by Lila Felix
Blake went through some more exercises that he wanted me to do on my own. By the time we were finished, I was exhausted. Carrying around that bum knee was more work than soccer ever was.
“Get some rest. You still tapering off on the meds?”
He started making notes about me again. I hated when he did that.
“I’m just taking them mainly at night when it starts swelling.”
He nodded. “
Well, ice it down now and if you need to take one before night, do it.”
“Yeah. How long has it been?”
“You’ve been here three weeks today. But you’re back on schedule since you got off your ass. So, maybe just another three weeks and you’re out of here. Back to your celebrity status.”
A blaze of concern shot through me. Three weeks wasn’t a lot of time.
I needed more time with her—to get as much publicity as possible, of course.
Chapter Twenty
Lyra
Starry Skies and Helpless Moments
The answering machine was dreadful. I had one of the old fashioned machines that beeped and couldn’t do anything else. Even voicemail freaked me out.
“Lyra, this is Pauline. Darlin’, I’ve booked you a job in New York City this weekend. It’s Saturday all day and they’ve agreed to the terms. This one came in after your little stunt on social media. Apparently Crown’s agent gave them my info. Let’s make this money and get you out of here. Call me when you get this.”
I picked up the phone and called her back immediately and accepted. She gave me the details and it was big money. It was almost enough to complete my savings account and have me set to leave. While I spoke on the phone, jotting down the details, I could hear Crown and Blake joking around outside.
I loved his laugh.
What Crown didn’t realize about life was that his wasn’t a life at all. He skirted on the surface of life, never really getting into the nitty gritty.
Even though he was a little older than me, he’d only lived a half-life.
“Lyra, you there?”
“Yeah. I’ve got it all. I will be on a plane Friday night.”
“Good. Be safe.”
Maybe Crown would want to go with me.
No, he wouldn’t.
‘Crown Sterling doesn’t go to New York.’ I mimicked his baritone.
He didn’t even know what he did. He didn’t even remember that he liked to read.
I glanced at the calendar that told me I had seven more days of freedom from a fear-filled life. I still retained some fear, but when Abraham got out of prison, there would be nothing but fear until I could disappear.
I peeked out of the back door window and saw the guys laughing about something. It was good to see Crown laugh. He needed more laughter.
And when he was gone, hopefully he would remember this place and seek what he didn’t have before.
The next couple of days I didn’t see him. I’d busied myself with preparations to go to New York City. He’d knocked on the door once to ask me how to cook a steak on the grill. I’d ended up doing it for him since I was concerned he was going to set both our houses on fire.
He was aloof throughout the whole thing.
On the outside, I brushed it off, but in my chest, it hurt. I thought, at the very least, we were forming a friendship. I must’ve been very wrong.
Thursday night, I went outside to enjoy the now cooler weather and look for a constellation I’d heard about from Chela. She and Eric were going to go to some observatory and invited me along, but I’d declined.
I’d sat there for about an hour before I heard Crown’s door open. I had a bell on mine, so I knew it was his. Plus, his cologne carried on the wind. The smell of it made me close my eyes and smile. I corrected my face before he could see it.
“Hey.”
“Hey. Long time no see.”
“What?”
“I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“You’ve been busy.” He stood beside my chair, hands on his hips, dressed in jeans and a thermal shirt. Another Crown outfit for the books.
“I have. I go to New York for a job. I had some things to take care of.”
“Thanks to your new popularity?”
“I think so. It was a good idea.”
He shrugged. Did he want to back out? He worked his jaw back and forth as he looked to the skies as if they carried his answers.
If they did, was he ready to catch them?
“You want to sit?” I motioned to the space beside me. The thing was, I didn’t want to seem too eager, though I was. I knew by the way he’d left me that night, the night I needed him most, that in my head, all of this carried a lot more meaning to me than it did to Crown.
It wasn’t easy to digest.
Especially when my heart was constantly trying to overrule those thoughts.
“I can. Why are you out here anyway?”
“Looking for some constellation Chela told me about.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, she told me about that too. Wanted me to go to some place to see it with a telescope.”
I didn’t tell him she’d invited me as well. “So you’ve been spending time with them?”
He paused for a second. I assumed I’d dug too deep until he started talking again.
“You were right. They are nice people. They have pictures of my mom—tons of them. I think—I think my dad was the one who didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They won’t say, but I think he moved us out of here to get away from her memory. He never talked about her.”
“Maybe so. Either way, I’m glad you’re getting to know them.”
“Me too.”
The whole conversation was forced and awkward. We had never been awkward before—even when he was high up on that golden horse.
We sat there for hours before a chill took over me. “I’m getting a blanket. Are you cold?”
“No. Let me get it. Do you want a sweatshirt or anything?”
My entire body stilled at his inquiry. It was one thing for Crown Sterling to say please, but as I looked into his gorgeous smoky eyes I noticed the difference right away. The haughtiness and insolence were all but removed and in their place was concern and care. I hadn’t looked into his eyes until that point. His nose was scrunched along with his mouth in what I read to be apprehension.
