A Boat Made of Bone (The Chthonic Saga) (16 page)

Will turned away after telling her he loved to be with her, and while she suddenly felt bashful, he was evidently as uncomfortable as she. He avoided her gaze, glanced up the deserted street, then down at his shoes—he was wearing a pair of black square-toed shoes. She saw him swallow and purse his lips together. The fact that he was suddenly unsure of himself made her ribcage expand. The uncertainty, the desire to be accepted was something that didn’t enter the equation during the sex, which she was learning was just a function of the dream—she seemed to have no control of it. It was almost hormonal. Awesome, yes, but something else other than a position they got themselves into voluntarily.

It was the entrance to the dream. The gateway. Or it was, till today.

Kate wondered if he’d come to the same conclusion.

She stepped forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I’m so glad we got through that.”

His eyes found hers and a smile spread across his face. “What a relief, Kate. I—well, just . . . thank you for listening to me.”

As they turned to walk away side-by-side, the street was suddenly populated. A busker occupied a doorway, singing some romantic crooner-type of song. Nearby, at an outdoor cafe, everyone was giving a toast. A vendor sold flowers from a box hung around his neck, walking slowly through the mass of people in the opposite direction. Will bought a couple roses, using money he willed into existence, and handed them to her, flashing her one of his huge, dimpled grins. She took them and felt a heady flush—no one had ever given her flowers before. The roses were large, unopened buds, so heavy that the thought came into her mind that each rose was a piece of Will’s heart. His dream heart—the one that she’d built a home inside.

“So, were you ever married?” she asked as they made their way toward the London Eye. He would be able to tell her now that they’d gotten past the true horrors of his life—which, she had to admit, were pretty sad. The thing about the blood donations would be a hard truth to live with.

“Yes,” he said, squeezing her hand tight. “But it only lasted a few years. It was a mistake. We both realized that as soon as we were married.”

“A mistake because you didn’t love her or she didn’t love you?”

He tilted his head in acquiescence. There was no more hesitation when she asked him direct questions like that. “I was selfish. I didn’t know that I’d have to give up parts of myself and my desires to make a marriage work. I was too young. Too stupid and selfish. When I first realized that, I thought I could get over it. I thought it would go away.”

“But it didn’t?”

“Not really, no. I didn’t mind being with her, I just realized she deserved someone who felt the sacrifices were worth it.”

How hard could that be?
Kate wondered.
Didn’t love mean they weren’t sacrifices?
“I’m glad you didn’t lie to me about this stuff.”

He stopped and stared at her, blinking. “Now Kate, why would you think I’d lie to you?”

She shrugged, pausing and returning his stare. “To feel safe, I guess. I don’t know. People lie, sometimes.”

“Well, you got the worst of it out of me, Kate. You know how I feel about my sojourn on Earth. I’m not going to compound it at this point by lying to you.”

“Compound it. What do you mean by that?”

“You never know, right?”

“Never know what?”

He made a rolling gesture with his hands, “You know, the afterlife. What happens when we die?”

“You are dead, aren’t you?” A flicker of hope flared through her chest. Maybe he was alive?

“Yes, but is
this
the afterlife? I don’t know.”

They kept going. Her mind tried to race around his words, but the enormous Ferris wheel and the crowds around it distracted her. Dusk fell like a fuzzy black cloak and the lights of the city glimmered to life.

“What drugs did you do?” She asked as they got into line for the Ferris wheel.

“Not a lot. Cocaine. Heroine. But it was minor.”

“How minor?”

“Oh, on a yearly basis, I’d say about three times a year at most. I was usually working. I didn’t have time to indulge in it much,” he leaned against the rail surrounding the line. “What about you?”

“Nothing. Not much. I’ve smoked weed a bit, but I’m not into that scene. I get paranoid on weed. I hate that.”

“None of the hard drugs for you, eh Kate?”

Kate laughed. “If I want enlightenment, I guess I’d rather meditate. Plus I’m not rich enough to afford that expensive crap.”

“When I was alive, people would say to me, ‘Will, you know you only live once!’ And I bought it. I fell for that, but I fell for it in the wrong way, I think, now. Instead of realizing that I was bound to die eventually and I better do a lot of good, I tried everything. Drugs, sex—and I mean some really farfetched stuff, Kate—”

“What, like orgies?” The thought sickened her, but she asked it anyway, and she hated herself for not stopping before the words were out. She really didn’t want to know. Yes, the sex they had was dream sex—it was amazing and impossible and erotic—but she still didn’t get into the freaky crap that was out there in real life. She wasn’t into that.

Will blushed and cleared his throat uncomfortably, coughed into his hand and looked around, suddenly more awkward than she’d ever seen him. If Kate hadn’t felt so embarrassed herself, she would have laughed.

“What was that?” She asked in response to the murmur Will hid with a hand over his mouth.

“I said yes, yes, OK?”

“Why are you embarrassed about it?” she prodded. She knew why she felt the way
she
felt, but why was Will embarrassed about this?

“Kate, I only lived once, and when I did, it was all about me. All of it. It was like my motto was, ‘I live to extract pleasure from every situation.’”

“Why didn’t you ever remarry or something?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess I felt I deserved to die alone.”

“Wow,” she whispered.

It was their turn. They boarded the capsule and the door slid shut behind them before anyone else got on.

It would have been romantic if she hadn’t just heard Will say he thought he deserved to die alone. The inside of her head was a bell and his words echoed around it like the metal chime, furious and angry, jarring her, shaking her up within. Should she say anything? Could she even comprehend what that meant, to die alone? Kate had a family. At least, she had parents and two younger brothers. She had a gaggle of friends. And until she met Will, the plan was that she’d someday marry and have a few kids, thus ensuring that she’d never die alone.

