Charcoal Tears

by Jane Washington

  I was myself again.

  They walked with me to my car and I saw Tariq waiting, so I switched directions and moved to their jeep instead.

  “Bye,” I said, feeling miserable. I tried to smile, but I was pretty sure that I failed, and I hated myself for it.

  Cabe turned so that the people milling around the car park had nothing to stare at but his broad back. He pressed a finger to my chin. “You’re making that face again,” he warned. He wasn’t joking; he was serious this time.

  Noah turned to the side, almost boxing me against the car as he looked down at me. “We should follow her home and make sure she doesn’t get into any trouble with that asshole.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but it didn’t come out. Should I be insulted that Noah had just called my father an asshole? I wasn’t sure. I thought he was an asshole, too.

  “What time do you work?” Cabe asked.

  “I have a few hours,” I hedged.

  His finger had slipped against my chin when I spoke, and he traced it along my jaw now. He seemed very focused, his eyes sparking with a glare of intensity. Noah nudged him, and he dropped his arm, looking up at the sky for a moment.

  “Good.” His voice was gruff. “Tell Tariq to drive home, and then get in the car”

  He backed off me and I swallowed, a nervous feeling brewing in my stomach and making me feel sick. My legs were shaky as I approached my younger brother. I didn’t trust my voice, so I simply held out the keys to him. He flicked a look over my shoulder, his brows drawing together.

  “You sure, Seph?” He sounded like he didn’t know whether to be worried or not.

  “They’re fine,” I assured, but my voice came out a squeak. He narrowed his eyes on me, and I cleared my throat. “They’re fine,” I reiterated, with a little bit more steel. “Can you go shopping and hang out a while? We’ll still go home together in a few hours.”

  He nodded and I handed him my battered purse. He unlocked the car and I turned back to the jeep. They saw me heading back to them and Noah jumped behind the wheel. Cabe opened the passenger door for me, and then climbed into the back.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Home?” Noah shrugged. “Unless you want to go somewhere in particular?”

  “Home sounds fine.”

  He offered me a smile and then turned on the radio. I curled my knees to my chest, looping my arms around myself. As we pulled into the apartment building, Cabe was there to open my door again and I fidgeted all the way up to the top floor. Noah caught my hands, pulling one of them away. He held it and drew me into the apartment. Cabe closed the door and they headed straight for the kitchen. It seemed a routine of sorts; Cabe grabbed an armful of snacks, and then they both walked down the sunken living room and Cabe kicked open one of the doors. This room looked back onto the city, and there was a grand piano set against the glass wall. Bookshelves hugged the inside walls, and this room had another sunken part, boasting the piano and a few couches. The raised part held the bookshelves and a comfortable armchair, as well as a computer desk littered with electronics.

  The door to the apartment banged open as Cabe put down his snacks, and Noah’s grip on my hand turned to iron. He sent a panicked look at Cabe, whose expression had gone blank.

  “I forgot to tell him,” Cabe muttered. He raced out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Quiet male voices drifted to where I stood and I rounded on Noah.

  “What was that? Who’s out there?”

  His thumb brushed over the inside of my wrist, his turbulent eyes distracted. “Miro,” he said. “He doesn’t want to see you right now.”

  “Huh?” I started to pull away, wanting to peek through the door, but Noah swooped me back with a chuckle.

  “Hey, little ghost. You wouldn’t leave me here alone would you?” He planted his hands on my hips and shifted my back against the side of the piano.

  I pushed him lightly, warring feelings of panic and solace seizing me and making my head spin. There was some part of me—an alien part of me—that recognised Noah and Cabe as familiar, and comfortable. But the real me was afraid. “You can’t distract me. Who’s Miro?”

  His mouth hooked into a smile and he captured my other hand, tugging my arms together and tucking them behind me, effectively forcing my body forward and fitting it into his.

  “I can distract you.” His voice was both amused and breathless, his head nudging mine to the side.

