by Sadie Sears
Just gone.
I puttered around the kitchen for a bit while she warmed up by the fire. Lighting the wood stove, I filled a kettle with water to boil and pulled a box out of the cabinet. My mind was hopping back and forth from excitement to doubt. What if we started something again and her family ripped her away a second time? Would she let them do that again?
The snowstorm picked up outside, and I watched the snowflakes pour down from the sky. This was something we hadn’t really seen much of in North Carolina. The winters there were rather mild, and snowfall was minimal unless we went way up into the mountains. Their trees, though, weren’t so quick to turn, and the colors were beautiful, especially when I’d been at her side. Everything had been more beautiful then.
When the sound of whistling reached my ears, I flinched back into reality. I pulled the kettle off and poured the scorching hot liquid into two mugs from the rack. Damini still held her hands out toward the flames when I walked back over, and she accepted the mug gratefully.
She peeked inside and inhaled deeply. “Hot cocoa?”
“What else for a snowstorm?” I took a sip of mine, savoring the flavor. When I glanced over, she was staring into the fire again. “Did I burn it? I’m not the greatest cook, but I know how to boil water.”
Laughing, she shook her head, more dark locks spilling over her shoulder. “No, I was just mourning the missing marshmallows.”
“Oh.” I set my mug down on the low side table. “I’ll see if we have any.” It was entirely possible that we did.
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “This is okay. Better than okay. Thank you.”
I settled back into my seat. “You’re welcome.”
That time, the silence was comfortable. There were still things we’d have to talk about, or rather, that I wanted to talk about, but they could wait. I didn’t want to ruin the peace just yet.
The cabin was well-built, and the heat from the fireplace started to warm the open space. Damini unzipped her puffy coat and removed it, setting it aside with the rest of her belongings. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of her in the fitted red sweater. My dragon raged inside me, begging to get closer, and I only barely suppressed the urge.
“Are you okay?” She scooted a bit closer, concern in her rich, brown eyes.
I cleared my throat awkwardly and looked away. “Yeah, fine. Just worried about this storm, is all.”
A smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Sometimes I miss the milder winters of North Carolina. Cool outdoor weather lasted longer, the summers were hot, but the beaches were nice.”
“And no avalanches,” I added.
She laughed and it tugged at my heart. “Definitely no snow avalanches. Books were a different story, though.”
The university library had seen a lot of us back then. I’d always been obsessed with reading, using books to escape to another world, to work out my active imagination. Damini had joined me in the stacks, sometimes for research, sometimes for a reading session, sometimes for other things. We may have accidentally knocked over a shelf or two.
“That librarian was so mad at us,” she continued, her face alight with the memory. “She thought you were a student and made us work there every day for two weeks as punishment.”
I leaned forward and buried my face in my hands, poorly smothering my own laughter. “Little did she know that was the best punishment I’d ever had.”
“You got the returns put up so quickly that we practically spent the entire time in the back room.” She leaned her head on the back of the couch. “I’m surprised your commanding officer didn’t reprimand you for that.”
Shrugging, I sat up straight again, though I couldn’t wipe the grin off of my face. “Eh, the Air Force is a bit more lenient in that regard, I guess. As long as I showed up for my regular duties, they didn’t really say anything. Do you remember the time he almost caught you in the dorm?”
Damini sat up and hit me with a couch pillow. “You said we had permission! You snuck me out of a second-floor window. I thought you were going to get court-martialed if they caught me on base!”
By that time, I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. “And you lost your shoe in the mud, but you were so terrified of getting caught that you just kept running!”
“Those were expensive!” She hit me with the pillow again. “The other one had to be thrown away anyway because the red clay stains wouldn’t come out of the suede.”
One after another, the memories of our year together swarmed me. We’d met in a bookstore near the campus. She’d been looking for a specific textbook for one of her college classes, and I’d found it for her. Then she’d asked me if I could ring her up at the customer service counter, so she didn’t have to wait in line. I’d informed her that I didn’t work there and then I asked her out for coffee.
When I wasn’t on base and she wasn’t in class, we’d been attached at the hip after that. The parks and walking trails around the city. Concerts and water parks. Art galleries and museums. Our beach trip on summer break. She’d been lucky enough to have an off-campus apartment, so we didn’t have to sneak around the dorms, but on the rare occasion we went back to my place, we’d had to tiptoe in and out.
There were so many memories crammed into that one year. I’d been tempted the past few years to go back there just to relive it, maybe catch a glimpse of her revisiting the place. I’d asked Ben, the sole water dragon among our clan, to swing through Boston on our way to Spruce. He hadn’t minded, since Boston had plenty of water to be around and a bumping nightlife, but I’d just wanted to see Damini.
If she’d been in town at the time, though, my dragon would’ve sensed her. As it was, my timing was impeccable. There had been nothing to pick up on, and we’d continued on through.
Our laughter died off, and Damini turned slightly on the couch to look out the window forlornly. It was a solid sheet of white outside. She sighed and glanced at me.
“So, what’s the plan, Rescue Ranger?” she asked. “How do we get back to town in this weather?”
