by J.M. Cagle
Chapter 4
“I realize it is Monday and no one wants to do any work, but if I have to be here, then you have to pay attention.”
Joey turned to her class, raising an eyebrow to a boy in the back row who was texting on a forbidden cellphone. He quickly slid it into his jeans pocket and sat up, clutching his hands in front of him and smiling. The picture of the perfect student.
“Alright, if we’re ready to pay attention.” she lifted a copy of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. “I believe we were discussing the setting of a post-apocalyptic world.”
“Isn’t it more dystopian, Miss Trevor?” one student called out.
Joey leaned back against the front of her desk. “Dystopian is more about a society that has risen out of the ashes of the destruction of society. This book is set during a time when the devastation that destroyed the original society is still taking place.”
The student nodded before burying his nose in his copy of the novel. Joey was pleased to see he was already half-way through, twice as far as the weekend homework assignment had required. “Does anyone know the definition of apocalypse?” Joey asked the class.
“End of days,” someone yelled out.
“Kind of general,” Joey said. “Anyone else?”
“Destruction.”
“Not exactly.” Joey laid down the book before crossing to the white board to write out the word. “I’ll give you a hint. Its roots are Greek.”
“Ah, that don’t help,” one of her students moaned.
“Watch your grammar,” she said over her shoulder. There were titters behind her. “Come on,” she said, turning to face the class again, “give me some more definitions.”
“Asteroids.”
The class erupted in a gale of giggles. Joey smiled, inclining her head slightly. “That is the Hollywood version, I suppose,” she allowed. “But I’m sure even Bruce Willis would be able to come up with a better definition than that.”
“Apocalypse is a prophetic disclosure, or an event of great importance,” a deep voice behind Joey said.
She turned, vaguely aware of the sudden change in attitude of the students, particularly the female students. Where they had been sprawled on their desks, doodling in notebooks and talking behind open textbooks, they were now sitting up straight, their attention completely drawn to the door at the side of the classroom. Joey followed their gazes, a part of her not really surprised to see Sam standing there.
He was leaning his shoulder against the doorjamb, his ankles crossed just above the tops of his black Converse. He was dressed identically to the way he had been on Saturday with the exception of a blue oxford shirt where he had been wearing white before. The top buttons of the shirt were undone, revealing just a slight hint of smooth, tan skin underneath. Once again Joey responded to the sight of him with an intensity that took the air from her lungs.
“Is that your boyfriend?” a girl in the front row asked in a stage whisper.
Joey glanced at her, having forgotten the students for a brief second. She cleared her throat. “Read,” she said, giving the novel on the student’s desk a shove.
She walked toward Sam, too aware of his gaze watching her every movement. It made her lose her step, her ankle rolling as she slipped in her pumps. Sam was immediately at her side, crossing six feet of space in less than a second.
“Alright, Miss Trevor!” one of the students called, causing the others to laugh again.
“Read,” she barked over her shoulder as she let Sam lead her out of the room.
“What are you doing here?” she asked immediately, moving out of his reach the second the classroom door clicked shut.
“We need to talk.”
“I’m working.”
“It’s important,” he said as he grabbed her arm again. Heat flooded her cheeks, her chest, as the warmth of him settled on her bare skin. Joey pulled away again, more out of self-preservation than anything else. She couldn’t think when he touched her like that.
“I can’t,” she whispered, unsure if she was talking to Sam or herself. She leaned back against the wall, the cool of the tile settling her pounding heart for a brief moment. But then he was standing in front of her, the smell of him enveloping her.
“Things are moving faster than I expected,” he said, raising a hand as though he intended to touch her, to caress her face, but he stopped, dropping it to his side again. “I have to get you out of here.”
“Why?”
“You have to trust me, Joey.”
She shook her head, her eyes moving slowly over his face. So handsome. She couldn’t imagine how such an angelic face could have been given to such an amazing sample of the male species. It didn’t seem fair, to give one man the perfect body and a perfect face. There was no defect, no hook to the end of his nose, no tilt to his perfectly shaped eyes, no asymmetry to his square jaw. She had never seen another person with so many perfections.
“I can’t,” she said again.
“You don’t understand. What happened on Saturday, it will happen again.” He hesitated a second. “Or worse.”
