Echoes

by Marissa Lete

  “I trust you,” I finally say across the darkness of the car. Then, without meeting his eyes, I grab his arm, my hands making contact with his hot, bare skin.

  “You do?” he asks as I inspect the wound, noticing that even though there’s a lot of blood, the wound isn’t too deep.

  I tear off my jacket, still avoiding those piercing yellow eyes. “You just took a bullet for me. I’m pretty sure that warrants my trust.”

  “Maybe I should have started off by doing that,” he tries to laugh, but it comes out breathless.

  Shaking my head, I wrap my jacket around the bullet wound, tightening it on his arm despite his sharp intake of breath. “You got lucky. It’s not too bad. But it needs to be looked at.”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “Someone who knows what they’re doing.”

  “I know what I’m doing. I’ll be fine.”

  I shake my head, turning my attention back to the road in front of us. “Do you think anyone is following us?”

  “If they are, we’ll know soon enough,” he replies.

  I nod, then pull the car back onto the road.

  ✽✽✽✽✽

  Twenty minutes later, I come to a screeching stop in the stone circle driveway in front of Maverick’s house. I hop out of the car, then walk over to the passenger side and open the door. He looks pale.

  “Come on,” I grab his right arm, helping him step out of the car.

  “I’m okay, honestly.”

  I look at his left arm skeptically, taking in the blood soaking through my jacket. Then I tug him inside.

  We go to the kitchen, where Maverick instructs me to grab the first aid kit from a cabinet. Inside the kit, I find the gauze pads and long white bandages, setting them on the table. Maverick sits down next to the sink. “Should we clean it first? I mean, that’s what you do, right?” I ask him.

  He nods but doesn’t look confident. “Fun fact: this is actually my first bullet wound. But I guess so. There’s rubbing alcohol in there.”

  I grab it, then bring the supplies over to him. Carefully, I untie the knot in my jacket, pulling it away from Maverick’s arm. He winces when it gets close to the wound. “I’m sorry,” I say, watching as fresh blood slowly seeps out of his skin once the jacket is gone.

  “Don’t be.”

  I unscrew the cap of the rubbing alcohol. “Well if I wasn’t before, then I am now.” I lift his arm over the sink, then carefully pour the liquid over it. His jaw tenses and his other hand grips the edge of the counter, knuckles turning white. When I’m done, he lets out a ragged breath.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor?” I ask him.

  He looks down at his arm, touching the skin next to the wound with his finger. It’s a small wound, and it looks like the bullet just barely grazed him at an angle, without actually entering his skin. It’s bleeding still, but it looks less intimidating under the bright fluorescent lights of Maverick’s kitchen.

  “I’m sure. Just bandage me up. It’s not that bad,” he tells me.

  So I grab the gauze pads, laying them carefully over the wound, then I take a long white bandage and wrap it several times around his arm tightly.

  When I finish, I take a step back. “I guess that should do,” I say. I lift my hand to pick up the first aid kit on the table next to him and Maverick catches my wrist, his warm fingers curling around my clammy skin. I don’t flinch, I don’t try to pull my hand away; there’s no point, because when he looks at me, into me with those burning amber eyes, it lights a fire inside my chest.

  “Laura, I’m so, so sorry,” he tells me, his voice quavering.

  “Why are you sorry? You saved my life.”

  He shakes his head. “If it weren’t for me, your life never would have been in danger.”

  “Maverick, you can’t—”

  “No, Laura,” he tightens his grip on my wrist. “I’m sorry. For everything.”

  I open my mouth, but he speaks again before I can get any words out.

  “What I did to you, it was wrong. I should never have done it. It should never have been an option.”

  “You did it because you wanted to protect me,” I say.

  “I did it because I thought I was being selfless. I thought that without me in your life, you’d be safer. You’d be happier.” He loosens his grip, letting my hand drop to my side. “But really, I was just being selfish. I should have talked to you. I should have given you that choice.”

