by T. N. Cole
I kissed her until our need for each other became too great to ignore. We took our time peeling clothes off one another, knowing that this time would be different than all the other times we had been together.
There were no frantic kisses, and there was no teasing; it was all committing each other’s bodies to memory. I was showing my love for her in ways I would never be able to do with words. I was doing something I had never done before—I was making love to her.
And after, when we were spent and lay tangled in the sheets and each other’s arms, we whispered words of love to one another before we drifted off to sleep.
SPRING BREAK WASN’T UNTIL next week. But I had gotten word that my mom wasn’t doing so great. So naturally, I had immediately left to go see her. It was hard leaving Tristan, but I told myself that I would only be gone a few days. Nothing would happen to him while I was gone.
I was anxious to see my mom. I knew it had been way too long since I had last seen her, but I was too wrapped up in my life in America now. With Tristan. My heart fluttered just thinking about him—his blue eyes, his warm touch, his soft kisses, his hard kisses… I stopped myself before I could get carried away. I turned my attention to the window as the car weaved in and out of traffic. Paris looked more or less the same since I had left more than a year ago for America.
The car pulled through the gate and into the circular driveway. I was out of the door before the car had even come to a complete stop. I flew up the stairs and burst through the door before the doorman could get it. Poor Charles was never fast enough to get the door for me, even when I was a kid. I laughed and waved as I rushed past him.
I stopped dead in my tracks as I was about to sprint up the stairs to see my mom on the third floor. “Marie!” I grinned as I hugged her. “You never even texted me while I was in America? How have you been? How’s Mom? Aunt Nora said she’s not doing so well right now.” Marie had been my nanny and a maid at my house ever since we had moved to Paris when I was nine years old.
She looked horrified to see me. Not the reaction I was expecting. “Miss Katelyn. I no know you were coming,” she fumbled with her thick French accent.
“Aunt Nora didn’t tell you I was coming?” I frowned.
She shook her head. “Miss Katelyn. What…What has Ma’am Jessup told you about your mother?”
I was confused. “She said she’s been doing fine up until recently?”
Her eyes immediately started welling with tears. “Oh, Miss Katelyn. Ma’am Jessup is bad, bad lady.” Ice immediately flooded my veins. “I try to call you. Ma’am Jessup—she threaten me if I talk to you. I—I’m so sorry.”
“What are you saying, Marie?” I grasped her shoulders and forced her to look at me.
She sniffled and sobbed out, “Your mother is no doing good. Le doctor says she only has weeks. Maybe days.”
My whole world stopped. I stepped back in shock. “No,” I insisted. “That can’t be.” I turned and sprinted up the stairs. I needed to see her. I could hear Marie calling my name and running after me.
I flung open the doors to my mom’s room. “Mom?” And there she was. I had never seen more tubes and machines hooked up to her. She looked so tiny in the middle of the king-size bed. I covered my mouth with my hands as tears sprung to my eyes. I walked to the side of the bed. “Mom?” I repeated. But there was no response. I took her hand as I sat on the edge of the bed; it was cold and pale in mine. I sobbed, “Mom. Mom, wake up! Please!”
I didn’t even register Marie coming into the room, but she was suddenly standing next to me. “Miss Katelyn,” she said hoarsely. “She’s been in a coma for two weeks now. We no know how long she has left.”
I could barely comprehend everything Marie was telling me. “No. No, no, no. This isn’t happening. Why didn’t they tell me?” I couldn’t see through my tears anymore. “Mom!” I wailed. “Mom! Don’t leave me!”
I would never forgive myself for this. Most of all, I would never forgive them for this.
The rain was coming down in sheets as I found myself standing in the middle of an empty street.
“What the…?” I curled my arms around myself and glanced around. Despair settled over me as I realized where I was—my hometown.
I heard a couple yelling over the sound of the pouring rain. Curious, I walked toward the angry voices. I finally saw them standing near a streetlight at the corner. I squinted, slicking my hair back in a haphazard attempt to stop the rain from drizzling down my face.
