Lux (12 page)

When I look up, I find that he’s seen me, too.

His eyes are frozen on me as he waits in line, so dark, so fathomless. This energy between us… I don’t know what it is. Attraction? Chemistry? All I know is, it steals my breath and speeds up my heart. The fact that he’s invading my dreams makes me crave this feeling even more. It brings me out of my reality and into something new and exciting, into something that has hope and life.

I watch as he pays for his coffee and sweet roll, and as his every step leads him to my back booth. There are ten other tables, all vacant, but he chooses mine.

His black boots stop next to me, and I skim up his denim-clad legs, over his hips, up to his startlingly handsome face. He still hasn’t shaved, so his stubble is more pronounced today. It makes him seem even more mature, even more of a man. As if he needs the help.

I can’t help but notice the way his soft blue shirt hugs his solid chest, the way his waist narrows as it slips into his jeans, the way he seems lean and lithe and powerful. Gah. I yank my eyes up to meet his. I find amusement there.

“Is this seat taken?”

Sweet Lord.
He’s got a British accent. There’s nothing sexier in the entire world, which makes that old tired pick-up line forgivable. I smile up at him, my heart racing.

“No.”

He doesn’t move. “Can I take it, then? I’ll share my breakfast with you.”

He slightly gestures with his gooey, pecan-crusted roll.

“Sure,” I answer casually, expertly hiding the fact that my heart is racing fast enough to explode. “But I’ll pass on the breakfast. I’m allergic to nuts.”

“More for me, then,” he grins, as he slides into the booth across from me, ever so casually, as though he sits with strange girls in hospitals all of the time. I can’t help but notice that his eyes are so dark they’re almost black.

“Come here often?” he quips, as he sprawls out in the booth. I have to chuckle, because now he’s just going down the list of cliché lines, and they all sound amazing coming from his British lips.

“Fairly,” I nod. “You?”

“They have the best coffee around,” he answers, if that even
is
an answer. “But let’s not tell anyone, or they’ll start naming the coffee things we can’t pronounce, and the lines will get unbearable.”

I shake my head, and I can’t help but smile. “Fine. It’ll be our secret.”

He stares at me, his dark eyes shining. “Good. I like secrets. Everyone’s got ‘em.”

I almost suck in my breath, because something is so overtly fascinating about him. The way he pronounces everything, and the way his dark eyes gleam, the way he seems so familiar because he’s been in the intimacy of my dreams.

“What are yours?” I ask, without thinking. “Your secrets, I mean.”

He grins. “Wouldn’t
you
like to know?”

Yes.

“My name’s Calla,” I offer quickly. He smiles at that.

“Calla like the funeral lily?”

The very same.” I sigh. “And I live in a funeral home. So see? The irony isn’t lost on me.”

He looks confused for a second, then I see the realization dawn on him.

“You noticed my shirt yesterday,” he points out softly, his arm stretched across the back of the cracked booth. He doesn’t even dwell on the fact that I’d just told him I live in a house with dead people. Usually people instantly clam up when they find out, because they instantly assume that I must be weird, or morbid. But he doesn’t.

I nod curtly. “I don’t know why. It just stood out.”
Because
you
stood out.

The corner of his mouth twitches, like he’s going to smile, but then he doesn’t.

“I’m Adair DuBray,” he tells me, like he’s bestowing a gift or an honor. “But everyone calls me Dare.”

I’ve never seen a name so fitting. So French, so sophisticated, yet his accent is British. He’s an enigma. An enigma whose eyes gleam like they’re constantly saying
Dare me.
I swallow.

“It’s nice to meet you, Dare,” I tell him, and that’s the truth. His name rolls off my tongue like I’ve said it a thousand times before. “Why are you here in the hospital? Surely it’s not for the coffee.”

“You know what game I like to play?” Dare asks, completely changing the subject. I feel my mouth drop open a bit, but I manage to answer.

“No, what?”

“Twenty Questions. That way, I know that at the end of the game, there won’t be any more. Questions, that is.”

I have to smile, even though his answer should’ve annoyed me. “So you don’t like talking about yourself.”

He grins. “It’s my least favorite subject.”

But it must be such an interesting one.

