The Temptation (Kindred)

by Alisa Valdes

  The woman ran with the children to her own lime-green minivan, and put them inside, while other people congregated around the man in alarm. Someone called for help on a pay phone, and a man tried to stop the bleeding. Another tried to revive the man with mouth-to-mouth. But the man was dead, limp as a rag doll.

  “I can’t watch this,” I said. “Get me out of here.”

  You asked me how I did what I did. It’s a long answer. This is where the answer begins.

  “Please,” I said. “This is too much.”

  Okay. I’m sorry. I thought you should know.

  I awoke with a jolt then, in my own bed, drenched in sweat with my heart pounding as though I’d just run a mile. I heard the echo of my scream still hanging in the air. The iPod was off now, and my dark room was silent and still. The image of the dying man stayed with me, and every detail of the dream was clear in my memory. It was unlike any dream I’d ever had before. I was pretty sure it hadn’t been a dream at all, but something else. A message.

  Soon, I heard my mother’s exhausted feet shuffling in their slippers down the hallway, and her sighing, and then there she was in my doorway.

  “Everything okay?” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes. “I heard you scream.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to hide from her the way I trembled with fright. “I just had a bad dream, I think. I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “It was awful, Mom. The worst dream ever.”

  She came over to give me a kiss, and noticed I was soaked with sweat.

  “Sweetie,” she said, “you don’t look well.”

  I answered with tears flowing from my eyes, in a sniffling sort of voice, unable to shake the sense that it had not been a dream, that what I’d seen was real. “Can I sleep in your room tonight?”

  My mom nodded, but her brow was creased with worry. It had been a good six years since I’d asked to sleep with my mother. Under any other circumstances, I might have been embarrassed about this; as it was, I felt nothing but anxiety, fear, and tremendous sadness for the man who had been violently murdered in front of his children, and for the children themselves.

  As I followed my mom to her room, with Buddy at our heels, I was overwhelmed with a sudden, confusing awareness: ours was a dreadful world, with the constant potential for horrendous suffering and misery; yet ours was also an extraordinary world, filled with infinite music, kindness, love, and beauty. I’d always known bad things happened, but it had been something happening to other people, out there, away from me; in that moment, bad things happening felt intensely, terribly personal. I felt I knew that murdered man. I was more disheartened than I had ever been, but beneath that sorrow bubbled an insistent joy and hope that felt an awful lot like love.

  Nothing made any sense.

  I crawled up into my mother’s high four-poster bed, and she got in and turned off the bedside lamp. We both lay awake, her listening to me, me listening to her.

  “Mom?” I asked, finally.

  “What is it, pumpkin?”

  “Hold me like you used to when I was little?”

  And, mothers making up a huge part of the side of the world that is good and right, she did as I asked, without questions.

  Chapter Seven

  On Monday, after a weekend resting at home with my mother, it was back to school and back to life as I’d known it before the crash.

  I drove from our house to the Einstein Bros. Bagels near my school, feeling very high up off the road in the Land Rover my dad gave me over the weekend to replace the BMW. My dad owned a luxury car dealership in Santa Fe, and had no shortage of showy cars to choose from. I was a little embarrassed about the enormity of the new SUV, which felt like a tank, but he had assured me it was the safest thing he had in stock.

  I hadn’t heard from Travis again all weekend, or dreamed about him, and I felt sad about that and not knowing how to find him.

  Outside, it was snowing again. The Land Rover infiltrated the storm, churning solidly—almost calmly—over the road. Dad might have been a lazy parent in most other ways, but in the car department he excelled.

  I parked, and dashed through the snow toward the bagel shop. My best friend, Kelsey, looked up as I entered the warm, balmy café. I’d texted and talked to her on the phone a few times over the weekend. When my mom had gone to the grocery store, I’d even been free to tell Kelsey all about what had happened at the accident, and she’d listened and asked questions. Like my mom, she’d wondered if maybe I had hit my head, but she was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt because when her grandma died, electric lights and appliances in her house had gone on and off on their own at random for about a week after. But, Kelsey had added, the imagination can also play tricks on a person when you are emotional enough; her parents were both psychotherapists, and this type of analysis was the norm for her. Still, it made me think. I had a very good imagination as it was. Maybe I’d imagined some of what I’d seen with Travis. Maybe the dream was just a dream.

