The Rush (16 page)

“I was still processing Sam…. It was kind of the opposite of a vacation.”
I breathed out in a shaky whisper.

             
“Oh my god, Ivy, get over it already. It’s not like he
died
. You are being so dramatic about the whole thing!” Anaxandra rolled her huge blue eyes in an exaggerated circle and then removed her attention from me completely, looking down at her nails as if they held the solution to world hunger.

             
Exie smacked the back of her sister’s head with a sharp satisfaction. “God, Ana, that is the ugliest thing you have ever said! What is wrong with you?”

             
“Ow!” Anaxandra rubbed at the back of her head and scowled at her little sister. “What is wrong with
you
? And you know that Ivy is the only one upset about the accident. Everyone else seems to think it’s a good thing…. a sign of things to come!” Her face lit up with an expectant smile. “You’re a good omen, Ivy. Stop worrying about Sam and enjoy what this means for you!”

             
The bile rose higher in my throat and I lunged forward, throwing myself in Sloane’s bathroom. I didn’t have time to reach the toilet, so I stood at the sink, dry heaving the non-existent contents of an empty stomach. A weighty pressure landed on my lungs and my vision blurred at the edges, threatening my consciousness altogether. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

             
Sloane appeared behind me and turned me away from the mirror where I had been unconsciously staring daggers into my own, hated reflection. She pushed roughly on the back of my head until the top half of my body hung upside down and my face was awkwardly placed between my knees.

             
“It’s Ok, Ivy,” Sloane murmured sweetly to me. “Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Slowly, that’s it, slowly.” Sloane’s voice held a gentle authority that I responded to immediately. This wasn’t the first time we had been through this routine.

             
The world started to come back into focus even as all the blood rushed to my head and my neck flooded with warmth. Breathing was becoming easier, the sick, venomous feeling slowly receding back to the depths of my black, toxic soul.

             
“Ivy sooner or later you’re going to have to get over this cry for attention,” Evaleen taunted from the other room. “If Nix loses his patience with you, you’re only going to have yourself to blame.”

             
“There is something wrong with you two,” Exie scolded as she joined us in the en suite bathroom. “You’re just like everybody else. It’s like you’ve turned into
them
.” Exie gestured toward the floor, indicating the party downstairs. She hit them with an insult that once upon a time would have really riled them up. “You’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid.”

             
“Grow up, Ex,” Anaxandra snarled. “Some of us like drinking the Kool-Aid. One day you’ll get it, you’ll accept what every single one of us eventually comes to accept. It’s easy to be judgmental from where you’re standing, but one day you’ll have to stand in our shoes, one day when they offer you the proverbial Kool-Aid you’re going to drink it. Just like we did, just like our mothers did, just like their mothers did. Remember that.” Anaxandra finished her speech by returning her gaze to the oval vanity mirror and preening for three more seconds before nodding her head to Evaleen. Both girls gave us one more pitying stare and then left to join the party downstairs.

             
The three of us stood silent and frozen in the safety of Sloane’s bathroom processing Anaxandra’s ominous words. Sloane was the first to move and when she did it was with an icy frigidness. She turned around and leaned forward on the bathroom’s marble countertop, gripping the edge until her hands became white.

             
“What if she’s right?” Sloane whispered, avoiding her face in the mirror. “What if we turn out just like them?”

             
A hundred different answers spun and twisted in my head but when I finally spoke it was with hope. “What if we don’t?” I paused, letting the question settle in the air around us. “Sloane, what if we don’t?” Each word was spoken with solid intension and earnest strength. There was so much hope in that seemingly impossible future that it was too tempting to set aside without further examination.

Exie
looked up when I spoke, shaken from her fearful trance. There was a lighter spark in

her
deep blue eyes, a glisten of miniscule hope that hadn’t been there before. “Sloane, what if we don’t?” she squealed and pulled me to her in a tight hug. She bounced up and down and then pulled Sloane into our circle of affection like we had already conquered this life and moved on to greener pastures.

             
I let myself get caught up in her excitement, feeling real hope bloom like the first flowers of spring after an endlessly frozen winter. There was no reason for it, no explanation for why this time my voice sounded confident and sure. But there it was all the same and the three of us were suddenly infected with as much hope as we were once diseased with despair.

Chapter Thirteen

              “Alright ladies, it’s time to make an appearance,” Sloane admonished after several minutes of hugging.

             
Exie and I made simultaneous groans of frustration, but let Sloane lead the way out her door and down the staircase to the main floor. There weren’t that many women gathered tonight, less than fifty. But each room was packed with competitive estrogen and enough ego to suffocate an innocent bystander.

             
Caterers floated from room to room carrying trays of bite-sized canapés or flutes of champagne and soft jazz drifted through the air barely heard over the steady conversation. Men had joined the ranks of women since I was upstairs, dates, husbands, lovers, Nix’s apprentices…. There were not as many of them as there were women, but the crowd was diversified and it put me back on edge.

             
We waved and smiled at everyone important, at everyone we were supposed to pay notice to. But each of us avoided Nix’s authoritative eye and the expectation-filled expressions of our mothers. Exie and Sloane were as uncomfortable as I was dealing with these people and we shared a mutual acknowledgment that a quick walk-through constituted a legitimate appearance. With a sad, soul-crushing kind of despair I noticed Anaxandra and Eveleen mingling with the veteran women in the crowd, sipping vodka martinis and discussing current events.

