The Risen: Courage (24 page)

“It’s not your fault.” I reach for him, touching our fingertips together. He is still too overcome to allow more.

His eyes watch our hands with their gentle game of entwinement. “You asked me to join you,” he says with his voice still burdened from his thoughts. “I told you no, but if I had put my own petty needs aside, I would have been there to save you. It would never have happened.” His eyes float to my face heavy with his guilt. “I keep failing you and I can’t help but wonder if Dolph could do better by you.”

“Shut up,” I tell him. It’s the world’s worst pep talk, but I am not feeling very peppy. “I would have walked into trouble eventually if you were there that night or not. It’s my gift. You have your smile to get you out of trouble and I have my luck to attract it.”

He smiles, crawling to hover over me. “It’s a curse I swear,” he says and smiles the very smile I was talking about at me. I feel it returned as I mimic it. “You up for this?” he asks me with hope and so much more in his eyes.

“It’s been awhile,” I smile, ignoring the fluttering of my heart with his question. “but from what I remember, I’m not the one that has to “be up” for it.”

He lowers his lower body to touch mine, keeping his torso suspended with his arms. A moan pulls from my throat when I feel his body’s response to the same possibility that has my heart racing.

“Covered,” he tells me as his voice becomes deep and husky.

His clothes come off slower than mine had with his further attempts to seduce me, and when I feel his skin to mine, the heat overtakes us both. The room fills with our voices crying for the other as he gently takes me. Ice is tapping on the window and it sounds like the soft sounds of applause for the love we have salvaged tonight.

CHAPTER
30

“I
guess you figured out how to make Lawly okay with Dolph hanging around last night?” Aimes asks me as we shift our way through the crowds around the cafeteria. With the weather growing colder by the day, most have started lingering in the hallways for their social interactions. Sounds of their conversations, and the few remaining children running around, make the air feel more claustrophobic than it should.

“What are you talking about?” I ask her battling against my nerves that seem to be shorter than normal.

“Really?” She looks at me with a look of disdain. “You two weren’t exactly very shy. Either he is very good, or you are very good, or it was one of the amazing flukes that leave us wondering why it can’t always be like that.”

I want to blush. I just don’t want the teasing that will occur if she knows how embarrassed I am. I had forgotten about our close quarters last night under the skilled body of Lawless as easily as he had lost himself in my abandonment. We had fed off the other until the sensations were too much, bringing us clinging to each other with hungry hands and mouths. None of this is what I want to share with her as she stares at me with searching eyes and a devilish smile.

“It was a fluke,” I tell her, leaving her curiosity with more devil than searching.

“I guess that is why we snuck away so early to eat and shower?” Aimes asks still unrelenting with her smirk.

I smile, merging into the small spaces left by so many pushing into the hall. “His morning gloating is a little annoying,” I lie to her. The early morning hours are when he is the most himself, but I couldn’t bear it this morning. I’m not running. I’m just mastering avoiding. I need a new gold medal to wear with my other medals.

“Just tell him it was a fluke.” She shrugs making her grin even more lopsided with her mischief.

“We never tell him that.”

“You’re right. They are so much worse when they have their little sexual egos hurt.”

“Words of advice or experience?” I ask her, returning the mischief back to her.

Aimes sticks her tongue out at me as we finally make it through the congested room of the library to an open, private corner. She pauses, looking to me with honest curiosity. She asks me, “Why do they always think they are God’s gift?”

“Because we never tell them about the flukes.”

She laughs as we take the two over-stuffed reading chairs in the corner. From here, we can see most of the room and the conversations are a mixture of volumes and moods. It swirls in the room combining the different elements like a recipe of life. No one is really happy and no one is really depressed. It’s a flat line of facts that once again the sun is upon us and another day is here to survive, which in itself sounds pretty depressing.

“Glad to see the morning finds you two well.” Selma’s voice slithers from a spot beyond us. Like magic, or voodoo, the crowd parts right at that instant to reveal whom we missed when we picked this area to sit. Like a viper in the tall grass sensing its prey, I’m pretty sure she saw us the whole time.

“It had. Now, not so much,” Aimes answers sounding a lot like her old self.