  She waved, smiling, from a back table, where she sat alone. She was effortlessly pretty, with wavy blond hair and sparkling blue eyes, wearing all black as she often did—training for when she finally moved to New York City to be a famous writer. I waved at her and smiled, then made a quick beeline for the counter to order. I grabbed my bagel and joined Kelsey, draping my red peacoat over the back of the wooden chair. I hugged her, but shuddered in her arms.

  “You okay?” Kelsey asked me, concern etched into her face.

  “I feel like I’m going crazy,” I told her honestly.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Just tell me something normal,” I said. “Anything.”

  “Well,” she said, still worried. “I was able to get that ska band we talked about to play for my Christmas party.”

  “That’s great,” I said absently.

  “I still totally want you to play something on your violin, though.”

  “Cool.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of some obscure classical pagan holiday song.”

  I tried to crack a smile at the joke, but failed.

  Kelsey continued, “Oh! And I still need your help figuring out how to decorate. I don’t want to go too traditional and boring, but I don’t want it to look stupid, either. My mom wants a dancing Santa and elves, but I was like, please, no. She still thinks I’m, like, six.”

  “Wow, lame,” I said.

  “No, what’s lame is she’s totally against having mistletoe. What’s the point of having a Christmas party and inviting Jackson Wyatt if I don’t get to accost him under the mistletoe?”

  “He probably wouldn’t mind,” I said of Jackson, Kelsey’s latest crush.

  “You’d think I asked Mom to make the guesthouse into a smoosh room or something.”

  “Ew?”

  “It’s freakin’ mistletoe, not a box of condoms.”

  Normally, I would have laughed and come back with something equally inappropriate, but I felt distant, almost as though I were watching my own life from far away, and I squeaked out, “TMI.”

  “Hey,” said Kelsey, her eyes concerned once more. “Seriously. You don’t seem right, Shane. You can tell me, whatever it is. Might help to get it out in the open?”

  I looked around to make sure no one was close enough to overhear us, and nodded.

  “Okay. So, like, I had this dream Friday night,” I told her softly, “and—”

  That’s when the door of the café jingled open, and my technical boyfriend Logan walked in. He’d been out of town all weekend, trying out for a junior national rifle skeet-shooting team. While this was surely admirable in some circles, his love of hunting was one of many reasons I had begun to grow uncomfortable with him. After dating him for a year, it seemed like his interest in blood sports had grown stronger and stranger over time. We hardly had anything to talk about anymore. I’d talked to Logan briefly on the phone yesterday, enough to tell him I’d had an accident bu
t that I was fine. He hadn’t asked too many questions about it before launching into a detailed account of how he made the team.

  Kelsey looked up and saw Logan; knowing my mixed feelings for him and my strong feelings for the boy who’d rescued me Friday, she sang under her breath, “Awk-ward.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said sympathetically.

  Seeing Logan now, I remembered again why I’d fallen for him. He was the hottest guy at our school. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with light brown hair, sparkling hazel eyes, and a smooth, intelligent face—phenomenally handsome in a well-heeled, Brooks Brothers kind of way. The first time I laid eyes on him, I was sure Logan belonged on a sailboat in a Ralph Lauren ad. Today was no different; he wore his yellow ski patrol parka, dark jeans, and shearling duck boots. He searched the room, and spotting me, his face lit up. It pained me to see him so happy to see me, knowing that I just wasn’t that into him anymore.

  I sat up straighter, and smiled at him, trying to seem normal. Logan was about to wave, but he was distracted by a person trotting through the snow behind him toward the door. Ever the calm, considerate gentleman, he stood back to pleasantly hold the door for the stranger. I swooned a little at his politeness, reminded once more that Logan was the sort of guy old ladies trusted to walk them across the street. He did have a certain charisma and charm, and probably had a great future in politics like his father, a state senator.

