Awakening: Book 1 The Last Anakim Trilogy

by Janet V Forster

  He kissed me again, deeply. This time his tongue dipped into my mouth and I caressed it with mine as his fingers moved down to my tummy, to where my shirt had pulled out of my shorts. He touched my skin.

  ‘Oooh.’ I gasped and wriggled.

  ‘Aha, a weakness,’ he laughed, breaking the mood and tickling me mercilessly.

  ‘Stop, please, stop!’ I screeched, squirming and trying to push him away, unable to catch a breath, suffocating on my laugh until my gaze locked with his and the world spun.

  And then he was everywhere. His mouth on my mouth, demanding, his body hot and heavy on mine, the hardness at his pelvis grinding into me, his hand on my breast, massaging. Closing my eyes I tried to focus on breathing normally. It was impossible. The sensation of him against me was like walking a tightrope without a safety wire and wanting to do cartwheels. I drew breath in ragged gasps as he lifted his mouth from mine. Flames flickered in his eyes.

  I recognised his question. ‘I want to Nick.’

  I wanted the magic before it was too late, before the inevitability of life shattered our pleasure. My imagination had tormented me for long enough and right now I didn’t care whether or not he would go away again, or what the future held.

  The tension left his muscles as he gave in to himself and I writhed up against him.

  ‘You’re making me wild, Deb,’ he groaned.

  ‘Do it,’ I ordered.

  Around me the world blurred and spun. My body began to buzz, to thrum with a throbbing desire, so strong it possessed me. He pushed my shorts down and released himself. Then, a sudden sweet pain as he entered me, carefully at first, watching my reaction.

  ‘It’s okay …’ I whispered, my throat tight. I could feel him inside me, filling me. ‘Don’t stop.’

  We started moving together. His face hovered over mine. He was so beautiful, so intense. His eyes were burning. I could see myself in them, an inferno raging all around me. Then his mouth found mine again. He groaned and we began to move more urgently, our bodies in unison, slowing only at the greatest depth as he touched the core of me and life around us ceased.

  19

  KATE

  Winter had dug its frozen claws in deep and was set to continue for a couple of months more. I was tired thanks to work, Uni and a bit too much partying

  Mads and I were hanging out more, although Pierre and Francois were reluctant to include her in our tea sessions which were kind of sacred. Still, I spent a lot of time with her and sometimes when Mitchell wasn’t around, which was rare, we lay on her unmade bed and talked about our lives, our hopes and dreams, and boys. Occasionally we fell asleep, our faces still stained by laughter, enveloped in childhood for a moment, innocent and close.

  Part of the reason for our closeness was that she was working at a club only a few minutes’ walk from Mercatura. When I had finished my last set I sometimes watched her until she was done at midnight, and then we’d go out. Mostly we ended up at the Spice House where the building throbbed to the sound of Hot until the early hours of the morning and the bouncers knew us.

  ‘Didn’t I see you here last night, little girl?’ Steve, the burliest of the bouncers, wearing a t-shirt at least three sizes too small, asked. ‘Shouldn’t good little girls be at home in bed asleep?’ He peered down at me. I wasn’t intimidated. His partner, Brad, who was half his size, both width and height-wise, had told me that animated movies like The Lion King and Ice Age, made him cry uncontrollably.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be keeping an eye out for patrons with knives, like the guy two back, instead of badgering little girls, Steve?’

  ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ Steve said, his terrifying face and large bulk heading rapidly towards the person I’d just mentioned as he motioned for me to enter the club.

  Mads was already surrounded and I headed to the bar to get a drink.

  ‘She draws them to her like maggots to a carcass, doesn’t she?’ Luca, the young blonde bartender observed, glancing in her direction wistfully.

  The crowd around Mads stood out from the rest of the patrons. There was an aura of dark fatalism that pervaded the space around them. As if all of the inconsistencies of life had been removed, leaving only a gloomy certainty which needed escaping.

  I shrugged, but I knew that he was right.

