Breathless (2 page)

I could feel you before I saw you; the hair on the back of my neck bristled with every breath you took. My heart pounded, forcefully trying to escape the lonely confines of my hollow chest. Your footsteps finally made crunching sounds in the dead grass surrounding the table and I knew you were upon me. The first thing I saw were your blue eyes glowing with reflections of the moonbeams in the late summer sky. Neither of us said a word, I was frozen with pizza half way to my mouth and you just stood there smiling. I don’t know how many minutes passed but it was long enough that the awkwardness slowly weakened. I’d never experienced that before, an uneasy silence growing comfortable all by itself.

You held out a drink for me to take but I hesitated and felt my brow crinkle. “You forgot it,” you said and your voice was calm, airy, and felt like velvet to my ears.

“I forgot?” I puzzled.

You pointed back inside toward the food court. “Left it sitting on the counter.”

I looked down at my pizza, the plate, and the napkins. Everything I’d brought with me, no drink. I laughed too loud at my silliness and looked back to you just in time to see you blink rapidly as an uneasy nervousness spread across your handsome face. But as my laugh faded, your smile returned.

“May I?” you asked, and gestured toward the empty chair next to me. I hesitated but you’d expected as much. Your hand reached to my face but paused to see if I would shy away from it – I didn’t, I longed to see what you planned to do with it. Rough fingers skimmed across my skin, trailing from my earlobe to the center of my chin. “It’s okay. I don’t bite … hard,” you joked and gave me your best non-predatory smirk that would have sent most girls running for the hills, but instead made my heart leap. The warmth of your hand left my face and my skin screamed in protest at its loss.

You tilted your head back the way you’d came. “If you want, I can just leave you alone.”

Your blue eyes filled with sadness. For the first time you looked normal, not like the dream man I’d seen for so long. Your façade of perfection crumbled and I could see the tiredness appear on every inch of your body. You still didn’t look like anyone else here, no cheesy print shirts or fake leather sandals. The crisp linen shirt you paired perfectly with pressed khakis and canvas shoes gave the illusion you wanted everyone to buy, just like I had believed, but in that moment I thought I saw the real you. The creases from worried anguish clearly etched in your brow and bright eyes that held dark secrets pulled me in even tighter.

“You just got here.” I spoke softly, almost as afraid you’d stay as I was you’d leave.

“Right choice.” You winked, as your façade moved right back into place. “Stay it is.”

I inhaled deeply, counting as it took you three of my breaths to walk around the table to sit beside me. You moved so close I could feel the warmth of your body wash over me and I yearned to lean closer, feel it deeper.

“The nights are so much better, it’s too hot in the day.” You spoke without a care in the world, like by my side was where you’d always been.

I glanced at you from the corner of my eye, afraid that if I looked at you straight on you’d disappear. You were beautiful. Your lips looked full and soft; I wondered what they felt like. There was a small, white scar under your left eye that added to your air of mystery. The planes of your face were rugged and you were older than I’d thought, too old to be sitting under the night sky with someone my age.

“The stars are so clear, beautiful,” I said as I tore my gaze from you and looked upward.

“Not the most beautiful though,” you said, and moved your hand to rest on the knee of my crossed legs, not a full grope but more of a tentative caress.

Heat of embarrassment rushed over me, so hot I was surprised we both weren’t sweating. Part of me knew warning bells should be going off in my head at your intimate touch but another part, the one that wanted your touch, chose to ignore them.

“Why are you out here all alone?” you asked.

“I don’t really know,” I said, still watching your hand as it rested so easily on my leg. “I like it outside after the sun has gone down and it’s not so hot. And I wanted to get away from all those people in there, they can be...” I let my sentence trail off, I didn’t want to admit I was hoping you’d find me. You made me feel alive, mature. What if you found out I wasn’t and how much I thought about you?

“Can be what?” you questioned forcefully, as your hand dug into my leg, causing me to flinch slightly. Those warning bells finally began to sound lightly as fear threatened to surface. Our encounter seemed off, you seemed off – not how I’d pictured, and I was afraid it was my fault. I thought maybe I wasn’t what you’d wanted either.

