’t look angry—well, not at me—he just looked worried, his eyes moving to the locket before flicking away.
“What’s a surge?” I asked.
“The curse,” David said, “it can come in waves. The feelings get stronger for a time and the fluctuations can cause us to hate you. They’re dangerous, if uncontrolled.”
My eyes widened and my head snapped up to look at Falcon. “Us? But
you said you weren’t under the curse!”
“He lied.”
Bret nodded to confirm.
“Then…” My heart hurt as I realized. “You never really loved me either. All this time, caring for me… it was this curse.”
“No, I—”
“And you.” I turned to David. “Your love isn’t real either! How can I possibly know what to do with this? And on my daughter’s wedding day.” My voice went so high it could’ve shattered glass.
“Ara, please—”
“No!” I shoved him away, filling with dread when I saw the clock behind him. “We have to go.” I wiped my face dry, my hands shaking. “I… we have to go.”
They stayed put as I left the room, doing everything in my power not to sob my heart out and make my face all blotchy and red. Every moment of our past over the last year rushed around in my head, trying to come to terms with the truth.
But as I reached the bottom of the stairs, one little piece of information collided with another, forcing my feet to halt: a surge. He said it was dangerous. Made them hate me.
I looked back up the stairs at David staring down from the top. “When you hurt me that day,” I said.
He sighed, rolling his head down.
“You did what?” Brett said, walking out of the bedroom, wiping a clean line of blood from his lip. My eyes went to David’s bloodied fist, gathered in limply to his waist.
“Was it a surge?” I asked.
David swallowed first before nodding once, his eyes round and large with guilt. But I only felt relief. I’d been racking my mind trying to figure out how someone that loved me so deeply could have been so inhumanly and uncharacteristically cruel to me. It didn’t fit.
“Here.” Brett handed David a towel. “You need to get that cleaned up before Elora sees it.”
David shook his hand out and wrapped the towel around it tightly, his eyes passing every object in the stairwell and the entranceway but me. “Promise me you won’t run, Ara.”
“Run?”
He looked at my locket. “We have to talk about this—tonight, after the wedding. Until then, please don’t run, and please don’t hate yourself for what happened.”
I fixed his gaze in place with my own. It would be impossible not to hate myself right now, and with that hate came the desire to run. I didn’t understand it, but it was what it was. I wanted to run as far away from myself as my feet would take me. But I wouldn’t do it. I would stay and hear what he had to say, because even though his love for me wasn’t real, my love for him was, and I just couldn’t turn my back on that. Maybe that was selfish of me, but so be it.
“I’ll stay,” I said, turning away. “But I do hate myself, and nothing will change that.”
“Ara,” he whispered under his breath as I closed the front door behind me.
52
David
Elora was too happy to notice the gash on my hand. She laughed almost the entire drive from home to the beachfront. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her so happy. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been so sad.
Damn Falcon. Damn me for allowing him to care for her. I knew this would happen; I knew it! And yet I did nothing to prepare her, to warn her. Now, she hated herself. She thought I would hate her. But how could I? Even without the curse altering my perception of her, she was everything. She kissed Falcon, yes, but she slapped him good and hard after it, and that was what mattered to me. Not what happened before it. It was only a kiss. Nothing more, after all. I could live with that.
But could she? And that was what worried me. Ara and I only discovered the true depth of our connection later in life—how it guided our every move—and it made perfect sense to me now why she threw herself from the lighthouse after she slept with my brother. She could see no way to reconcile that except to remove herself from the picture completely, and if she felt anything now that she felt that night, she was in danger. And it wasn’t her damn fault.
“Dad?” Elora said, and Ali stopped laughing, the mood changing suddenly. “What’s wrong? What happened to your hand?”
“I punched Falcon.”
“Why?” she screeched, shuffling forward to inspect the damage.
“He said something he shouldn’t have,” I lied.
Elora laughed. “Silly dad.”
“I can fix that,” Ali said. “Not the bone, but I can at least fix the flesh.”
“You don’t have your kit,” Elora said.
“I do back at the ballroom. I take it everywhere normally. I only need some vampire blood and a few herbs, and it’ll be good as new.”
I nodded to agree.
“Just get through the ceremony, Dad.” Elora cupped my hand as though she could soothe it back to normal. “We’ll get you fixed right up after.”
If only that were true. Nothing would fix me if Ara refused to forgive herself. Nothing would ever take the pain away. What Falcon had done here was unforgivable. He’d destroyed everything I built with her, and for what? For a kiss.
