The Year of the Great Seventh

by Orts, Teresa

  “You believed someone else knew about what was happening to you, didn’t you? That’s why you told me to not open the door to anyone.”

  Nate took a deep breath and spoke, looking out onto the street. “After I booked our flights, I got a call from the airline saying someone had called that morning requesting our flight details. I knew someone was tracking our moves, but I never suspected Preston.” Nate glanced at me over his shoulder. “I should’ve known. I broke my promise. I told you I’d always protect you.”

  “You didn’t break any promise. You protected me,” I said quickly, before he decided all of this was his fault.

  “We’re not safe here. He may come back.” Nate turned around, seemingly worried. “We’ll move to another hotel. Get your stuff.”

  “Let me clean up the cut on your lip first. It’s still bleeding.” I went into the bathroom and soaked a cotton ball in water.

  When I went back into the bedroom, Nate was drying the blood on his lip with his shirt. He was staring down the street vigilantly, as though he suspected Preston could be on his way back.

  But unless Nate had bionic sight, it was impossible to tell people apart from this high up.

  “Sit here.” I pointed at the sofa.

  Nate sat, tilting his head and resting it on the back.

  Bending over him, I tried to press the cotton ball on Nate’s lip, but as he was sitting and I was standing in front of him, I couldn’t really reach his lip comfortably.

  “You can…,” Nate said, tapping on his thighs.

  If I didn’t misunderstand, Nate was suggesting I sit on his lap facing him so I could reach his lip more easily. The maneuver was technically for first-aid purposes, but the thought of being so close together made my heart contract.

  Nate kept his eyes closed as if trying to make the situation more comfortable. The street lights illuminated his face, making me aware that it was beautiful Nate right in front of me. In the dim light, the intense emotions that he brought out of me flashed through my mind at the speed of sound.

  Carefully, I sat on his lap facing him and brushed the cotton ball on his lip with my shaking hand.

  “It burns,” Nate complained with his eyes shut.

  “You’re a tough guy. I’m sure you can bear it.” I joked.

  Nate’s mouth lifted into a smile.

  Why did he have to do this to me? Why did he captivate me so easily? All it took was one of his bad-boy smiles to make me lose any control over myself.

  His legs felt strong and robust. His shirt was open, as the buttons had ripped off during the fight. His torso was covered by the stain and I could sense the strange heat that emanated from it. The defined muscles that interlocked over his stomach were still clearly visible under the gray stain.

  I couldn’t get hold of myself. I had to bring back rational Sophie. The one who would never dare cross the line to the forbidden side, because as things stood, this bracelet may not protect us from our sins.

  I wanted to think of grades and exams and behaving myself, but each time I stroked the cotton ball on his cut, I only became more aware that our lips were only inches apart.

  As if Nate had been listening to every one of my thoughts, he opened his eyes, locking his gaze on mine. The city lights enhanced the perfect angles of his face, his deep, dark eyes, his full lips.

  He had the exact same effect on me as that first day I saw him. His power, his confidence, his caring ways just took hold of me.

  Nate leaned closer to me, and slowly, enjoying the ever diminishing distance between us, our lips met.

  In the deep part of my subconscious someone was telling me to move away, but every part of my body wanted to keep going. The chemistry that we’d been repressing for so long propelled into the air at once. I knew there was no way back. I was under his spell.

  Nate caught me unprepared when he began to move forward, inviting me to lie on the sofa. His lips traveled along my neck as I shifted to rest on my back.

  Nate seemed to have succumbed to what his body had been yearning for so long. He was lost in the madness of his constant fight with desire and closer to defeat than he’d ever been.

  Nate was now lying on top of me. He stroked my hair tenderly as if I was his most precious treasure. Each kiss was more passionate than the last.

  Sirens echoed in the background, the snowflakes gravitated outside the huge glass windows, and the glittering skyline made it difficult to believe this was happening for real.

  Nate looked deep into my eyes, as if he couldn’t believe it, either.

