Fragile Darkness (31 page)

But everywhere I looked, time rolled backward, and I could see him again, the night last fall after he'd pulled me from the river, coming to stand in the doorway after his shower, with a white towel slung around his bare shoulders and his jeans unfastened, dragging me to him and pushing me away, sitting on the side of the bed with a cup of hot tea in his hands, and leaning over me after a bad dream. I hadn't been thinking clearly that night. Actually, I hadn't been thinking at all. I'd just needed …

Comfort.
That's what I'd told myself afterward. Security.

But just because you wanted something to be true, didn't mean it was, and what I'd felt that night, the soul-deep restlessness, had nothing to do with comfort.

I squeezed the sandwich, sending peanut butter oozing from wheat bread. Old jeans and soft T-shirts were comfortable. Dylan Fourcade was not.

With Bakta still watching, I brought the sandwich to my mouth, but even the small bite stuck in my throat, and the pale green walls closed in on me.

Restless, wondering if Dylan had any more of that magical dream tea, I stood, and the cat jumped to the counter.

I stepped toward the doorway, he leapt to the floor.

I moved quietly down the hall.

He slunk after me.

I stopped.

He stopped, too, keeping the same distance between us, like my own personal feline bodyguard, or, I thought with a silly smile, Dylan's sergeant at arms.

Squatting, I held out my hand, like I did to call Delphi. The big Siamese didn't move, didn't even blink.

I tried again.

Nothing. Not even a twitch of a whisker.

Sighing, I was pushing back to my feet when he took one slow, cautious step.

I hesitated, waiting. With cats, the move had to be theirs.

He moved slowly at first, one cautious step at a time. Then he was there, pushing his pointy face against my palm, tentatively at first, then harder, stronger.

“Good boy,” I murmured, rubbing his black ears. Without really thinking I scooped him into my arms, and the ferocious guard cat started to purr.

Triumph made me smile. With a quick nuzzle of his wiry fur, I turned back to the front room. No sound came from within, only the muffled music leaking in from the bar downstairs.

The apartment was long and narrow, with three rooms the same size in a straight line and a hallway running along the side. The boxy bedroom was still utilitarian with a beige blanket pulled over the mattress, no shoes on the floor, the tall dresser alone against the wall. And yet everything seemed different, because I was different. Dylan was different. Six months ago he'd been a stranger, and now he was—

I still didn't know. I knew little more than his age and the fact he'd had to drop out of college, that his best day had yet to come and his scariest day involved me, and that Native American blood ran through his veins.

But that wasn't true, either. There was so much more to a person than basic facts like birthday and education, hobbies and interests and career goals. Those were the surface things, the clothes we put on to face the world. What defined someone ran way deeper.

And in
those
ways I knew Dylan better than I knew anyone.

Anyone.

He sat on the floor of the front room with his back to the wall and his legs bent, his feet flat against the hard wood. He'd showered and changed, but he still wore faded jeans and a black T-shirt. He held a stick in one hand, curved into a circle. With the other, he worked white yarn.

He knew I was there. He knew I was watching. He didn't need to look up for me to know that. I also knew it was no coincidence that he sat out of the line of the window and opposite the front door.

Against the adjacent wall, his laptop glowed from atop two milk crates. An old sofa sat opposite the television. Black-and-white photographs hung on two of the four walls. It was all the same, exactly the same as before.

“I think he likes me now,” I said, ignoring all the big, life, death, and destiny stuff gaping between us and focusing on something simple: his cat.

Against the dream catcher he was making, his hands stilled. One second dragged into two, three. At first I thought he wasn't going to look up.

Then he did.

I'm not sure why my breath caught. Maybe because it always did when he looked at me like that, with that hot, slow burn in his eyes. But there was something else this time, a watchfulness, part protective, part predatory.

“He's always liked you,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” I said, rubbing my thumb along Bakta's cold nose. “That's why last time he watched me like he was trying to decide if he should scratch my eyes out.”

“That's not what he was doing.”

“No?”

“No.” Dylan's hands worked the yarn again, but he never looked away from me. “He was waiting.”

I laughed. “To see if he should scratch my eyes out,” I persisted.

“No.” Same word, but this time his voice was thicker, smokier. “To see if you recognized him.”

“Recognized him?” Pulling the big cat back, I peered into the blue marble of the cat's eyes, as if we were old friends. “Why would I recognize—” Then it hit me.

“How old
is
he?” I whispered.

“Fourteen.”

I did the quick math. Bakta was born when I was two.

“I knew him before,” I realized, looking at the big beautiful Siamese as if seeing him for the first time. He watched me the way Dylan had at the Greenwood party, guarded, protective almost but with something else, a longing that made me want to pull him close and never let go.

“You named him,” Dylan said quietly.

I looked up, didn't understand the sudden glow in Dylan's eyes. “I named your kitten?”

“No,” he said. “You named
your
kitten.”

 

THIRTY-ONE

Bakta stared up at me, the recognition of a thousand lifetimes swirling in his eyes. “Mine?”

“Yours.”

My throat got stupid tight.

“Why didn't he go with me?” I asked.

“We couldn't find him after the fire.” His face a tight collection of lines and angles and memory, Dylan looked down at the dream catcher. “We thought he was gone, too. Then Dad and I were out there with the demolition team, and I was kicking around where your room used to be, and I heard something.”

I couldn't stop running my hand along Bakta's fur.
My
cat. That Dylan had been caring for all these years.

“How long had it been? Since the fire?”

“A couple of weeks. I didn't see him at first, because he was so little. But then I walked toward the trees and sat down, holding out my hand.”

I could see it. I could so see it.

“And he knew you were safe,” I said.

Dylan looked up.

