Borrowed Heart

by Linda Lamberson

  He shut down his computer, walked over to his coat closet, and grabbed the Cubs hat I’d worn whenever we went outside together. He looked at it for a moment before readjusting the cap’s strap and putting it on.

  “Good night, Evie,” Quinn said out loud as he turned off the lights and headed to bed.

  What had he just spent the last hour-and-a-half doing? In hindsight, I wished I would have peeked. I sat invisibly in my chair, glancing back at his laptop every so often. I knew I had no right to pry, but I couldn’t help myself; curiosity got the best of me. Against my better judgment, I materialized and slowly made my way across the room.

  I felt like a thief skulking about his apartment in the middle of the night as I turned on his laptop and entered his password—a spy about to steal top-secret information. I went to his Documents folder and found one file with today’s date; it was simply titled “E.”

  I inhaled deeply as I opened the document, not knowing what to expect; but no amount of breathing could have prepared me for what I read—

  You appeared like a flash of light,

  As bright as the sun.

  You were the air that I breathed;

  The water that quenched my thirst;

  The healer of my wounds.

  You were the girl of my dreams.

  Because you were the one that I loved.

  You vanished deep into the night,

  To the other side of the moon.

  You were the toxin that choked me;

  And the rain that drowned me

  As you ripped my heart apart.

  Your desertion became my nightmare

  Because you were the one that I loved.

  I’m falling.

  Where is my guardian angel?

  Who will catch me now?

  I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I tried to catch my breath, but it hurt way too much, so I just stopped breathing altogether. I thought I was the only one who was suffering miserably, but I was wrong.

  The anger I was harboring towards Quinn began to dissipate into thin air, replaced by anger towards myself. I never should have made that promise to Quinn; it was a stupid mistake. It would have been better for the both of us if I had erased all memory of me this summer from his mind.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  The sound of Quinn's voice startled me, and I jumped up out of the chair. I looked at him, unable to say anything. He walked over to his laptop and saw his poem up on the screen.

  “Figures,” he snapped. “You refuse to talk to me anymore, so you resort to snooping around to find out what’s going on with my life. Is that it?”

  “That’s not fair,” I said, trying to defend myself.

  “Well, what do you call this?” Quinn practically shouted.

  “I could ask you the same thing!” I pointed to his laptop.

  “It’s none of your damn business.” Quinn slammed the laptop shut. The silence that followed could not have been any louder or more uncomfortable.

  “Look,” I said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to snoop. I’m sorry. I just …” My voice trailed off.

  “You just what, Evie?” he snapped.

  I was at a loss for words. Being here, standing in front of him, both thrilled and frightened me. I was overwhelmed with guilt for hurting him, but I couldn’t see past how badly he had hurt me. I missed him so much, and at the same time I wished I never had to see him again.

  “I was just so furious with you the other night—I’m still furious with you,” I muttered.

  “Evie, you’re the one who told me to move on. I didn’t want to—remember? You can’t turn around now and be mad at me because I tried to let you go. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “I know, I know,” I readily conceded. “But I can’t help the way I feel. I just … I didn’t expect you to move on so quickly … and in that way. I didn’t expect to react the way I did when I saw you with her.”

  “You saw me? … With her?” Quinn asked, horrified.

  “No!” I shrieked, equally horrified. “I couldn’t bear the thought of you two together much less the sight of it.” My body shuddered involuntarily. I walked towards the windows and looked outside.

  “I don’t know what to say other than ‘I’m sorry,’” he said regretfully, “I’ve never been more sorry.”

  I refused to turn around and look at him.

  “Evie,” Quinn said longingly as he walked towards me, stopping a few feet away. “The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt you. And I definitely never meant to throw it in your face like that. But when I came home the other night and saw you sitting here, when I saw you look at me like that, I knew I had.

  “The weirdest thing about it,” he continued in the wake of my silence, “is that even though you looked at me like you hated me, part of me was just so happy to see you.” He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Quinn, please … don’t,” I said as I took a step to the side, away from him, while keeping my back to him.

  “What difference does any of this make now?” I asked.

  “I don’t want things between us to end like this,” he replied.

  “You know we can’t be together.” I took a deep breath and sighed heavily. “And even if we could, we could never go back to the way things were. Too much has changed.” My mind flashed to an image of Quinn as he walked through his front door, disheveled and reeking of Ashley’s perfume. Nausea washed over me, and I shuddered again.

  “Quinn,” I said, turning around and facing him. A new sense of conviction to be strong coursed through my body. “You were doing the right thing—you were moving forward with your life … and you would’ve continued to do so if I hadn’t slipped up and let you see me the other night.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said snidely. “I would love for you to explain which part of me was moving forward. Was it the part where I would’ve given anything to have been with you the other night instead of her? Was it the part where I prayed that you would answer me—that you would stop me from walking up the stairs into her place? Or was it the part where I pictured your face … your body the entire time I was with her?” Quinn paused in frustration.