“No, you don’t understand.” She pushed away from the wall. “I don’t do trust.”
She felt his eyes on her as she moved further up the hall, pacing between her classroom door and the drinking fountain directly across from it. “I know you saved me,” she said. “If you hadn’t come when you did, that man would have done—” She stopped, the ideas of what might have happened still powerful enough to make her stomach clench with the reality of it. “But it’s over; he won’t come back.”
“It wasn’t a he; it stopped being a he or a she thousands of years ago. And it will come back. It could be here now.”
Joey shook her head. “Do you know what you sound like?”
Sam looked away, frustration clear in every inch of his body. His legs were spread slightly, his hands clenched into fists as his waist. His shoulders were squared, tight under his jacket. And his jaw was set, a tiny muscle jerking to the left of his chin.
She had this crazy image in her mind of kissing that muscle, of tasting the salt of his skin. She turned away, moving into her short path again as she tried to focus.
“Miss Trevor, don’t you have a class?”
Joey looked up as the principal walked toward her down the long corridor. The image hit her like a brick to the chest, dark and bloody, a face like something from a medieval painting, staring at her from behind the slipped mask of Mrs. Hernandez’s face. She nearly fell, stepping back so quickly that her teeth sliced through the top edge of her lip where she had absently been chewing on it.
“Close your eyes,” Sam said in her ear as he quickly came to her aid once more.
Joey did as he said, turning her head so that it fell against the outside edge of his shoulder.
“Everything okay?” Mrs. Hernandez asked, the concern in her voice so desperately opposed to the image Joey had seen.
“Fine,” Sam said. “She hasn’t been feeling well. I actually came to take her home.”
“Oh, well,” Mrs. Hernandez laid a hand on Joey’s back. When she did, the image returned, sharper than before. Not only that but the image moved, laughing with a gleefulness that was like a greasy hand snatching at Joey’s stomach, twisting and tearing until she couldn’t control the urge to vomit. She jerked from both Sam and her principal’s touch, rushing to the bathroom that was, thankfully, only a few steps away.
She thought for a moment she was going to vomit all her internal organs as the spasm tore through her, tearing at her chest until she cried out. But it finally stopped, leaving her exhausted, hugging the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl.
It hadn’t been that intense since she was a small child. And it had never happened at work.. Her gift was part of why she chose this job, why she worked with children. Children rarely had darkness under their outer façade, rarely showed her things she did not want to see. And the people who worked with children tended to be beautiful underneath, filled wi
th the beauty of a desire to form the minds of future generations. .
But that . . . that had been like nothing she had ever experienced before.
Joey dragged herself to a standing position, brushing discarded tissue and dirt from her knees. She bathed her face in cold water at the sink, trying not to close her eyes because it only brought back the vividness of Mrs. Hernandez’s true face.
“I shouldn’t have let her touch you.”
Joey cried out, spinning around to find Sam just a foot behind her. “Don’t you ever make any noise?”
“Sorry.” He held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “I was worried.”
Joey turned, again running cold water over her face and then watching it trickle between her fingers. He moved up behind her, laying a hand between her shoulder blades. A sense of peace settled over her, calming the jittery nerves that had been jumping and dancing just below her skin. When she finally closed her eyes, there was nothing but a quiet darkness etched to the back of her eyelids.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“What did you see?”
Joey straightened, catching his eyes in the mirror. “What do you mean?”
“When you looked at that woman. What did you see?”
She turned, shaking her head as she tried to move past him. No one but Dotty knew, and Joey had never been sure that Dotty believed her. Sam took her arms, pulling her in front of him so that she was pinned between his body and the sink counter.
“I know what you do. I need to know what you saw when you looked at her.” He pushed a curl out of Joey’s eyes. “I assume it wasn’t pleasant.”
“You’re pretty observant.”
“It’s important, Joey. I need to know what kind of humans are around you.”
She tilted her head slightly, curious about his choice of words. “Mrs. Hernandez is a sweet woman.”
“I’m sure she is. In public.” He moved closer to her, as though the inch that separated them was too far for this particular conversation. She became aware of the heat of his inner thigh as his leg pressed up against her hip, the rippling muscles in his abdomen, his chest, as he thrust up against her breasts. If there hadn’t been a layer of clothing between them . . .
And then the toilet exploded.