He Saved Me

by Whitney Barbetti

  The moment we entered through the back door, the temperature in the house had dropped twenty degrees. Six was back.

  He looked at us both, but mostly Julian, with annoyance before he stalked into the kitchen. Julian grinned at me like we’d just been caught with our hands in the cookie jar. I grabbed some towels from the downstairs bathroom and threw one at Julian before motioning my head to the kitchen, to follow Six.

  Julian reached out, grabbed my hand, and pulled me along with him.

  The first thing I saw was Mira, sitting on the countertop, swinging her legs with an apple at her mouth. She looked at me much like how I looked at her, with curiosity. But when she pulled the apple away from her face, she wore a shit-eating grin.

  Six was leaning against the counter opposite from her, drinking coffee. He looked at me before flicking his eyes to Julian. I could see Six was trying to figure out what to say, how to say it.

  And before he could open his mouth to spit his words, Julian spoke first.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I know I’m an unwelcome presence in this house, at least in your eyes,” Julian said. “But I’m not leaving.” His voice was as firm as the grip he had on my hand.

  There was silence. Well, silence is not totally accurate. Mira sat on the counter, swinging her legs as if she was enjoying the show. I didn’t know what to make of her. She was like a stray animal. I didn’t know how domesticated she was.

  Six took another sip of his coffee, his eyes never leaving Julian. I watched as he set his coffee down with care. He was mulling over his thoughts, arms crossed over his chest. He flicked his gaze to Mira. I furrowed my brow in confusion. Six was a force to be reckoned with, so why was he looking to Mira?

  “You shouldn’t have swam in the ocean. It’s cold. You’ll get sick.” Finally he spoke.

  But I’d been too impatient. “Oh, what? Worried I’ll catch a cold and then be stuck in this house some more? Bummer.”

  Six eyed me with the look that told me to be careful. But I stood my ground.

  He looked back to Mira, who was looking at him. She shrugged and bit a large bite from the apple. They communicated without words. Maybe she was perfect for him, as Six seemed to forget he had a voice half the time. She swallowed her bite. “It’s done. Move forward.” She flicked a glance to Julian, who squeezed my hand more tightly.

  The atmosphere was tense. It felt like I was talking to my parents. If this was what talking to parents felt like, that is. My mouth opened and annoyance licked the air. “Julian’s here. The end. There’s not going to be a discussion.”

  Six’s piercing gaze moved to mine. I flinched, only a little. There wasn’t violence in his gaze, only curiosity. Probably because I never questioned him, never stood on two feet before him.

  “All we need to be discussing,” I said, my voice even, “is where to go from here.”

  “Go?” Six asked.

  “I’m not going to be stuck in this house forever, am I?” I wouldn’t. I refused. It’d been nearly four months. Too long.

  Six sighed and looked at Mira again. What the hell was the deal with their looks?

  Mira shrugged again. “I’ll train her,” she said, rubbing her lips together. She looked me up and down. “She’s right. She can’t be stuck in this house forever.”

  “Train me?” I asked.

  Six finally looked back at me again. “We might have to gather more intel. On Hawthorne.” He looked me up and down. “I don’t want to bring anyone else into this.” He pointed three fingers at us. “We need to keep this here.”

  “Who would I tell?” I asked. It was said sarcastically, but Six ignored the tone.

  “The last time you snuck in was sloppy.” He gestured a finger at my face, where a small scar still lingered from the fall off the balcony. “Mira’s going to go with me this time.”

  “Why?” I protested. Why was I protesting? I didn’t want to get near Hawthorne ever again. But having Mira go in my place made me feel like I’d failed.

  “Mira’s small,” Six looked at Mira, who was looking at me with cat-like eyes. Rimmed heavily in black liner and focused on me. “She’s done this with me before.”

  “Breaking and entering?”

  “Gathering intel,” Six corrected.

  “Which requires breaking and entering.”

  Six looked at me almost with warning, but I was just getting heated up. Julian cleared his throat and I finally looked at him.

  “You don’t need to go back there,” Julian said to me. I narrowed my eyes at him, but his eyes were steady. He wasn’t intimidated by me.