“So, you’re telling me I can ask you twenty things, and twenty things only?”

Dare nods. “Now you’re getting it.”

“Fine. I’ll use my first question to ask what you’re doing here.” I lift my chin and stare him in the eye.

His mouth twitches again. “Probably the same thing as you. Isn’t that what normal people do in hospitals?”

I flush. I can’t help it. Obviously. And obviously, I’m out of my league here. This guy could have me for breakfast if he wanted, and from the gleam in his eye, I’m not so sure he doesn’t.

I take a sip of my coffee, careful not to slosh it on my shirt. With the way my heart is racing, anything is possible.

“Was I right? Why
are
you here?” Dare asks.

“Is that your first question? Because turn-about is fair play.”

Dare smiles broadly, genuinely amused.

“Sure. I’ll use a question.”

“I brought my brother. He’s here for… group therapy.”

I suddenly feel weird saying that aloud, because it makes my brother sound
less than
somehow. And he’s not. He’s
more than
. Better than most people, more gentle, more pure of heart. But a stranger wouldn’t know that. A stranger would just slap him with a
crazy
label and let it be. I fight the urge to explain, and somehow manage not to. It’s not a stranger’s business.

Dare doesn’t question me, though. He just nods like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

He takes a drink of his coffee. “I think it’s probably kismet, anyway. That you and I are here at the same time, I mean.”

“Kismet?” I raise an eyebrow.

“That’s fate, Calla,” he tells me. I roll my eyes.

“I know that. I may be going to a state school, but I’m not stupid.”

He grins, a grin so white and charming that my panties almost fall off.

“Good to know. So you’re a college girl, Calla?”

I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about why you think this is kismet.
But I nod.

“Yeah. I’m leaving for Berkeley in the fall.”

“Good choice,” he takes another sip. “But maybe kismet got it wrong, after all. If you’re leaving and all. Because apparently, I’ll be staying for a while. That is, after I find an apartment. A good one is hard to find around here.”

He’s so confident, so open. It doesn’t even feel odd that a total stranger is telling me these things, out of the blue, so randomly. I feel like I know him already, actually.

I stare at him. “An apartment?”

He stares back. “Yeah. The thing you rent, it has a shower and a bedroom, usually?”

I flush. “I know that. It’s just that this might be kismet after all. I might know of something. I mean, my father is going to rent out our carriage house. I think.”

And if
I
can’t have it, it should definitely go to someone like Dare. The mere thought gives me a heart spasm.

“Hmm. Now that
is
interesting,” Dare tells me. “Kismet prevails, it seems. And a carriage house next to a funeral home, at that. It must take balls of steel to live there.”

I quickly pull out a little piece of paper and scribble my dad’s cell phone on it. “Yeah. If you’re interested, I mean, if you’ve got the balls, you can call and talk to him about it.”

I push the paper across the table, staring him in the eye, framing it up as a challenge. Dare can’t possibly know how I’m trying to will my heart to slow down before it explodes, but maybe he does, because a smile stretches slowly and knowingly across his lips.

“Oh, I’ve got balls,” he confirms, his eyes gleaming again.

Dare me.

I swallow hard.

“I’m ready to ask my second question,” I tell him. He raises an eyebrow.

“Already? Is it about my balls?”

I flush and shake my head.

“What did you mean before?” I ask him slowly, not lowering my gaze. “Why exactly do you think this is kismet?”

His eyes crinkle up a little bit as he smiles yet again. And yet again, his grin is thoroughly amused. A real smile, not a fake one like I’m accustomed to around my house.

“It’s kismet because you seem like someone I might like to know. Is that odd?”

No, because I want to know you, too.

“Maybe,” I say instead. “Is it odd that I feel like I already know you somehow?”

Because I do. There’s something so familiar about his eyes, so dark, so bottomless. But then again, I
have
been dreaming about them for days.

Dare raises an eyebrow. “Maybe I have that kind of face.”

I choke back a snort.
Hardly.

He stares at me. “Regardless, kismet always prevails.”

I shake my head and smile. A r
eal
smile. “The jury is still out on that one.”

Dare takes a last drink of coffee, his gaze still frozen to mine, before he thunks his cup down on the table and stands up.