Like he was afraid of my rejection of this newfound kindness.
“Thank you. There’s tons in my…”
“Living room. I remember.”
A thud of paranoia hit my sternum, but instantly fizzled away. Crown wasn’t being stalkery. He was being—nice.
I really needed to chill.
Minutes later, he was back, holding at least a dozen blankets and a couple of sweatshirts. The pile was so big it covered his face.
“I said a blanket, not all of them.”
He moved the pile around with his face until he could work his mouth freely. “I know that. You’re gonna hurt your neck looking up like that.”
He didn’t need to worry about my neck. If he kept up all these niceties, Crown was gonna break his ego and my heart.
“Let me help, at least.”
I got up and helped him dump all his cargo into my chair. We spread out the blankets and he offered me a sweatshirt with the name of his team on it. If I was reading into everything, which I totally wasn’t, I would’ve taken it as a token of his choice of my warmth over his team.
But I wasn’t one of those girls who read between the lines.
I wasn’t.
Heaven above, I was too—a big, goofy underlying message investigator.
I sighed loudly at my own assessment of his gift.
“What was that for?” He was surveying our work.
“This is very nice of you. Thanks.”
Nodding, he waited until I laid down and then lay next to me. He moved his left arm to prop under his head and his right extended out above my head. I felt like such an idiot girl—an idiot
teenaged girl who’d never been on a date. Concentrating on the stars above me did nothing to quell the tickles in my belly.
It was ridiculous.
I was ridiculous.
His arm wasn’t there for me. He wasn’t my personal pillow.
I considered what I did next as another lesson to Crown as to how to live a little.
Either that, or how to misinterpret everything to the point of humiliation.
Biting back my fear, I scooted up and laid my head on his arm. He didn’t respond at first, so in my trepidation, I moved back.
“Get closer,” he whispered. I stalled. Certainly, I hadn’t heard him correctly. “Come on, I won’t bite, even though you didn’t make a rule against it.” A smirk took shape on his face.
Moving next to him, he curled his arm under my neck and lay his hand on my shoulder. I could feel the warmth radiate down the length of me, all the way to my toes. His smell enveloped me and for a while I forgot that we were supposed to be looking at the stars at all.
After a while, he shifted, turning towards me, but not without wincing.
“You’re hurting today?”
“I am. The more I work out, the more it hurts—more so at night.”
“Why are you turning then?”
With my hand on his chest, I tried to push him back down, but it was like pushing against a mountain. He chuckled deep and the sound seemed to reach out to me, caressing me like a dream.
“Because I want to look at you.”
He must be on medication. Poor thing, Blake worked him into a full on pain medication overdose.
I shrunk under his heavy stare. It was one thing to be observed from behind a lens. I controlled those shoots. There was a miles long list of rules I had.
Those shoots weren’t done unless I was in control.
That was the whole point.
Crown made me feel like we shared control of everything. Like the moment, I pulled, he would push. And the second I pushed, he would pull.
Like this Crown was waiting underneath a rind of self-righteous muck.
Ice-like webs of reality strung along my heart, reminding me that he probably needed another picture or something.
I needed to change the subject, and quick.
“How’s Sally?”
“I gave her to Chela. I’m not here for very much longer. I can’t take her with me. There’s no room in my life back there for—much else.”
He’d turned over to stab me multiple times with his words. It was all calculated. But something in me wanted to fight back.
“You knew that. You knew when you took her in and fed her and loved on her that you wouldn’t be able to keep her.”
With my breath held, I looked at him again. Baffled looked good on him.
“It’s a cat. She’s fine. Chela loves her.”
“Oh, so you think you can just pass her off to someone else and she will be fine?”
“Yeah. She’s a cat.”
Good grief, she was a cat. I had to remind myself that he wasn’t talking about me, he was talking about a cat.
A feline.
Ugh.
I barely forced the tears back enough to speak. How had I allowed this to happen? How had I let him have such an effect on me?
“I just really liked her.”
“I’m sorry.”
He was sorry. Sorry never fixed anything.
Frustrated, mostly at myself, I turned my face away from him until I could guarantee that those tears wouldn’t betray me.
“Why are you so scared of—everything?”
My hackles raised. It couldn’t be helped. Tornadoes of fear mix haphazardly with memories pushed through me, leaving none alive.
“Why do you care, Crown? This isn’t part of the deal.” I tried in vain to get away, but brawny arms around my middle wouldn’t allow it.
“Don’t run from me. You’re not scared of me, are you?”
“No.”
“Tell me.”
Somehow, there, encircled in the strength of his arms and under the umbrella of the stars, I told him everything.
“His name was Abraham. He was the high school football coach, elder in the church, on the town council—he was the pinnacle of the town. He was fifty six years old the first time he installed a camera in the girls’ gym at the school. I was still in middle school, then.”