  ‘Just don’t get tainted by them. They’re using, the clubs full of it tonight,’ he warned, drifting away to serve another customer.

  They used drugs openly, which left me feeling both unsettled and tantalised. I tiptoed around the edge of their world, trying not to let the danger there touch me but I felt the pull, the fear of endless temptations, of succumbing and losing myself to that dark world.

  Deep down Mads and I weren’t so different. In many ways we were the same, both artists, the product of sheltered, but broken childhoods. Both of us had faced abandonment. We were searching for our place in the light.

  ‘Baby, Baby, Baby.’ Mads buzzed over to me, grabbing my hands and spilling my drink as she pulled me into an embrace and tried to dance with me. Her face was flushed, her pupils like saucers. I wondered what she’d taken, guessed some kind of amphetamine, maybe ice. Dark rings under her eyes were starting to show through her make-up.

  Placing my drink on the sticky bar counter I tried to shake the liquid off my arms as she laughed and vanished into the throng. She had been succumbing more and more easily to the mind-altering substances she had initially dismissed as nothing more than a dalliance. More and more the strength of her outer persona, her image, hid the Mads I had once known, the tender, funny girl, with a soft side. Her inner child was crying out, suffocating, slowly smothered as she became a shell filled with darkness, embracing more and more of the gloom around her. Mitchell’s frenetic existence and her terror at losing him to it were robbing her of her soul.

  The DJ was on again and soon Mitchell appeared next to me, too close, swigging my drink as he waited for his to arrive. Girls crushed in around us.

  ‘Aah, that’s disgusting,’ he said, gesturing for the bartender to pour a drop of vodka into my lime and soda. I shook my head, but it was added anyway.

  ‘Whatcha doin’ Katie baby?’

  ‘You know, this and that,’ I said. ‘Watching your girlfriend for one,’ I added, hopefully reminding him that he had one.

  ‘Oh?’ he asked, not even mildly curious. His eyes darted greedily across the assembled hoard.

  ‘She’s on something.’

  ‘Well I think you’re the only one who’s not. Maybe you should try something, it’ll help you relax and have some fun.’ He looked back at the girls in tight scanty clothing and I noticed him narrow his focus and settle on a tiny girl with long black hair. I shook my head in disgust, but he was already moving away. The sickening clash of too many fragrances followed him.

  ‘I’ll see you around,’ he called over his shoulder. I didn’t bother to reply. He wouldn’t have heard me anyway, and probably wouldn’t have appreciated what I might have had to say.

  Few could manage a lifestyle like Mitchell’s and still function at his level. Of course he used meth, but it didn’t seem to impact on his performance. He bounced back like a jack-in-the-box.

  I moved away to where I could watch the dancing, standing in a shadowy, slightly secluded corner just behind the band as they started up again.

  The steadily moving mass fascinated me. Some gyrated, intent on the rhythm, others lusted, their hips pushing and searching greedily. Hips ground and bodies swayed and bent. Others seemed to have abandoned themselves to the night, their gazes vacant as the music moved their form, like a puppeteer manipulating a puppet. A haze of sweat, heat and movement under the pulsating lights. The hypnotic melody and rhythm of the band provided a delusional backdrop.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said as a bulky silhouette blocked my outlook. I moved slightly to try and see around him but he moved closer, obscuring both my view and the view others had of me and I started to feel insecure.

  ‘Hey babe,’ he brayed, reachi
ng out to touch my arm. I backed away. ‘Don’t go, not after all the effort I’ve made to cross that bloody crowded floor to get to you.’ His breath was sour and involuntarily I took another step backwards.

  ‘Somewhere I need to be,’ I mumbled. His grasp tightened around my wrist and he tugged me closer.

  ‘Don’t give me that crap. I’ve seen you standing here for ages …’

  ‘Well I’m going now.’ I tried to yank back my hand and step away from him but in a move quicker than I would have thought him capable of, he used his body to pin me against the wall and I felt his hand on my leg, pushing up under my short skirt. He was very strong. I couldn’t get away.

