Erasing Faith

by Julie Johnson

  This had been no normal spell or chant.

  “Wes…” I whispered, looking up at him with alarm. “What just happened?”

  He couldn’t even look at me. I saw him swallow several times, watched his eyes open and close rapidly as though they might somehow blink away whatever had just occurred. The girls were clapping and circling the table, each bearing small loops of sturdy white rope. When they grabbed my left hand and slid the tiny circular cord onto a very specific finger, I almost fell over in shock.

  “Did they… did she…” I gulped for air. “Wes?” My voice was squeaky.

  “I think…” He cleared his throat, hard, then looked over at me steadily. “Uh…”

  I stared at him for a long, frozen moment, waiting for him to finish. Waiting for him to confirm that my suspicions, crazy as they might’ve seemed, were correct.

  “Well, Red…” Something changed in his eyes. They went sort of soft as they moved over my face and the hint of a grin touched his lips. He took a deep breath before he spoke.

  “I think we’re married.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: WESTON

  IN OTHER WORDS

  There weren’t a lot of rules.

  Lie.

  Cheat.

  Steal.

  All perfectly fine with the agency.

  Threaten.

  Torture.

  Kill.

  Just another part of the job description.

  Boundaries.

  Ethics.

  Morals.

  They were blurred lines I was never forced to define and frequently found myself crossing.

  My world didn’t distinguish right from wrong. Black and white were nothing more than lofty ideals. I lived in the gray area.

  There weren’t a lot of limits, in the gray.

  But there was one. A single, icon-clad, unbendable margin you did not cross.

  Don’t get attached.

  Don’t leave loose ends.

  Don’t forget that it’s all temporary.

  If there was one protocol you didn’t disregard, it was that one.

  I looked down at my left hand. I would’ve laughed at the sight of the pure white cord wrapped just below my cracked red knuckle, but I couldn’t seem to find any humor in this situation. I wasn’t allowed to care about Faith. Wasn’t supposed to make any permanent connections or long-term bonds.

  She wasn’t mine. She never would be.

  Except, now… she kind of was.

  And she was more than just a loose end.

  She was my fucking wife.

  I’d crossed the line of demarcation. I’d broken the one rule I lived my life by. I’d disregarded my most important order.

  In other words, I was fucked.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: FAITH

  RUN WILD

  I was curled into a ball on the window seat in my bedroom with a large glass of wine in hand, listening to the mournful strains of Christina Perri’s Distance when I heard the front door open.

  “Faith?” Margot called.

  I took a large swallow of wine, listening to the sound of her approaching footsteps.

  “You home?”

  My bedroom door creaked ajar and Margot’s head popped through.

  “Hey! There you are,” she said, walking into the room and settling in on the cushion beside me. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

  “Sorry,” I murmured, staring at my toes. I really needed to repaint them — the deep blue Margot had applied before my date last week was already chipping.

  She was silent for a moment. “Why are you sitting in the dark?” she asked finally.

  I sighed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  I took another sip of wine. “I don’t even want to say it out loud.”

  “Is this about Wes?”

  I nodded miserably.

  “What’d he do this time? Bring you to practically the brink of orgasm and then bail with a lame excuse about having to work again?”

  I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “Okay, no.” She ran one hand through her pixie cut, mussing it instantly. “Did he force you to scale another tall building or monument and then kiss you at the top?”

  I cracked a smile. “No.”

  “Just tell me,” she whined. “I hate guessing.”

  “Fine.” I straightened my shoulders out of the hunch they’d sunk into and braced myself for her reaction. “He…”

  “Yeah?” Margot prompted.

  “He kind of…”

  She made an impatient hand gesture.

  “…married me.” I winced, anticipating her response.

  When she didn’t say anything, I glanced over and saw that her jaw had dropped open and her round eyes had zeroed in on my left hand like a laser beam. I let her absorb the news for almost a full minute in silence until, finally, her gaze refocused on my face and she reached out a hand toward my wine.

  “I’m gonna need a sip of that before this conversation goes any further.”

  I smiled and passed her the goblet, watching as she took a large swig.

  “Now,” she said, turning to face me fully. “Start at the beginning and tell me everything. If you leave out a single detail I’ll eat all the Nutella in our pantry and play Justin Bieber songs on full volume for the next six months.”

  My face contorted into a horrified expression at the thought of such torture. I quickly reclaimed my wine and launched into the story, making sure not to scrimp on the finer points — because, obviously, I wasn’t about to jeopardize my Nutella. I told her everything: the Anna altercation, the ride to Gyula, the festival, the gypsy’s tent. When I finished, she stared at me for nearly a minute with a bizarre look on her face.

  “So...” I asked in a tentative voice. “What do you think? Because, honestly, any insight would be helpful right about now.”

  Margot looked deeply into my eyes. “Let me get this straight…” Her voice was more serious than I’d ever heard it. “You married a guy without even sleeping with him first? What are you, Amish?!”

  I snorted into my wine glass.

  ***

  Late that night, I lay in bed thinking about Wes and staring down at the thin white cord wrapped firmly around my left ring finger.

  Obviously, the marriage wasn’t legally binding. It wouldn’t hold up in the eyes of the courts. Neither the U.S. nor the Hungarian government would regard the union as a valid contract. They’d laugh it off, much in the way Wes and I had done earlier that afternoon, after we realized what had happened.

  He’d teased me about not even bothering to wear white to our ceremony.

  I’d joked back that he could’ve at least carried me over the threshold of the tent.

  We’d made light of the entire thing. On the surface I’d been full of smiles, rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness of the situation. Giggling as we’d climbed onto his bike and headed back to the city.