The girl was wearing a black dress and I watched as she pushed the guy she was arguing with. Hard. He stumbled back and his head snapped up in surprise. That was when I realized who he was and what I was seeing.
No.
I started walking faster toward the young pair. “Guys!” I tried to yell. “Tristan! Mel!”
They couldn’t hear me. “Believe me, I’ve tried to make myself feel more for you, but you more than anyone should know it doesn’t fucking work like that!” Dream Tristan yelled.
I waved my hands in front of his face, trying to get him to stop making an ass of himself. He couldn’t see me. I cursed and turned to see Dream Mel make the devastated face that had haunted me for years. “Mel!” I shouted as she turned and started to run. I glanced at Dream Tristan; he was frozen to the spot, letting the cold rain run over him.
Please don’t have the car come, please don’t have—
My wishful thinking was useless as I saw the car racing down the wet streets. I broke off into a sprint. I screamed her name over and over as I tore off after her.
“Mel!” My voice became hoarser as I got closer.
She finally turned at the sound of my voice, but it wasn’t Mel anymore. It was Kate.
Her eyes widened as she saw me barreling toward her. “Tristan,” she whispered frightened.
She turned and saw the car headed toward her. “Move, Kate! Move!” I jumped toward her as she held her hand out to me. And everything went black.
I gasped for air as I shot up in bed. What the hell was that?
It had been four days since I had last seen Kate. Her mom had summoned her home, and she had left on the next flight out. I had wanted to go with her, but I had work and an exam. Kate wouldn’t have let me come anyway—something about her not wanting me to meet her psycho mom. I hadn’t heard from her since she left. I tried to tell myself that she was just busy with whatever her mom had all of a sudden needed her for, but I had a really bad feeling about it.
I almost broke my no drinking ban. I was so fucking miserable without her. Going from seeing your girl practically every minute of every day to radio silence was the worst form of torture. I was well aware that I was getting sappy. But hell if I didn't miss Kate.
I stared at her beautiful laughing face on the screen of my phone. I yearned to hold her and be able to breathe again. Every fiber in my body ached to be with her. My eyes wanted to see her, my nose wanted to smell her, my ears wanted to hear her voice, my lips wanted to taste every inch of her, and the rest of my body wanted to feel her and make sure she was safe and happy. My heart started painfully going into overdrive. I hadn't felt my heart in five years—maybe more. I only knew happiness when I was with her. I was only alive when I had her.
Kate: Just got home! Come over to the apartment?
As soon as I read her text, I was flying out the door. Finally.
I knocked on the door of her apartment. “Kate, baby, you there?”
No response.
“Kate?” I listened for her usual running footsteps. Instead, I heard the clacking of high heels against the hardwood floor. I froze when the door suddenly swung open.
“Tristan, what a lovely surprise.” Nora Jessup smiled coyly. “Well, I guess I should say a surprise for you, of course. Have a seat.”
I had no choice to obey; my mind was refusing to cooperate. It didn’t want to comprehend the ghost of my past sitting in front of me—in my girlfriend’s apartment, no less. “What are you doing here?” I managed t
o ask hoarsely.
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m visiting my daughter.” She made a sweeping gesture with her arm.
“Kate? Kate isn’t your daughter.”
“Oh, Katelyn! Will you come out, please?” Her smirk was making me sick to my stomach. What was happening?
Heather’s bedroom door opened instead, and I met a pair of brown eyes. They weren’t the warmth of Kate’s chocolate brown eyes that I craved, but instead, they were dark brown eyes that I hadn’t seen in five years.
“Melanie?” There was no way. She was dead. I had gone to her funeral. No. My mind refused to process this. Yet, here she was, in the doorway of Heather’s room. She looked different. Her face was more angular, harder. Her eyes no longer danced at me. She looked both the same and completely different. She was barely anything like the girl I once knew, and there was more evidence of that in the way she looked at me. She wore the same look of hatred her mother always sent my way.