“We don’t.” I nodded my head toward the windows. “Not in that, at least. We’ll need to wait out the storm. It should only be for one night, and then things will hopefully have calmed enough for me to fly us back safely.”
She scrunched her nose and hesitated, tapping her fingers on her knee. “Jessica was waiting for me to call her when I got back into town to make sure I was safe. She’ll be worried.”
“I’m not going to risk your life in the mess that that storm is right now,” I told her. “She—wait, the same Jessica? Your study buddy from your journalism class?”
Damini pursed her lips and nodded. “Yep, the same one.”
“I liked her. But she’ll have to forgive you on this one. Even she would agree that she’d rather see you back safe than on time.”
With a heavy sigh, she leaned back into the couch. “Yeah, you’re right.”
She propped one foot up and tugged her boot and sock off, stretching her leg out to warm her toes up by the fire. When she started to work on her other boot, she winced.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, dropping to the floor in front of her.
“It’s fine; it probably just needs to rest.” She tugged again and whimpered.
I pushed her hands away, loosening the boots up more and easing it off. Her skin was already a gorgeous tawny brown thanks to her Pakistani heritage on her mother’s side, but her ankle was alarmingly dark. I reached for my bag again.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this when I was checking you earlier?”
She hissed between her teeth as I shoved her pant leg up and lifted her foot into my lap to start wrapping it. I nearly went nuts at the contact with her bare skin. “I didn’t think it would be that bad. Argh!”
“Sorry, sorry. It’s really swollen.” I tried to be as gentle as I could with her. My dragon didn’t like that I was hurting her, even though I was obviously helping. “That’s probably why your boot wouldn’
t slip off. You won’t be walking on that for a couple of days at least.”
Damini winced again. “What about driving?”
“You’d still have to apply pressure to it, and it would hurt.” I’d inspected it as I wrapped it, and there wasn’t anything broken. I applied the metal clip closures and pulled the leg of her pants back down over it, then propped her foot on a couch pillow in front of the fireplace. “It looks like just a bad sprain. I don’t think anything is broken, so you’re in luck there.”
I dug around in my bag again until I produced a resealable bag. She looked like she was about to say something, but I stood and walked around her to the door. Outside, I used my powers to keep the wind from knocking me around too much as I shoveled some snow into the plastic bag, then ducked back inside quickly and shuddered at the sudden temperature change.
“This should help with the swelling,” I told her, setting the bag of snow across her ankle. “At least until it melts, then I can refill it again if we need to.”
“Thank you, Vince.” She tried for a strained smile. “Thanks for helping.”
3
Damini
Being in the cabin, in the middle of nowhere, with my long-lost love puttering around, making a fire, cooking up hot chocolate, lighting candles… This was beyond surreal. There was no way this was real. One hundred percent, I was still buried underneath the snow and ice, freezing to death in a glorious hypothermia dream. The experts said freezing to death was a great way to go. This must be it.
I surreptitiously pinched my arm. No, I was awake. This was happening. Vince hadn’t just reappeared in my life, he’d saved my life. Shit. He was playing it cool, like no big deal, but it was huge. He’d destroyed my entire life nine years ago. So badly that I hadn’t had a real relationship since. Only my family had been my constant. They had their issues and at times I wished they would change. Okay, a lot of the time. They needed to be more open-minded, less snobby. For sure. But they’d always been there for me, every single day of my life.
“So, what’ve you been up to?” I didn’t say the rest. What had he been up to since he left me and stomped on my heart on the way out the door?
“Well, I floated around for a while, then ended up here in Spruce. I’m with an agency of dragons.” He cleared his throat. “You?”
Agency? That sounded official. “I, uh, I’m not exactly qualified to do anything, really. I left college in my last year. But my family keeps me busy, and I like to keep active.” I sighed. “You know… hiking and such.”
He nodded and tapped his foot. The unspoken words weighed heavily between us. It was hard to think of small talk when I wanted to ask him why he’d hurt me. It didn’t matter that it had been nearly a decade, I’d never been able to get him completely out of my mind, or the question of why it had all happened.
My mother had come into my room when I was putting on my makeup, getting ready to meet Vince. She’d looked like she was about to burst into tears.
I’d rushed to her side. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
She’d sunk onto my bed. “Oh, Damini. I’m so sorry. I honestly thought he’d deny me, send me away, but…”
With a sob, she’d pulled her phone from her pocket and swiped through, until she came to an image of a check on her bank account. “He cashed the check, my darling.”
“What are you talking about?” I studied the check, made out to Vincent Orlando. It was for a substantial amount of money. More than substantial. I was surprised the bank even cashed it. “What is this?”
“Yesterday, I approached your boyfriend. I offered him money to leave you. He… Honey, he lit up like a lightbulb when he saw the check. He snatched it and left. I waited to see if he’d really cash in, but when the bank information updated this morning, he had. Damini, my darling, I’m so sorry.”