“Well, let me know what the jury decides.”

And then he walks away.

I’m so dazed by his abrupt departure that it takes me a second to realize something because
kismet always prevails
and I’m
someone he might like to know.

He took my dad’s phone number with him.

T
ime swirls
and twirls and twists as it goes.

It’s tenuous, it’s sharp, it’s complex.

Adair DuBray does rent the Carriage House, and he’s elusive, and he’s mysterious and every day, I want to know him more.

Every day, I feel more like I know him already.

Every night, I dream about him, growing closer and closer to him.

A month passes, and one night, we stand at my favorite place, the blue tidal pools, and stare at the stars.

Dare points upward.

“That’s Orion’s belt. And that over there…. That’s Andromeda. I don’t think we can see Perseus tonight.” He pauses and stares down at me. “Do you know their myth?”

His voice is calm and soothing and as I listen to him, I let myself drift away from my current problems and toward him, toward his dark eyes and full lips and long hands.

I nod, remembering what I’d learned about Andromeda last year in Astrology. “Yes. Andromeda’s mother insulted Poseidon, and she was condemned to die by a sea monster, but Perseus saved her and then married her.”

He nods, pleased by my answer. “Yes. And now they linger in the skies to remind young lovers everywhere of the merits of undying love.”

I snort. “Yeah. And then they had a corny movie made for them that managed to butcher several different Greek myths at once.”

Dare’s lip twitches. “Perhaps. But maybe we can overlook that due to the underlying message of eternal love.” His expression is droll and I can’t decide if he’s being serious or just trying to be ironic or something, because
the irony is lost on you.

“That’s bullshit, you know,” I tell him, rolling the metaphorical dice. “Undying love, I mean. Nothing is undying. People fall out of love or their chemistry dies or maybe they even die themselves. Any way you look at it, love always dies eventually.”

I should know. I’m Funeral Home Girl. I see it all the time.

Dare looks down at me incredulously. “If you truly believe that, then you believe that death controls us, or maybe even circumstance. That’s depressing, Calla. We control ourselves.”

He seems truly bothered and I stare at him, at once nervous that I’ve disappointed him and certain that I’m right.

I
am
the one surrounded by it all the time, after all…by death and bad circumstances. I
am
the one whose mother just died and I know that the world continues to turn like nothing ever happened.

“I don’t necessarily believe that death controls us,” I amend carefully. “But you can’t argue that it wins in the long run. Every time. Because we all die, Dare. So death wins, not love.”

He snorts. “Tell that to Perseus and Andromeda. They’re immortal in the sky.”

I snort right back. “They’re also not real.”

Dare stares at me, willing me to see his point of view and I’m suddenly confused about how we started out talking about love and are now talking about death. Leave it to me to work that into conversation.

“I’m sorry,” I offer. “I guess it’s a hazard of living where I do. Death is always present.”

“Death is big,” Dare acknowledges. “But there are things bigger than that. If there aren’t, then this is all for nothing. Life is worth nothing. Putting yourself out there, and taking chances and all that. All of that stuff is bollocks if it can just disappear in the end.”

I shrug and look away. “I’m sorry. I just believe in the right here and right now. That’s what we know and that’s what we can count on. And I don’t like to think about the end.”

Dare looks back at the sky, but he’s still pensive. “You seem rather pessimistic today, Calla-Lily.”

I swallow hard, because I do sound like a shrew. A jaded, ugly, bitter person.

“My mom died a few weeks ago,” I tell him and the words scrape my heart. “It’s still hard to talk about.”

He pauses and nods, as though everything makes sense now, as though he’s
sorry
because everyone always is. “Ah. I see. I’m sorry. I know how that feels. My mom is gone too.”

I shake my head and look away because my eyes are watering and it’s embarrassing. Because God. Am I ever going to be able to think about it without crying?

“It’s ok. You didn’t know,” I answer. “And you’re right. I’m probably jaded. Being surrounded by death all the time… well, I guess it’s made me ugly.”

Dare studies me, hard, his eyes glittering in the light of the driftwood fire which reflects purple flames into his black bottomless depths.

“You’re not ugly,” he tells me, his voice oh-so-beautiful. “Not by a long, long shot.”