  He was switching on the compelling gravity of his personality again, and I started to forget what we were talking about. My head fell to the side and the now familiar haze descended over my mind, filling me with an elation that wasn’t quite mine, and sedating me with a weakness that confused my senses. The air crackled with electricity and he grunted, pushing against me.

  I blinked my eyes open and my head snapped up. Did I just zap him?

  He backed off, his eyes stormy. He slowly allowed my hands to pull back to my sides, and he lifted his brows at me, gradually coming to the same realisation. He seemed confused for a moment, and then he released me.

  “Stay right there.” He pointed at me: a warning. He moved to the door.

  It was quiet outside, and a minute later I heard the front door opening and closing as well. Whoever Miro was, Cabe had already taken him out of the apartment. I moved to the piano bench and slumped down, pushing listlessly at the keys. I’d never accidently zapped a person before. Was he in pain?

  I tried to recall what I had been doing, or what he had been doing, but the memory was off, slightly unfocussed. It took a few minutes for them to return, and when they did, Cabe was almost bouncing off the floor with excitement.

  “Show me!” he demanded.

  Noah was gruff. “I don’t think she even realised, calm down.”

  Cabe made a face, marched to me, and forced me to stand. “Spark up,” he ordered.

  “Huh?” I swayed back a little, examining his face.

  “Fine. Here… watch.” Noah pushed him out of the way and grabbed my face, his hands fitting to my cheeks, fingers brushing behind my jaw.

  My eyes went wide as he swooped down and pressed a kiss to my chin.

  “What the fuck?” Cabe grabbed his shoulder, on the verge of pulling him off me.

  “Shut up and watch,” Noah was mumbling, his mouth still on my skin.

  I was shivering, the sick feeling back in my stomach, muted by the unfocused haze rolling through my head. His lips traced from my chin to the corner of my mouth and the air filled with tiny currents. I sucked in a breath and he made a sound in the back of his throat, turning and stalking from the room. He slammed the door and I heard him swearing on the other side.

  Cabe smirked at the door and then looked back to me, muttering, “remarkable.”

  “The electricity?” I was almost too scared to say it, and my voice shook with the uneasiness that still rocked through me, making me unsteady on my feet, like a fight or flight response was battering urgently against my body, trying to seize me in its urgency for action.

  His eyes flared. “Yeah, Seph. Can you control it?”

  “Usually.”

  He grinned. “I almost want to try, but I think I learned my lesson watching Noah.”

  “Did I hurt him?”

  Cabe’s words rolled out on a laugh. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’re not surprised?” My tongue was thick, causing my words to tumble out it a shaky way. “You knew? H-how?”

  Cabe rolled his eyes and pushed me back down to the piano bench. He walked to the door, opened it, and shouted to Noah.

  “Pull yourself together,” he called. “You’ll confuse her.”

  Noah muttered something back, but it was too soft for me to hear, and Cabe laughed again.

  “I don’t know whether to be jealous or not,” I heard him say, and then they were both inside the room again.

  Noah seemed under control once again, his crystal gaze casual and careful. He sat beside me
and started to play. I watched his fingers, wondering if they were going to answer my questions. After a while, the melody turned to something simple, repeated over and over, slowly. I watched, placed my hands against the same keys, and copied. It didn’t sound as good, but I hit the right notes. His smile was soft, and he repeated the same process with a different set of notes.

  “Are you going to tell me how you knew about the electricity?” I eventually asked.

  Cabe sat against the steps leading down, a laptop propped against his knees. “Not today,” he replied. “That is a conversation for another day. There’s no rush, Seph. Trust us for now.”

  No rush… because things weren’t moving too fast as it was.

  After a while, Noah stood and stretched, moving to empty his book bag onto the computer desk. He started to work through what I assumed was homework, and I sat in the middle of the stool, poking away at the notes I had learnt.

  Eventually Cabe lifted his head and nodded to me. “Homework time.”

  I made a face at him, but slid off the piano stool. Homework was easy, and I was done with it in half an hour. I moved straight back to the piano stool, repeating the melodies over and over until the notes ran smoothly together just like how it sounded when Noah played.