  “I can do it,” I said raising an eyebrow staring him down.

  Mira hopped off the counter, landing loudly on her boots. She walked up to me and picked up one of my arms, jiggling it. “You’re weak,” she said.

  I yanked my hand away and glared at her. “No I’m not,” I protested. She was a few inches shorter than me, but that didn’t stop her from spinning me around and wrapping her arms around me from behind.

  “Try to escape,” she said.

  Incensed, I struggled my arms free from the hold her arms had on me. But they wouldn’t budge. I looked down at her forearms, saw the muscle tone and went slack. She loosened her arms around me before walking around.

  She pointed a finger at me. “You are weak. And you give up really easily.” She walked over to Six and leaned against the counter next to him. “That’s why I’m going and you’re not.”

  I gritted my teeth, embarrassed and pissed off. Everyone was staring at me. I crossed my arms over my chest. “Am I just supposed to sit here, no big deal? And wait?”

  Mira nodded, ran a tongue over her teeth. “Basically, yeah.”

  “I’ll be here,” Julian said softly. But I was annoyed with him too. Annoyed because they were right.

  “Are you going to train me then?”

  “That’s the plan,” Six finally spoke. “We were caught off guard in Colorado. I want you to be better prepared.” He motioned to Mira with a shrug of his shoulder. “Mira knows what she’s doing. She’ll train you.”

  My mind jumped back to the origin of this conversation. “Wait – intel? On what?”

  “I need a better look at those papers you saw on Hawthorne’s desk. There was information on them that I couldn’t read well from the photos you took.” He looked at Mira again. That was getting really annoying. “And there are other things, I need Mira for because of her knowledge and connections.”

  I knew there was no way that arguing would work out for me, so I didn’t. Instead, I walked away, done with the conversation. I bolted up the stairs, grabbed tennis shoes and socks and walked to the room that held my treadmill.

  Twenty minutes later, sweat was drenching my face, falling from my hairline into my eyebrows. Stinging my eyes. My muscles were aching, my breathing was ragged. I didn’t normally run this hard, push myself to the point of pain.

  I nearly fell, my muscles seizing with protest. So I stopped the treadmill, not even bothering with the cool down, and jumped off.

  “Andra.” I jumped again and turned around, seeing Julian sitting in the corner of the room, a book in hand. Wearing the glasses. The ones that made him look like a sexy professor. His hair was flopped over, touching the tops of the glasses.

  “What?” I instantly winced at my tone. I bit my lip. “Sorry.”

  Julian motioned to me with his hand. “Come here.”

  I lifted my tee and wiped off the sweat coating my forehead as I walked towards him. He patted the floor next to me so I slid down the wall to sit beside him.

  “Here,” he said, tossing me the book he’d had in his lap. I flipped it over, saw “J.J.” on the cover, but it was a title I didn’t recognize.

  “What’s this?” I flipped through the book, wondering where it had come from.

  “It’s my next book. This is a proof.”

  I looked up at him, confused.

  “This is the book I told you I was writing, that d
ay we were on the lake. When we went camping.”

  My heart picked up its pace. “About…” I said, before swallowing, “my mom?”

  Julian smiled. “A fictionalized version. But yes. There is still a lot of truth within these pages. I’d like you to read it, but I’d prefer to talk to you first about it.” He brushed away some hair that had escaped my ponytail.

  My eyes met his. “Let’s go on a walk,” I said, swallowing. My hand trembled a little when he reached for it with his.

  We walked down the stairs and out the back door, past Mira and Six who were on the shore. Six was laying down next to her, propped up on an elbow. He was staring so intently at her that he didn’t even notice us walk the opposite direction down the beach. It was weird seeing Six so focused on someone else. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never known a bit about his personal life. And knowing Mira was pregnant made everything confusing.

  I had no right to the details of Six’s private life, I knew that. But it was an uncomfortable feeling, feeling like I didn’t know a single thing about him, not really.

