Chasing After Infinity (30 page)

Going down the stairs, he sees me in the shadows of the staircase. Adrian’s father points at me, looking distasteful and angry. “How many times have I told you to stop bringing your whores home?”

“It’s none of your business.” Adrian’s voice is low.

They seem like they’re ready to face off.

“You became my business when I adopted you. If you’re living under my roof, you get to listen to my rules, boy.”

Before I can stop him, Adrian moves to punch him but his father grabs him and slaps him across the face. The loud slap is
resounding
. He stands there, silenced, his left cheek slowly reddening from the blow. His eyes are narrowed and his jaw is tense.

In one smooth motion, Adrian grabs my arm and pulls me out the door with him.

Adrian puts the car in drive and hits the gas pedal, speeding out of the driveway. We rush around the corner and gripping the steering wheel tight, he almost knocks the ornamental fountain down. Heartbeat racing, I watch his narrowed look and gritted teeth, my whole body flooding with raw adrenaline. The car veers sharply to the next lane as we quickly speed out of his neighbourhood.

In front of us, the stoplight turns orange and instead of pressing on the brakes, I feel the car speed up. Orange turns to red and at the last second, Adrian slows down. We slam to a stop, the car jerking forward just as some people pass.

Adrian fists his hand and hits the wheel hard. It’s so silent in the car that I hear the choked sound in the back of his throat.

“Let me look at your cheek,” I insist, reaching up to touch his left cheek which is turning a deep red.

Heat burns in his green ember eyes but a second later, his tense stance softens as if a fire had gone out. He says, “I can’t go back. No one wants me there.”

He drives the car to the side of the road on the local where we then get outside and sit on the hood in silence, watching the other cars whiz by. The windshield wipers are still furiously going, the snow falling over the top of our heads.

Adrian lights a Camel and begins smoking, his eyes blurry and filled with shadows. I watch him, my voice numb. I sense that all he needed was someone beside him.

“I found out that I was adopted when I went through my parents’ personal papers and found a file on me that contained all the adoption info,” Adrian tells me, his voice detached. He snorts. “I remember asking my mom where I was born and she lied to my face, telling me the wrong hospital.”

I can’t imagine what the pain must’ve felt like when he realized this. That everything he believed in were just lies. “How old were you?”

He shrugs, stubbing the cigarette out.
“Maybe ten or eleven.”

His fingers follow after mine, along the car, our hands barely touching. A flood of heat rushes through me. I weave my fingers through his and I allow it, feeling the warmth of his palm against mine. Then I realize that I’m holding on to him just as tightly as he holds on to me. We’re holding onto each other as the world unravels around us like falling snowflakes.

Afterwards, when we’re cold and shivering, we drive to my house where my dad is off to work once again. We warm ourselves up by making some hot chocolate in the kitchen. We both needed to concentrate and turn our focus on something else.

“I didn’t know you knew how to make hot chocolate,” I say, raising my eyebrow as Adrian pours the chocolate powder into the hot milk, mixing it with a spoon. “I thought you only ordered them.”

He flickers a look at me, smiling. “I’m a person of many hidden talents,
hm
?”

Adrian leans against the fridge,
clinking
his mug with mine. “Cheers.”

I take a deep sip, the marshmallows floating to my nose. The drink almost burns my tongue but it’s delicious. I sit back against the countertop, drinking heavenly hot chocolate. “
Mmm
, pretty good for an amateur.”

He suppresses a smirk as he watches me. Conscious of his eyes, I look at him. “What?”

“You have something here,” he says, using his finger to tap my face. Then he laughs suddenly. “You look like Hitler Junior.”

I swear that my eye just twitched. “I do
not look
like him,” I reply, huffing.

He hides a grin.
“Similarity in the nose…oh and maybe the voice too.”

“Hail Hitler,” I say in a poor German accent.

Amused, Adrian gets out his phone and before I can protest, he snaps a picture of me. I blink from the flash. “Hey!” I say, wrestling it from him as he laughs. On the screen, I have a huge hot chocolate smear all over my upper lip.

“See, resemblance,” Adrian says and he leans forward. “This is going in the time capsule.”

I let him sweep me into his arms, curling one hand through his thick hair. I bury my face into his shoulder and suddenly, we can’t pretend anymore. All those long-buried emotions are rising up and churning around but I can’t seem to hold on to a single painful thought. Pain is something that dulls over time but will never fully go away.

I inhale in his familiar apple-cider and the scent of his skin mixed with his leather jacket and everything just drops away. “Adrian,” I whisper into his hair.

“
Shh
,” he says and it’s the crack in his voice that breaks me. “Can I hold you for a minute?”

I look deep into his eyes-pools of chlorine. I can see my reflection in them, solid and looking far, far away. He still is gazing at me, his eyes at half-mast.

His lips meet mine heatedly, my hands trail down to his back, and the usual knot in my stomach relaxes. My anxiety fragments into millions of pieces and glides away. The numbness goes away if only for a little while and I find myself melting into the hole that I promised
never to fall into again.
The same one that trapped me almost a year ago.
The one that I just can’t shake away.
But for now, I just focus on what’s really there: the light shining across his hair, bringing up flecks of gold-copper, his hands warming my skin, the familiar spark between us and our fiery kiss. I’m pressed against the granite, the countertop digging into my back as we kiss each other hard, and the fire between us refusing to be extinguished.

