by T M Linville
Lily stood silently outside the door until he stopped talking and she thought she heard Shay crying. Did he put her up to this?
Restraining herself to the fullest extent possible, she tapped lightly on the door. Suddenly the door flew open and Shane came barreling into the hallway.
Inside the apartment, Shane was talking but Shay wasn’t listening. When it had been silent for a few minutes, Shay thought she heard a tap on the door but Shane was on his feet and across the living room before it completely registered. He swung open the door and stepped into the hallway, practically pushing Lily halfway across the hall.
"Didn't you get the text?" Shane shouted.
"Yes, I just want..." Lily began but Shane interrupted.
"What you want is to leave her alone, she doesn’t want to talk to you anymore."
Shay stood up and walked toward the door. She saw Lily standing in front of Shane, her face was covered in tears and her eyes were puffy and red. Had she made a terrible mistake? Was she just in love with her and just taking it slow?
"I just want to talk..." Lily began again.
"She doesn't want to talk to you. What part of that don't you understand?" Shane interrupted again.
Lily looked around Shane and directly at Shay. She had been crying for some time. It was obvious by her puffy eyes, wet cheeks and crumpled tissues in her hand.
"Just talk to me," Lily pleaded. "Please!"
"Go home, Lily," Shane yelled over the two girls trying to talk.
Lily kept thinking be calm Lily. Be calm. Do not kill her best friend, she kept repeating this to herself as Shane yelled at her.
The only thing she heard was 'She doesn't want to talk to you'. The tears came harder now. She had to talk to her. She leaned around Shane and saw Shay.
"Just talk to me. Please," Lily begged from the hallway.
Then the door slammed in her face.
Lily lifted her hand to the door handle. She was shaking all over. The only thing she could think about was never seeing Shay’s beautiful smile ever again. She grabbed the handle and began to push and then, somehow, she made herself stop. If Shay didn’t want to see her anymore, what could she do? She couldn't make Shay see her. No matter how much Lily loved her, no matter how much she would sacrifice, it didn't matter if Shay didn't want to see her. But Lily wanted to hear Shay say it. She wanted the words to come from her lips. She wanted to hear her say goodbye.
She released the handle and staggered toward the elevator. She would give her time to calm down and try again.
Shane walked over and put his arms around Shay but she didn't want comforting. All she wanted to was to go after Lily and take back the message she had sent.
"It's for the best," Shane comforted.
Shay pushed him away, walked into the bedroom and collapsed onto the bed. It was done. Shay’s best friend had just sent away what was quite possibly the love of her life. Maybe Lily was hiding something, maybe she just didn't think everything Shane had talked about was all that important. She had never asked about Shay’s parents and honestly, what difference did it make. Maybe Lily’s father was sentenced to die for a crime, maybe she doesn't talk to her father, maybe she just doesn't think it was important either.
Shay heard the front door open and close. Was she back? Shay jumped to her feet and ran to the door just as Shane was coming back in.
"Is she out there?" She managed to choke out.
"No. I was just making sure she left," he said snidely.
"Maybe she'll call”' Shay sniffed.
"No, she won't. I turned off your phone and hid it."
"You what? Why the hell did you do that? Where is it?"
"You need to sever all ties honey," he said coldly. "If you don't, she'll just be right back."
But how could she sever all ties? Shay was in love with her. She just couldn’t imagine being without her now. But Shane was right. Was Lily hiding something? Why had she never invited Shay to her place? Was there something wrong with Lily? Did Shay fall for the wrong person?
Shane decided to sleep on the couch in case Lily tried to return. Shay tossed and turned, unable to sleep thinking about Lily and if she had just let Shane talk her into making a terrible mistake.
Lily walked over to the nursing home and went to the roof. Shane had closed the curtains and the windows so Lily couldn’t even hear their conversation. Did he know something? Did he figure out that Lily wasn’t entirely truthful? She tried texting Shay but got no response. Finally, around 8:30, she called. It went straight to voicemail.
Lily trudged home and went straight to her apartment. Luckily Eric wasn't lurking. The last thing she needed was to have him start a fight. Right now, she’s kill him if she saw him.
She kept turning it over in her head. She doesn’t want to talk to you was all she kept hearing. She paced the floor trying to figure out what she was going to do. After two hours of pacing and trying Shay’s number and leaving message after message, she realized she had to leave New York. If she’s going to have to live without Shay, she surly couldn’t stay.
Leaving New York
Lily packed a bag with clothes and toiletries. She stopped at Erica’s door and knocked loudly.
“Lily? What’s wrong?” Erica asked when she opened the door.
“She doesn’t want to see me anymore,” she managed to mumble through the tears.
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I just know I can’t stay here.”
“Lily wait. Where will you go?”
“I’m going to the Nashville coven. I’ll be safe there and maybe being outdoors will help to get her out of my head.”
“But Lily,” Erica pleaded.
“I have to go, Erica. I’m sorry.”
Erica tried to stop her. At the elevator, Erica tried to talk to her.
“Lily, what happened?” Erica asked.
“She doesn’t want to see me,” Lily cried. “Shane had something to do with it.”