“Like I did,” I said before I could talk myself out of it. Always before the moves had been his. He'd been the one to come to me, both when my eyes were open, and when they were closed. He'd been the one who knew what to say, and when to say it. How to touch me. Kiss me.

Shatter me.

But it wasn't the destroying kind of shattering. I knew that now. It was the kind that made ice break away, and let healing begin. The shattering that cleared away debris, like the demolition crew that had cleared the remains of the house after the fire, to make way for something new.

“I knew that from the first time I saw you,” I said, watching the light of a single lamp play against his eyes. “I felt it, that there was something there, some kind of connection. But I was with Chase, and you were a stranger, so I ignored it.”

Ignored him.

“Until you pulled me from the river.” And gave me the heat of his body and his breath, and reignited a forgotten dream. “That's why I kissed you,” I said, remembering it all. Feeling it all.

Missing it, missing
him.

“Because part of me recognized you, even then.” I crossed to him and went down on my knees, holding Bakta there between us, the cat I named but he raised.

“No matter which road I choose, it always takes me back to the same place.”

Him.

Us.

“Living the same moment over and over.” Unable to stay away from each other, but unable to be together, either. “Stuck in a weird time loop like a scratched DVD that keeps circling back, but never goes forward.” Heart in my throat, I lifted my hand from Bakta and brought it to the wide line of Dylan's cheekbone.

He ripped away so fast my hand froze there, in midair. “It's late,” he said in a raspy voice, one I
so
recognized.

I also recognized what was coming next.

“You should get on to bed.”

I sigh-laughed. It was either that or shove him as hard as I could. And I was so tired of that. Tired of shoving him away, when what I really wanted was to find a way back to before, when all the doors were open, and with nothing more than a look or a touch, he made the shadows go away.

“Did that used to work?” I kept my eyes playful, even as they challenged. “When I was two? Did I do everything you said just because you said it?”

The way
his
eyes got all dark drove me.

“I don't get you, you know that? I ask you to stay away, and you follow me. Now, here we are, alone in your apartment, and you try to send me to bed like a babysitter.”

Something fierce hummed through me, a confidence I hadn't felt before. “Well, guess what?” I leaned closer, lowering my voice. “I'm not a little girl anymore.”

It was amazing the way he could take stillness to a whole new level.

I watched his eyes, feeling the burn, feeling the hot, slow incineration deep inside me, and wanting more. “And I know what I need.”

Taking his hand, I brought it to my chest, where my mother's dragonfly dangled.

“This,” I whispered, feeling a different kind of warmth. “For you to touch me, like you did before.”

He tried to pull back. “Trinity.”

The wall stopped him, and I wouldn't let go. “Like you did when LaSalle tried to kill me,” I rushed on, “but you wouldn't let him, because you wouldn't let go.”

Dylan didn't move, not even with breath. But I knew he breathed. The warmth feathered against my neck.

“I
remember,
” I said, watching him. “Being there today, at the park, it was like a door opened, a door I'd hammered shut because I didn't know how to handle what was on the other side. But I remember now. I remember you—and my mother.”

The confusion and discovery, the warmth, the pain.

“That's why when everything else went dark, I kept seeing the roller coaster.” Like a bookmark dragging me back to something important.

Not a memory, I realized now. Not something I could look away from. “Because somewhere inside, I knew the only way I'd ever move forward was to go back and find what I left there.” What I lost.

Somehow he went even more still.

“My mom was touching me and crying,” I remembered, “telling me how much she missed me and loved me.” Exactly like she'd done all the other times I straddled the line between my world and hers.

“And all I could think was I never wanted the moment to end.” Because it had been beautiful and perfect. “But then I heard you, shouting my name.” And a different kind of beautiful and perfect had whispered through me.

They were my memories, but they played in the burnished silver of his eyes. “You were in shock.”

Maybe. But that didn't change the truth.

“Part of me wanted to stay with her, but then I felt your hands on me, the heat that streaked from them.” I leaned closer, searching. “Like invisible missiles firing through every nerve ending.”

His chest strained against his T-shirt.

“And I looked into your eyes.” Silver. Tortured. Like that exact moment. “And I knew it wasn't time for me to go, that this is where I'm supposed to be, with
you.
”

It's what I'd been fighting all along.

“It's why I'm here now, why I asked Jessica to take me to you Sunday night, despite the fact I told myself you were the last person I wanted to see.”

His breath was slow, rough. “Because of Chase,” he whispered.

My eyes filled. “Because every time I think of you, there's this horrible stabbing inside me, and I see Chase again.” The night of his uncle's party, after he walked away and Dylan stepped from the shadows. “The way he looked at me when he found us together.” It was the moment I'd realized Chase and I were over.

“And at Six Flags,” I added quietly. “When he told me to go with you.”

Finally Dylan moved, lifting a hand to finger my hair.

“It was like he knew,” I said. “Like he knew our paths were separating, that he was going in one direction, and I was going another.”

With Dylan.

I'd known it, too.

I'd been fighting it for months, since the moment Dylan pulled me from a river and unlocked another inside me, one that had been hidden, but once exposed, ran hard and deep and strong.

Because Dylan Fourcade was not a stranger, and he never had been. I'd known him long before I knew his name. Long before I saw his face. He'd been in my dreams as long as I could remember.

That's what I'd been fighting, telling myself I was being foolish, creating some big romantic fantasy out of the flimsiest of dreams.

But they weren't flimsy, and I no longer had the luxury of writing off what I saw behind closed eyes as simple dreams.

“So you torture yourself,” Dylan said quietly. “With all the things you could have done differently.”

I didn't know how to stop. “He didn't deserve to die.”

Dylan's hand slid from my hair to my neck. His fingers skimmed. Heat streaked. And all those quiet, fragile places inside me slowly began to reconnect.

His words were simple. “Neither did you.”