“No.” She practically leapt from the mattress and ran to the opposite end of the room.
I stared at her, my eyes wide, mouth hanging open. I was supposed to be her source of comfort. It was my one redeemable quality. No way was I going to let her convince me that I had lost it. I hadn’t. Just with everything that had happened recently, she hadn’t been able to come to me. I hadn’t been able to hold her, ease her hurt…because I’d been the cause of it.
“Stop it.” I stood up and closed the distance between us in two steps. Before she could bolt again, I had a hold of her, both arms wrapped around her tightly.
“Let go, Blaise.” She tried to fight me, but it only made me grip her stronger, keeping her close to my chest. I leaned down until my lips were even with her ear. “I’m not letting go. Not ever. You hear me? I don’t care how hard you fight or what you do to try and hurt me, I am not letting go.” And I didn’t. Not when she tried to head-butt me. Not when she dug her heel into my foot and not even when she launched her entire body weight into the hold I had on her. I held on. Silently. Relentlessly. Until she broke.
“I hurt,” she cried.
“I know.” I gently rocked her back and forth while the tears continued to fall and the pain found its way out of her body one shudder at a time.
Ava slowly but surely let down her guard and eventually found herself molded to me again, two fucked up peas in a broken pod. That was us. But I was starting to like us this way. Was starting to appreciate what it meant. Sure, we had experienced extreme pain, but it was that precise experience that had allowed us to feel supreme happiness. Because there wasn’t one without the other. It was through the struggles that we’d found success. Through our fears that we’d found courage. Through the heartache that we’d found love.
However low Ava had fallen tonight, I knew without a doubt, she’d rise just as high. And given the chance, I’d be the one to take her there.
Chapter 20
Every night for the next week I went to sleep to the sound of Blaise’s voice over the old tin can phone which was now my official favorite blast from the past. In some way it was like we were having a second chance at rebuilding our entire friendship. This time around we weren’t crying about parents who bailed, or concocting desperate attempts to salvage what was left of our families because for the first time in my life, I felt like I’d drained it all from my system. We were just us. Talking about simple things like the things you could and couldn’t successfully pair with Nutella. Pretzels sure, celery not so much.
Or how Blaise’s collection of guitar picks had exceeded two full size vases and was well on its way to filling a third one, and how it was ridiculous that he never allowed anyone to use them. We laughed for hours about the time we’d gotten trapped inside the bus with screaming fans shaking it back and forth with all of that crazed fan-drenaline pumping through their veins, threatening to tip it over with us still in it. And then we cried until we fell asleep when we came to terms with how broken things had been between us.
I knew he wasn’t drinking and from the recaps he was giving me about his sessions with Doctor Rae, Blaise was finally working through some of the things he’d never been able to address before as well. He still hadn’t come around to telling the guys and part of me was starting to wonder if I was holding out for that simply on principal or if I truly believed that it would be significant in his recovery, as well as a way to solidify the new foundation we’d been busy building.
I needed an outside opinion. And, since I didn’t have access to Doctor Rae, I went for the next best thing.
“What’s up, buttercup?”
“Hey Royce.” My heart ached thinking about what Blaise had recently revealed about him.
“I hear you’re the reason Blaise is showing up to work every day with that dopey ass smile from ear to ear.”
The ache was gone instantly. “Oh yeah? How dopey?”
“Like ‘Sneezy, Sleepy and Bashful can’t be far behind’ dopey.”
I laughed. “That’s pretty dopey.”
“You’re telling me. I haven’t seen a face like that since Sammy accepted Derek’s wedding proposal. Remember that week of giddy hell?”
“Are you kidding me? Who could forget? Derek’s mouth was stuck in such a perma-grin I thought his face would stay that way forever. It was fucking creepy. Oh, and remember the photo-shoot for the album cover? Talk about bad timing. I still crack up every time I look at it. You, Blaise and Angel all sullen and serious standing in the charcoaled remnants of a house a la ‘Life from the Ashes’ and then there was Derek, smiling from ear to ear.”
Royce was totally losing it on the other end. “Holy shit! I know. You can hear it on the album to. All of the tracks, but especially in Life from the Ashes, it’s like the guitar sounds happy or something. Damn, kind of makes me wonder how this album is going to turn out now that Blaise is all blown up in the love bubble.”
“Jeez, Royce, you kind of make it sound like Blaise being happy could jeopardize the band.” It probably wasn’t what he’d meant at all. On the other hand, maybe it was something I was really worried about.
“Not at all. I think the change in Blaise is going to take us to all new heights. Remember what he was like when we first started? All that raw, honest shit he was belting out? He’s doing that again. I mean, that whole tortured thing is gone, but the vulnerability is back and now he’s got the sound of someone who’s had the experience as a singer to really know his own skills. It’s been fucking amazing. You’d be so impressed with him, Ava.”
I already was. Maybe I was stupid to still be holding back. “Royce?”
“Yeeessss.”
“Do you think it matters that he won’t tell Derek and Angel?” I was absentmindedly staring out of my window and into the same room Blaise would later be sitting in, just so he could spend the night talking to me. He could just as easily be calling me from his cell phone while in the comforts of his own home, one that wasn’t crowded with one bad memory after the next, but instead he was choosing to be here. With me. The way he had been before.