I shook my head quickly. “I wanted to be alone … with you.” My words were barely a whisper dancing across the cool breeze of the night and I hoped you had heard them before they blew away. I hoped you’d believed them and that they pleased you.

You ducked your head timidly and slowly pulled your hand from its resting place. “You’d rather be with me?”

My heart jumped but I didn’t speak.

“Somewhere cool like it is right now?” you asked, as you tilted your head up to the sky and closed your eyes in delight.

“Sure, I’d love that. I’ve never really been anywhere but here and I’ve always wanted to be around snow since there’s never any here. Just once or twice a year, but it’s usually just like an inch. We did go snow skiing when I was young, but I barely remember it.” I could feel myself getting flustered the more and more I talked, I wanted to shut up but for some reason my mouth just kept moving. I curled my lips under the edges of my teeth and bit down so hard a faint metallic taste assaulted my senses. “Have you ever been in a lot of snow?” I finally blurted out.

“I have, all the time,” you answered calmly and subdue in comparison to my blathering.

“Are you from somewhere cold?” I asked, knowing it was none of my business.

“I am,” you stated. “Maybe you should just come home with me.”

I laughed. “But I don’t even know your name.”

“And if you did?” You raised your eyebrows at me and I felt a rush through my entire body.

“Well, then maybe … you know, I, if only …” I stuttered, and then wanted to slap myself for sounding like a stupid child.

“Eat, drink,” you finally demanded.

I did, chewing so quietly, praying you wouldn’t hear me but I only took a few more bites before moving the plate across the table. You moved my drink closer to me with a smile. Finally picking it up, I took a long drink from the cup that was covered with condensation. Little droplets of water dripped off and landed on my lap, both of our eyes turned down to follow them and then moved back to each other. Your eyes watched me intently, flickering back and forth from my mouth to my eyes before finally tearing away from my stare. I thought it was a moment of shyness as you were overcome with me, which only made me want you more.

But I was wrong, so wrong. Looking back I wish our story had ended there, it would have remained a happy story. A fond memory I could have looked back on as old age took away every ounce of beauty you saw in me. But that’s not where we ended, that is just where we began.

A lonely shade of white

My head began to fill with an overwhelming fogginess. I looked around to see if anyone else was there. All I could see was you and the stars brightly reaching down from the heavens. You touched my face. I saw your lips form into a perfect pucker as a
shh
sound washed over my ears. Fire spread from my chest up to the top of my head. I tried to pull away from your hot hands but you wrapped them around my head, digging your thumbs into the hollows of my cheeks. You pulled my face so close I felt your nose dig into mine. I wondered if this was what I was supposed to feel, was this what happened when a girl was attracted to a man? I’d been kissed before, I’d even made it to second base with a boy once. But I never really enjoyed it, there had never been any butterflies or sparks – I thought maybe that’s what this was, sparks. I was wrong again.

“You’re safe, my sweet Annabel, you’re safe.” Your voice just a whisper in my ear.

Annabel? I wanted to scream, who’s Annabel? I wasn’t her. I didn’t even know anyone by that name. But no words came, only nothingness came – dark nothingness. My head was screaming but the words were blocked out by the fuzziness of confusion.

I felt my eyelids flutter and a rancid taste of bile rose in my throat. A clanking roar blasted through my ears. My hands tried to reach and cover them but I couldn’t. We were moving; my body could sense movement. We weren’t at the mall anymore, we were in a dark room. I smelled you, soap mixed with honey, a sweetness that made my stomach churn. Then your hot, clammy hands brushed against my face as something bitterly sweet filled my senses – I’ll never forget that smell, the smell that brought back the darkness.

The hardest part was knowing that I slept as you robbed me away. Took me from everything I’d ever known and all I did was sleep. You forced me to sleep with that sweet smell, always forcing it into my mouth and nose. I don’t remember it, the sleep. There were no dreams, nothing startling me awake – just sleep and that lingering bitter sweetness.

But when I woke again, the pounding in my head immediately told me I was still alive. The burning in my chest rose into my throat as pins and needles assaulted every inch of my body. I was alive, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be.