  “Evie, the look on your face as I walked through that door,” Quinn pointed to his front door, “is nothing compared to the guilt that has consumed me every minute of every day since that night I walked out of hers.

  “If that’s moving forward, then I’m at a total loss as to how to do it because the way I see it, if I had a choice between you and any other woman in the world—I would pick you, hands down. I would always pick you.”

  “Quinn,” I said cautiously, “I know I promised I wouldn’t erase your memory, but I really think you should reconsider. You wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. You would be able to forget about me … You’d be able to fall in love.”

  “I already fell in love,” he countered. “And I’m still in love with you.”

  “But you know we’re on borrowed time.”

  “So? Tell me, what other time is there? Life is all about being on borrowed time. Just say the word, and I’ll be with you for as long as I can—for as long as you’ll have me.”

  Even if Quinn still loved me, he had to know he shouldn’t. He had to realize that this was not the natural order of things … that we made no sense. And I loved Quinn, despite the fact that I knew I couldn’t. I had already broken the Rules I was obliged to uphold. To make matters worse, I knew my love for him was putting him at even greater risk of harm. Yet here we were, standing on our respective sides of an impassable abyss.

  “Quinn, we obviously were never meant to be together.”

  “How do you know what we were meant to be when you can’t even remember who you were six months ago?” he exclaimed. “You know what—you need to know. Screw the Rules; I’m sick of them.

  “Evie, I think I started falling in love with you the first week I saw you in Swain’s psych class … And I only got more hooked when I as
ked for your notes after class one morning, when I followed you to your next class like a stray dog, when I ran into you at the Union … And at the party, when we kissed—that was all it took for me. That’s when I knew there was something between us—”

  “Quinn, please stop—”

  “Why should I? You’ve broken the Rules before and look where that’s gotten us? It’s completely idiotic, and I’m sick and tired of playing games. If we can’t be together, then at the very least, you should know what you’re missing—what you could have had.”

  “You don’t think I know how idiotic this is? … I’m dead, Quinn! You are standing there pledging your love to a dead girl! A ghost!” I shouted. “I’m not real. I can never be real in the way you need me to be. I can never give you what Ashley or any other human girl can.” Sorrow flooded me, drowning out the echo of my words reverberating within the shell of the body I now inhabited.

  “Evie, you are the most real, the most alive, person I’ve ever known.” He closed the distance between us. “The other night was a mistake … the worst mistake of my life. But it made me realize how much I love you. I don’t want to be with another girl. I want to be with you.”

  “Quinn … we can’t ever be together … like that,” I said, choking back the ache in my throat.

  “I don’t care. If we can’t act on our feelings for each other in that way, so be it; I’ll live without it. But what I can’t live without is you. Evie, I know I messed things up royally, but please don’t push me away. Please tell me how to fix this,” Quinn begged. “Tell me how to make it right again between us.”

  I could feel my defenses slipping. I was afraid to trust what Quinn was saying, but that didn’t stop me from hanging on his every word. I wanted to believe he loved me as much as I loved him.

  “Evie, I’ve missed you so much,” he whispered hoarsely. “Please don’t tell me that this is the end of the line for us.” He cradled my face with the palm of his hand. I looked into Quinn’s eyes; they looked like peaceful, calm blue ocean waters.

  I knew that I should resist him, but I was too tired of arguing with Quinn and fighting my feelings for him. And I was tired of trying to play by the damn Rules that prevented us from being together. And, regardless of whether I obeyed them or broke them, I was convinced, now more than ever, that this moment would have played itself out sooner or later. This was more than Quinn and I just wanting to be together—we didn’t know how to be apart from each other.

  Quinn gently tilted my head up towards his. He leaned in and kissed me tenderly. My love for Quinn welled up inside of me like water behind a dam about to burst. Suddenly, the last two weeks didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was that I was exactly where I wanted to be—in Quinn’s arms.

  He pulled me in closer and kissed me again. Sparks flew the second our lips met. I reveled in the way my body reacted to his. We kissed each other like this would be the first and last time we would ever be together—for all I knew, maybe it would be. We embraced each other so tightly we couldn’t physically get any closer, and yet we still weren’t close enough. The heat emanating off his body was like gasoline to the fire raging inside of me. His breathing got heavier and deeper. I could feel his pulse begin to race. He started maneuvering me across the room and down the hallway towards his bedroom, kissing me the entire way. I followed him blindly.

  “Evie, we better stop,” he whispered in between kisses, “before things go too far.”

  “Shh,” I whispered as I teased his lips with mine. “You said it yourself … some Rules are meant to be broken.”

  Quinn took a deep breath and sighed. “I did say that, didn’t I?” The serenity I had seen in his eyes now was replaced by a smoldering blue storm. He kissed me again, and I welcomed the heat that spread through my body at lightning speed.

  He began pulling at my T-shirt. As if on cue, I lifted my arms up to help him. Then he reached for his T-shirt, but I simply ripped it off, not wanting to wait another second to feel the warmth of his skin against mine. Before I knew it, I was sitting on the edge of his bed with him standing over me. He paused for a moment to look at me. His eyes flickered wildly, revealing exactly how he felt … and what he wanted.