  He's doing that thing again, where his eyes focus on me, never blinking, never moving, like I’m the only thing he sees. I feel my heart in my chest, threatening to beat right out of me.

  I ponder his words, trying to imagine being in Maverick’s place, faced with a decision as monumental as he had. He thought that I was in danger. He thought that by giving me up, he could save me. He’d done everything in his power to protect me, to keep me out of this, even after he realized his mistake. And now, he’d just taken a literal bullet for me.

  Sure, his choice to erase my memories had hurt me, but isn’t that the thing about choices? There’s no way to guarantee that they’ll be the right choice. They can always end up backfiring or hurting someone. And we’re here, now, in this strange place between friendship and a relationship, caught up in this terrible mess that we aren’t sure how to fix. What happened before has been done, but if it had never happened, we might never have learned about each other’s abilities. Our abilities connect us, make us understand each other in a way that no one else can.

  I gaze back at him, trying to calm my breathing. “It’s okay. I forgive you,” I tell him, and I mean it.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know if it’s that easy.”

  I shake mine, too. “Even if it’s not, I want to try. I want to know you. I want to know how I felt about you before. Which means we both have to get past this.”

  He blinks a few times. “Are you sure?”

  I nod.

  He moves to me, then, without warning. He slides off the counter and steps closer. I stumble backward in surprise, but he doesn’t let the distance between us grow, stepping forward at the same time until my back hits the edge of the opposite counter.

  His hands reach for my neck, curve just under my ears. Ever so slightly, he uses his thumbs to tilt my chin up until my face is aligned with his. His amber eyes flick back and forth between mine, seeming to ask a question: is this okay?

  In answer, my eyes flutter closed. My heart races in anticipation.

  A second later, his lips touch mine, and my stomach responds as if I’ve just taken a dip on a rollercoaster or jumped out of an airplane. Too soon, they’re gone, but he stays close and puts his forehead against mine, his breath mingling with mine. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Don’t be,” I reply breathlessly.

  And he must not be, because a moment later he kisses me again, this time harder, more insistent. Like he’s kissed me a thousand times before. And perhaps he has.

  Just as quickly as he had moved to me, he moves away, leaving all of the places he’d touched me feeling cold and empty. All that’s left is a tingling feeling that spreads across my skin. Across my lips. The echoes of his kiss.

  I try to steady my breathing as he stands a foot away from me, looking at me with those golden eyes. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed that. Missed you,” he tells me.

  I don’t know what to say, so I just stand there, watching him stare at me. He’d kissed me. I’d let him kiss me. I’d wanted him to kiss me. What were the implications of this? I’d just barely started feeling comfortable enough to think of him as a friend. To trust him. And now there’s this burning in my heart, in my cheeks that I can’t control. I know what we must have been to each other before, but were we on our way to becoming that again? Will it ever be the same, now that I can’t remember anything that happened before?

  “Come with me,” Maverick says before I can come up with something to say. He offers his hand. I take it, and he i
ntertwines our fingers. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  He leads me through the house and up to a pair of wooden double doors. The room contains a large screen and several rows of chairs. A home theater.

  “This house never ceases to amaze me,” I say.

  “I’ve lived here for months and I’m still not sure I’ve seen the whole thing,” Maverick laughs. He leads me to the front of the room, then lets go of my hand. “Choose a seat.”

  “This is going to be tough, it’s pretty crowded in here,” I reply, and he chuckles, nudging me forward. I sit down in the third row and watch as he goes to the back of the room.

  “I’ll be right back,” he says, then goes through a side door. A minute later the screen comes on, displaying a photograph of me standing in front of a chalk sign holding an ice cream cone, smiling at the camera.

  Maverick comes back into the room and sits down in the seat next to me. He holds out a small remote and I grab it, examining it in my fingers.

