by Keary Taylor
“Oh yeah?” he said as he leaned in toward me, his arms folding on the table. “And does this guy know about the angels?”
“He does,” I said, never letting my stare back into his face waver. I wasn’t going to let Jason hurt me again. I’d gotten over him long ago.
“And just how serious is this relationship?”
“It doesn’t get much more serious.”
“Then why don’t you have a ring on your finger, Jessica? What’s holding him back?”
I felt like my insides had finally cracked and I became hollow inside. My eyes fell to the table once again, unable to take the cruel look that was building in his eyes.
“You see, Jessica. No one is ever going to be able to handle you. Your family couldn’t. I couldn’t. This guy eventually won’t be able to. As long as there are ‘angels’ in your life, you’re going to be alone.”
My breathing sped up and black spots formed on my peripheral vision. And suddenly a familiar tingling started on the back of my neck. “Why are you taking this from him?” the words resonated from a place inside of me.
My fists clenched all the harder and my blood boiled. “You’re wrong,” I finally said. “I don’t have to explain anything to you, about who he is, what he’s done for me, what I’ve been through since you hurt me so badly I had to nearly flee the country. But you’re wrong.”
“Am I?” he asked with a cold smile.
I sat back in my seat, staring him in the eye. As I did, a strange expression came over his face. The calculating smile was replaced by a look of confusion, almost fear. But my blood was still boiling. “How did I ever waste any of my time on you?” I said coldly, shaking my head slowly.
Jason’s eyes whipped around, looking for something I didn’t see. When his eyes fell back on me, they were wide with unease.
“I have to go,” he said, his eyes twitching from side to side again.
“Please do,” I said, watching as he rushed out the doors. As he fled, I felt my brand prickle just slightly once more before a warm breeze washed it away.
It took several long minutes for me to collect myself enough to get up. As I headed towards the doors Jason had run through, I caught a glimpse of a set of dark eyes watching me before they disappeared. An all too familiar chill worked its way up my spine.
I spent the rest of the day trying to pretend the conversation with Jason had never happened, trying to pretend I hadn’t felt my brand act up. It hadn’t acted up since I had nearly died. I wasn’t going to acknowledge that it was telling me something. So I pushed it all away and blew way too much money on things I didn’t need.
Alex walked back through the doors of the house looking worn down but satisfied. “Crisis taken care of,” he said as he wrapped his arms around me as we stood on the balcony.
“I’m glad,” I said, feeling distracted as I looked out over the water, my cheek pressed into Alex’s chest.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, his lips brushing the top of my head as he spoke into my hair.
I shook my head and pressed my lips tight together. “I just missed you.”
“Come on,” he said as he pulled me back inside. “Get changed. You’ve got to come try out the water!”
“You mean swimming in the ocean?” I asked, fear peaking my voice.
“Of course,” he said as we stepped into his room. “You can’t come to Laguna Beach and not go in the ocean.”
“You know I can’t wear a swimming suit,” I said as I froze in the doorway.
Alex had just pulled off his shirt but froze and turned around to face me. The evidence of why I couldn’t wear some skimpy bikini was evident on his own back. I saw emotions clashing in his eyes as he was brought back to our reality. Again I felt a pang of guilt for ruining his life.
“Never mind,” I quickly recovered. “I’ll just wear my tank top over it.” That brought his smile back.
We didn’t actually swim much. After a few minutes in the water we ended up on the beach as the light was fading in the sky, turning it a brilliant pink. I lay on my back in the sand, Alex propped up on one elbow looking down at me. The back of his hand traced down my jawline, creating tingling sensations. He dipped his head down and pressed his lips softly to mine. He shifted his weight, pulling his body on top of mine. One hand circled around my waist, pulling me as close to him as possible.
My head spun as Alex’s lips trailed to my throat, his hand sliding over my stomach. Before I knew what was happening next, I was scooped into his arms and we were tumbling through the door and into the massive shower in the master bathroom.