Selma isn’t phased by Aimes’ remark at all. Her smile is stuck on sentimental, and with how she is watching me, I have a sickening suspicion that Aimes is not her target today. I have that privilege with all the earned bonuses of psychotic that goes right along with it. Lucky me.

I sigh, bracing myself for the attempt of a mind screw I know she is plotting behind her smile. “Need something, Selma, or did you just get lost on the way to the punch?”

“I hear strawberry helps hide the taste of crazy when serving bullshit to the masses.” Aimes is twirling a strand of her white-blonde hair with a relaxed poise Lawless would be proud over. If she could stop tapping her foot with the energy of a toddler on a sugar bender it would be a lot more convincing.

Selma doesn’t even flinch with the remark. Her dark chocolate-colored eyes are locked on me with a death grip. She could be chiseling my tombstone by hand with her intensity. She most likely is doing it mentally.

“It must be hard to always be the strong one; the one they always look to. Especially when your friend just skates through life, living behind their adoration to keep her safe,” Selma says reopening a book I have closed. She is a few chapters behind for her to reach her goal.

I say nothing, giving her not the least little nibble of which way to dig her talons into me. It’s more fun to watch people like her try to grasp at air than to give them an avenue to skip down. I want to see how well she can play this game before I return her pitch.

She isn’t discouraged with my lack of concern. She just finds a different swamp to wade through. She says still wearing the artificial smile, “Rhett has spoken so often about you. He really admires your strengths and how bravely you are always putting
them
before your own safety.” She pauses with hopes the compliments will take root so that her next move may bear fruit. “He also mentioned how awful your parents were to you. How they never really loved you like you deserved to have been loved. You’ve lived your whole life trying to earn someone’s love and now you are searching to fill that same void with
their
respect.”

I’ll give her points for getting closer to home with that one. I continue to stare at her, waiting for her attempt for a homerun, which worries me some since that last pitch was so close to the plate.

“He told me about Law and Leslie as well. I was very ashamed of her actions when I found out. I feel like a fool to have trusted her.” She lets her smile fade to a forced frown as she tries to play the an-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-a-friend-of-mine card. It’s cute, but not the homerun she was hoping for. “The shame
you
must have felt when you found out trusting Lawless to such a degree. Then to find out it was all a plot by the man who had sworn to protect you, how heartbreaking!”

That one flew right over home plate, but I’m not taking the swing. I have two more strikes before I’m out.

“You deserve so much more, Helena.” She looks at me the way a mother is supposed to look at her child when discovering they are hurt. With how starved my heart has always been to have Carol look at me in such a manner, I can feel my resolve cracking. “Tell me it wouldn’t be nice just once to let someone else carry the weight. How nice would it be just once to be the one just accepted and not the one who is always tested?” She asks me with a face I have craved and I feel myself finally give under her skills.

“What are you trying to get at, Selma?” I ask her, forcing my voice to fill with contempt and not the cravings.

“It’s okay to be tired and scared, Helena. It’s not fair for them to force you to always bear their faults. You have your own needs. You have just as much right to be comforted as they do,” she implores me to understand.

Aimes laughs with a tone of amusement. She says, “You obviously didn’t hear her last night. She was comforted just fine.”

“Flukes aren’t very satisfying for anything the heart needs,” Selma says, entwining me in my lie. To disagree now would unravel the web I have spun. A web she has used to trap me to be devoured later.

“Is that how you’ve become this person, Selma? Has a lifetime of flukes left you a puppet master for Travis? Or, is that just an added plus of this new role of yours? You lure them in and he makes them sign on the dotted line?” I told myself I wouldn’t take the bait, but once again my mouth is moving before my brain can stop it. My mouth and my feet once again with a plan of their own - shocking. Obviously, it is not self-preservation.

She melts back to her self-assured smile. We both know I have taken the poisoned bait and now she just has to wait until it’s fully digested to win. Her silence is provoking as she reverses the roles we were playing. She lets me sit and wait for her answer showing her smile as she climbs under my skin.