His words make me lose my train of thought. Because of the way he’s looking at me right now…
like I’m beautiful,
like he knows me
,
when I’m really just Calla and he doesn’t.

“I’m sorry I’m so emotional tonight,” I tell him. “I’m not usually like this. It’s just… there’s a lot going on.”

“I see that,” he answers quietly. “Is there anything I can do?”

You can call me Calla-Lily again. Because it seems intimate and familiar, and it makes me feel good.
But I shake my head. “I wish. But no.”

He smiles. “Ok. Can I walk you back up to the house at least?”

My heart leaps for a second, but the idea of facing Finn right now isn’t one I enjoy. So I shake my head.

“I’m not really ready to go back yet,” I tell him regretfully. Because it’s the truth.

He shrugs. “Okay. I’ll wait.”

My heart thunders in my ears as I pretend that I’m not thrilled with that.

“Have you heard the myth of the Gemini?” he asks. “Castor and Pollux were twins, and when Castor died, Pollux was so devastated that he asked Zeus if he could share his immortality with his brother. Zeus turned them into stars, and now they live forever as a constellation. We can’t see it right now, so you’ll have to trust me.”

“Are you telling me this because I’m a twin?” I ask, my eyebrow lifted. He shrugs.

“Not really. I can tell just by looking at you and your brother that you’d do anything for each other. I’d expect nothing less out of you than to become a star for him.”

He smiles and I shake my head because he has
no idea
what I might’ve done for my brother, and actually, as each day passes, I have no idea what I might have done for him. I might have dreamed it all up, imagined it, and now it’s not relevant.

We fall into silence and sit in the sand, so close that I can feel the warmth emanating from his body, so close that whenever he moves, his shoulder brushes mine. I shouldn’t get so much pleasure from that, from the accidental touches, from his warmth.

But I do.

We sit in such a way for an hour.

In silence.

Staring at the ocean and the sky and the stars.

No one has ever felt comfortable like this to me before, with silence that isn’t awkward. No one but Finn. Until now.

“Did you know that the Italian serial killer Leonarda Cianciulli was famous for turning her victims into tea cakes and serving them to guests?” I ask absently, still staring out at the water.

Dare doesn’t miss a beat. “No. Because that’s an odd thing to know.”

I feel the laughter bubbling up in me, threatening to erupt.

“I agree. It is.” It’s something my brother shared with me yesterday.

Dare smiles. “I’ll be sure to work that in at the next party I attend.”

I can’t help but smile now. “I’m sure it’ll go over well.”

He chuckles. “Well, it’s a conversation starter, for sure.”

I don’t move because I sort of want to stay here forever, even though the dampness of the sand has leached into my jeans and now my butt is wet.

But even though I don’t want this to end, the darkness is so black now that it swallows us up. It’s getting late.

I sigh.

“I’ve got to go back.”

“Okay,” Dare answers, his voice low in the night, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think I detected regret in it.
Maybe he wants to stay here longer, too.

He helps me to my feet, and then keeps his hand on my elbow as we walk over the driftwood and through the tidal pools and up the trail. It’s that thing that real men do, the guiding a woman across the room thing. It’s gentlemanly and chivalrous and my ovaries might explode from it because it’s intimate and familiar and sexy.

When we get to the house, he removes his hand and I immediately feel the absence of his warmth.

He looks down at me, a thousand things in his eyes that I can’t define but want to.

“Good night, Calla. I hope you feel better now.”

“I do,” I murmur.

And as I pad up the stairs, I realize that I actually do.

For the first time in weeks.

I dream about him again, and he’s so familiar and warm, his dark eyes sparkling as he looks into mine. “
You’re better than I deserve,”
he tells me, and that startles me, because I think it’s quite the opposite. I tell him so and he smiles knowingly, as though I’m wrong and I’ll realize it. When I wake up, I still feel warm.

As the weeks go by, I feel better and better, even if my brother seems to feel worse.

Each day he sinks deeper, and I grow more and more helpless because I don’t know how to reach him.

“Come with Dare and I to see the Iredale,” I plead with him one rainy morning. Finn looks out the window, finally lifting his nose from his journal.

“No thanks,” he says woodenly. “I’m not into being a third wheel.”