  “I can’t give you back your memories,” Maverick starts, and I meet his eyes, trying to see what’s inside them, “but I can give you this.”

  “What is it?”

  “That remote,” he points at the screen, “controls that, which has a slideshow of all the photos I have of us.”

  I gasp. “Are you serious?”

  He nods. “This is the first photo I ever took of you. On our first date.”

  I look at the picture of myself again, realization hitting me. “Oh my gosh,” I say. Hastily, I hit the forward button on the remote, and the photo changes to a selfie of us standing in front of an ice cream store. It looks vaguely familiar, like I might have driven past it before. My hair is shorter in this photo—I’d grown it out a little in the past year.

  After studying it for a long time, I change the photo again. This one’s a candid shot of me sitting at a table in a restaurant, digging my fork into what looks like some kind of pasta dish. I’m smiling, my mouth wide open like I’m laughing at something.

  “Second date,” Maverick tells me, “Lorenzo’s Italian restaurant, downtown. I basically had to beg you to go out with me again.”

  I shoot him a look. “Seriously?” Then I remember hearing the echo of Maverick cornering me in front of my house before school to question why I was avoiding him. The conversation that ultimately ended with me telling him I liked him.

  “You were a tough catch, I’d say,” he chuckles. “It took like two months for you to start referring to me as your boyfriend.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “I’ve never dated anyone before. I was probably terrified of you.”

  He shrugs, “I’ve never thought of myself as intimidating, but maybe I was a little forward about my feelings.”

  “Maybe,” I reply. Another thought pops into my head, and I start to ignore it before I realize that with Maverick, I don’t have to hide certain parts of my life. So I open my mouth instead. “Hearing the echoes always scared me away from relationships. It’s kind of hard to juggle all the noise of the past and keep up healthy friendships and relationships without being able to explain why I zone out or don’t want to go certain places. I never really thought about dating anyone. I guess until you, that is.”

  Maverick nods in understanding. “In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense.”

  I start to flip through the photos again, pausing on a few that stand out to me so that Maverick can explain them. Half of them are candid shots, little moments that Maverick caught of me doing something or laughing at something. The rest are either selfies or had been taken by a third person.

  There’s me, sitting at a table at Louise’s, a fry in my hand, head turned toward the window. Us, standing by my front door, a bowl of Halloween candy on the ground behind us. Selfies of us in front of restaurants, at parks, inside each other’s houses. Him and I sitting at the Thanksgiving table with my family and a woman that looks just like Maverick. Us standing under a bunch of mistletoe in ugly Christmas sweaters. The photos are in chronological order, and I watch as the seasons change, the leaves bare, and then budding. Our jackets thick, and then gone. Maverick’s mansion appears in some of them: me sprawled out across a chair by the pool in sunglasses and a bathing suit, Grace in the chair next to me. The picture I’d seen on the fireplace mantle appears, Maverick kissing my cheek in front of a line of trees. The photos flip by, hitting me with a new wave of feeling at each one.

  It’s like taking a trip down memory lane, except I have amnesia, so I’m seeing all of the memories for the first time.

  The last photo is of just me, staring directly into the camera, smiling. My hair looks windblown, tangled and frizzed out all around my face. My skin is slightly flushed like it’s hot outside or I’ve just run a mile, and there’s a blur of greenery behind me. Normally, looking like that, I’d never want someone to take a photo of me. But instead of shying away from the camera, I look confident to be the focus of the photo. I look happy. I barely recognize myself.

  “That’s the last one I got,” Maverick says from beside me. I turn to him, trying to keep my watery eyes from spilling over.

  “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for showing me these.”

  He nods, taking a deep, shaky breath. “I just want you to know that I care about you. I never stopped caring about you.”

  Even though I only remember knowing him a short while, I know he’s telling the truth. “I don’t remember how I felt about you,” I tell him, “but I want to figure it out. I just need time to get to know you better.”

