by Lucy Rains
A sound behind me brought me back to the present.
Pierce lightly tapped on the door. He let out a sigh as he looked at me in my sleepy state. “I need to get to class soon. Can you be ready to leave in 20?”
I wanted to say no, resentment lingering from last night. But I nodded silently. His eyes lingered on my face. I felt his cautious energy, knowing he was at a loss for words. Not caring to fill the silence or placate his discomfort, I stood up and went into my closet to change. I felt him leave behind the closed door.
I was staring at my reflection, trying to figure out what to do with my bedhead, annoyed at the continued lack of hair products, when I felt Alex’s energy coming toward my room.
“Jade!” Alex shouted from the doorway,
My head snapped towards him, “What?” I barked, annoyed at his apparent exuberance so early in the morning.
“Gavin lost a bet and you have to come see this.”
I scowled at Alex and turned back to the mirror.
Alex, not caring about my scowl, grabbed my hand, tugging me out of bathroom, “Come on! Before he cheats.”
“I need to get ready to leave,” I complained.
“This is way more important.”
“Why?”
“Gavin thought he could do more push ups then me, so we made a bet,” Alex snickered. “I won, of course, so now he gets to peel a banana with no hands.”
“You guys are fighting over push ups at eight in the morning?”
“Hey that’s better than last time. Last week, we made a bet over who had the- actually nevermind. But I won that too, by the way.”
I trailed behind him to the kitchen to see Gavin bent over the counter with pieces of banana peel on his face. My eyes widened and my hand flew up to my mouth, trying hide my surprise.
Gavin glanced up at me as I entered the kitchen. He rolled his eyes skyward, then glared at Alex, “Seriously, dude?”
Here was arrogant Gavin, bent over a banana, with pieces of peel stuck to the sides of his mouth, looking forcibly humbled. I knew his dignity was hurting.
“All is fair in love and war,” Alex said smugly.
Gavin closed his eyes and let out a heavy sigh, “I have killed you, like, three times in my head.”
“Have you tried using your feet?” I asked with a semi straight face.
Gavin glared at me and I couldn’t help it. I choked on a snort.
This felt wrong, out of place. The temptation to laugh and joke was there, but it felt foreign, like a comfy pair of sweats you hadn’t worn in months and forgot how good they felt. But it was still summer and too warm for the sweats. Circumstances were still tense, unsettled, I shouldn’t be laughing and joking with Alex.
Gavin bent down and began picking at the end of the banana with his teeth, trying to get an opening. He had manage to pierce the ends but needed to pull the peel away from the fruit. The banana would flop around in his mouth at each attempt.
“How’s the taste?” asked Alex.
“Shut up,” said Gavin as he spat pieces into the sink.
“I still think the toes would help,” I offered.
“And then put the thing back in my mouth?” he asked.
I shrugged, “Your feet would hold it steady so you could peel it.”
“No thanks.”
I rolled my own eyes at his stubbornness. He took my idea but tweaked it, using his elbows to steady the banana so that he could continue to pull the peel down with his teeth. I would have thought it would be satisfying seeing Gavin getting mushed up banana on his face, but it didn’t suit him.
Alex and I applauded his efforts and Gavin gave a mocking bow. Pierce walked up behind me at that point. “Jade, we’re leaving in 5 minutes.”
I straightened and hastily walked out of the room. Not before I overheard Pierce grumble, “Gavin? The hell are you doing?”
Running back upstairs, I washed my face and quickly threw my hair up into a small ponytail.
After only a few minutes a knock on my door pulled me out of my bathroom to see Kyson.
“Pierce said it's time.”
“Okay, I’m coming.” My stomach rumbled as I walked past him to the stairway.
“Did you get something to eat?”
“No, I was too busy watching Gavin humble himself with a banana.” I explained.
Kyson chuckled. “As entertaining as that sounds, you should have eaten.”
When I got to the bottom of the stairs Pierce held out a protein bar and water bottle to me. “She can eat on the road.”
“See you guys later,” said Kyson as he headed towards the kitchen. I could hear Alex and Gavin bantering in the kitchen over their bet still.
“Does everyone else have to leave, as well?” I asked as I climbed into the front seat of his truck.
“Yes. Everyone has class or work,” Pierce answered as he started the diesel engine. “Why?”
My eyes squinted in the morning sunlight, “Would have been nice to stay in bed all day.”
We rode in silence as I ate my small breakfast. Once I was finished, Pierce asked how I was doing from last night.
“I’m trying not to think about it.”
“Well, it might take a little while, to not be able to think about it.”
He waited for me to respond but I stayed silent. “Just remember, you have us to help you.” He turned to look at me. I nodded, unable to hold back the bitter feelings that filled my chest..
“How could you leave me?” I asked quietly.
“What?” Pierce’s expression was confused.
“How could you leave me?”
“Leave you?”
“After everything, when Kyson brought me back.”
“Jade,” his voice exasperated, “it had to be that way.”