  The intensity of feeling his body pressed against mine was indefinable. A bewitching peace trapped me and invited me to fall deeper into a spiral of non-return.

  Nate started unbuttoning my blouse as his lips ran along my neck.

  Driven by the urge of the moment, he kicked the lamp on the coffee table, catapulting it onto the floor—but he was so immersed in possessing every part of me that he hadn’t seemed to notice.

  The power I had over Nate was even surprising to me. I couldn’t have imagined, not in a million years, that I could persuade Nate into crossing this line. Especially this one, where it could lead to a fatal end.

  I knew this is what Nate feared all along. The Syenite stone protected me from who he was becoming, but taunting the devil from this proximity had no guarantee.

  As he took off my blouse, I realized his eyes were slowly turning white, the veins on his face were swelling at an incredible speed, and his jaw was expanding.

  But I didn’t care. I wanted him to make me his. It was too late. We’d already made the vital decision.

  After each kiss, Nate pressed his body harder against mine, forgetting I was fragile, finite, and that the weight of his body alone could break me into irreparable pieces.

  Nate was shivering and his eyes were lost in the infinite, making the crucial decision of taking me with him to his unspeakable world.

  I knew he would have never allowed this, but now I realized that this evening, I was the one who’d caught him under my spell.

  I didn’t know whether it was Nate or the other one possessing every part of me, but whoever it was had won my soul over a million times. That glorious sense lulled me into the numbness of infinity.

  Nate leaned back, resting his weight on his knees, and without ceasing to kiss me, he proceeded to take off his shirt. Now, half his body was bare; he was only wearing his jeans.

  I knew I could’ve tried to escape, but my soul had already decided to give in to the eternal energy that was filling each part of my body. This was probably the beginning and the end, all at once, decided with the toss of dice.

  His hands were now on my neck as he kissed me again. He was beginning to press me a little too hard and I started to have trouble breathing, but I didn’t try to fight him off. Every piece of me was doomed to follow him wherever he took me.

  Nate leaned back to unbutton his jeans with one hand while the other one was still on my neck. Suddenly, his gaze remained fixed on my neck and after blinking strangely, quickly, he yanked himself away from me.

  Sprinting to his feet, he let the words come out in gasps. “I need to get out of here.”

  Then he darted out of the room, smashing the door shut behind him.

  No words spoken—no promises broken.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE NEW HOTEL HADN’T exactly been an upgrade. We were now staying at a motel on the corner of East 119th and First Avenue right in the middle of Spanish Harlem.

  Nate thought it was unlikely that Preston would look for us here, and I totally agreed with him. No teenagers in their right mind would stay at a place like this.

  Nate had left several threatening messages to Preston during the taxi ride to the hotel, telling him if he ever got close to me again, he was going to regret it. He also ordered Preston to tell him what he knew about the Syenite stone and why he wanted my bracelet.

  The situation between Nate and me had become extremely awkward. We hadn’t
spoken about it, and Nate was just acting as if nothing happened at all. He hadn’t said a word to me the entire trip, and every time I tried to bring up what happened between us, he just replied with one-word answers.

  It wasn’t only his silence that was nerve-wracking. On top of that, Nate was acting cold toward me. Our hands accidentally brushed while we were getting out of the taxi and he’d quickly moved his hand away.

  I’d always heard women were supposed to be more enigmatic than men, but Nate’s complexity was just overwhelming. I never knew how he felt or what was in his mind. It was really anyone’s guess.

  After checking into two different rooms, Nate claimed he was tired and wanted to rest. Not wanting to confront him at this time of night, I accepted defeat and retreated to my room. I knew there was no time to waste. I could see what was happening to Nate.

  The room was musty and smelled like old carpet. This was about the smallest room I’d ever seen. There was only a single bed, which literally touched three walls. A tiny window on top of the bed let artificial light in from the corridor. The walls hadn’t had a coat of paint in years. The bare bed was covered with a red-and-green striped blanket.