Erica sighed and took Lily in her arms. Lily dropped her bag and put her arms around Erica. When the elevator finally dinged, Lily grabbed her bag and stepped across the hall and into the elevator. Erica knew that there was no stopping her. Maybe Lily had finally found love. Erica hoped that wasn’t the case. Because if it was, Lily would love Shay forever.
Lily rode to the garage, walked to her car then fell to her knees. She couldn’t believe that this was happening. She had finally found love and now it was over. She had to leave. She just couldn’t stay. If she couldn’t be with Shay, there was no reason for her to stay in New York.
She pulled herself up off the concrete, fumbled through her bag and found the car remote, the remote to the Nissan TurboMax then thought better of it. She put that one back in her bag and fumbled for the one to the Mercedes 1025i. She leaned down and unhooked the cloth cover that was over the car. She flung it to the side and let it drift to the floor beside the TurboMax.
Without LaShay, she no longer belonged in New York. She began to cry harder. She drove through the streets of the city to the interstate. Once on the interstate, she only stopped for gas and restroom breaks. Her thoughts would drift back to LaShay and her eyes would well up. Dammit Lily! Stop it! She would tell herself. She wasn’t sure exactly how to get to Nashville from New York City, but she didn’t care. She didn’t even use the auto-drive system. She would just drive south as fast as she could until she reached the Carolinas, then she’d travel west.
After about five hours of driving she just didn’t want to drive any longer. She exited the interstate and found a decent hotel. As long as it was clean and had inside access. She parked the car as close to the front door as she could, grabbed her bag and checked in. Once in the room, she locked all the locks, checked the window locks and fell across the bed. She was asleep before she felt the bed beneath her.
Her dreams were jagged and fractured. Glimpses of alternate futures, futures that seemed not only distant, but impossible now that LaShay was no longer in
her life. She felt as if part of her had been stripped away.
She tossed and turned for what seemed like days. When she woke, it didn’t feel like she had slept at all. The clock on the table said it was just after eight PM. Her whole body would shake occasionally, like an arctic wind whipped up her spine for only a brief moment. She was hungry, famished even, and remembered that she had been so caught up in Shay that although she had had food, she hadn’t had any blood in days.
She was in a wickedly ill mood. She wanted to find Shane and find out how many swipes of her claws she could take at him before he hit the ground. And she wouldn’t care if it resulted in her immediate death. He had taken away an unknown future that she knew was supposed to be with Shay.
She pulled a pillow to her chest and wrapped her arms around it. A low growl brewed in the back of her throat as the angered vampire began to stir. She wiped her face across the pillow to wipe away the tears as she felt her eyes begin to burn, then out of rage ripped the pillow in half. In the next instant she had slammed the bed into the far wall and was on the balls of her feet, crouched on the floor where the bed had been not two seconds before. A low, terrifying growl escaped her lips and her hands curled into claws that punctured the carpet then the concrete floor. Her hands pulverized the chunks into powder then she dug her claws down again.
How could this happen? she thought
Lily was furious..She wanted so badly to be in Shay’s arms that it hurt.
Why hadn’t she shown her how she felt? Why didn’t I tell her how in love with her I really was? Could she also feel the lingering sensations that my touch left on her skin every time we made contact. Just one time, why didn’t I tell her I loved her?
But she didn’t tell her, and now she was gone.
She took a deep breath then another and another until she finally began to calm down. There was really nothing she could do. She had no idea why Shay had rejected her and there was no reason that she should think that she’d change her mind.
She looked down at her hands and at the light gray powder that covered them both. She turned them over to inspect the damage. Her human skin had torn when she hit the floor. She walked to the bathroom to wash the pulverized concrete and blood from her hands. According to the amount of blood, her knuckles had been pretty chewed up from the concrete and like many times before, her claws had punctured her palms. It didn’t even hurt anymore when she did it.
After almost an hour, she had calmed down enough, to leave the room. She walked down to the front desk and asked about the nearest place to get a steak. She kept her hands in her pockets, just in case.
“Well, I don’t know if they’re still open but you can try the restaurant about two miles that way,” the boy at the front desk told her, pointing out the window toward the opposite direction of the interstate.
“Thank you, I’ll try there,” Lily smiled and strolled out the double glass doors.
She drove down the street about two miles and saw a little diner that looked like no one ever visited. The glass windows across the front were caked with dirt and dead bugs. It still had a neon sign that read “OPEN”. It doesn’t look open. She searched for the reader board that hung on almost every other business in the U.S. It listed the type of place it was, if it were open or closed and the hours of operation. There was no board and no signs.
She parked the car in the empty, dusty parking lot than was still dirt and small rocks. Lily could remember when that was the norm. Everywhere else there was white concrete. She grabbed the rusty bar that was across the door and it flew open, almost hitting the glass behind it. That is lighter than I thought it would be she thought, looking at her hand to make sure there were no claws. She grabbed the door and walked in. There were a few couples finishing up their meals. Where are their cars? Lily wondered.The waitress looked her way and smiled.
“What time do you close?” Lily asked the waitress as she walked toward me.