  ‘Get off me,’ I tried to yell, but the pressure of his bulk against my chest crushed the air from my lungs and I couldn’t get any volume out. Stuck in a dark deserted corner of the club had suited me previously, but it was really working against me now. We remained unnoticed, the noise of the band and the movement of the dancers continuing uninterrupted around us.

  ‘Didn’t you hear her mate? She said get off her!’ Suddenly his suffocating weight lifted off me and I gasped with relief. In a blur strong arms spun him around and rammed him against the wall, an elbow to his throat. I stumbled back, caught by confident hands which gripped my shoulders.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, as the room tilted and swayed around me. Spinning. Faster and faster. The boy’s face, the one from the park. There must be a God, I thought as I gazed into his violet eyes. Then everything gave way to weightlessness and darkness.

  20

  DEB AND NICK

  We lay on the beach side by side and silent, drying in the sun after the briefest of swims in the frigid water. Our hands were intertwined. My body glowed and tingled magically. Even the glistening lake looked enchanted, millions of tiny twinkling icicles dancing across its surface.

  The sky was soft and endless above us. Only the lengthening shadows, creeping towards us from the trees at the edge of the forest, indicated that the day was moving on. I felt deeply connected, like the energy from our bodies was seeping into the sand, charging the tiny particles we were lying on, lighting brilliant diamonds to warm the sun. The trees sang soft lullabies and the birds were angels. For a moment we disappeared into nature’s panorama, content.

  Like all things amazing, it was temporary.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m so hard to read sometimes,’ Nick said, his words forcing the angels’ regretful retreat. His brow furrowed and he looked away.

  What could I say? He wasn’t joking, that was for sure. In fact, it was definitely the understatement of the century. Trepidation rippled through me. Where was he going with this? I glanced over at him, lingering on his strong profile and watched him watch the drifting sky.

  His chest rose and then fell abruptly. ‘I want to be with you, Deb.’ He turned onto his side and raised himself up on an elbow, switching to holding my hand with his other hand. ‘So fine, so delicate,’ he said, toying with my fingers, ‘like a sparrow.’ I turned to face him and he lifted my fingers to his lips.

  ‘I don’t want today to end.’ He smiled sadly, recognising the inevitable.

  ‘Me neither,’ I answered. A cloud trapped the sun for a moment and the sand became dull, like the diamonds had been nothing but an illusion.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m thinking that clouds are coming.’

  He looked back up. ‘My father says that everything ends … bad things … and good things.’ He extended a hand up to the sky to the cloud which hung stubbornly above us and it seemed as though he moved it with a gesture and we were bathed in glory again. ‘Magic.’

  ‘Yes. Magic.’ I agreed. Today was all about magic.

  He touched the pendant which dangled from the necklace around my neck and the tiny diamonds cast flickering speckles onto his chest. ‘Whatever happens, we have this moment to hold on to … always. Some people live their whole lives and never experience anything like this.’

  We observed the lake together, like it was the dawn of creation, as if we’d been there before anyone else.

  ‘I feel sorry for them,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘I guess they don’t know any differently.’

  ‘This experience will change things, won’t it? Nothing will ever be quite the same.’

  And like that I reminded him of something which took him from me for a while, the uneasy silence indicating a spell broken. He stood and pulled on his t-shirt and then changed his mind and sat, but with his arms around his knees, distanced from me.

  The moment was over and I wasn’t sure why.

  ‘Life is complicated isn’t it?’ he asked suddenly, breaking the silence. A cool breeze had picked up. I pulled on my top. It was getting late.

  ‘Is that your way of telling me yours is, Nick? Mine is not too bad. School, work, eating, sleeping … you know, deciding what I want to do next year, the usual things.’

  His mouth turned up on one side as he grimaced. ‘I guess so. My life is complicated.’ George’s words of long ago rang out within me. ‘I don’t remember it ever being any different.’ His face became haunted. ‘Something always comes up and steals away what you thought you had.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, unclenching my teeth and forcing myself to relax my jaw.