             
Another one bites the dust.

             
And another one, and another one, and another one bites the dust.

             
We ducked into the den toward the back of the house. The room was unoccupied, but we knew it would be. Personal offices are always off limits at these things, hence the reason we use them as our safe haven. Technically we were still apart of the party.

We squished together on a rich
, deep chocolate suede sofa surrounded by ceiling to floor bookshelves stacked with volumes of intellectual books that had probably never been opened and began our ritual of making fun of everyone we could remember seeing in our brief sprint from the bottom of the staircase to this room. We pulled our cell phones out and multitasked by trash talking and texting. This was procedure for us, years of routine and tradition.

             
“So did that guy ever work out for you?” Sloane asked with a sly lift of her eyebrow.

             
“Guy?” I clarified. A surge of irrational panic slid through my veins leaving sticky residual anxiety congesting my blood vessels into immovable blockage.

             
“That one from your first day back? The one that offered you a ride?” Sloane clarified as if I was especially slow tonight.

             
“Oh, right. Yes, actually. We have a date tomorrow night. Some house party thing….” I trailed off and then felt the need to defend Chase’s choice of first date. “He asked me out for tonight first, but obviously I had other plans. So we decided to do this thing tomorrow night because he already told his friend he would be there,” I rambled nervously. “His name is Chase.” For a moment I assumed she meant Ryder, which sent off all kinds of panic alarms in my head. I realized then that I held a fierce desire to protect Ryder from this life, from me…. and I didn’t understand where it was coming from. I didn’t even really like Ryder. He was more like this phenomenon in a life where everything had become far too predictable. But maybe that was why I wanted to protect him. Maybe because he was all but invincible to my curse, I wanted to protect him from every potential female that could hurt him.

             
Which was kind of messed up since he was already saved from being the victim.

             
It was all the other boys that lay in the wake of my war path that I should really be concerned about.

             
Except I tried that once….. I tried that with Sam and things did
not
end well.

             
“I remember,” Sloane grinned, lifting her second eyebrow to join the first. “But a house party? Seriously? I thought I raised you better than that.” She threw me a saucy grin to let me know she was kidding.

             
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, he had this whole wining and dining event planned but when I turned him down for tonight he was already locked into this party thing. It should be fun. The guy who’s throwing it is super sweet and funny. And Chase’s whole circle of friends will be there, so….” I trailed off not really knowing where I was going with that or why I was defending the night at all. It was a party, so what? We went to parties all the time.

             
“Aw, I think our little Ivy is nervous,” Exie elbowed me in the ribs from where she sat in between Sloane and me. “Your rambling a little bit, sweets. Are you scared to go to the party?”

             
I thought about that for a minute and decided I was more than scared, I was petrified. It would be my first high school event since the accident last spring. I had plenty of reasons to be nervous but I was raised to believe that kind of anxiety was a weakness.

             
And I wasn’t supposed to have any weaknesses.

             
“Maybe just a little bit,” I smiled, hoping my nerves would be misinterpreted. “I kind of like Chase. He’s adorable in that soccer-jock-I’m-so-l-laid-back-I-should-be-a-surfer-way. You know?”

             
“Sure, we know,” Sloane giggled, turning her attention back to the text message she was sending to her boyfriend of the month. “Surfers in Nebraska where there aren’t even any noteworthy lakes, make complete sense.”

             
The three of us dissolved into laughter.

             
At that moment my phone lit up with an incoming message and I smiled down at Chase’s name and short note.
Having fun at the family thing?

Chase was a good choice for the first boyfriend back in the game. He was low maintenance and extra sweet. He would be careful with me, even if I would eventually break his heart. He didn’t know it now, but even if he was the best thing for me, I was definitely the worst thing for him…. probably ever.
  

             
“Speak of the devil,” I mumbled with a smirk twisting my lips.

             
“And he shall appear,” Nix finished the phrase from the doorway. A chill slid down my spine at his reference and I couldn’t help but picture his dark mess of hair with red horns and his perfectly sculpted hands holding a pitch fork. “It’s hard to enjoy the party when you’re hiding back here ladies.” He smiled casually at first, slowly, as if he were in on our private joke, but then his expression grew more serious and he hit us with the intense severity of his dark eyes that only Nix was capable of. “Your mothers are all looking for you.”

             
We responded without talking, jumping to our feet in trained obedience. I tried to get to the door first, hating the idea of being the last one in the room with him. Not that I was abandoning my friends, but either of them would be safe. Nix wouldn’t try to detain them. Not yet anyway….

             
He caught my eye though and with an infinitesimal shake of his head I knew I had been trapped regardless of my efforts. I moved to the side and let my friends through the door. They gave me a discreetly sympathetic look before slipping into the hallway in search of their mothers.

             
“Ivy,” Nix greeted smoothly, piercing me with his concentrated gaze, like a knife in the gut. His expression sliced open my belly hemorrhaging heavily my insecurities and fears.

             
“Hey, Nix,” I replied smoothly, confidently, casually and with any other positive adverb I could convey. I forced myself to remain the picture of aloof ease, proud and relaxed. With my chin tilted just a fraction higher and my shoulders held back I faced the monster in front of me silently pleading he would believe my act.