I sat straight up and tried to look around. But my head was overcome with whirling. My arms and legs were free to move but they refused to acknowledge that they were still connected to my body. I told them to jump, to leap from this bed that was surrounding me but they wouldn’t. One arm shot up and the other stayed limp. One leg moved left and the other right. The fire in my throat finally erupted from my thrashing and spilled its contents down the front of a plain white shirt that I saw was covering my body. Not my shirt though. Maybe it was no longer my body either.

This time I heard you before my body knew you were there, I think it had already grown accustom to your presence. My mind had not though, it had been sleeping.

“It’s just the medicine,” I heard your soft, sickly voice declare. I tried to find you but my eyes were lost, blurred in whiteness.

I tried to move again and felt the fevered pounding in my chest increase as I finally gained some control over
this
body. I fell, landing with a thud that reverberated through my body onto the hard floor. Hurried feet appeared in front of me as nothing more than white socks. I watched as some of the hot liquid covering the plain white shirt dripped onto the plain white socks.

“You’ll be okay, just take it easy. The medicine is leaving your body.”

I opened my mouth, closed it, opened it, closed it. It felt foreign and would not do what my brain was commanding. My mind was racing everywhere all at once. So many emotions streamed through me that I couldn’t decipher them from one another – fear, hate, panic, pain – I felt them all in a rush of confusion at the unknown.

Legs bent in front of me slowly becoming knees. Your hot touch ran across my forehead, I felt nothing. No desire to sway into your touch as I had the times before, yet no strength to flinch away either.

I forced my eyes to rise to your face. I didn’t want it to be you that I saw. I didn’t want those icy blue eyes to look back at me, with those worry lines etched so deep. Someone else, I longed for you to be someone else. Not the man I had yearned for. But there you were, the last face I’d seen on that night under those bright, clear stars.

“You’re safe, Annabel, you are home.”

I woke again, in the same room as before – I had no idea how long I’d been there or where you were. The space between pizza at the mall and that day was muddled, all twisted together in a haze of dreams. But at least I’d had my dreams again, at least they were there to tease me with a life outside of this white room. Your face was ever present though and I remembered food and water, but the memories were all flashes of bright light and blue eyes.

But I was growing more alert, eyes opened to a stark whiteness that made them burn and fill with tears. White everywhere – walls, ceiling, bed, covers, door – nothing but pure brightness with a single light bulb hanging from a cord centered directly over me. I was covered with a thin sheet with nothing on my body underneath; I could feel the fabric rough against every inch of my body, every cell acutely aware of my nakedness. What had you done to me? That question screamed in a rush of blood that blared in my head. My fingers pressed against my inner thighs and ran over my bare center. I closed my eyes and exhaled in a slow and steady stream of relief when nothing felt different, I would have felt different – I knew I would. If you’d taken that part of me while I was unconscious, I would have known and my fear would have turned to loathing.

A white chair to my right had a neatly folded, clean white shirt resting on it. That shirt called to me telling me to rise, clothe my bare body, and escape. My arms and legs instinctively jerked expecting to meet resistance, but they merely flew into the air and crashed back to the bed – you hadn’t tied me down. I thought everyone that was taken was tied down like it was a main teaching point in Kidnapper 101. Maybe I should have guessed there was a reason you trusted my captivity enough you felt no need for restraints, but at that time I took it as a blessing.

I set straight up, eyes rapidly searching the room. Calming my breath was harder than it should have been. Pulling air in and pushing it back out was involuntary, but controlling the speed so I didn’t pass out again took effort from my whole being. Digging the heels of my hands into my eyes blocked the bright white that was surrounding me, just enough that I felt momentarily safe. A small, dark cocoon within myself – that’s all that brought me comfort right now.

Home. You’d said I was home. I knew by the chill in the air and the musty, damp smell that this was not my home. The place I’d called home since I was four years old was varying shades of brown and smelled like food, it always had. Apple pie, baked bread, chocolate cake, chili, spaghetti sauce – my mother cooked more than she did anything else. It brought her solace, and until this day I never realized how much comfort it brought me.