  My jaw dropped when I realized that the stranger Logan held the door for was . . . Travis, dressed much as he had been the day he rescued me, and wholly out of place here. I gasped at the sight of him, and dropped my coffee cup on the table in shock.

  “Shane?” asked Kelsey, setting my cup upright again before too much fluid slopped out of it, and mopping up the rest with her napkin. She put her hand on my arm in concern. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s him,” I whispered to her as my heart raced with fear and excitement. “That’s the guy who rescued me.”

  Kelsey’s eyes lasered in on Travis, and widened in surprise. “Did you tell him to come here?”

  “No! I swear. There’s no way he could know I’m here.”

  “Are you serious?” she asked, trying to keep up appearances of normalcy for the sake of Logan, who was smiling at us as he walked to the line to place his order. Travis shook the snow off in the entry, his eyes scanning the room. When he spotted me he grinned broadly, and his smile—white teeth and perfect lips framed by dimples—was absolutely stunning. I felt weak, and scared, and tried to understand. This was impossible, I told myself, and yet it was happening. It was happening. Again.

  Travis walked directly toward us, removing his hat politely. I saw now that he had brown hair, cut in a stylish way. He looked good with the hat, but he looked completely amazing without it.

  “Mornin’, ladies,” he said shyly when he got to our table, holding the hat over his chest. He smiled, in an embarrassed sort of way.

  “Hi,” I answered, all my panic suddenly gone. I felt the same warmth and sense of well-being that I’d felt the last time I’d seen him. I stared, mesmerized by the symmetrical, perfect beauty of his face. Again, I had an almost overpowering desire to touch him, kiss him.

  “I’m Travis,” he said to Kelsey, holding out his hand to shake hers, and I realized I should have introduced him.

  “Hi,” she said, shaking his hand and seeming every bit as much in awe of him as I was. “I’m Kelsey. Shane’s best friend.”

  “He helped me when I crashed,” I said nervously, my heart pounding. “He called nine-one-one. I’m very grateful.”

  “I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said, smiling at me, taking something shiny out of his pocket. “I found this after they towed your car away. Thought you might want it back.”

  He let the gold necklace with the heart pendant unfurl from his fingers, and it seemed to glow for a brief moment in his hand. Kelsey didn’t notice because she was too busy looking into his eyes as though she wished there were a giant mistletoe hanging over his head right now.

  “Omigosh, how sweet,” said Kelsey, sincerely. “You came all the way here to give her that?”

  Logan came up now, holding his cup of coffee, and stood next to Travis. Seeing the necklace he’d given me for Valentine’s Day, dangling in Travis’s hand, he shot me a quizzical look.

  Quickly and nervously I said, “Logan, this is Travis, he’s the guy who called nine-one-one when I crashed Friday. Travis, this is my boyfriend, Logan.”

  I hadn’t meant to emphasize the word boyfriend so much, but it just came out that way. I looked at Logan and said, “Travis brought my necklace back today. I lost it in the crash. Isn’t that nice?” I was smiling way too hard to be convincing.

  Logan still looked confused. Defensively, he moved to my side, and clamped his beefy arm around me. It felt wrong to be held by him in front of Travis, and I squirmed a little. Logan responded by gripping me more tightly.

  “Where’d you find that?” Logan asked Travis.

  “In the snow where she crashed. I went by there yesterday, and there it was, shining in the sun.”

  “I gave her that,” said Logan. “It’s an antique. Part of an estate sale from Valencia County. Worth a bundle.”

  Travis nodded. “I know you got it for her. She talked a lot about you after the crash.” He smiled at me to let me know he was on my side, and didn’t intend to make trouble for me. He handed the necklace to Logan and said, “It’s real nice.”

  At the same time he gave Logan the locket with his right hand, Travis slipped a folded piece of paper to me with his left. Travis’s touch, as before, sent a shockingly pleasant electrical current through my body, almost like a deep breath and a shiver combined. It felt so good. I closed my fist over the paper, not daring to open it now.

