When her jeans, along with the rest of her, disappeared around the corner of the metal building, he fixated on the edge of the structure, where the dented and dusty-grey sheets of corrugated metal met the piercing baby blue of the sky. What a contrast, he thought. Just like Riley. What you saw was not always what you got. That girl’s mind never stopped working, planning ahead for what was next to come.
And perhaps, Drake mused, that was the reason he was still there.
CHAPTER FOUR
It wasn’t until dinner in the community building, when someone broached the subject of my silence, that I realized since seeing Blossom, I’d not spoken much to anyone. With one elbow propped on the table, and my hand fisted under my jaw, I pushed mixed vegetables around the plate, smearing them with the homemade gravy. I was lost in my own little world when Drake nudged me in the side.
The fork slipped from my grasp and into the lumpy gravy with a thunk. I cursed. “Why’d you do that?” I snapped.
“What’s wrong with you?” He scooped a heaping spoonful of macaroni and cheese into his mouth and watched me.
“Nothing. Everything. Doesn’t matter.”
He shrugged and filled his mouth with more pasta. “Fine.” He mumbled around his partially chewed food.
“Gross,” Kris said, glaring in Drake’s direction. He stopped chewing and stared at her, waiting for an explanation. With an exaggerated sigh, she pointed at his full mouth and said, “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to talk with your mouth full like that? It’s gross.”
Ignoring her obvious displeasure, he smiled, letting the curved macaroni noodles move around his teeth.
“You’re nasty,” she complained. But he’d managed to get a smile out of her. Progress, I thought.
I watched the entire exchange between them with my face still propped in my hand. Kris didn’t like Drake. She didn’t even seem interested in pretending. He wasn’t Connor and she pointed that out every chance she got with her dagger-like stares and insulting quips. She always watched the interactions between me and Drake carefully, probably hoping they would never become anything other than a tumultuous friendship. Still, most of the time, instead of insulting her back, Drake reacted toward her with a hefty amount of immaturity. As if Kris was a younger sibling. Perhaps he’d had a little sister before the world died. Maybe one day I’ll ask.
When she turned her shoulder toward us and went back to eating her own food, I let my eyes drift down to the sea of corn and peas floating in the puddle of thick gravy on my plate. After another minute went by, I let my fork fall back into the mess and shoved the tray away.
“Well?” Drake said, again prodding me in the side with his elbow.
“Well, what? Just not in a talkative mood today. Is that a crime?”
“Damn,” he said, swallowing his food. “Are you PMSing or something?”
“No,” I snapped. “And even if I was, I wouldn’t chat over the dinner table about it with you, of all people.” I rose from the table so quickly my knees banged the underside, but I ignored the sharp pain and grabbed up my tray, leaving it on a nearby cart for the clean-up crew.
It took ten seconds to walk across the room and flee out the doors and into the fresh air. Zoey was sleeping near the front entrance but jumped to her feet when she heard me exit the building. With her tail wagging dangerously fast, and her body jerking to keep pace with it, a smile came naturally. She was a dog. Dogs didn’t care about the specifics of why their people were upset, only that it was their job to make them happy again. A dog uses its entire being to make their person happy. It’s what they do best, and why the puppy years of chewed shoes and pee puddles on the living room rug are worth it. I let her rub against my leg a few times before unleashing her from the support post she was tied to and leading her through the night back to our living quarters.
We were halfway there when Winchester jogged up beside us.
“Win, I’m not in the mood to chat,” I warned him.
“That’s fine. I’m not either,” he said. He looped an arm around my free one and we walked together back to the main building. Winchester hardly ever touched me. If I hadn’t been in such a foul mood, I would have noticed at the time that perhaps he really did want to talk.