”After everything I had gone through that night? ” He started to speak but I kept going. “You have too high of an expectation of me if you thought I could handle that.”
He was silent, his jaw clenching tight and it boiled my blood.
“Don’t you feel guilty? At all?”
His response came quick “I don’t have time to feel guilty.”
But it was a lie. His guilt flooded over me and I felt how much last night pained him. His pain struck at me hard and I almost gasped.
“I knew you were safe,” he said.
“It’s not about being safe, Pierce! It’s about being sane! It’s about my mind breaking apart. It's about me seeing so much death for the first time in my life.” Tears were pricking the corners of my eyes and I turned away from him to catch my breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
The words were like water to my fire. My anger was gone, deflated, as I stared at the hard line of his jaw, his nose, his chin. Thinking of the assassin that he was last night, and now the soft man he was beside me. His emotions that I could taste spoke higher volumes than his words. I could feel what he wouldn’t say.
“If Jason knew about you, or should I say, when he finds out about you, it will complicate things.” He paused. “It will complicate everything.”
I rolled his words over in my mind, trying to understand why. “The agency you work for? They would try to use me too?”
“Probably, yes.”
“But what’s wrong with that?” I asked. “I would join you guys on your assignments like I did last night, so what?”
He scoffed, pinning me with an incredulous look. “Because last night went so well?”
I swallowed, and replied in a soft tone, “But...at least I would be with you guys, right?”
His face softened at my words, but his eyes went back to the road. “You have to look at the whole picture though. If you become apart of the agency with us, your mother will know exactly where you are, and what you’re doing.”
I brought my hand to my short ponytail and pulled on a few damp strands as I considered his words. My mother didn’t scare me. She was more like an annoyance, an insect buzzing around my ear. The
guys wanted to be rid of her, I wanted to forget about her.
“Also,” he continued, “having you a part of the agency, with Jason knowing about you,” A pause, “it scares me. He hasn’t ever done anything wrong, but I don’t trust him.” His voice was grave, and tense. “He wants whatever will benefit the agency.”
I continued to pinch my hair between my fingers, understanding Pierce’s motives better now. It didn’t make the memories less painful, but it did make me less bitter. I remained silent for the rest of the drive.
I followed Pierce through two classes and the down time in between. He was on his last year of working towards getting his civil engineering degree, so his class discussions went way over my head. It gave me time to ponder about what he had shared on the drive over.
My life was not my own. My mother wanted me. Now I find out it's only a matter of time before the government wanted me. And there was no promise the government wouldn’t give me back to my mother. What were my options? Did I even have any?
My mother already knew about the guys and had granted their release. The government protected them, kept them safe from her. Could I hope that I would be given the same treatment? Perhaps it was best to get the introductions done with Jason sooner than later so that this could be talked about. It was going to happen eventually. Jason would learn about me and my abilities and then we would be at a crossroads.
My dilemma was overwhelming, my options few to none. I wasn't street savvy, I was clueless to modern society other than academics and here I was needing a new identity while also trying to avoid detection from people that had state of the art equipment to find me. I didn’t want to continue relying on the guys any longer than I had to. But they were expecting me to help them in their plans of revenge and then disappear with them. What if I disappeared, but not with them?
We were snacking on green smoothies and walking to his second class when my mind wandered over the past the guys had shared together. I knew some of their lab experience and the horrific acts that had been done to them. But what about after?
“What was it like, when you guys got out of the lab?”
Pierce stopped slurping from his straw to look at me, caught off guard by my question.
I continued, “I mean, you spent your lives in that place and then to suddenly be in society? Had to of been quite a shock.”
“We weren’t just thrown out on the street or anything. The agency set us up in a furnished apartment and we had what I guess would be called counsellors to help us get acclimated into the real world. Thanks to movies and Netflix, we weren’t completely clueless. We knew how average people interacted and were even caught up on modern slang. We got set up with driving lessons, learned how to use cell phones, it was fine.”
“But…” I didn’t know how to ask the next question without giving offense. “Your time in the lab had to be pretty traumatic, emotionally damaging.”
Pierce smiled and threw away his empty cup, “You’re wondering how we didn’t turn into psychopath serial killers?”
I shrugged, not wanting to admit that’s what I was thinkinging. Anyone that had been through the physical torture the guys had experienced would make any normal person a drooling schizophrenic, or a raging murderer.
Pierce stopped in the hallway, outside a doorway that I assumed was his next class. He leaned against the wall and looked down at me. “We had each other, and we made a point to keep each other sane. We did have a therapist come in and offer to talk with us about our ordeal when we got out but it didn’t help.”
He grabbed my hand and led me into the lecture hall to the chairs on the end of the back row. “We’ve had time to heal. It took awhile for us to feel stable enough to venture out alone, to be able to sleep through the night.”
I sat down in the swivel chair while he pulled out his tablet, paper and books. “But, when you were in the lab, did you think you would ever get out?”