  Logan didn’t notice Travis’s masterful sleight of hand, but Kelsey did and she looked at me in shock. My boyfriend just narrowed his eyes at Travis in a jealous, almost hateful way. Travis did not attempt to return the glare, or even acknowledge it. Rather, he gave me a look of understanding.

  “I better go,” he said. “Pleasure to meet you both.” To Logan directly, he said, “Take good care of her.”

  He gave me a quick, secret smile. I smiled back, affection pouring from my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I was smitten with this guy. It wasn’t right, or logical, or anything other than what it was—the most powerful attraction I had ever felt for anyone or anything in my life.

  Logan, seeing our exchange, let go of me and lunged after Travis, swiftly catching him by the arm.

  “Yo, Stetson,” Logan said, copping a tough-guy stance I’d never seen him use before. He puffed up his chest and stepped into Travis’s personal space, too close. “I appreciate what you did here for my girl. And I’d like to give you a little something for your trouble.”

  Logan took his slick black leather wallet out of his back jeans pocket with great show and pomp, opened it, and flipped through the many crisp twenty-dollar bills he had there.

  “Not necessary.” Travis looked patient and unsurprised, his innate compassion evident and in stark relief against Logan’s arrogance. He took a step back.

  “Here,” Logan said, trying to hand Travis a few bills. It wasn’t nice, what Logan did; it was meant to put Travis in his place. I was sickened by the ugly gesture, and realized then I’d have to break up with Logan no matter what.

  Travis shrugged gracefully out of Logan’s grasp, ignored the money, and walked away. I wanted him to stay. I felt helpless and confused. My breath caught on the lump in my throat as he slipped out the door into the swirling snow. He shouldn’t be going alone. I should be with him.

  “You know,” joked Logan, picking up the money from the floor, “you really ought to be more careful who you crash in front of next time. I think that hillbilly freak kind of likes you.”

  “Lucky Shane then,” said Kelsey, her eyes narrowed in disgust at Logan. �
��He seems really nice, unlike some people.”

  Logan rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if you want to live in the sticks and your idea of fun is baling hay, he’s perfect.”

  I hurried to change the subject. “How was the tryout?” I asked Logan. “Tell us about it.”

  “Oh, man,” said Logan, quickly forgetting about Travis, his eyes lighting up. “It was awesome. I made the team, no sweat, but the coolest part was that at the end, I pegged a dove.”

  “Pegged a dove?” I asked.

  Logan pantomimed shooting toward the ceiling. “Yeah, I was aiming for the clay pigeon, and then the dove just came out of nowhere and flew right in the line of fire, so I nailed it, and got the pigeon, too!”

  Kelsey and I exchanged a look that was part worry and part disgust, masked by politeness. Logan kept talking.

  “Just knowing I’d gotten it, seeing it fall out of the sky . . . ,” he mused, with a strangely bloodthirsty look in his eyes. “It was awesome, that’s all. It was like it was some kind of a sign. Oh, and look!”

  Logan unzipped his backpack and took out a long rectangular wooden box. He opened it to reveal a huge, shiny silver knife, resting on blue velvet. It had notches in it, and was curved unlike any knife I’d ever seen, with what looked like an ivory handle.

  “It’s a bayonet military hunting knife,” he said ecstatically, almost lustfully. “I’ve wanted one for a long time. Dad was so proud I made the team, he got it for me. The handle is awesome. It’ll be awesome to use this someday.”

  “That’s great,” I said without any real enthusiasm. The knife scared me.

  “Awesome,” griped Kelsey, a vegetarian.

  “Yeah, right?” said Logan, completely missing the sarcasm in her voice.

  “Um, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need to go to the bathroom,” Kelsey announced, gripping my arm with her hand. “Shane? Do you need to go, too?” She gave me a look that meant she wanted me to come with her.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

  “Women,” said Logan, again rolling his eyes as he shut the knife back into its case. “Never understood why you always go in pairs. Whatever.”