When we reached the entrance side of our building, I released Zoey from her leash. The rules clearly stated that she had to be kept restrained. Another ridiculous rule. We watched Zoey run around in circles, sniffing the ground, sniffing the air, just being a dog. I slung the leash around my neck and almost begged Ryder or one of the other community leaders to happen upon us. My curiosity over getting in trouble for unleashing the dog was nearly unbearable. I truly didn’t care.
I’d become quite the lawbreaker.
Winchester shuffled his feet in the loose desert dirt and sighed loudly. “Can I ask you something?”
I looked at him sideways before glancing back down at Zoey. “Sure,” I shrugged.
“How come you never talk about him?”
Though my blood frosted over, clogging up my veins with ice, my cheeks flushed with heat. I knew which ‘him’ Winchester was referring to. And I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. But he needed an answer.
“He’s not here. There’s not much to talk about.” I tried to act indifferent, but my voice caught on the last word, betraying my calm exterior.
“Right,” he said. “Out of sight, out of mind? That’s how you like to do things?” He folded his arms and glared over at me.
My hand dropped from the end of the leash and stiffened at my side. “Are you blaming me for something, Win?”
“Is it because of Drake? Are you sleeping with him? Is that why you won’t talk about Connor being gone? Why I haven’t seen you cry yet?”
My mouth opened in shock. “If you’re going to accuse me of being a whore, at least say the word. Because I don’t have time to play games.” I felt another flush of heat flare up my neck. My ears were dangerously close to spontaneously catching on fire. Though we stood cloaked by the dark of early night, I was certain Winchester would notice the blush, which infuriated me even more.
He balked. “What? Just because you’re having sex doesn’t make you a whore. Jesus, Riley. Listen to yourself, will you!”
“I’m not sleeping with Drake!” I screamed in his face.
“I didn’t say you were! I was just asking a damn question!” he yelled back.
“Then what the hell are you saying?!” My fists were now balled at my hips, and Zoey had stopped performing giddy circles and stood at attention with her head cocked to the side, watching the two of us stare each other down.
“You don’t feel anything! You can’t even say his name! You won’t allow yourself to miss him – that’s what I’m saying!” Winchester threw his hands up in the air in frustration and I flinched back from him. Before then, I never thought he’d hit me, but I couldn’t help the reaction. The fear I had over someone else’s fists. It was a fear that never truly let me be. I’d had so many people try and kill me over the last year that even the most innocent of hand gestures sometimes made my heart skip a beat.
His face fell in an almost comical way, and he looked at me as if I’d slapped him hard across the cheek with a bible. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, apologizing for more than my overreaction.
He forgave me by reaching out and pulling me into his chest, which was surprisingly toned, and swallowing me in a bear hug out of which I had no chance of escaping. With his mouth close to my ear, he spoke carefully, as if the words had been pondered over and practiced a thousand times before he’d decided to use them.
“Riley, you can’t spend each day simply surviving it. You have to fight to be happy, to find and keep the love that comes your way. But you can’t fight me. We’re a family now, our little group of survivors. A family. You’re like my sister…I would never hurt you. But sometimes I want to shake you…shake you until you wake up. Because you’re gone. You’ve floated off into the clouds. Can’t you feel it
? Our family is falling apart without you here. Kris is growing up. Skip is dying. Connor. Connor is gone. Jacks is mess…a beautiful mess, but still only one push away from losing his shit. Don’t you realize you are the glue and string? You hold us together – this messed up collection of displaced people – that’s what you do.” He shuddered a breath in and out before continuing. “I don’t give a rat’s ass who Drake is to you. If he’s your family now, then he’s my family too. But there’s something that happened with him, something that’s still happening that’s keeping you from seeing what’s going on around you. Keeping you from dealing with the truth. Connor’s gone. But we aren’t. We need you to come back, Riley.”
I cried silently into his shoulder. Tears rand down my cheeks and soaked the spot on his jacket where my chin rested. Had I really pushed myself that far away from the others? If I could even speak the words, would they really want to hear what happened in Los Angeles? Would they want to be in my head when I woke up and realized I’d lost Connor and Kris because of my obsession to find someone I had known for five minutes? That it was all my fault that Connor wasn’t with us anymore?