“Five minutes ago,” she smiled. “But I’m sure we can get you a meal to go if you’d like.”
It was five minutes after nine.
“Yes, thank you,” Lily said gratefully. “Steak, rare, please,” she said, questioningly.
“How rare?” the waitress asked.
“The rarer the better,” she said.
She paused a moment as if waiting for Lily to say something else.
“Oh, French fries?”
Then the waitress smiled and said, “One rare steak and fries, coming right up.”
Lily sat down at the closest table to where she was standing, then looked around the restaurant. Five out of the six people in there, were looking at her but she just ignored them.
It wasn’t five minutes before the waitress came out with a Styrofoam container. Styrofoam? Lily though. Where in the world did they get Styrofoam? They stopped making that stuff over forty years ago.
“What would you like to drink, hon?” she asked.
“Soda is fine, whatever you have,” Lily answered.
She stood up and walked to the cash register where the waitress had placed the container of food before disappearing back into the kitchen. Lily opened the container and saw that the steak was barely even browned. She smiled. The waitress returned with a covered Styrofoam cup and sat it on the counter.
“Thirty eight dollars and thirty one cents,” the waitress said.
Lily placed three bright blue twenties on the counter. “Keep it,” she said nodding at the waitress.
“Oh,” she said startled by the gesture, “but I really didn’t do anything.”
“It is after nine though,” she smiled and picked the food up off the counter. “Thank you.”
“Uh, no problem,” she said as Lily walked out the door.
She took the food back to the hotel and ate in the room. The allow knife and fork wasn’t quite up to the task so she ate the steak with her fingers. Not exactly lady like, but hey, she was hungry. Very hungry. The steak wasn’t a great substitute for blood, but it had to do for now.
When she was done, she did her best to conceal the holes in the floor before she placed the bed back in its proper place. She clicked on the TV and started flipping through channels. She wasn’t really looking for anything, She was just trying not to think about Shay. Or Shane for that matter. She found some cheesy chick flick and settled in against a stack of pillows. It didn’t take long for her to doze off.
Shay wiped the tears from her face again and rolled over in her bed. She couldn’t stop thinking about Lily and what Shane had convinced her to do. She decided that she had to talk to her. She got out of bed and went to the living room to get her phone off of the charger. Shane had finally gone home and given her phone back to her. She had promised that she wouldn’t try to call Lily, but Shane still would not bring her phone to the bedroom.
Shay pressed the icon for phone and then tapped Lily’s picture. The phone rang on the other end. After four rings someone answered but it wasn’t Lily.
“Hello?” Erica repeated into the phone.
“Hello? Is Li… Lily there?” Shay asked. Her voice still cracking from crying.
“Is this LaShay?” Erica asked.
“Ye… Yes,” Shay answered, shakily.
“Lily isn’t here, hon.”
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“No, dear, I really don’t,” Erica answered honestly.
Erica wanted to question Shay about what happened but decided that it wasn’t her place. “I’ll tell Lily you called if I talk to her.”
“Thank you,” Shay said, sniffling a little harder.
It was dark and the air was moist. Lily was crawling around on her hands and knees in the dark. She felt something soft but cold and wet. Then she focused in the faint light and could make out the shape of a face. She looked down at her hands and they were covered in blood and as she looked past her hands she could make out a body. The stomach area was a black, empty hole. She turned her face away only to feel a cold hand on her arm. Wh
en she turned, it was LaShay’s face she saw.
Lily sat straight up in the bed, wide awake. Her heart pounded in her chest, sweat beads dotted her forehead and her hair stuck to the back of her neck.
“How am I going to make it through this?” She asked herself, hiding her face in her hands.
She turned off the TV, took a quick shower, got dressed and checked out. It was about four AM when she pulled onto the interstate. She put her foot on the gas and accelerated to over one hundred miles an hour. The needle crept to one hundred and twenty and she set the cruise control. She cranked up the stereo until it felt like her ears would explode.
She stopped only to fill up with gas. She wondered if she should stop and eat again. She couldn’t allow hunger to let her temper flare again. She decided that since she was confined to the car, that she would be fine.
She slowed only when she feared a state trooper was over the next hill or around the next turn. Three times, she was right and waved at them as she passed them driving with auto drive turned on. As soon as she was out of laser range she resumed driving with cruise control.
She buzzed past cars that were in the auto-drive lanes. She drove for a few more hours before she began to see familiar signs.
It was about midnight when she turned off of the interstate and onto a familiar road. The road twisted and turned through the dark. She fought the urge to accelerate, there were too many deer in this area and she really liked this car. An old twelve cylinder Mercedes SL65 AMG.
When she reached an overgrown driveway, she slowly plowed through the weeds and underbrush. Gravel cracked and popped as the car drove over them. She cringed as saplings growing in the driveway scrapped down the sides and bottom with a high pitched squeal. It didn’t look like anyone had been there in years. Vincent had left a trust fund to cover the yearly property taxes, as he did with the other coven locations. The trusts were also supposed to cover general maintenance, like lawn care and property upkeep. She had to make some phone calls to Vincent. Then she thought that she probably needed to get a phone since she left hers on her kitchen counter up north.