The Reaping of Norah Bentley (25 page)

“What’s wrong?”

He took a long time answering. “I’m just worried about you,” he said.

“Don’t be.”

“I’m making things difficult between you and your friends. Between you and him.”

“...You mean Luke?”

His jaw clenched at the name, like Helen’s did when somebody cussed. He nodded. I frowned, not wanting to talk about this right now, not willing to slave under the weight of it all again now that I’d had a taste of liberation.

“I don’t really care about Luke,” I said.

“I wish that was true.”

“It
is
true.”

Eli looked unconvinced, and my light step suddenly became the trudge I’d been moving around with for most of the day. He stayed quiet, unwilling to really argue with me—probably because he knew he was right. I did too, and I had a feeling he was waiting for me to admit it. So with an irritable sigh, I said,

“Okay. So I care a little. We...we sort of had a fight this morning.”

“A fight?”

I nodded quietly, slowed to a stop right there in the middle of the sidewalk. It wasn’t especially crowded— just a few people shuffling in and out of the shops, an old couple sitting on the bench next to the bus stop, a young mother with her two sons holding either of her hands. But suddenly it seemed like they were all staring at me. Like look at her, look at that girl—did you hear about what happened between her and her best friend? I wanted to hide from them. All of them.

I pulled away from Eli, wandered into the alleyway between the post office and some vacant building that I think used to be a bakery. The broken cement sloped gently down on this side and rose steeply up the other, and I walked all the way to the bottom of the hill and stood in the center of it, leaned against an empty bike rack next to a side door that said ‘Employees Only’.

Eli followed, still looking worried, but half-confused now, too.

“All of the people,” I explained. “I wanted to get away from them.” I didn’t explain why; figured he could see for himself, now that the day’s worth of tears I’d been fighting were welling up in the corners of my eyes and threatening to overflow any second.

“What exactly did he do?” he asked angrily, wiping away a tear that managed to escape down my cheek.

“It’s stupid.”

“It’s about me?”

“...Mostly.”

“If he wants to talk to me about it—”

“I don’t think he wants to talk.”

Something dark, dangerous, flashed through his eyes; reverberated in his voice when he very quietly said,

“What else does he think he’s going to do?”

“I don’t know.” I frowned. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Eli’s hand had fallen away from my face and he’d clasped it with the other behind his head and was pacing, pacing up and down the pavement, kicking at the loose pieces of cement.

“Eli?”

He stopped and glanced back at me, but didn’t speak.

“Promise me you won’t hurt him,” I said, walking towards him.

“Not if he keeps hurting you,” he said flatly.

“He didn’t hurt me.”

“He made you cry.”

“No—I mean, well yeah, but I…I’m a girl. Crying is sort of what we do.”

“No, it’s not. And if it happens again—”

“It won’t.” I took both of his hands in mine, felt the tension in them and tried my best to massage it away. “So please?”

He took a deep breath and pulled me against him. “Please what?” he muttered into my hair.

“Please just promise me.”

The tension in his hands started to spread, took over his whole body and turned it into something rigid, unyielding. I was insistent, though, and pushed closer to him, hoping if I held him tightly enough I could somehow crack the stony shell threatening to encase him. And after a minute, he sighed and said,

“Fine.”

“Thank you.”

He answered only with half a nod, his eyes not really looking at me.

“…Now can we please talk about something else?” I asked. “Anything else. I’ve been waiting for you to distract me from this all day.”

He leaned back, quietly studied my face for a second. There was still a hint of violence in his eyes, but he was smiling a little too—and there was something strangely seductive in the way the light and dark sides of his personality merged together on that perfect face.

“All day?” he asked.

“All day.”

His hands left mine and found my hips instead; his fingers hooked through the belt loops of my jeans and he pulled me toward him again, met my lips with a slow, gentle kiss. “Well I can be very distracting,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” I said, my now-free hands tracing the outline of his stomach through his shirt, traveling up across his chest and hooking together behind his neck.

His body quivered at my touch, and then his lips were against my throat, softly kissing their way up underneath my hair, stopping at my earlobe and lingering there for several deep breaths that sank in warm and moist against my skin. He pressed closer to me, his hands gripping my hips and turning me towards the wall, crowding me against it.

A door slammed somewhere nearby, and we both jumped— but that was the only attention either of us paid to it; he was kissing me again and my heart was racing too fast, the blood pounding behind my ears too loudly for me to try and focus on anything but him, his scent and the minty taste of his mouth. Then somebody coughed deliberately loudly—the door-slammer, maybe— and Eli laughed without taking his lips away from mine, the vibrations from it sending fresh shivers coursing through my whole body. He kissed me one last time before pulling away and glancing over his shoulder.

A woman with bright purple eye shadow was standing outside the post office door on the opposite side of the alley, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a smug look on her face. We’d been caught. And for some reason I found that hilarious, and once I started laughing I couldn’t stop. Then Eli started laughing too—more at me than anything else, I think—and while the woman stared at us like we were crazy, he kissed my cheek, grabbed my hand and started to pull me back towards the street.

“Come on,” he said, giving crazy-eye-shadow-lady a friendly wave I mimicked so enthusiastically that, between that and laughing, I almost lost my balance and went rolling back down the hill.

When we reached the sidewalk again, Eli guided me down to the crosswalk and then across the street, turning the opposite direction of my house—although I was still so lightheaded that it took me a minute to realize it.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I’ve got another distraction for you,” he said. “Somewhere I want you to see.”

“Uh-oh,” I teased. “It’s not another graveyard, is it? Because I’m not going to lie—that would probably kill the mood.”

“Definitely not,” he said with a smirk. “Quite the opposite, actually.”