A cool breeze struck us from the side and together we braced against it. I sucked it in to inflate my lungs and kept my damp cheek on Winchester as I spoke. The words came out strangled and painful. But they were honest. The truth was all I could give him.
“I killed people, Win. How much of that do you want to hear? Because it wasn’t pretty. There’s a ripping sound flesh makes when you slice through it with a knife, did you know that? A hollow crunch when bones break. The smell of death…of a fresh kill…that is something entirely different from the rot and leftover bones we all know. They drew my blood and I drew theirs. We were like animals, except worse. Animals kill because they have to. Humans are different. Sometimes they kill because…because they want to. Because they’re sick. Drake is here because he saved my life and he has no one else. No family. Maybe I wanted to save him too? I don’t know. I came here for Skip. For Lily. Not for me. But so there will be others to take care of you. Maybe because I knew I couldn’t do that anymore. I can’t be your glue, Win, don’t you see? How can I keep all of us together when I can’t keep myself from falling apart?”
We were both crying then. Lost in a misery as deep as the biggest sea and as dark as the longest night. The only light was the hope that each tomorrow we woke up to see would be better than each today, and that, somehow, the pain would eventually fade.
“We’ll be okay if we stick together. Don’t forget that,” he said, using his thumb to wipe the tears off my cheek. With a rough pat on Zoey’s head, he shrugged the way Winchester did so well, with a sheepish grin on his face and a crooked arch of his trimmed brow. Then he left me standing in front of the lodging building, the dog’s leash still draped around my neck, Zoey sitting at attention, waiting for a command, the soft light from inside shining onto us.
Before he was out of earshot, I said just above the shifting breeze, “Do you love him, Win? Do you love Jacks the way I loved Connor?”
He paused and looked up at the sky. His back rose a hitch, then fell into a sort of slump. “Riley, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved what I can’t have. That’s my burden to carry. I’ve accepted that because I have a place beside him. Even if it’s just as his friend.” As he walked away, he might have been crying, but he never turned his face toward mine to confirm it. All the time I’d been missing Connor, I had missed what was happening around me. That Winchester was missing something, too.
“So, girl,” I said, sniffing to keep my tears in. “I’m thinking we should start planning our escape. What do you say?” It was meant as a joke, but the moment the words came out, I felt lighter. As if leaving some of my group behind and taking off on my own was somehow inevitable.
I took Zoey back inside, down to our sub-floor level, and let her stretch out on one of the lower bunks while I brushed my teeth. It was such a menial task in the post wiped-out world, but dentists weren’t exactly practicing anymore, which meant if I wanted my teeth to stay securely in my mouth for as long as possible, I had to take care of them. I even flossed.
Skipping a shower in the co-ed bathroom at the end of the hall, I stripped out of my jeans and shirt, took the bed opposite from the already napping dog and stared at the lazily spinning fan in the center of the room, wondering when I would tell the others that I was leaving. It had sort of snuck up on me. All the effort I’d made into keeping us together, and my struggle to make Drake acclimate to the change of life... What a waste it all had been. Because the moment that Win hugged me and told me I was their glue, I felt more like a ticking bomb. I was too unstable to lead anyone, and too stubborn to follow. And it was time. Time for me to learn how to take care of myself, without the pressure of screwing it up for everyone else. Jacks and Lily would be safe at the Ark. Kris had a real chance of making friends and fitting in. The others would find a place. But me? My place wasn’t sleeping underground, or working a community farm. I used to think it was by Connor’s side, but why did a man have to define me? Besides, Connor was gone.
No. My place was with the wind. And I needed to let it carry me to tomorrow, where if God truly did exist, my pain would be duller and quieter.