  We’d fled the last hotel in a rush in the middle of the night. Nate had come back to my room and said we should get out in case Preston came back.

  I had time only to ball up my clothes and stuff them in my suitcase. I dumped the bag on my new bed.

  For a second, I wished I could talk to Megan and Emma about what happened with Nate. I felt so lonely.

  I knew Nate was just on the other side of the wall, but I felt so distant from him. That taxi ride felt like an eternity. It was as if we were two strangers sharing a ride. Nate was alienating me, and he was breaking my heart by doing so.

  I stuffed my suitcase in the only space available, behind the door, so I could sit down on the bed. I pulled out my folder with the prophecy from the Ceasareum and the copy of the four crab symbols.

  Taking my shoes off and crossing my legs, I sat in the middle of the bed with the pieces of paper aligned in front of me. I was emotionally exhausted, but I wasn’t planning to give up on Nate yet. I wasn’t going to move from here until I understood what those symbols meant and how they related to Cleopatra. I stared at the pieces of paper for about an hour, but my eyes were closing. I couldn’t think straight. I was too tired.

  I wanted to focus on my research, but I couldn’t stop playing in my mind the images of Nate kissing me and unbuttoning my blouse on the sofa. It was almost as though I could relive the moment over and over. I missed his touch, his lips, his presence. What happened to him? Why was he pretending it didn’t happen? Why was he refusing to even acknowledge it? Why had he run away? After all, it was my decision, too.

  The truth was Nate had expressed his wish of wanting to wait.

  Still I ignored his words and let myself go.

  I wanted to think that right now he would be replaying in his mind each moment as I was, but that probably wasn’t the case. It was more likely he was regretting having let himself get carried away by his instincts.

  *

  The light that filtered through the window woke me up. I must’ve fallen asleep lying on top of the papers that I’d spread on the bed the previous night. It was already noon! Why hadn’t Nate woken me up? Was he still sleeping too?

  When I saw all the papers wrinkled on top of the bed, I remembered I hadn’t made any progress the previous night. Probably, the best option was to go back to the Met’s Egyptian exhibition now that we knew what the crab symbols were. And maybe I could get Nate to talk about what had happened the previous night.

  There was no phone in the room. I tried dialing Nate from my cell, but his phone was off.

  After brushing my hair, I put on a pair of jeans and a hoodie and went over to his room. I knocked on his door and waited, but there was no reply. My instincts told me Nate was in there and he was avoiding me. I knew he wouldn’t leave me alone in the middle of Spanish Harlem.

  I knocked again, frustrated with his attitude. “Hey, I know you’re in there.” I was beginning to lose my patience, although I suspected maybe he didn’t want to see me.

  The silence stretched, making me think maybe he’d really gone out.

  “Sophie, I… I want to stay in today,” Nate mumbled from the other side of the door with an irritating tone of indifference. I didn’t have a clue what game he was playing.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I… I… I just need a bit of time on my own.” He tried to explain as if this was something normal. “Why don’t you take the day to visit the city?”

  I was furious now. He was treating me like I was some random girl he met the night before.

  “Okay, but open the door. I want to see you before I go,” I insisted, trying to hide the anger in my voice.

  “I’m… I’m still in bed. We’ll catch up this evening.”

  He didn’t seem to care that I’d be wandering around the city on my own, that Preston was out there somewhere. I could feel my blood boiling. Why was he doing this to me? Why now? We certainly didn’t have time for silly games. I needed him to stop this.

  After taking a few seconds to calm myself down, I decided to just give in to his nonsense. “I don’t believe you, but it’s okay. If you need time on your own, I guess I’ll go.”

  That didn’t really change how angry I was. I guess I knew how to look after myself, and I didn’t need him as my permanent bodyguard. Or, at least, that’s what I wanted to think.

  Without steaming over it further, I went to my room, grabbed my warm gear, and fled. Before walking out onto the street, I decided to recount the money I had left while I was still in the warm hotel lobby.