Pierce looked down at his paper, his eyes losing focus. “No. So when we did, it was like breathing pure oxygen for the first time. That didn’t get rid our nightmares but it did help ease the pain of the past. That and tapioca pudding.”
I wrinkled my nose in disgust and he smiled. He looked back down at his papers, lost in a memory but speaking out loud. “We talked about you.”
My brow furrowed in confusion. He continued before I could ask what he meant. “In the lab. All those years ago when we had seen you, coming and coming from the ‘white room of coats’. That's what we called it.”
I was stunned, “I didn’t know you saw me there.”
Pierce nodded, still not looking at me. I was thankful. I put a hand to my burning cheek. Had he seen me naked? Heard my screams?
“We wondered who you were, if you were like us, and if so, why you weren’t locked up with us.”
My hand on my cheek froze, and I held still as Pierce turned to look at me. I felt like a traitor in that moment. Escaping the trauma that had been forced onto the guys. Why hadn’t I been locked up with the guys? Why had I been different?
The teacher came into the front of the room and began speaking about fluid mechanics and other terms I didn’t understand. Other students settled into their creaky seats and focused on their laptops and tablets.
But the professors words quickly turned to mush in my ears as I thought about Pierce’s statements. Why had I been kept with my mother all those years? Was it because I was female? As I turned ideas over in my head, my only reasoning I could settle on was because they were saving my body to use for bearing children. They didn’t want to put my body through the same violent acts as the guys because they wanted it to be in suitable condition for creating offspring. Still, these reasons didn’t relieve me from heavy sense of guilt.
Pierce laid an arm across the back of my chair during the lecture and I assumed it was an attempt to comfort what I knew he felt was my darkening mood. When I glanced at him quickly though, I saw his scowling gaze across the room at a couple guys whispering quietly to each other and looking our way. Or, my way. I rolled my eyes and turned my head away from them.
Their whispers, though quiet to the common ear, was easy enough for me to pick up. Words like ‘hot’, ‘party’, and ‘invite’ flitted towards us and I heard a heated growl come from Pierce’s throat.
I wanted to roll my eyes again and turn away but Pierce’s distress called to my own emotions and instinct demanded that I comfort him. I tried for a moment to push it away, to ignore it, but a panic began building under the hum of my chest and threatened to give me the shakes.
My hand reached out of its own accord and rested on his thigh. The move was involuntary. I simply relaxed under the instinct that pushed inside of me and then my hand was on him. His body warmed under my touch, his thick muscles twitched and began to relax. His breath came out long and heavy, releasing his tension.
There were still glances from the guys throughout the class, but Pierce remained calm.
At the end of class we began walking across campus towards Pierce’s truck. The day was warm and the sun blared in my eyes.
“Any news on my mother?” I asked. “Have you guys seen or heard anything?”
“Last we checked yesterday afternoon, she was back working in the lab.”
My neck had to stretch slightly to look up at him, and I raised a hand to my eyes to block the sun’s glare. “How do you know that?”
“We track her cell phone. And Alex has managed to look into traffic feeds from time to time.”
I looked back down in front of me as a sudden wave of exhaustion washed over me. My limbs felt heavy and walking to the truck seemed like 50 miles.
Pierce noticed my slower pace and put an arm on my back.
“What’s the matter?”
I shook my head, “I don’t know. I just got really tired all the sudden.” My stomach chose that moment to grumble loudly. I placed a hand over it. “And I’m starving.” I admitted.
I looked into Pierce’s eyes and felt his conc
ern drift around me. “I’m okay, I just need food and a nap.”
“You sound like Alex.” Pierce left his arm on my back and we continued walking towards the truck.
“But I don’t get sick, so I don’t understand why I feel like this.”
“New stresses, probably.”
As we approached Pierce’s truck an alarm went off in my head when I felt Pierce’s emotions spike with intense distress. He swore softly under his breath. I looked up to question him more when I saw him staring straight ahead of us. I looked in the same direction and saw a well dressed Asian man leaning against the front of Pierce’s truck. With dark hair draped across one of his brown eyes, he was no taller than me but the vibes I felt made him feel much taller. Confident, arrogant, so sure of himself. His hands were tucked in the front of his slim grey trousers, one brown leather shoe crossed over the other. His face broke into a smile as we approached. He was older than Pierce, several years older, with a pooch beginning to form in his midsection. Regardless, he still moved with a steady sureness that showed he was comfortable on his feet.
Pierce left his hand on my back when we stopped walking, halting several feet back from his truck.
“Jason,” he greeted. “What’s up?”
“Pierce, good to see you.” Jason’s eyes looked me over, not being shy about it either. “Who’s your friend?”
Pierce looked down at me for a second and then back up to Jason. I felt his reluctance. “This is Jen.”
Jason pushed off of the truck and pulled his hands out of his pockets. “Nice to meet you, Jen.” He gave me a smile meant to charm me but it only raised the hairs on my neck. I wasn’t used to being looked at like that. He was attractive, even sultry in his own way. Pierce’s hand tightened on my back, his fingers bawling into the fabric of my shirt.