“Not happy to see me?” Mel replied coolly as she sashayed to sit on the couch opposite me with her mother.
“This isn’t real. Is this a fucking joke? Where the hell is Kate?” I demanded.
Nora laughed while Mel grinned. “Oh, my dear cousin…” Mel shook her head in mock dismay.
“What?” I clenched my fists against the couch. “Is she okay?”
“Oh, Tristan.” My heart jolted at the sound of Mel saying my name after so long. “It’s not her that you should be worrying about. It’s you.”
I pulled out my phone to call Kate—I needed to know she was safe. “Uh, uh, uh…” Mel leaned across the coffee table and pulled my phone from my grasp, tossing it on the couch. “We’re talking. It’s rude to be on the phone when you’re having a conversation, you know. A very important conversation.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to have this conversation with you,” I replied wryly. I was in emergency mode now. All my emotions were shut off, shock included. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Oh, but you do.” Mel laughed lightly.
There was a silence; Mel and Nora exchanged a knowing glance. “So, how do you know Kate?” I asked nonchalantly, still trying to mask the turmoil of emotions inside me.
“I can’t believe you don’t recognize her, silly. She’s my cousin. Remember, Lyn-Lyn? I think she came to stay with us for a couple of weeks when we were eight years old? So that means she was, what, four years old at the time?”
I couldn’t conceal my look of shock fast enough, which Mel jumped on. “Did she not tell you? She’s only recently turned eighteen. Of course, she didn’t tell you. That crazy girl.”
My heart started pounding hard enough for me to feel it in my ears. “What are you talking about? What are you doing? Mel, what happened to you?”
“You happened to me, Tristan. You ruined my life. And you left me when I needed you most.”
“What are you talking about? Everyone told me you died! Dead on arrival. How did you survive that?”
“See? I knew you meant for her to die. You never even tried to save her,” Nora interjected.
“That’s a lie! You’ve been lying to her all this time? What kind of mother are you?” I hissed back. Then I turned to Mel. “Mel, you have to believe me. I tried to save you. I almost died, too. The whole right side of my body was shattered in the accident!”
“There’s no use in lying about it, Tristan,” Mel replied in a bored tone. “What’s done is done. I know you were more than happy to get rid of me. I’m just glad I have a cousin as amazing as Katelyn to do something about you.”
My head started throbbing, but I managed to reply evenly, “What are you talking about?”
“My cousin, of course!” Mel clapped her hands together. “She’s brilliant. I didn’t even know she had all this planned. Don’t you see how perfectly it was working? She was going to destroy your life.”
Then Nora cut in. “That’s why we had to send her away, you know. She can get a little carried away. She was only supposed to break you—make you go insane and ruin your future. Except then she decides to make you fall in love with her and mess around with you like you did to Melanie. So, you would know what it was like to fall in love with someone who could never love you back. She was getting in too deep, so we sent her back to visit her mom in Paris.”
I couldn’t even begin to comprehend what they were telling me. My hazy brain could only work out that Nora had brainwashed and turned Mel against me. My mind refused to touch on the part where Kate was just pretending to be in love with me. I laughed humorlessly. “There’s no way Kate has been faking it. What I feel for her—what we feel for each other—is more real than anything we ever felt together, Mel.”
Mel’s eyes flashed; the only sign that my comment bothered her. “Then where is your precious Kate. She’s not here, is she? Ha! I don’t even know what she’s told you that’s real. Did you know her mother is in the later stages of cancer? But she was so committed to exacting revenge for the cousin she loves so much, that she was willing to leave her mom’s side in order to ruin you?”
It couldn’t be true. “I still don’t believe you’re real, Mel. Do you even remember anything before the accident?”
She laughed sarcastically. “Of course not, you left me to die. I don’t remember a single fucking thing. Not even the accident. All I know is that I love my cousin. This just shows she would do anything for me.”