I’d been stunned, and when Jessica, my roommate at the time, came home and I told her, she hadn’t believed it, but I had no reason to think my mother would lie, and the proof was in her bank account. A cashed check to Vincent Orlando. The image of the check on the screen of Mom’s phone had flashed through my mind over and over as we packed my things and left. Mom got us on the first flight out of North Carolina. I went back to Boston right away, unable to face the thought of running into Vince again. Mom had gotten me a new phone as soon as we got into the city, and I even changed my email addresses.
I wanted nothing to do with a man who would take money to stay away from me.
Yet despite my attempts to distance myself, and despite the large amount of time, here I was, stuck with Vince. Oh, boy.
I realized I’d been quiet for a little too long. But then, so had Vince. He must’ve felt guilty for accepting the bribe. The words were on the tip of my tongue to ask him why he’d done it, but I convinced myself to stay silent. We were stuck in this cabin together overnight. I didn’t want it to turn into a sobbing, angry mess.
One of the things my therapist had helped me work through was my temper. I’d learned how and when to keep my mouth shut, and I was enormously proud of that ability.
I cleared my throat several minutes later when I couldn’t wait. “Which door is the bathroom?” I asked. There were a couple of doors off of the big room that was the living room and kitchen in one.
He pointed to one. “There. Can I help you?”
“No, it’s okay. I’m good.” I got up with my weight on my good foot and left the bag of half-melted snow on the sofa. It hurt less than I expected it to, but still, I was careful not to put all my weight on the foot. It hurt the least when I didn’t try to bend it, so I kept my foot flat on the floor and stiff. I probably just needed a few days in a boot. Thank goodness he’d had a wrap.
After doing my business, I washed my face and hands and then fished a hair tie out of my pocket. Pulling my hair back, I stared at myself in the mirror. I’d come a long way, emotionally, in nine years. Every day had been a small struggle, questioning myself, worrying about what was wrong with me that a man who was supposed to love me would take money over me.
I would make the best of the night, continue with my resolve to let it all go, and tomorrow get the hell out of here and stop thinking about it.
That was the best thing. Pretend Vince was my friend, and that we were going to spend a friendly evening together. Yes. I could do this.
Limping out of the bathroom, I found Vince bent over a cabinet in the corner. “How about a board game?” he asked. “Monopoly or checkers?”
We used to play Monopoly together all the time, so not that. “Checkers sounds good.”
He grabbed the box and stood. “At the table?”
“Sure,” I said softly, turning toward the kitchen.
“No, wait,” he said. “I think there’s one of those TV tables here somewhere. Go sit on the sofa and put your foot back up.”
That was probably a good idea. I shifted direction as he ran to the room he’d disappeared into before, and by the time I got my foot up on the couch and the ice on my ankle, he was walking back in the room with a folded-up table. “Here we go!” He set the table up over my lap and then pulled the armchair close.
Just as Vince opened the checkers box, my stomach rumbled. I was pretty hungry, but I had no idea what he had to eat in those cabinets. I didn’t want to ask, and my thighs certainly had enough extra padding to get me through one night without food. It would be fine, and the hot chocolate was enough to keep me hydrated until tomorrow.
“Are you hungry?” Vince jumped up before I could reply. “I’ll make something, I should’ve done that first thing.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said, but he was already across the room and in the kitchen.
“Nonsense. Let me see what’s here.” He opened and closed a bunch of cabinets, then walked back toward me. “Okay, our options are some cured meats that I don’t have the first clue how to cook, boxed mac and cheese, and an assortment of MREs. Some of those aren’t too bad, as I recall. There are also canned goods like pasta and vegetables.
I could heat some of them up?”
That seemed safest. I hadn’t ever had an MRE, but I wasn’t in the mood to try one now. “Canned pasta and vegetables sound great to me.”
He nodded and saluted me. “Coming right up.”
As he moved around the kitchen and situated a couple of pots over the fire on a tall wire rack, he hummed. “I wish we had a radio. I hate total silence.”
Secretly, I agreed, but I kept quiet. I had too many emotions running around inside me to give him the satisfaction of any sort of camaraderie.
He glanced at me with a nervous smile, and I had to remind myself of my plan to keep things civil and friendly until I could get the hell out of here and go back to Boston. “Yes,” I said belatedly. “I like music in the background, myself.”
“I remember.” He said it so quietly that I barely heard him. Was that regret I heard in his voice? Surely, he wasn’t going to feel bad now, after all this time, about hurting me.
The food heated quickly, and Vince transferred it over onto a couple of divided tin plates. He sat across from me and took a bite. “Mmm, nothing like canned ravioli.”
I chuckled and stirred mine. “It fills the gut.”
“Oh, sorry.” He jumped up again. “There’s only water unless you’d like more hot chocolate.”
“No, water is fine.” I shifted on the sofa. “I’m sorry you’re having to run around for me.”
He stopped and looked back at me. “I don’t mind at all. I’m only glad I came along when I did.”
Well, I was glad to be alive, that was for sure. It would’ve been nice if it had been literally any other dragon in the world, however.
After we ate our ravioli and peas, Vince grabbed the dishes and filled a metal tub with snow. He set the tub on the rack he’d used to make dinner. “We can play a round while that boils,” he said.
I nodded and smiled as he set up the checkers game.