  Julian tugged my hand as if he could sense my thoughts straying, so I caught up to him. He sighed heavily, as if the burden of the knowledge he would impart upon me was too heavy for even him to bear. “So you know I investigated your mother’s death. My investigation was rather amateur, but I am lucky with the connections I have.” He looked out over the ocean before looking at me. “Your mom had a pretty rough childhood, you know?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know anything about my mother’s childhood.

  “She had her sister, your aunt, but not really anyone else. Both sisters had a trust fund set up in their name and they had access to the funds once they became legal adults.”

  I’d guessed as much when I’d first started connecting the pieces of my mother’s death and the possibility of money set up in a trust for me, based on the documents I’d seen at Hawthorne’s apartment and what Julian had told me on the lake. “But my mom lived so modestly. I honestly never thought we’d had money.”

  “I think that’s what Hawthorne saw too. I think he killed your mom for money.”

  It was a lot to take in. For years I'd been angry and unable to forgive my mom for taking her life. To learn that maybe it hadn’t been a suicide was confusing. On the one hand, I was angry. Filled with rage for Hawthorne, for stealing my mother’s life, from taking her away from me. And I was angry with myself, for all the years I pushed her away, not indulging in memories of her because I’d blamed her. But, if I was being honest with myself, I was also relieved she hadn’t killed herself. I had a tornado inside of me, twisting with rage and regret and relief. I swallowed and stopped walking, tugging Julian’s hand. “Why do you think, specifically, he killed her?”

  Julian faced me and grabbed my other hand with his. “Hawthorne claimed bankruptcy shortly before your mother’s death. I guess your aunt was sick and he’d mismanaged money.”

  “My aunt had cancer. She was never in remission longer than a year or two before it would return.” I started thinking about it all.

  “I found a lot of information online, and some of it was troubling. My father shared what information he could from your mother’s case, but none of it made sense. This wasn’t released to the public, but your mother had taken a large dose of pain medication – a nearly lethal dose in her system. But there were no pills in the house, no prescription for the medication. But her tox screen came back with a significant dosage of pain killers. Where did she get them from?”

  My heart was picking up its pace. “She didn’t take drugs at all. Not even Tylenol. She was kind of old school.” I remembered that. Bits and pieces of my mother were coming back to me. My eyes closed with a memory.

  “I can’t believe you’re giving me alcohol,” I said laughing with my mouth open.

  My mother raised an eyebrow at me. “I’m not giving you alcohol,” she corrected with a small smile. She rubbed her fingers around my gums. “I’m rubbing whiskey on your gums. Molars are a bitch.”

  “Mom!” I said as much as I could, with her fingers in my mouth.

  “What?” she asked with a shrug. She pulled her fingers out of my mouth. “There,” she said, pushing my chin up to close my mouth. “Suck on some ice cubes if it bothers you still.”

  She capped the whiskey and put it in the cupboard above the fridge. She turned around to me, biting her lower lip, her green eyes sparkling. “I think this calls for an unconventional dinner, don’t you?”

  “Depends on what you mean by unconventional.”

  She put her hands on her hips, trying to look authoritative, but my mother had more pep than I did. “I’m thinking,” she said slowly, “that the only thing that makes sense is ice cream.” She tilted her head to the side, giving me her wide smile.

  “I don’t know, mom,” I muttered unconvincingly. “It sounds disgusting.”

  She pursed her lips and nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.” But she couldn’t fight her smile. That was what I remembered the most about her: her smile. It didn’t merely light up her face, it lit up a room. She was beautiful, and not just because she was my mom.

  “Most mothers wouldn’t treat molars with booze and ice cream,” I said, grabbing my coat by the door as she gathered her keys and purse.

  “I guess that makes me special,” she replied, winking, as she passed me.

  I came back to the moment with Julian and smiled at him, reassuringly, though I felt unsettled. I didn’t often think of my mother. I’d been angry with her for so long. The first time that Hawthorne had touched me, I’d sobbed for hours into my pillow, begging to wake up from the nightmare and see my mom’s face. And as the tears had dried, I’d been angry with her, for leaving me to live this life. It ached to think about.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,” Julian said, interrupting my thoughts.

  A big part of me wanted to agree with him. This was heavy. But a larger part wanted the truth, wanted to process the entire thing at once.