  Once I had them memorised, I raised my head. “More.”

  They were both already staring at me, and I drew back, startled. Noah rose from the desk and sat next to me again. I raised my fingers, ready, and he rearranged my hands, forming a fist and fitting it beneath my palm so that my fingers curled around it and then he pushed down to straighten it on top. He nudged my newly arranged fingers toward the keys and repeated another melody, with more notes this time. It took a few tries for me to get it right, and then he sat and watched as I repeated it over and over. The new hand position took a little getting used to, but it made drifting from one note to the next much smoother. I kept messing up, and eventually I nudged Noah away so that I could practise without him making me nervous.

  The monotonous task helped to calm the thoughts that ran riot in my head, but it wasn’t enough to control the sickening clench in the pit of my stomach.

  I didn’t know why, but somewhere deep inside, I felt unnatural. I felt as though a spell had been cast over me, and I no longer had any choice in how my life would progress, but that was entirely nonsensical.

  What did it matter if the boys weren’t normal? What did it matter if this wasn’t a normal friendship?

  5

  The Paired People

  I borrowed Cabe’s phone to call Tariq, and they dropped me off at the park he was hanging

  out in. I spotted some of his friends as I jumped out of the car and approached.

  “Hey!” I called out.

  Tariq jogged over to me, a few of his friends following behind. His shaggy hair was dewy with sweat and his eyes were alight with his own unique brand of happiness—a sight I often marvelled over.

  I accepted the keys Tariq handed me and his friends all said hello to me, calling me by name. I nodded to them in response, a little uncomfortable that they knew who I was—since they had never paid me any mind before Cabe and Noah switched to our school. Tariq grumbled something, shooting a look at them as we walked back to the car. They still watched our retreat.

  “What?” I nudged him.

  “Nothing.” He continued to grumble.

  We got into the car and I backed out of the parking lot, driving past the jeep. I wasn’t surprised when it followed behind, but Tariq was.

  “Seph?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re following.”

  “I know, Tariq.”

  He sighed and relaxed back against the seat. “They make me pretty uncomfortable, and I really don’t know what to say about the way they act around you… but—”

  “But there’s no real basis?” I couldn’t help the bite to my tone, and I worked to soften it. “They’re helping.”

  “I know they are. That’s sort of what I was getting to. You’re smiling, and laughing, and painting again.” He shrugged. “If it’s because of them, I guess I’d prefer them to hang around.”

  We parked down the road and made our way to the house, Tariq dropping behind me as we passed through the door. Silence greeted us, and I did a quick sweep of the rooms, trying to ignore the new computer that sat in the unused dining room, conveniently tucked away beside the sagging cupboard that used to hold our mother’s fancy dinner set—but now housed a small rat colony, no doubt. I suspected that nobody ever came into this room, and the mysterious Silas had clearly come to the same conclusion—though it wasn’t a far reach, as there was a thick layer of dust that coated the floor, table, and windowsills.

  Gerald was gone, I concluded upon returning to the kitchen, and so was the money.

  I said goodbye to Tariq and ran back to my car, waving to the boys before I got inside. I waited for them to take off before I put my car into gear, determined that they didn’t find out about the club just yet. I arrived at work only ten minutes early as opposed to my usual couple of hours. Sally seemed relieved, and I could tell that she had been wondering if something had happened to me. I almost never missed a shift. I prepped the bar and then moved down to the entrance as people started to file in.

  I stamped hands, ignored pickup lines, and ground my teeth together at the touches that lingered. I wasn’t even looking at their faces anymore, and when someone’s hand pulled at mine, the difference in touch was immense. It robbed the air from my body. Every other hand had been cold, clammy even. This one was warm, it sparked something to life inside my chest, and I didn’t have to look up to know that it was my silent stranger. He gently turned my hand outward, using it as a cradle to display his palm, and he reached for the stamp with his free hand, his fingers closing around mine. I watched, my breath halting and the meaningless motions of the world grinding to an abrupt halt. There was an unexpected deliberateness to his movements this night, a heavy rumination tinged with enquiry, and it weighed down on me as I waited for him to stamp himself.