I screamed and giggled as the icy water pounded my skin. My back met the tiled shower wall as the water slowly turned warm, Alex pressing tighter against me.
His hands came to my stomach again, sliding under the tank top I wore. As our lips moved together he slid it slowly up until it came over my head and fell to the floor with a slop.
My hands wrapped around Alex’s shoulders, sliding over his ridged muscles, trailing down his back. My fingers brushed over the heavy scars there, my insides doing strange quivers.
In one fluid movement Alex hoisted me up and my legs wrapped around his waist. His fingers were just drifting to the clasp of my top when he froze, his entire frame coming to a standstill.
“What am I doing?” he said with a raged breath, placing a hand on the shower wall, his forehead resting against mine.
“Not as much as I want you to be doing,” I moaned, at the same time disentangling myself from Alex. He chuckled, bringing his hands up to either side of my face, and biting his lower lip.
“I’d better be careful or I’ll be earning my own brand in a second,” he said. I tried to give a return chuckle, even though I didn’t find any part of that statement funny. He pressed a quick kiss to my lips and took a step away. “Um, did you bring any concealer with you?” he said sheepishly, his finger touching the side of my neck.
“What were you trying to do?” I teased as I brought a hand to my neck to cover the mark that was apparently already blooming.
He merely gave a shrug with a wry smile and stepped out of the shower. He grabbed both of us a towel and we went back to his room.
After grabbing my clothes I took an actual shower, a really cold one, and grabbed a drink while Alex showered after me. I lay on his bed, picking a piece of paper I saw sticking out of the end of Alex’s bag. It was actually a picture.
It was taken the night on the yacht, down in Seattle. The night Cole had kidnapped me. It had been snapped just fifteen minutes or so before Cole had let me know he was there, even though he was invisible.
A reflection of the light brought my eye to my left wrist, the one that was encircled by the bracelet Alex had given me at Valentines. The one I never took off, except to shower. My gaze drifted up to my fingers. There should have been another piece of jewelry there from Alex. The one I had waited every day to receive for the last four months.
Alex walked back into the room, only a towel wrapped around his waist.
“Hey now. I thought we had established that we were being good,” he said slyly as he walked to his bag and pulled out some clothes.
“Oh, I’m not trying to temp you into bed with me. Yet,” I added as I gave him a half smile.
“Close your eyes for a second,” he said as he unfolded a pair of pants. I did as he said and less than two seconds later he told me to open them. He stood there in just a pair of jeans, his beautiful and perfect chest still exposed.
“Come here,” I said with a smile and ushered him toward me with a finger.
A sly look crossed his face as he walked slowly across the room to the bed. He lay next to me and briefly pressed a kiss to my lips. He then took the picture from me and studied it.
“You looked so amazing that night,” he reminisced as he stared at it. “It’s too bad Cole had to come and ruin it,” he joked.
“Yeah, too bad,” I only half joked back. I studied Alex’s face as he continued to l
ook at the picture. “Cole told me you were going to ask me a question that night,” I suddenly blurted. As I did, I felt Alex instantly stiffen. “Was he telling the truth?” I knew Alex knew exactly what I was talking about.
Again Alex was quiet for a long moment. I felt him relax a bit and he wrapped his arms around me, giving me a light squeeze. “Yes, he was telling the truth.”
The tension I was feeling inside threatened to cause me to spontaneously combust as Alex didn’t say anything more after that. “And now…?” I barely managed to whisper.
“Now…” his voice was very quiet but he kept his embrace tight and secure around me. “Everything has changed now.”
I felt my heart sink as I heard his words and I suddenly felt like I might vomit. I think I might have even felt worse in that moment than I had when I had been sick and dying just a few months before. “Oh,” was all I managed to get out in a hoarse whisper.