  He nods. “As I said before, anything you want to know, just ask. I won’t keep any secrets from you ever again. And if you decide you don’t want anything to do with me, I’ll respect that.”

  My mouth forms into a small smile. “Thank you, but right now I don’t think that’s going to be the case.”

  He smiles back, then he leans close.

  His kiss fills all of the cold, empty parts of me with warmth until I’m bursting at the seams.

  Chapter 31

  With a start, I pull away. “What time is it?” I ask. I pull out my phone. Twelve thirty. “Shoot, I was supposed to be home already.”

  Maverick stands up. “Let’s go.”

  We get in the car, and Maverick has to drive me to the school to get my car that we’d left in the parking lot all those hours ago. It feels more like days, after everything that’s happened.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? Now that we have more information, we can start figuring out how we’re going to take her down,” Maverick tells me as we pull up next to my car.

  “Sounds good,” I say, tugging on the door handle. I look back at him, feeling like there’s more that I should say, or do. But I end up just closing the door without another word.

  I drive home in the quiet, thinking about everything that happened. The gunshots that hadn’t hit me directly, but had felt like they’d punched me in the gut. Maverick’s kiss, which had only brought tingles and butterflies. The photos, the memories that Maverick had shared with me. It had been a long day.

  When I pull up to my house a little after one, the lights are still on inside. I look at my phone to see what messages they’ve sent, wondering where I am. There aren’t any. I wonder if they are still awake. Certainly, they would have tried to call already if they were. Right?

  I carry my backpack up the porch steps, holding my key out to unlock the door, but it’s already unlocked. Strange. Mom never leaves the door unlocked past dinnertime, even when I’m still out and about.

  When I get inside, I drop my backpack on the floor, then sweep the house, looking in every room, thinking maybe my parents had fallen asleep on the couch or something. But no one is downstairs.

  My heart starts to race. I run up the stairs, pushing the door to my parents’ room open. They’re not in bed.

  “Mom?” I call out. “Dad?” I go into their bathroom, their closet. I check my own room and the guest room. There’s no one here. Pulling out my phone, I
dial Mom’s number.

  After two rings, I hear the chimes of her phone ringing from somewhere inside the house. I follow the sound, racing downstairs into the kitchen. On the counter, her phone is ringing, right next to Dad’s phone. Under both of them is a piece of paper.

  A note, written in loopy cursive handwriting.

  Laura,

  Thanks for stopping by my office. Your parents are safe with me, but if you ever want to see them again, you’ll need to come by my lab within the next eight hours. Both of you.

  Yours truly,

  Alice

  The note flutters to the ground after I’ve read it. I cover my mouth in my hands, slumping to the floor next to it. My parents. Alice has kidnapped my parents.

  Through blurry eyes, I pull out my phone and call Maverick.

  “Hello? Laura?”

  “Maverick. You—you need to come back,” I say between sobs.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “My parents,” I say, then I have to take a moment to breathe. “Alice has my parents.”

  “I’m coming,” Maverick tells me. “Is anyone else there? Are you sure you’re alone?”

  I look around the house that I’d just searched minutes ago. “I’m alone,” I reply.

  “Stay there. I’ll be there soon,” he tells me.

  Ten minutes later, he finds me sitting on the kitchen floor, my head on my knees. He squats down next to me, his hand on my back.

  “Laura. I’m here. Are you okay?” he asks. I look up at him through teary eyes.

  “She left a note,” I say, spotting it on the floor and reaching for it. I hand it to him, and I watch as his eyes flick across the page. Then they meet mine. “We have to go,” I tell him.

  Maverick shakes his head at me. “It’s a trap. It’s always a trap.”

  I shake my head back. “But we have to. What is she going to do to them?”

  Maverick doesn’t answer me. I feel another wave of sobs coming on, and I put my head back down, resting on my knees. Gently, Maverick grabs my arm, pulling me to my feet. Then he wraps his arms around me, and I bury my face into his chest.