“Good.”

I wrapped both my arms around one of his, and we picked up our leisurely pace from earlier, following the sidewalk down into the more residential part of downtown. We passed apartment complexes, their playgrounds filled with screaming kids; the sprawling lawns of old houses that at one point were probably grand, stately homes, but most of which now were in serious need of a restoration project. The closer we got to the edge of town, the more run-down the houses seemed to become, and the less familiar everything seemed. I knew I’d been here—I’d been everywhere in Sutton—but for some reason my memory of this part of town was vague, like the memory of a dream I’d had a long time ago.

The sidewalk ended, but we kept on walking. Eli was quiet, and I didn’t speak either because I was too busy observing, trying to remember where I was, why I’d been here before. I was squinting, trying to read a street sign off to our right when Eli stopped so quickly I almost ran into him.

He was standing on the edge of a long, winding driveway that led to a white house, half-hidden behind two giant willow trees. Before he even said anything, I was already stepping towards it to get a better look. It was getting stronger—that feeling that I’d been here before. Less like a dream now, and more like a nagging song I’d heard but couldn’t remember the name of.

The gentle breeze swayed the tree’s limbs back and forth, and through them I caught glimpses of the columns adorning the front of the house, the ivy that was wrapping around them, spreading across the porch and up the siding, up over the dark red door. Between the ivy and the curtainless windows, and the ‘no trespassing’ signs nailed to the door, it had the same obvious look of abandonment that most of the houses on this street did.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“…This is my house,” he said.

“Your house?”

He walked up and took my hand again, started across the yard. “When I was alive, this is where I lived. My parents moved away a couple years ago, after I…after they lost me. But it’s stayed empty all this time. I guess Mom wouldn’t let Dad sell it—she loved this place too much.”

“Where did they go?”

We’d made it half-way across the yard before he answered me. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Somewhere outside of my region.” I gave him a confused look, and he went on: “The region I’m responsible for reaping. It’s about a two-hundred mile radius, and I’m not supposed to leave it. And they’re somewhere outside it.” His voice got quiet towards the end.

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“It’s just part of the job,” he muttered.

I squeezed his hand, wishing I could take some of his hurt away, absorb it into me like he’d done with mine earlier.

“It’s not so bad,” he said quickly, glancing at me. “I got lucky, still having this place to come to. There’s a landscape guy that stops by every month or so, but other than that I pretty much have the place to myself. I even managed to grab some of my stuff before they moved, so it still sort of feels like home in my room.” He shrugged and kept walking, pushing through the tree branches and then leading me around to the back of the house. He retrieved a small silver key from underneath a potted fern, unlocked the back door and pushed it open.

“After you,” he said.

There were no blinds on the back windows either, so the sunlight was streaming through, gleaming off the hardwood floors and forming a shining golden path that ended at the foot of a narrow staircase. I breathed in deep—the faint scent of some sort of lemon cleaner and the pine floors—and stepped inside. My eyes swept over the open floor plan, up the staircase and up, up to the vaulted ceilings that had to have been at least fifteen feet high.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

Eli placed his hand on the small of my back and steered me toward the spiraling staircase. My foot had only reached the bottom step, though, when something weird happened.

That same nostalgia I’d felt standing on the lawn was back, flooding over me. I was just about to tell Eli I was almost
sure
I’d been here before, when the walls flashed to a pastel shade of yellow. I blinked, hard, and when I opened my eyes again they were back to white. Plain white. I squinted, but they stayed that way. Then I heard sounds echoing around the empty room: a woman humming, a child laughing—sounds that should have creeped me out, since there was no one but us around to make them. Instead, there was a feeling of incredible warmth spreading through me, a mixture of familiar longing and burning curiosity.

I relaxed there on the bottom step, and just looked around some more. Blinked again. The walls were still white. Why did it feel like they should have been yellow? Like someone was playing a trick on me?

“Norah?”

His voice made me jump, and because I needed to explain away my sudden trance, I asked, “Did these walls used to be a different color?”

“…Yeah. They did, actually,” he said. “They were this weird yellow color a few years ago.” He stopped and gave me a confused look, like the strangeness of my question had just hit him. “How did you…?”

I didn’t want him worrying about me any more than he already was, so I kept my crazy visions to myself this time. “It just…it just has that remodeled look,” I said. “And it didn’t cover the yellow completely in places—like, um, over there.” I pointed to a random patch of shadowy wall, and hoped he didn’t look too closely.

He gave me another puzzled look, but then he shrugged and said, “Guess it didn’t.” He slid past me, his body brushing mine on the narrow staircase. After leaping a few steps, he paused and looked back at me, almost shyly.

“My room’s upstairs,” he said, and stood for just another second on the sunlight-drenched steps. It was the first time, maybe, that he didn’t look human to me. Right then he was some brilliant, unearthly creature; a god of the sun, controlling its rays so they illuminated him in the best possible light. And it was hard not to be captivated by him, if only long enough to take my mind off of the weird vibes I was getting from the house. So when he turned and bounded the rest of the way up the stairs, I didn’t hesitate to follow.

For a guy, his room turned out to be incredibly clean. It was so neat and put-together that for a second I didn’t even realize that there was no furniture other than the twin bed in the corner; there were boxes everywhere, though, all of them stacked with things—notebooks and books, mostly. Novels, textbooks, a giant world atlas with pull-out maps perched precariously on a dented box next to the closet. The closet’s folding white doors were pushed back, revealing an orderly rack full of clothes. And he was right—it
did
feel like a home; there were even posters on the wall, a T.V. with rabbit-ear antennas at the foot of the bed, a stack of DVDs next to it.