  I had only forty dollars in cash. The most sensible option was to take the bus. I couldn’t afford a taxi and it was way too cold to walk. The icy wind slapped me in the face the moment I pushed open the lobby door.

  I pulled down my wool hat to cover my ears and stuffed my hands—already protected by gloves—inside my jacket pockets. The cold in December was utterly unbearable.

  Christmas lights hung from the fire exit of the apartment block across from the motel. There was a Christmas tree by a window on the second floor. The lights all blurred together into one. I wiped the tears out of my eyes. It wasn’t just that Christmas was around the corner and I was stranded in New York with Nate, who, on top of everything that had happened, was now refusing to talk to me. It was also that the Christmas season reminded me of my birthday. Every year, for the last sixteen, I celebrated with Mom and Dad. And this year was the first one I was going to be on my own.

  Nate had no clue I was turning seventeen tomorrow, and I wasn’t planning to tell him. I hadn’t told him before because I didn’t want us to waste any time with celebrations while we were here. Anyway, thinking about how he was behaving today, I don’t know that it would have made any difference.

  The street was covered with snow from the previous night. It wasn’t the beautiful, immaculate white snow that appears on postcards. The sidewalk had been cleared, and the snow piled up next to the road was melting and gray. The sky was darker gray, making me wonder whether I was ever going to see the sun. There was a bus stop right across from the motel, but the traffic was heading north.

  Assuming that the traffic direction probably alternated between avenues, I realized that I had to get to Second Avenue. Crossing the street should normally be an easy task. After so much snow, however, it became almost impossible. Every intersection was a puddle of slush. I had no choice but to step back and get some momentum to jump over the pool of freezing water, knowing that my foot could land in it. Skipping over puddles of water and ice, I managed to get to Second Avenue.

  While I was waiting at the bus stop, I thought my feet were going to freeze. I could feel the cold pavement through the soles of my wet sneakers. Thankfully, the jacket was warm enough, but my mobility inside it was limited and I felt like a stuffed sausage.

 
It occurred to me that I took the weather in L.A. for granted. Being able to spend your Christmas holidays by the beach was priceless.

  As I scuffed my feet together and looked at the ground, I was aware of other people at the bus stop openly staring at me. Continuing to avoid eye contact, I came up with several hypotheses.

  The first was that I was way overdressed compared to everyone else. Now that I thought of it, my attire was more like that of a skier than a New Yorker. The second was that everyone else in the bus stop was African-American or Latino. I was about the palest person you could see on the entire block. The last hypothesis was that I was so scared and lost that people could smell it.

  I climbed on the bus and it careened past the Metropolitan for twenty blocks, schooling me in New York 101. In this city, there are two types of buses, local and limited ones; the second type only stopped at some stops.

  Once I managed to get off at the corner of Central Park South, I had to take another bus going up Madison Avenue to 81st Street. By the time I arrived at the Met, it was past 2:30 p.m., and I was going to need to have my toes amputated. This was proof that I had a long way to go before I could call myself a New Yorker.

  Being back at the museum felt like déjà vu. This was my second time in only a couple of days. As I already knew the drill, I found a map and located the parts I wanted to visit. Today, I conducted a more thorough investigation, as I had three full hours to visit the museum.

  Last time we had only visited the Egyptian Art wing, but today I also wanted to check out the Greek and Roman art. Especially Roman art from around 69 BC to 30 BC—the years Cleopatra had been alive. I wanted to see if any other pieces of art from that period—jewelry, paintings, furniture, or sculptures—had the same symbols as the crabs from the obelisk.

  There were several terracotta sculptures and jars on display in the Roman Art Pavilion. Also on display were cases with pieces of jewelry, vases, and bowls. The walls were covered with paintings.

  The museum was quiet. There were only a couple tourists looking around the room and a guard standing by the entrance. Most people had probably decided to stay in after the snowstorm. Also, it was already toward the end of the day at the museum.