The kiss is a wish itself, the wish to get away from where we are now and just escape from the world.
To forget even for just a second.
The moment lingers and I get pulled along with it, feeling just like that one fateful night in my house. Feeling like I’ll never have to face my deepest fears again.

chapter
twenty-three

AVENA

There’s something about looking back on the past that makes me reflective and nostalgic. I pull up pictures from a dusty box in the attic, sitting back down to absorb my beating heart. There’s one of me and Mom from when I was five and she’s holding out her arms, trying to chase me as I toddle down the street, the hurried smile on her face as the picture snaps. There’s another of us as a family with a reluctant sixth grade me in the middle of them wrapping me in a hug, trying to get me to smile. Dad looks ten years younger, the wrinkles in his forehead having disappeared and the smile looks genuine, unlike the ones that he wears now, all strained and tense. Then I see a Christmas picture of us all together and we’re beaming beside a tall tree filled with glittery ornaments. I still remember that Christmas.

It was a white Christmas and I was ten. Both of my parents had taken a day off work and we spent the entire evening watching Frosty the Snowman, the old version. I helped Mom bake a platter of sugar cookies and the smell was heavenly; like white chocolate and freshly baked goodness.

We didn’t have as much money then so I was pretty happy about receiving a handmade bracelet. I had made a scarf for Mom and a woollen pair of gloves for Dad. We had a good Christmas that year.

After looking at a few baby pictures and more family portraits, I decide that I can’t take anymore and slowly put the box back where it belongs.
In the dark.

Being alone is difficult.
In the house all alone, with no one to talk to but only empty white walls to stare at.
When I’m not with my dad, or Kara and Hayden, I’m with Adrian. We spend the rest of December lounging in my room or skipping class to laze in the courtyard, him smoking and me staring up at the sky.

It’s hard to distance myself from Adrian nowadays. It’s hard not to get my feelings tangled up. I look at him and feel the warmth stirring inside, my heart beating like the rhythmic and unrelenting pounding of drums.

Sometimes I’d catch myself hanging off the edge of a cliff.

Either I hold on or fall off into a never experienced abyss.

“Christmas is coming soon,” Adrian says to me.

 
We sit on the slushy beach, our jackets laid out beneath us, him smoking and me laying my head against his chest. We had driven to Verona Beach as soon as class let out, both of us tired of the stifling repetitiveness that is school.

Even though Christmas is still a week away, people have already put up the decorative lights and plastic
Santas
and reindeers. Bright lights and cheerful Christmas carols can’t disguise the stark gloom in my home. The warm yellow lights and candles can’t block out the feeling of emptiness.

I squint at the glaring sunlight reflected off the ocean, sighing. “Christmas sucks.”

Adrian glances at me. “You don’t like it?”

“It’d be the first Christmas without my mom,” I try to explain. “I just have a feeling that it’d be a bad one this year.”

“Yeah, I hate Christmas too, actually,” Adrian says, taking a long drag of smoke. “All the cheap decorations and loud fake laughter,
it’s
useless romanticizing.”

“Celebrating it just makes me sad,” I admit. “It reminds me too much of what I’m missing.”

Adrian nods, brushing his fingers through my hair, a calm and soothing sensation. I tilt my head so that I can look at him and he traces a line down my face.

“I can’t think properly when you’re doing that,” I say.

“Then don’t think.”

“I just need you to make me forget,” I whisper. I tip my face to his and our lips meet, a spark coursing through me. Adrian grabs my face between his hands, forcing me to look up into his stormy eyes.

“You want to forget everything?”

Before I can nod, his mouth captures mine, kissing me violently. Briefly our teeth collide, and then his tongue is in my mouth. Desire bursts throughout my body, and I’m kissing him back, corresponding to his passion. My hands thread into his hair, grabbing some, pulling it hard. He groans, a low sound in the back of his throat that resounds through me, and his hand moves down my body to grip my thigh, his fingers hiking my leg onto his waist. He rolls on top of me, pressing me down on his jacket lying in the snow, pulling me into him as our mouths fight for dominance.

All of the sadness and angst is drenched into our kiss and then I realize something. We’re both hurting. He feels what I feel. All this
sadness is churning and surging around and I’ve got nowhere to run but only to run to him.

I
hook
my hand around the back of his neck, parting my lips, pulling him even closer to me. I taste cherries and smoke in his mouth, our kisses rough and white-hot.

He breaks off the kiss, out of breath. His eyes are shimmering with desire, flushing me with heat.

“Tell me that this is real,” I murmur into his mouth. “Lie to me.”

Adrian moves his lips. “This is real.”

I believe him.

I don’t believe him.

***

As the sun is setting and the hours at the beach seem to melt away, Adrian and I decide to wade into the water. It was a stupid decision because the temperature is hardly above zero and we’re wearing our jackets and jeans. But we live life only once and the icy water would jolt our senses to full awareness instead of feeling the numbness.