CHAPTER FIVE
A sloping hill rests proudly in the center of an overgrown meadow, its weeds reaching up above my knees, swaying with an eagerness to tickle my bare thighs. With my fingers out, I brush the grass carefully, feeling each soft blade glide along my skin. The breeze is hushed, waiting, anticipating. For what, I’m not sure. So I hold my breath, listening to the calm voice of the summer day. There are no birds chirping, no squirrels chattering. Even the crickets and various other insects have hidden themselves somewhere away from what is coming on the horizon. It’s a storm. A loud one. Dark and angry clouds punch at the sky with fat fists, beating tears down onto the earth below.
I stand still, confused, as the sounds of the woods open up. Animal cries and screeches echo around me and I spin, trying to see what it is that has them so excited. And that’s when I spot them. The children. My children. They stand together at the top of the hill, their hands entwined, their faces expressionless. So I run. I run through the meadow, yelling their names, crying for them to come to me, but they don’t. They never do. Instead, they turn and disappear down the other side of the hill.
Why won’t you come to me? Stop! Please, come to me!
My screams go ignored so I run faster up the hill, cresting it, looking desperately for my children. And suddenly, the storm has opened up above me and the water hits my skin like shards of broken glass, but I won’t stop till I see them. My eyes are open wide, searching the grasses and trees in the distance. There they are. At the bottom of the hill, standing in grass up to their narrow waists, talking to a man. He says something and then Shannon breaks away to dance in the rain storm. Dean jumps in the puddles, laughing when the muddy water splashes up his legs. And the man just watches them with his arms loosely swinging at his sides, his back to me, unaware that I am here. But I don’t need to see his face. I know who it is.
Connor. He’s with my children now. They aren’t alone.
* * *
“Hey, Riley…wake up.”
Something soft smacked my arm and I bolted upright, banging my forehead on the wooden underside of the top bunk. Instinctively, I balled up my fists and flailed about until my hands connected with something that wasn’t the bed frame.
“Omph,” someone said at my side. “Stop hitting me!”
It wasn’t Kris, so I continued swinging until a strong hand grabbed mine and twisted my wrist just enough to be uncomfortable. When I jerked my arm back, it was reluctantly released, and then the mattress squeaked as the pressure of another body lifted off it. The light flickered on. Standing in the center of the room was Drake, wearing nothing but a pair of tight boxer briefs. There was absolutely nothing left to be imagined, and even in my sleepy stupor I struggled to level my eyes with
his face.
“What are you doing in here?” I gasped. I grabbed for a sheet to cover myself, but realized I had fallen asleep in just my bra and underwear on top of the bedding. The closest item that was at all shield-worthy was my pillow, so I snatched it up and held it to my chest.
Drake rolled his tired eyes at me. “Please. I’ve seen you in less. A lot less.”
“What are you doing in here?” I demanded a second time. A yawn at the back of my throat struggled to escape, but I kept my jaws locked, snuffing it out.
“I told you earlier, I can’t sleep with those guys.” He crossed his arms and glowered at me.
“So you just let yourself in here?”
“No. She let me in.” Drake nodded at the other bunk, where Kris’s belongings were draped over the top in reckless abandon. She called it decorating. I called her shirts and pants hanging from the railing something else.
“She wouldn’t do that,” I said, wondering where Kris was, since her bunk was in fact not inhabited.
“Well, she did.”
“Were you…sleeping next to me?” I clutched the pillow closer, worried that I’d been violated in some way while I was passed out.
“Um, no,” Drake chuffed. “You were having a nightmare again. I tried to wake you up the nice way, but it got so bad I had to smack you with my pillow. Sorry.”
“You…hit me?”
With a shrug, he sauntered into the bathroom and made no attempt to mask the sound of himself urinating. Speaking over the steady stream of what had to be ten gallons of purging water, he muttered through a yawn. “Like I said, I tried to be nice about it, but you wouldn’t wake up.”
Find Me Series (Book 3): Finding Hope Page 4