“You aren’t,” I tell him, but he won’t listen and I go with Dare alone.

“The Iredale ran aground in 1906,” I explain to him as we walk down the beach, to where the remains of the old wreck rise out of the mist. Its weathered bones look at once ghostly and impressive, skeletal and freaky. “No one died, thank goodness. They waited for weeks for the weather to clear enough to tow her back out to sea, but she got so entrenched in the sand, that they couldn’t. She’s been in this spot ever since.”

We’re standing in front of her now, her masts and ribs poking out from the sand and arching toward the sky. Dare reaches out and runs a hand along one of her ribs, calm and reverent.

I swallow hard.

“It’s a rite of passage around here,” I tell him. “To skip school and come out here with your friends.”

Except I never had any friends, other than Finn.

“So you and Finn came here a lot?” Dare asks, as though he read my mind, and his question isn’t condescending, he’s just curious.

I nod. “Yeah. We like to stop and get coffee and come sit. It’s a good way to kill the time.”

“So show me,” Dare says quietly, taking my hand and pulling me inside the sparse shell. We sit on the damp sand, and stare through the corpse of the ship toward the ocean, where the waves rise and fall and the seagulls fly in loops.

“This must’ve been a good place to grow up,” Dare muses as he takes in the horizon.

I nod. “Yeah. I can’t complain. Fresh air, open water… I guess it could only have been better if I didn’t live in a funeral home.”

I laugh at that, but Dare looks at me sharply.

“Was it really hard?” he asks, half concerned, half curious.

I pause. Because was it? Was it the fact that I lived in a funeral home that made my life hard, or the fact that my brother was crazy and so we were ostracized?

I shrug. “I don’t know. I think it was everything combined.”

Dare nods, accepting that, because sometimes that’s how life is. A puzzle made up of a million pieces, and when one piece doesn’t exactly fit, it throws the rest of them off.

“Have you ever thought of moving away?” he asks after a few minutes. “I mean, especially now, I think maybe getting a break from…death might be healthy.”

I swallow hard because obviously, over the years, that’s been a recurring fantasy of mine. To live somewhere else, far from a funeral home. But there’s Finn, and so of course I would have never left here before. And now there’s college and my brother wants to go alone.

“I’m going away to college in the Fall,” I remind him, not mentioning anything else.

“Ah, that’s right,” he says, leaning back in the sand, his back pressed against a splintered rib. “Do you feel up to it? After everything, I mean.”

After your mom died,
he means.

“I have to be up to it,” I tell him. “Life doesn’t stop because someone dies. That’s something that living in a funeral home has taught me.” And having my mother die and the world kept turning.

He nods again. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. But sometimes, we wish it could. I mean, I know I did. It didn’t seem fair that my mom was just gone, and everyone kept acting like nothing had changed. The stores kept their doors open and selling trivial things, airplanes kept flying, boats kept sailing… it was like I was the only one who cared that the world lost an amazing person.” His vulnerability is showing, and it touches me deep down, in a place I didn’t know I had.

I turn to him, willing to share something, too. It’s only fair.
You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.

“I was mad at old people for a while,” I admit sheepishly. “I know it’s stupid, but whenever I would see an elderly person out and about with their walker and oxygen tank, I was furious that Death didn’t decide to take them instead of my mom.”

Dare smiles, a grin that lights up the beach.

“I see the reasoning behind that,” he tells me. “It’s not stupid. Your mom was too young. And they say anger is one of the stages of grief.”

“But not anger at random old people,” I point out with a barky laugh.

Dare laughs with me and it feels really good, because he’s not laughing
at
me, he’s laughing
with
me, and there’s a difference.

“This feels good,” I admit finally, playing with the sand in front of me. Dare glances at me.

“I think you need to get off that mountain more,” he decides. “For real. Being secluded in a funeral home? That’s not healthy, Calla.”

I suddenly feel defensive. “I’m not secluded,” I point out. “I have Finn and my dad. And now you’re there, too.”

Dare blinks. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“And we’re not in the funeral home right now,” I also point out. We take a pause and gaze out at the vast, endless ocean because the huge grayness of it is inspiring at the same time that it makes me feel small.