“Do I think it matters that Blaise hasn’t been open about his struggles with booze, etc.? I did…and I probably will again when we hit the road and temptation tags along like its annoying unshakeable younger sibling, but for now, no I don’t think it does. He’s recovering. He’s being proactive about it. And honestly, I think it’s something he’ll have to do in his own time. He’s not there yet. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t getting better. He is Ava. Everyone is noticing. Derek and Angel think it’s just because of the love bubble, but I know it’s more. And so do you.”
Royce had unknowingly raised another question for me. “So, Derek and Angel aren’t wondering where I’ve been all this time?” Shit. I was starting to wonder where I’d been all this time.
“Blaise just told them you had some personal business and you’d be back as soon as you could. Said Francis would handle things until you came back”
Well that was an interesting spin on things. “Are you telling me, he completely ignored the fact that I quit?”
“Obviously.”
Apparently if I wanted to be outraged, I’d be that way alone. Which made it hardly worth the uproar. “A little presumptuous, but whatever.”
“Get off it, Ava. I mean, I’d be all for you finding yourself, but I’ve never really gotten the impression that you were all that lost.” I could hear a car door open and close. He must have just gotten to the studio.
“Well, I sure as shit lost something along the way.”
“Yeah. Blaise.” The car lock beeped.
It was all so blatantly obvious the second he said it. Of course it was Blaise I’d lost. And now that I’d had him back, he was precisely the reason I hadn’t been able to make myself leave again. I wasn’t ready give up the comfort of having the boy next door, right next door. All this time I thought it had been about my mother. My relationship with her. Her drinking. How I had failed her. Had fail
ed Blaise. And how I’d been so busy trying to save both of them, I’d never spent enough time saving myself.
Except I’d already known that was bullshit and I’d told Blaise as much. If anything, watching my mother’s inexplicable surrender to her circumstances and the loss of her desire to do more than simply exist in a world post my father had fueled my need to fill my life with something big enough to sustain me, so no man could ever devastate me to the point of giving up.
Which naturally had backfired in some ways, leaving me to favor my job over any man I even attempted to date. Not that harboring a secret love for Blaise had helped matters any in that department.
There really was no logical reason for why I hadn’t returned to work yet and why I was insisting on staying in my mother’s house other than that I was afraid to rock the ‘Blaise Boat’. I wasn’t prepared to lose my best friend again. And so I’d insisted on waiting for him to do the one thing he wasn’t ready to do, thereby ensuring that I could stay right where I was. Stuck. But content. It was stupid.
“Having a moment are you?” Royce was chuckling on his end of the line.
“Yeah, you could say that.” I practically threw myself onto my bed, deflated by this new revelation. “How long have you been sitting on this little nugget of wisdom Royce and why have you been holding out on me?”
“Um...since you ran back home and because you weren’t ready.”
I frowned. “How would you know if I was ready or not?”
“You haven’t called me. You clearly weren’t ready.” He had a point. I had strategically avoided talking to him. Like on some level I’d known all along that he would say things that would make me uncomfortable in one way or another.
“You’re annoyingly smart, you know that? I’m feeling very compelled to call you Baby Einstein right now.”
“I’d really rather you didn’t. Anyway. How are you going to tell Blaise you’re coming back? Will there be a big gesture? A romantic surprise? A standard Blaise and Ava screaming match? What?”
I hadn’t even thought that far. But Royce was right. There was nothing in my way but me. I could have everything I wanted. I just had to decide on how.
“I’ll tell you as soon as I figure it out.”
***
I’d been in the studio for at least an hour before anyone else showed up, busy working on a new song. Slowly but surely, everyone else had arrived with Royce strolling in last, wearing an oddly contented expression when he came through the door. Things only got weirder when I caught his gaze and he gave me a little nod, like we were exchanging some sort of secret message or something, only I didn’t have a fucking clue what that might be.
We worked straight through the morning until lunch, which we ordered in to keep on top of our tight schedule. It was Sushi Tuesday.
Out of habit, Derek kept the TV on for background noise while we ate. Life while recording an album could become strangely isolated and he’d determined at some point that keeping the news on was in some small way a reminder that we were still part of a big world, full of people waiting just outside the studio doors. Not that the news always made it that enticing to want to go out and be a part of it. Today was no different. Breaking news was flashing across the screen non-stop, along with that eye catching graphic depicting chalk outlines and crime scene tape. You know, the kind that’s code for murder for those people who keep their television’s on mute. Wouldn’t have wanted them to miss out on the fact that there was another killer on the loose.
Royce and I were arguing over the last packet of soy sauce when I heard Angel.
“What the fuuuck?”
Everyone’s heads turned toward the television simultaneously.
“What?” I said it just as I saw it.
“Dude, it’s your fucking brother.” Derek had seen it too.
It was there clear as day. His picture and name all tagged with the headline ‘Suspect’.
“Turn it up!” I ran at the TV as if I could somehow jump inside of it and confront the newscaster in person.