  “She didn’t take drugs,” I repeated. “She wouldn’t have taken pain killers to kill herself.”

  “Right,” Julian agreed. “So where would she have gotten them from? It didn’t make sense. But your aunt was sick at the time. She had painkillers.”

  My mind was twisting and turning. “You think Hawthorne tried killing her with painkillers?” I asked.

  Julian shook his head, his long wavy hair shaking in the wind. “I think he used the painkillers to subdue her. That many painkillers would have made her sluggish, extremely sleepy, and confused. The cut to her arm was perfectly straight. If she’d had those pills in her system, in that dosage, for long enough, she wouldn’t have been able to draw a bath, climb into it, and cut the line as straight as she did. She would have probably drowned before cutting herself.”

  I took a deep breath, hoping to calm my heart. I squeezed Julian’s hand. “Wow,” I said, a little breathlessly. Mom, I thought sadly. My poor mother. Tears pricked my eyes while my chest tightened. I inhaled and pulled my hand to place it on my chest, as if I could stop the ripping in my chest.

  “Are you okay?” Julian asked.

  I inhaled and exhaled, blinking away tears. “Yeah,” I said, the sound guttural. I looked up at Julian, who looked unconvinced. “Why didn’t the police investigate further?”

  Julian shrugged. “My guess is that there were no leads, or no reason to suspect foul play. They didn’t know your mom like you did.”

  I looked down at the sand, watched the small grains moving with the slightest motion of my feet.

  “Andra?” Julian asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Julian,” I answered, forcing as much calm into my voice as possible. “Really.” I looked up at him, saw him frowning. I reached a hand up and rubbed his cheek, needing the reassurance of his touch probably as much as he needed it from me. “Your hair is getting long,” I commented, brushing it from his forehead.

  “I can’t tell if I sho
uld go with this change in topic or steer us back to what we came out here for.”

  I swallowed. “Let’s shelve it, for now.” I needed to think, to process it all.

  Julian nodded and put his arms around me, pulling me close. I felt him kiss my hair and I closed my eyes, inhaling his cinnamon and sandalwood scent. I held tightly to him, telling myself to enjoy this. Hearing what Julian suspected about my mother’s death reminded me not to take this, take him, for granted.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I whispered in his ear.

  He pulled back and framed my face in his hands. I felt the loose tendrils whipping around us in the breeze that had picked up. My hands held his wrists as I stared up at him, feeling something turn over in my chest when our eyes connected. I’d said before that he looked at me like he wanted to reach inside of me, open me up. But he already had. He’d seen the darkness and he’d stayed. He’d found me.

  He loved me. He’d said it the first night we’d had sex, before I’d ran away. We hadn’t said the words again, and I wasn’t sure why.

  “What are you thinking about?” he whispered. We were in this little cocoon of an embrace, my hair providing a shelter from everything around us.

  “Love,” I said. It was honest. I watched his eyes warm before he kissed me, the touch of his lips on mine like a salve for the brokenness in my heart. I squeezed his wrists, pushing into him.

  He pulled back after a moment, his lips a breath from mine, breathing in and out. Then he eased back, a smile teasing his lips. “Let’s go make something for lunch.” He tilted his head in the direction of the house. I nodded and followed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Later that night, I left Julian to run on the beach while I made a snack. Six and Mira had been shopping, because the fridge and cupboards had more food in them than before.

  I pulled the jar of pickles from the fridge, spinning the metal lid off with enough force to have it clang on the counter. I stabbed the fork into the jar, coming out with one large dill pickle. I took one bite and then another, crunching on the pickle as I processed how I was feeling. I’d been prepared to figure out how to deal with Hawthorne myself, ever since I’d remembered what Julian had told me, about his suspicions on Hawthorne’s involvement in my mother’s death. And Julian. He was here, with me. I hadn’t had a moment to myself since he’d arrived and while happiness soared within me, fear did too. Fear for Julian. Fear for this depth of feeling. After my second pickle, I placed the lid back on the glass jar and turned it carefully, securing it. My fingers brushed over the slightly raised numbers of the expiration date and my eyes followed my fingertips.