  He threw his hands to the sky and let them drop with a slap. ‘There’s always something creating a complication.’

  ‘Oh?’ It was impossible to stop the sinking feeling inside from stealing a part of my face.

  He shook his head dismally, his eyes narrowing. ‘My folks, they don’t like your family.’

  ‘What? We don’t even know them. I think I saw a photo of your dad in the newspaper once, that’s about it.’ Gossip came to mind. ‘Is this the whole snobbery thing? We’re not good enough? Not rich enough anyway!’

  He brought his hand to his chin, his mouth becoming crooked, like he wasn’t sure how to explain what he wanted to say. ‘There’s always that, Deb, it goes without saying with them, but this is something else, something that goes way back. More like a feud.’

  I almost laughed, but he was serious and my face fell. ‘That sounds like something from the dark ages Nick! How can you have a feud going on when one party doesn’t even know about it?’

  He bent his head back and looked up at the sky and then back down to me. ‘It’s ridiculous, I know. Grudges … very old ones! Something happened before we were born. Do you know that our families, your father’s and mine, have been in this region for generations? Yours moved away. There was a reason for that, something which isn’t spoken of. You were never meant to come back.’

  ‘This is the first I’ve heard of it,’ I answered, confused, although something niggled at me. Why had my father chosen Three Kings? It made little sense when we could have been located in a bigger centre closer to his work, to school.

  He picked up a dry stick and started to shred it with quick rough tugs. ‘There was an arrangement, some sort of agreement. You and I … well, we were never meant to meet.’

  I wanted to dismiss what he said as nonsense, to tell him that it was madness, but I couldn’t rid myself of the niggle.

  ‘I know it sounds crazy Deb.’ His gaze softened and he dropped the last of the stick to the ground with a sigh.

  ‘Why would my father have brought us back here then?’ I asked, desperate to make sense of it.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Surely I’d know … at least something about this.’ But that wasn’t necessarily the case, not with the way my relationship with my father was.

  He shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t necessarily Deb. I didn’t until recently.’

  I stood up and wandered down to the water. ‘Maybe it’s another family, they’re confused.’

  He followed, coming up behind me. ‘No, they’re adamant it’s your family. That’s why your dad moved away.’

  I felt a flicker of shame and clasped my arms around myself.r />
  ‘What is the big mystery anyway?’ I wondered, looking out at the placid, slowly shifting water.

  His arms encircled my waist and I leant back into him. I felt his breath against my hair. ‘They won’t tell me.’

  ‘They’re just trying to manipulate you.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he sighed. ‘It’s such a big deal that I don’t get involved with you, but they won’t let me in on why exactly. I’m just expected to bow to their authority, even now! Crazy bastards they are anyway. Master manipulators.’ He sounded angry.

  ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter Deb. That’s what I wanted to tell you.’ His hug grew tighter. ‘I’ve told them I’m going my own way. I’ve had enough. I’m going to be a pilot. I’d rather saw off my own foot than work for my father under any circumstances anyway.’ He laughed bitterly.

  ‘I’m not completely cut off, for now anyway. I think they’re hoping I’ll change my mind when I realise the financial sacrifices I’ll have to make.’

  I nodded. ‘Life is short. You can make your own way.’ He turned me around and took both of my hands in his.

  ‘You make it sound so simple.’

  ‘You should follow your dreams, Nick.’

  His smile was bittersweet. ‘You’re so innocent and good. I don’t want to freak you out with my family stuff – we’re all a bit warped.’ He pulled me into a tight embrace. Heat radiated off him. I felt it recharging my heart.

  ‘You’re not like them.’

  ‘I’ve let you down Deb, made you sad. I don’t always know how to handle things in the way I should but I’m going to try and make things right, if I can.’ He twisted a stray strand of hair that had crossed my face around his finger.

  The sun caught it. ‘Spun gold,’ he said, marvelling and then burying his hands deep in my hair.

  ‘If only …’ I whispered, as his face moved in closer to mine.

  21