“Oh, no, Jessica,” Alex’s voice sounded panicked as he pulled me tighter into his chest. My emotions whiplashed as I realized with relief that I had misunderstood him. “That will never change. My feelings for you will never change. They seem to grow more intense by the day. There are days I worry they just might overcome me. I promise you that I will love you for forever and even longer than that. Don’t ever, ever question that.”
“But…” I said, feeling slightly comforted but not understanding what the problem was.
“But, as I said, everything has changed. I’m dead, Jessica. I know you don’t like it when I say that but it’s true. I’m not even human anymore. It’s painfully obvious in pretty much every aspect of my life. I have no idea what is going to happen in my future.”
“But the council, they said you could stay with me,” I said, suddenly feeling panicky and oddly uncertain. I had never questioned the council of angel’s graciousness to let Alex return to me but my head was suddenly filled with doubt. It had been a very gracious move. I knew what most angels were like. They weren’t the kind and giving beings most people believed them to be.
“I can’t be certain about anything anymore,” Alex said in a whisper as he released me and lay back on his back, staring blankly up at the ceiling.
I didn’t like the fear, no, the terror, that was suddenly ripping through my body. My hands started shaking and my stomach was in knots. I propped myself up on an elbow and took Alex’s jaw in my other hand, forcing him to look at me.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said in a low but firm and steady voice. “I won’t let them take you from me. If you have to go back, I’m going with you.”
Alex’s eyes hardened just slightly at this as he looked back into my eyes. “Don’t say that. You’re going to be walking this Earth for a long time. I made sure of that.”
“This Earth isn’t worth walking if you’re not on it anymore,” I said, feeling a loose tear fall from my lashes onto my cheek.
Alex pulled me into his chest again, pressing his lips into my temple.
“Please,” I cried softly. “I’ve thought about this every day since Cole told me. It tortures me, feeling the anticipation and the anxiety that you never will actually ask it. I don’t care about everything else, all the other complications. You’re exactly what I want, exactly as you are.”
He absentmindedly ran a hand down my hair, pausing briefly on the back of my neck where he knew the branded X was. “I can’t make any promises or guarantees right now, Jessica, other than that I love you more than I can possibly tell you.”
Despite his words, my insides finally crumbled and I hollowed out.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALEX
I coughed as a cloud of years and year’s worth of dust billowed around me. I was thankful this was the last of the carpet as I carried it out and threw it onto the flatbed trailer I had rented. It was a good thing I didn’t need to breathe or I would probably be getting very sick. If I could still get sick that was. Who knew what kind of stuff was living or had lived in the thirty-year-old carpet.
The blank walls stared back at me as I walked inside and I felt an odd sense of excitement. I was enjoying myself a lot more than I ever would have expected. I’d patched all the walls since Jessica and I had gotten home. Now with the old carpet removed I was ready to move onto the next phase of the remodel.
My mind wandered as I applied gallon after gallon of paint to the walls. It had been a mistake to go down to California. It had changed everything.
I felt completely torn, now knowing that Jessica knew I had planned on proposing. I was relieved that she knew. She should never doubt how much I loved her. And yet it made me sick that she did know. She would always think about what was supposed to happen but now never could.
Jessica would hardly talk anymore. She moved about her daily activities. She still went to work, still attended Emily’s yoga class, still checked in on Sal. But she wasn’t there. She’d checked out and I didn’t know where she had gone to. But I knew I was the one who had sent her there.
I thought back, to where this had really all began. It was amazing how astronomically your life could change in just one day. It had come crashing down the day I had gotten the phone call while I was in Africa. The two most important people in the world to me were dead, their lives gone out in just a blink of an eye.
There had been hundreds of faces at the funeral. Endless faces came up to me and gave their condolences. Some I knew, and yet I couldn’t specify a single person who had been there. They had all been a blur. And all I could think about was how I was finally alone. A true orphan. My mother had abandoned me as an infant, my father long dead, and now my grandparents were gone too.