  He said nothing and neither did I. There was nothing left to say. I pulled Quinn down on top of me, feeling the full weight of his body on mine. My head started spinning out of control as he began to explore my body. I wanted to give myself to him completely.

  Then, without warning, a searing pain hit me as an image flashed in my head—the headlights of a pickup truck barreling towards me. I tried my best to ignore it, not wanting anything to interrupt this moment. But another sharp pain tore through me as a second image infiltrated my mind—a man and a woman both in their late-forties. They were … my parents. I immediately pushed Quinn off of me and sat up.

  “What’s wrong?” He sounded confused and worried.

  I couldn’t answer him. I was being ambushed by snapshots of my former life. My mind felt like it was being ripped apart. The pain was so excruciating that I couldn’t even scream. I grabbed my head with both hands just before my body began seizing.

  “Evie, what’s happening to you?” Quinn asked in alarm. He scooped me up in his arms, but it wasn’t long before I began phasing uncontrollably in and out of my human form. I felt like my head would explode from the pain of thousands of memories of my life bombarding me simultaneously.

  “There are some things worse than death.” Agnes’s words haunted me.

  This is the end, I thought. This was the price to be paid for indulging myself—for acting on the passion I had felt for Quinn. I had hung myself with the tightrope I’d tried to walk.

  “Quinn,” I gasped. I struggled to regain some control over my body, but it was of no use. My physical form was no match for whatever was attacking my mind and shredding it to pieces.

  “My God! Evie?”

  I tried to grab his hand, but my fingers passed right through his. I could no longer hold on to anything tangible.

  “Evie!” Quinn screamed … and then I was gone.

  33. Hark! The Herald Council Calls

  “Eve?” I heard my name being called. I opened my eyes to find myself in an unfamiliar room.

  “Where … where am I?” I asked hazily.

  “You’re in the Council’s quarters,” Peter answered.

  “What am I doing here?” I was confused. I looked around to discover I was laying on a chaise lounge. I had no idea how I had gotten there.

  “That’s a good question,” Peter replied.

  “You mean … you don’t know?” I asked.

  “No … none of us do,” Peter paused. “Something happened to you. Your signature—it flickered again. Only this time, you managed to teleport yourself to the Archives … right at my feet. One minute you seemed to be in so much agony, and the next, you slipped into a state of unconsciousness, only to awaken now. It was the strangest occurrence I’ve ever witnessed.” Peter’s voice broke off again. “I was truly worried about you … I’m still worried about you.”

  My mind struggled to remember the events that led me back here. I remembered being with Quinn, talking to him … And I remembered kissing him—

  “Oh no!” I gasped. I immediately glanced down at myself. Somehow, I was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. I could only hope that my “default” outfit magically appeared while I involuntarily phased up here before Peter, or anyone else for that matter, saw me dressed as I was while in Quinn’s arms.

  Oh no! Quinn! I looked up at Peter, my eyes wide with terror.

  “Peter! Where’s Quinn? Who’s watching him?” I asked, panic-stricken.

  “Another Shepherd,” Peter responded.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Just over six hours in Aura time.”

  I had been away from Quinn for more than six days.

  “Have … have I been transferred off the case?” I asked hesitantly.

  “For now,” Peter replied.


  “What does that mean?” I squeaked.

  “It means that the Council is reviewing your case. It means, Eve, that depending on the outcome of the Council Tribunal’s Inquiry, you may or may not go back to being Mr. Harrison’s Shepherd.”

  I couldn’t grasp the idea of never seeing Quinn again … not now—not after everything we’d been through.

  “Eve,” Peter said softly, “tell me what happened.”

  “I remembered,” I said, looking up at Peter. “I remembered everything … Peter, I know who I am … I know who I was before I became a Shepherd.”

  * * *

  I followed Peter into the Council’s conference room, which could only be described as a makeshift courtroom. In the middle of the room was a single podium. About ten feet in front of the podium was a wooden table, similar to the ones located in the Archives, only longer, with seven chairs tucked underneath, each of which faced the room. Several yards behind the podium were a few rows of pews. The room was stark and cold. In fact, it was devoid of any artwork save for a large tapestry hanging up on the back wall of the room for all to see. I looked more closely at the tapestry and saw the Rules had been intricately and expertly embroidered within the fabric. I wondered if the Three Sisters had created this artful masterpiece. I read the Rules and shivered.

  Judgment day, I thought to myself.

  Just then seven figures materialized in front of me; four in the form of women and three in the form of men. I correctly assumed that they were members of the Council Tribunal as I watched them take their respective seats at the long table in the back of the room. Each Tribunal member was wearing the same robe, which looked like it had been woven from gold. But when I looked more closely, I realized each of the Tribunal members was emanating a golden hue—an aura—that made him or her glow slightly. Six of the Tribunal members were wearing matching white turbans, while the seventh, a woman who sat in the middle seat, wore nothing on top of her head.