“What, like, in bed, by yourself? Were you discovered by your housekeeper or a neighbor who noticed a foul smell drifting through the walls?” she asked it and once the words were hanging in the enclosed space of the gondola she knew that she sounded like a total jerk. That wasn’t why she said it. She tended to choose her words carefully, but Will had proven to knock her reservations loose. He turned everything upside down and Kate didn’t know which way to go to stay within an acceptable boundary.

And besides, she hoped to lighten the mood with a little joke. Turned out to be a bad one. A horrible, ugly joke.

Will looked like he was going to retch. His smile wavered, his lips seemed to tremble, his face went ashen. She knew that based on his response, what she said wasn’t too far from the truth. 

“Will,” she whispered, shaking her head, her gut twisting into knots as she realized how bad she made him feel. He turned from her and looked out at the night-scape of London. She followed his gaze and remembered what he said about it—that the city just went on forever.

Yes, he’d told her how awful he felt about who he’d been when he was alive; yes, he made some mistakes, but Kate was not his judge. So far all the man had done was make her feel magnificent. Before Will, no one had ever given her flowers. That was such a minor thing, and maybe some would say, stupid. But he’d made her laugh. He’d poured his soul into her and together they’d build this strange, exotic, and beautiful dream world.

“Will,” she said quietly, pleading.

He kept his back to her. Her knees weakened. She’d ruined everything for certain. How could she be so insensitive? So tactless?

“I’m so sorry, Will. I didn’t mean it—”

“It’s OK,” he said, not turning.

She touched his shoulder, scared that he’d be immovable, scared that she would make it worse by forcing her will upon him.

“I was trying to lighten the mood—it was stupid. I never meant to hurt you. I would have been by your side through everything. You wouldn’t have died alone if I’d known you when you were alive.”

Finally, he turned. “Kate, you wouldn’t even have recognized who I was then.”

***

It was the worst way to wake up. Not with the taste of a recent kiss in her mouth or with the memory of holding him fresh in her mind, but the bitter flavor of knowing that she’d hurt Will with her words. It was cruel, what she’d done. And uncharacteristic. She’d never have said something like that to Ty or almost anyone else. But she hardly acted the same in the dream as she did awake.

The only good that seemed to come from the dream this time was that she still remembered his name. Will. The starkness of reality hadn’t taken it from her. Perhaps finding out who he was before the dream meant that she would hold on to it. 

She swung her legs over the edge of her bed, found a notepad and scribbled information about the dream onto it.
William Hawke. Will Hawke.
There. In case she somehow, mysteriously forgot it again.

She grabbed her laptop and clicked on a “William Hawke” Google link from her searching about him before she fell asleep.

Her stomach did somersaults as she stared at the old picture of him. No doubt about it. It was Will. The Will from her dreams: sapphire eyes with their long dark eyelashes, that dimple like the last line of a haiku, and his perfect satin skin. 

Born in the thirties and dead by the early nineties. He’d been dead most of Kate’s life. If he had lived, he would have been almost ninety. And if he were living, would she care? Would what she felt for him transcend that enormous age barrier?

When alive, he’d been in a bunch of TV shows, but most of them she’d never heard of, except the one she’d seen at Suga’s—
LA: Bluefire
. The cop show. He also did movies, but nothing Kate was familiar with. In
LA: Bluefire
, he played an American hero. Pop culture junkies threw his name out when they joked that someone was going to ride the edge of law and exact vigilante justice. That was what his character in
LA: Bluefire
did. When the bad guy got off scot free, his character, Logan Craig, found them and exacted out his own justice, which was what a person would call police brutality today.

Still. People loved him because the bad guys were really bad. Drug lords. Pimps. Human-traffickers. Wife- and child-abusers. The show might have landed a spot on HBO today, and could have been really graphic. But back then it only lasted two seasons on a late spot, and it got away with all the questionable topics by dancing around the subjects, only hinting at them.

Kate kept reading, filling in the blanks about him. Not that it mattered much: she knew how she felt about Will. He got married once and then divorced a few years later just like he told her in the dream. Details on his personal life were rather scarce. The tidbit about his marriage was the only thing recorded on the wiki about B-list stars. The entry talked about his acting training, which was partially done in London as he had told her. According to some sources, he hated the cop show and only did it for the money. He preferred acting in film or on the stage.

Kate finished reading the wiki entry and felt strangely unsatisfied. So she went to YouTube and began watching clips from LA: Bluefire. She propped her laptop up on the corner of her desk, curled up, and let it play. Maybe tonight would be the first time she went into the dream twice.

10: The Gig

“C, G, A-minor, F,” Kate muttered as she scribbled the chords into the top corner of her notepad with one hand, while the other held her guitar on her lap. She put the pencil down and strummed the chords, trying out various lyrics.

It was almost eleven on Saturday morning. Kate had been up since dawn, when her roommate, Overachiever Jill, woke and began screeching out a bunch of violin solos. There was no way to sleep through that, so Kate got up too.

Kate paused in her playing, thinking about the lyrics she’d just sung. They were good. She grabbed her pencil and scrawled them into her notepad on her desk. As she did, her stomach growled—she still hadn’t eaten breakfast. She put her guitar on the bed, stood up, and stretched.

The kitchen was a mess. Dirty bowls and pans teetered out of the sink. Crumbs covered the floor. The visibility of the countertops was severely hampered by stacks of muffin tins and cooling racks. Kate mumbled under her breath about the incompetency of some people as she removed a blueberry muffin from a tin with a butter knife. Overachiever Jill made them after her insane practice session. Kate smeared a slab of butter on it and began eating.