He gasped and I realized he’d pulled me closer with every word. I hadn’t even gotten to the tough parts. Breaths, deep and hot on the back of my neck gave my heart a rhythm to beat to, since telling the story made it want to flutter out of control. His chest against my back felt like a brace that I needed to hold me together.
“By the time I got into high school—cross country—his tactics had apparently grown more sophisticated. Every shower stall and angle of the locker room had been infested with his cameras. Some girl found one when she was in the shower looking up. So we reported him.”
He didn’t let go, but his hold relented some. “So that was the end of it?”
“It was the end of it for the school. Like I said, he was big in the town and the whole thing was swept under the rug. Then one day, I was looking in the attic for my grandmother’s brooch. She kept it in a cedar hope chest.”
He whispered in my ear. “You lost me.”
“You’ll get it in a minute.”
I took one deep cleansing breath before reliving what was the most traumatic moment of my life. It went beyond a shock or a scare. It was the exact moment that every day of my life would change. I would never breathe the same again. I would never sleep the same again. I would never get dressed, take a shower, or even apply make-up without paranoia taking up residence over my shoulder.
“I remember everything. I was up there with Dad’s expensive titanium or whatever flashlight, looking through the chest. I had to move a heavy dress, so I put the flashlight under my chin. I found the brooch and when I closed the chest, the flashlight was shining onto that pink stuff that goes in between the boards. But there was something shiny there. So, I went over there and there were wires everywhere. I thought maybe they were cable wires or something, so I called my dad because they all seemed to be over my bedroom and bathroom. And the wires were thin. I don’t really know why they grabbed my attention like they did.”
I turned to face him. Some masochistic part of me wanted to see his face when I revealed that for years I’d been the star of my very own voyeur show at the hands of a man who we were supposed to trust. For years I’d felt like a willing participant. I should’ve known. I should’ve been able to tell.
I didn’t.
“What were they? Cameras?”
The word camera still made me want to vomit.
“Yes. But, apparently I was enough entertainment for him. There weren’t cameras in my sisters’ rooms or in their bathroom. My bedroom had its own bathroom. They were everywhere. In the ceilings, behind the mirrors, which were actually two way mirrors, above my bathtub, everywhere.”
I let out an uncomfortable giggle as he pooched his lips out and worked them from left to right. He was working stuff out.
He was missing the one link.
“How does it all connect?”
“Abraham Lawson owned our rental house. He’d been taping everything I did for years. Every time I changed. Every time I took a bath. All of it.”
My last words were muffled by the fabric of Crown’s sweatshirt as he drew me against his chest.
I had been stronger than I thought. I hadn’t cried or let me voice quiver. Maybe all that counseling had done me some good after all.
“I thought it was something silly like Candy Man or Bloody Mary.”
“What?” I pulled away from him, half laughing and half peeved.
“Well, from my standpoint you were frightened of reflective things. Windows, Mirrors, my TV. I didn’t know.”
My troubles already blurted, his assessment caused me to laugh harder than I had in years. I didn’t even know what Candy Ma
n was, but it was funny.
Most of my laughter was sheer insanity driven.
“So where is he now? The Abraham guy?”
Ugh, he just had to ask that, didn’t he?
“He is in prison…” Not meaning to, my voice rose at the end.
“He is or he isn’t?”
“He is for a week or so. Then he gets out.”
Crown sat up faster than I thought a person could, squared off his shoulders and balled up his fists. “I’ll kill him myself if he gets near you.”
The other night he wouldn’t even stay the night, but now he was threatening to kill people for me.
“What’s with you?”
“What?” He clammed up.
“The other night you couldn’t even bother yourself to stay with me when I needed you most and now you’re going in guns blazing?”
He looked at me but I looked away. One word while looking at his smoldering eyes and I’d be done for. “Maybe I’ve had a change of heart.”
The only revelation about that sentence was that Crown Sterling did, in fact, have a heart. He didn’t need me for publicity. All he had to do was spread that rumor around and even the New York Times would run a front page spread.
He needed to be called on his bullshit.
Getting on my knees and wobbling toward him, I stopped with my face in his, our noses almost touching. Damn him and his smelly good scent.
“Is this part of the deal? You having a heart?”
I sounded like a real wench.
He snorted, holding back from laughing at me. “Maybe it’s a perk.”
Maybe it was.
He took my hands in his and whatever chill that had once existed was long gone. “The other day, when you said sleeping outside was safer than inside?” I nodded. “And the routine at night? The one where you check everything. You’re checking for cameras?”
Another nod.
I felt like a sweater being shortened and frayed, thread by thread, and Crown was doing the pulling.
“You’re leaving Friday?”
“I’ll be back on Sunday.”
“Let’s sleep out here tonight.”
For someone who’d just realized he had a heart, he sure was good at all the things I wanted to hear.
“That sounds good. It’s a little cold out here.”
“Well, if you’d let me kiss you then that could be taken care of quickly. We’re just gonna have to wrap up.”