On the other hand, I understood that need, the burn. I’d suffered surges in the past and they ended with me in tears on the bathroom floor, knowing I needed her but too smart to go find her in that state. He’d be feeling pretty bad right now too, not just for hurting her, but because he knew she’d see him differently now. He knew he’d lost her friendship, her trust.
“We’re here!” the girls squeaked, jumping around in their seats. The driver pulled over and they jumped out before he could open the door for them, the wind catching Elora’s veil and sweeping it outward. Ali fixed it and fussed over her, looking down to say something to Harry as he walked over from the other car, while I used the doorframe as a kind of portal to pass through, leaving my troubles on the other side for the day and stepping out as a different man.
“You want a bandage for that, mate?” the driver asked me, nodding at my hand.
I took a good look at it. The knuckles had split open when they connected with Falcon’s vampire-tough jaw, and I was pretty sure the middle finger was broken. It looked bad, and it hurt like hell—a painful reminder of my problems. “Yeah. You know what, thanks. That’d be great.”
Elora and Ali stood on the top of the slope, looking down on the guests, all gathered by the water’s edge on white chairs pressed into neat lines in the sand. I followed the driver around to the trunk of the car and stood waiting while he dug through his first aid kit. He took out a springy elastic length of bandage and then wrapped it around my hand. The tightness soothed the ache and the gauze he placed over the knuckles soaked up the blood.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not at all.” He gave a little chuckle and glanced over at Elora and Ali. “Give the husband-to-be a lesson in manners, did we?”
I laughed too. “Something like that.”
“Ah, can’t say I blame ya.” He rested his hands on his hips, pushing his bulbous stomach out. “The daughter just got married six months ago. I’d’a socked the little bugger in the gob too if mi missus wouldn’t’a given me the old steel-cap in the clacker for it.”
At this point, I was glad I’d spent enough time in this country to pick up on the colloquialisms, or I’d not have had a clue what the hell he just said. Which, roughly translated was, My daughter got married six months ago, and I would have punched the prick in the mouth too if my wife wouldn’t have given me a foot up the ass for it.
“You know, you look a little young to be a dad,” he noted, brows coming together to scrutinize my face.
“I’m the brother—standing in.”
“Right.” He nodded apologetically, probably assuming our father had passed. “Well, good luck down there.” He reached for my hand to shake it, making a joke of offering his left hand to my damaged one and then laughing, switching at the last second to shake my right one.
“Thanks. I think I’m gonna need it.” I shut the trunk and tuned my ears in to Ali and Lors, preparing myself for what was ahead.
“You’re not having second thoughts,
are you?” Ali asked.
“No.” Elora dried her tears. “I’ve just never seen him get so emotional over me.”
Ali laughed. “You didn’t see him when you were in that coma after the beach-locket incident.”
Nor did I, but I was told he reacted to news of her death the way I had when I lost my Ara.
“Really?” Elora asked sweetly.
“He loves you, sweetheart,” I said, shutting the car door as I passed it. “I wouldn’t have let him marry you if he didn’t.”
“I know, Dad.”
I cupped the sides of her head and kissed her hair through her veil, wishing I could go back to my own wedding day and take more notice—spend a few more moments really looking at Ara, really committing her to memory.
Elora’s hand extended to the crowd then. “She’s sitting with Vicki.”
It took me a second to realize who she meant, and when I saw Ara in her pretty yellow dress, sitting in the front row, my shoulders relaxed.
“Were you worried she wouldn’t stay?” Elora asked.
My heart skipped for a beat. Those were very specific words. Yes. That was exactly what I was worried about. But how could Elora have known that? “No,” I lied. “I was just looking forward to seeing her.”
My brother looked up at me then, and I waved to say we were ready, the music my daughter would walk down the aisle to starting up a second later.
“What’s this song called again?” Ali asked. “It’s so pretty.”
“All that Really Matters by Richie Sambora.”
“Nice.” She reached down and took Harry’s hand, making sure he had the cushion with the rings. “Come on, Harry. It’s time to go.”
We waited as they walked ahead down the slope, Elora’s arm tucked into mine, our hands entwined. The fact that her knuckles were white wasn’t lost on me, even in my dark cloud of drama. My little girl—the same little girl that used to insist on wearing her pajama pants on her head for most of her fourth year; the same little girl that dressed in her prettiest dress and sat by the fire every Christmas singing carols to us in her loudest voice; the same little girl that told me she would never get married because she couldn’t love any man more than she loved me—she was no longer mine. Her heart now belonged to another—a man I once despised—and she wouldn’t be here anymore. Her life would be about something else now, and it scared me so much that I held on a little bit tighter.
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