“…was the suspect’s girlfriend. The two were believed to have been sharing the apartment for quite some time. Neighbors became alerted when the suspect seemed erratic in his behavior and began coming and going at odd hours of the day and night. When asked about the victim’s whereabouts, he had reacted aggressively, going so far as to threaten to kill his neighbor’s dog. At this time, the suspect’s whereabouts are unknown. We ask that anyone with any information please come forward. The police are instructing everyone to please refrain from approaching the suspect. At this time he has been deemed wildly unstable and dangerous.”
“This can’t be fucking happening.” I couldn’t believe it. It had to be wrong. Only the gut wrenching pain at the pit of my stomach had already confirmed that it wasn’t. “I just saw him a week ago. He was at the house. Ava saw him, too. From the looks of it, he’s been coming and going pretty frequently.” I scrambled for my phone. Ava never watched the news. She fucking hated it. There was no way she’d know. And if Linus was next door, she had to know.
“Pick up, Ava. Pick up!” Muttering into my phone landed me zero results. Panic was rising up within me. Not because I thought my brother was a violent killer on a mission to take out as many innocent people as possible, but because I knew the instant I’d tied the headlines to my brother’s name that he had snapped. Not from the trauma of our past, but from the illness passed down to him from our mother.
I was already out in the hall. I mumbled something about getting to Ava and kept running. I wasn’t moving nearly fast enough. It was like one of those dreams, those agonizing nightmares where everything occurred in slow motion while the intensity of knowing time was of the utmost importance ran through you. I told myself Ava was safe. She was over at her mother’s house. She didn’t even know. She wouldn’t know. Not until I found her and told her.
That was my fantasy. Only I couldn’t even fucking sell myself on it because the only image flashing in my mind was of my mother slashing away at the goddamned rose bush and Ava coming out to tame the demon for her. My mother had been harmless. Clearly, the greatest threat she ever posed was to herself, but look at what she’d done to her mark. She’d killed her.
Chapter 21
I was standing in the kitchen staring out at our driveway through the window. What little I had accumulated during my stay here was already packed and ready. I was simply waiting for my mother to come home from her job so I could thank her for everything and hit the road. If she got here sooner rather than later, I could probably get to Blaise’s place before him.
I checked the time again. It was already getting close to three. What was the deal? She was supposed to get out early on Tuesdays.
I was about to go dig my phone back out of my bag when I spotted him. Linus. He was running around the house, frantically pulling the curtains shut.
“Shit.” I’d seen that kind of mania before. Part of me had always wondered if it was hereditary, but when both boys grew into men, I thought they’d dodged the bullet. Even after seeing Linus the other day I had held out a smidgen of hope that he was simply having a bad day. That he was just stressed. Or tired. Apparently, that hadn’t been the case.
I stood there, tapping my fingers on the counter for a minute, remembering the state Blaise’s mother had been in that day. Even as a kid I’d understood how scared she was of that fucking plant. I hadn’t understood why, but I’d certainly grasped that it was real for her. The fear had consumed her whole. If Linus was going through the same thing, there was no way I could just let him suffer through it. Not when I knew no one would be showing up to help him anytime soon.
Without giving it another thought, I grabbed the spare key to the Nolan house off of the hook by the door and made my way over to see Linus, just like I’d promised Blaise I would.
Given that his mental state was probably somewhat shrouded and confused at that point, I bypassed knocking and let myself in. Not wanting to startle him, I quiet
ly moved around the house. I remembered vividly how engulfed their mother had been with whatever hallucination had been terrifying her. She hadn’t even been aware of my presence until I stepped in to help her slay the dragon. I just sort of assumed things would be the same with Linus. I was wrong.
“How did you get in?” His voice was so dark I hardly recognized it.
“I have a key, remember? I saw you were here and wanted to say ‘hey’. Were you able to secure that barrier you were working on the other day?”
His pupils were huge, making his eyes appear to be pitch black holes. He was sweating profusely, droplets forming on his scalp and gliding down the strands of his brown hair, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Did they send you?”
I shook my head slowly. “No Linus. Of course not.”
“You’re lying!” he shouted.
This was definitely different from the rose bush. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it just felt that way because in this scenario I was the rose bush.
“Linus. You’ve known me your whole life. I wouldn’t lie to you. And they didn’t send me. Couldn’t have even if they wanted to. I would never help them find you. Ever.” Not that I had a fucking clue who ‘they’ were. But it was pretty clear it was in my best interest not to be associated with them.
His black eyes were boring into me with a hatred I’d never felt from him before. It chilled me to my core.
“That’s what they would say. They got you. They got her, too. Thought they could use her to get to me. But they were wrong.” He ran his hand through his slick hair, smoothing it back. Then he wiped it on his shirt. My eyes followed the motions automatically. That’s when I saw it. Blood. He had smears of it all down the side of his sleeve and more down on his pant legs.
“Linus, what did you do?” It was barely a breath. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud at all. It had just slipped out.
“I’ll show you.” He came barreling at me. I didn’t move. Capture would be inevitable and engaging would only result in more violence. My best bet was to stay calm and find some way to prove that I wasn’t a part of whatever conspiracy was out to get him.
Lost Avalon: A Finding Nolan Novel Page 16