  He didn’t.

  He tugged, and I fell forward a step, my eyes snapping to his. Wild, dark and dangerously wilful, he wasn’t smiling—but then again, I’d never seen him smile before. He quickly pressed the stamp against his skin, releasing my hand, and my breath rushed out in an embarrassing struggle for equilibrium as his thumb lightly touched upon my cheek, a caress that lasted a moment longer than it ever had before.

  In a flash, he was gone, and my heart was threatening to dive out of my chest and leap up the stairs after him.

  I shook my head, forcing my attention back to the line, as someone was starting to complain. I thought about my reaction to his touch while I worked, wondering at the differentness in feeling between the man whose name I didn’t know, and the boys whose names I did know. The scratchy feeling was there—barely—but where I had grown used to the confusion and unease that usually accompanied it, there was underlying warmth to this cold, frightening man.

  Normal, I thought.

  It was normal.

  It was almost closing time before I finally slid into his booth, my feet aching and some unknown substance forcing the side of my shirt to stick to my skin. He didn’t look at me, but I got the feeling that he knew who was sitting next to him. How could he not? Nobody else dared to speak to him.

  “Things are getting stranger,” I told him, rubbing the back of my neck. “I’ve started getting this feeling, like my life is taking off without me, like it’s making decisions for me. Do you ever get that feeling?”

  I looked at him and caught the curve of his mouth before he hid the smile behind his glass. He found something amusing, but I wasn’t sure if it was an ironic amusement, or if he was laughing at me. I passed my eyes over his fingers as he drank, noting the scars criss-crossing over his knuckles. I could easily imagine this man being jaded by life, having his decisions stolen from him, but I couldn’t imagine him as a victim, it just didn’t agree with the ha
rdness in his eyes. This man was a fighter; he probably didn’t allow life to decide things for him.

  “Well,” I continued, picking at the corner of the table. “I have friends now. I think.” And someone out there doesn’t like it. I watched as he lowered his glass back to the table and turned his eyes to me, interested. It wasn’t so easy to talk to him when he was meeting my gaze, so I stared at the table instead. “Cabe and Noah,” I muttered, almost to myself. “They’re a little protective, and they try to control everything, but they’re nice and they know about what makes me different. Not even you know that about me.”

  “What makes you different?” His voice was familiar to me, though I had only heard it once before that I could remember. It had a clipped, Slavic undertone that warred with what I had guessed to be a Mediterranean complexion.

  I turned to study him as though his speaking had been an invitation to learn more about him. His eyes tilted up at the corners and his jaw pivoted sharply, giving the impression of broadness and making the stern line of his mouth even sharper. The longer I looked, the more like Quillan he seemed, but if Quillan had grown up with a Slavic accent, he had certainly learned to hide it well by now.

  “I know how to survive,” I finally answered.

  He inclined his head slightly and then went back to drinking. Maybe that was why I felt a connection to him. Maybe we both knew how to survive.

  I arrived back home at a little past two in the morning. My shoulders were stiff and my legs were aching as I forced myself up the stairs. I didn’t see the shape at the top until it separated itself from the shadows. Gerald. He lashed out and I fell back against the railing, a whimper catching in my throat.

  He wasn’t shouting obscenities or calling me names; he wasn’t making a sound at all, which meant that he didn’t want Tariq to wake up and intervene. My blood ran cold and I dodged his next swipe, keeping as quiet as he was. This was no drunken brawl. The moonlight filtered in enough for me to see him clearly by now, and I hoped that the mysterious Silas wasn’t watching, because I was pretty sure that I was going to need to use my electricity. Gerald’s fingers snagged on my book bag and it ripped, thumping to the ground. One of the zippers must have been pulled, because my tips from the night were rolling down the stairs. The sight of coins scattering over the last few steps arrested me, and for the briefest moment, I completely forgot about my father.