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, and ran my hands over my face. “How long have you been here? How did this even happen?” I asked again out of frustration. I needed to see Kate. I knew they were lying to me. But how is Mel alive if they’re lying?
“Katelyn arranged all of this without me.” Mel leaned back smugly, crossing her arms over her chest. “Well, with the help of my mom, obviously. I was just told that we were going back to America just for college, and that I was allowed to make my own life. Except I had to steer clear of Katelyn at pretty much all costs.”
“Her roommate’s name is Heather,” I pointed out.
Mel clutched at her heart mockingly. “You forgot my middle name already? I thought we were best friends, Tristan.”
“So you do remember stuff from before the accident.”
She shook her head with a smile. “Not at all. It’s just what I’ve been told Tristan, dear.”
“Then how do you know any of what your mother told you and Kate is real? Before the accident, you hated your mom. And she hated you. You were never good enough to be her daughter. You despised her.”
“Even if that were true, how could I hate her now? She saved me when you were nowhere to be found. She put me back together again, and now look at me—I think I have my shit together more than you do, to be honest.”
“I still don’t believe you two.” I imitated Mel’s nonchalant pose, laying back against the couch cushions.
“Okay well, did she tell you all about her best guy friend in high school? The one who died?” I started to get goosebumps on my arms. I didn’t want to know what she was going to say next. “She got all those details from me. I don’t remember the first year after the accident. I was in and out of it a lot. Procedures, drugs, therapy… Apparently, I talked all about you. I don’t remember any of it, but she knows everything about us. And she took that life as her own, but switched it so that you died instead of me. And she fucked with your head. Didn’t you notice? Didn’t you ever wonder why she pursued you so relentlessly at first? She forced herself into your life. That wasn’t by accident, Tristan. ”
I remembered all the small details. The nonchalant comments she threw out about her best friend. The tiny facts that made me question my sanity. I knew they were too much like my own memories to be a coincidence.
She went on. “My favorite part was when she got those guys to drug her and pretend they were going to make off with her. That’s when you really started falling for her, isn’t it? After her little hospital stint.”
I refused to think about all the times Kate coul
d have lied to me in the time we had known each other. Instead, I tried one to redirect the story back on Mel. “If you don’t remember us, then why don’t you just ask her then—since she knows it all?”
Mel shrugged. “Does it even matter anymore? We can’t go back to that. Not when you ruined my life. I’ll never forgive you for that night.”
“Mel,” I said shakily. “I didn’t mean—I never meant for you to get hurt that night. You have to believe me. You can’t listen to everything your mom is telling you.”
She smirked at me. “It doesn’t even matter what I believe. What matters is what Katelyn believes. And she’s all aboard the Hate Tristan train.”
“No. I—It’s impossible. I want to see her. Where is she?” I demanded.
Nora and Mel had exchanged another look before Nora answered. “She’s at her home in Paris. Her mother is not doing so well with the cancer.” That was a slap in my face. I didn’t know she lived in Paris. In fact, she had told that me she lived in Arizona and that she didn’t have a good relationship with her parents. She never mentioned anything about her mom having cancer. What else was she lying about? “There’s a lot you don’t really know about your Kate,” Nora added, seeing that I was distraught.
“I still want to see her.” I met Nora’s eyes unwaveringly.
She tapped her finger against her chin. “I guess that can be arranged. Pack your bags, Tristan Westdyke. We’re going to Paris.”
THAT WAS A LIE. We didn’t leave for Paris for another few days. I knew they were stalling, but I just didn’t know why. And, honestly, I didn’t care. I just needed to see Kate.
I tried to call her, but the number was disconnected, something I knew Nora had masterminded. It also explained why I got a text from Kate asking to come over—it was all an elaborate setup.
I wanted to see Kate; I needed her to tell me that this was fake. I needed her to tell me that Nora Jessup was a lying, manipulative bitch. And that the Mel impostor wasn’t real.