I couldn’t stay in that house. I saw them all everywhere. My grandfather sitting at his desk, my grandmother in the laundry room. My dad laughing from his bed. The lake had called to me.
And then I met this crazy girl on the stairs. I’d actually been a little worried she really was going to hit me with the baseball bat.
There was something about Jessica, even from that very first moment. She was so different from anyone I had ever met. I wanted to be with her constantly but didn’t want to come off as a creep. And then I heard her scream that night.
She told me about the nightmares, about angels.
I had been filled with such conflicting thoughts after I left the next day to go back to California. I couldn’t really believe the things she had said. What she had told me was impossible, or so I thought. It sounded crazy. Angels and nightmares, and about them being more than that. I hated to admit it but I had thought she really might have been crazy. Those kinds of things didn’t exist; angels weren’t real, despite how convinced she seemed otherwise.
But I also knew I was starting to develop these intense feelings for her. I wanted her company again. I needed to see her, to make sure she was okay. I wanted to protect her. From what, I wasn’t really sure.
After I had come home and found out what had happened to Sal, the scale had been tipped. I couldn’t help it, seeing her so broken and open. I still wasn’t sure what to think about the whole angel/nightmare situation but I knew my life would never be the same again without Jessica. When she showed me her scars I knew I would never love another person as much as I loved her. I knew the amount of trust and faith it had taken for Jessica to tell me the things she had, and even more so to show me the things she did. I was forever hers from that moment.
I also knew then that everything she had told me wasn’t crazy. It was all real.
I loved her more than I could imagine it was possible for someone to love another. And now I was hurting her. It was killing me.
I had just hammered the lid back on a can of paint when my cell phone rang. I wiped the drips of paint off my hands onto my work pants and pulled it out of my pocket.
“Hey, beautiful,” I said.
“Hey,” she said. The voice of a dead person. “I was going to stop at the store after work and grab a few things but my wallet isn’t in my purse. Would you che
ck and see if it fell out in the truck?”
“Yeah, hang on a second,” I said as I stepped outside. “It’s here. Do you want me to bring it over? Maybe I could take you to an early dinner when you get off?”
“Uh, I’m not really hungry right now.”
“Maybe some ice cream?” I hated how desperate I felt.
“Sure,” she answered with a hint of a sigh.
“Okay, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Exactly twenty minutes later I pulled the truck into the bookstore and walked inside. I looked around for her but only saw Austin working.
“Is Jessica still here?” I asked.
“She’s in with Rita. They’re talking about trying to get some author to do a signing,” Austin said as he walked around the counter and leaned against it, his arms folded across his chest. He looked at me with a faintly arrogant look, though his eyes were hard and cold.
“Oh, okay. I’ll just wait for her,” I said as I leaned against a table and mirrored his stance. He just stood there and stared back at me.
I couldn’t take the way-beyond-awkward silence for long. “So you and Jessica work together a lot now?” I blurted out. I had a bad habit of babbling when I felt uncomfortable.
“Most days,” he said as he chewed on the inside of his cheek.
The uncomfortable silence stretched on again for a few minutes.
“Jessica’s been different lately,” he said as his eyes hardened even further.
“Oh yeah?” I said, my eyes finally dropping away from his. Austin – 1, Alex – 0. “How so?” I didn’t see how letting on that I knew things were off would help.
“She’s been kind of depressed.”
I just gave a little nod as I kept my eyes glued to the floor just to the right of his feet. I wished Jessica would hurry out here so we could go.
“Maybe she should be with someone who would make her a little happier. Someone who would do anything for her.”
I finally snapped. All the tension that had been threatening to burn me up since Jessica had brought up the fact that she knew I was supposed to propose came flooding to the surface. In a movement that was too fast, I had closed the small gap between us and had bunched up his shirt in my left hand. My nose only an inch away from his, I hissed, “You have no idea what we’ve been through together. What I have done for her.”