With a nod she begins her story, sharing some small glimpse of the woman before us. “No, I was blessed before all of this. I had a good husband. He was my first love and we had the perfect fairytale. A few years after being married, we had our son, Beau. Our blessings kept growing, and like most people, the more they grew the more we forgot who to thank for them. We became so busy with our perfect life that we soon lost track of our beliefs. Church became something to do only on holidays and then slowly, not at all. We would tell ourselves we were going to change, but we never did. We never did until we were forced to.” Her smile is finally free from its cage and I see the real woman.

I know the twist her story is about to take before she says it. It’s the same twist that all of our stories have.

“There I was on the floor holding our son’s dead body, hating the Lord and ranting about how unfair for Him to take Beau and not me as well. I promised everything I owned if He would take me, too. I wanted to be with my son more than I wanted to live. I just never thought the Lord would collect.”

I watch as her memories take the slyness from her face. I see her stripped of all of her programed manuscripts and manipulations. Her heart is blistering and I can almost understand why she is the woman she is as I watch her suffering.

“My husband came in and started to try to revive him. He kept screaming for Beau to breathe and I kept screaming for him to let me hold him. When Beau came to, we were both so relieved. My husband picked him up and held him and that is when the real screaming started. Beau killed his father while I watched. I watched while my little boy murdered my husband like a monster and then he came for me, too. God did as I asked. He gave me the choice to live without him or to die with him. I killed my little boy for God and God took everything I had just like I had offered. So no, I am not the woman I am because of flukes. I’m who I am because of truths, simple black-and-white truths. When you’re ready to live with your truths, I’ll be waiting.” Selma stands, pressing her palms down her jeans to smooth imagined wrinkles with a nervous habit of a lifetime ago. She doesn’t glance backwards as she leaves, but I’m sure she feels Aimes and I staring at her retreating back just the same.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Aimes carefully says. It almost sounds more like a question than anything else. My weakness for the child story is not exactly a secret. Just the reason why I am so susceptible to it is.

“No, it doesn’t change anything,” I tell her with a voice as unsure as hers. “We all have our stories. You don’t see Chapel going all medieval crusades, so why should it make it okay for her?”

“Wonder what’s Travis’ story?” Aimes asks off-handed. Curiosity, cats and her have a shared theme.

I call her on her question. “You want to find out?”

I watch as her eyes grow and shrink from shock to uncertainty to shock again before she can finally find her voice. “You’re serious?”

“Come on, no one loves to talk about themselves more than Travis does. We’ll just tell him we are looking for repentance for our naughty, naughty ways.”

“The sounds Lawly was making last night, you might have to.”

“Jealously is such an ugly shade,” I tell her with false airs.

“Yeah, but whore isn’t. You’re just so purdy, remember?” she returns and I mock a gasp before playfully hitting her arm.

Hiding behind our laughter we are both nervous, if not outright afraid, of walking into the den of snakes. We have seen their handiwork and how their forked tongues can convince people to do such horrible things to the ones they love. Adam and Eve were God’s chosen. They had paradise to themselves and all it took was the whisperings of a single snake to bring them to ruins. What chance do we have against a whole den?

We continue with our completely inappropriate jokes as we make our way to the third floor. The more lewd the joke, the larger and deeper the looks of disapproval we gain from those we pass. By the time we reach the metal barrier of the top floor, I have verbally done more sexually in the time it took to climb the stairs than I have my whole life. Shockingly, Aimes tops my every joke with her own falsified escapades. If this gossip does reach our group, we will have a lot to try to explain and a harder time keeping a straight face as we do.

The floor is much as we left it yesterday, dark and emotionally stagnant. The same hollow eyes stare at us as we enter. Those same eyes watch us as we travel down the hall looking for the man who brags about having the ear of our Maker. Their depression hangs in the air like accumulated cobwebs. I can almost feel the shivers of walking through their wraithlike strings. Their sadness clings to me like a living thing, attempting to devour my life and laughter. Conversations aren’t just hushed here. This is where they go to die.

A man sits in the hallway letting his daughter invent her own version of the game duck-duck-goose. She’s been “ducking” the whole time we have been walking towards them, and by the smile on his face, I don’t think she ever reaches “goose”. They are an oddity of light and joy in a place devoid of any such sensations.

“Travis?” Aimes asks, reluctantly disturbing the private world of theirs.