  Inside, though… I was a mess.

  I’d always believed that marriage was more than words on a piece of paper. Tying your life to someone else’s wasn’t a consequence of legal jargon or an agreement of terms between partners and a justice of the peace.

  It was an alignment of souls.

  A fusion of spirits.

  So, no — lawfully I wasn’t Wes Adams wife.

  But spiritually? I wasn’t so sure.

  I spun the white cord in a circle around my finger. A handful of old words muttered by a witch-woman shouldn’t have meant anything. So why couldn’t I shake the sensation that I was now somehow bound to Wes in an unbreakable, indisputable way?

  It was as if my entire stratosphere had snapped into focus as soon as I’d stepped from the smoky darkness of that tent and met Wes’ eyes in the full light of day. I looked at him and everything seemed to shift, as though I’d been walking around my whole life looking at the ground beneath my feet, and someone had finally tilted my head back and introduced my eyes to the sky.
>
  Nothing was different; and yet, everything had changed. Whether we wanted to admit it or not, something ancient, something sacred, had transpired today. We could cover it up with teasing words, downplay it with jokes and jabs, belittle it with laughter — but, really, I think we both knew that the carefree no-labels, no-commitment attitude we’d both embraced up until this point was no longer relevant.

  Maybe that’s why, when he’d dropped me off, Wes had made his excuses and disappeared without so much as a kiss goodnight. I’d tried not to be too disappointed as I watched him ride away. Tried not to let it bother me that we’d turned something special into nothing more than a punchline. Assured myself that he’d come around, that he’d come back to me when he’d sorted out his head.

  I knew he was freaked out.

  So was I.

  But I did notice, in spite of all our teasing, neither of us had removed our rings.

  ***

  The sound woke me from a deep sleep.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  My heart began to pound and my disbelieving eyes flew to the window, my barely-conscious mind consumed by thoughts of the axe-wielding murderer who was likely climbing through the portal into my bedroom. To my great relief, the dark pane was still firmly closed. My apartment was on the first floor, elevated by a ground-level basement — it would be damn near impossible to climb through the window without standing on a dumpster or somehow scaling the ten-foot wall barehanded. No one was coming inside. I’d probably heard a gust of wind or a distant crack of lightning. Maybe I’d simply imagined the noise.

  Tap, tap.

  Nope, definitely not a figment of my imagination. I pushed back the covers and scurried out of bed, edging toward the window with my back against the wall like a secret-agent-spy-extraordinaire. When I reached the sill, I fell to my knees with my chin propped on the cushion of the window seat and craned my neck to peer through the pane.

  At this angle I couldn’t see much except the granite wall of the building across the alley. My startled eyes rounded like saucers when I saw a small projectile fly through the air and bounce off the glass like a tiny stone boomerang. A pebble.

  A freaking pebble.

  Thrown against my windowpane like I was some princess in a 16th century castle.

  Before I could stop myself, I was climbing onto the narrow window seat, pressing my hands flat against the glass, and staring down into the dark alleyway, looking for a figure in the shadows. When I spotted a familiar leather jacket, I hurried to slide open the window.

  “Wes?” I whisper-yelled down to the street, my eyes straining to meet his in the black night. “It’s three in the morning. What the hell are you doing down there?”

  I saw a flash of white teeth in the darkness as he grinned. “I had to tell you something.”

  “Who do you think you are, Romeo?” I rolled my eyes. “A text would’ve sufficed.”

  “Cut me some slack, I’m trying to be romantic.” His words floated up to my ears, and I could hear the amusement in his tone.

  “I told you I’m not a princess. This is definitely crossing the line into fairy-tale territory.”

  “You’re right. You’re not a princess — you’re Little Red. And I’m the Big Bad Wolf.”

  “Still a fairy tale,” I contested.

  “Not if you read the original version,” he countered.

  “True enough.”

  “Are you going to let me in, or were you planning to leave me hanging out here like an asshole all night?”

  “Hmm.” I pretended to think about it for a moment.

  “Red,” he growled.

  I laughed, slid the window shut, and ran —yes, ran — to the front door, pulling it wide so he could come inside.

  He stepped over the threshold and opened his mouth to say something, but I threw out a finger and pressed it to his lips, silencing him before he could make a sound.

  “Margot,” I mouthed, gesturing toward the bedroom door only feet away, behind which my roommate was sleeping soundly.

  Wes’ mouth curled into a smile beneath my fingertip, but he nodded and allowed me to tug him from the doorway without another word.

  When we reached my bedroom, there was an awkward moment when I realized there was nowhere for us to sit except my rumpled bed.

  You already married the guy, my subconscious reminded me. I’m pretty sure you can sit on a bed with him for a few minutes without spontaneously combusting.

  We settled in with a few feet of distance between us. I sat with my back to the headboard and my knees bent up to my chest; he sprawled out on the end of the mattress like a king, owning the space.

  I swallowed hard when he leaned back against the blankets and his t-shirt rode up, revealing a slice of taut, tanned abdominal muscles. I could happily sit here drooling at him all night, but I had a feeling that wasn’t my best look — I was already contending with bed-head and weird middle-of-the-night eye gunk.

  “So,” I said abruptly, after a few minutes had passed in silence. “You wanted to tell me something…”

  He turned his head in my direction and I saw his eyes were remote, his mind far away.

  “Is this the part where I comment on how big certain parts of your anatomy are, Mr. Wolf?” I asked, reverting to our Little Red Riding Hood joke to bring him back to me.

  His eyebrows went up and a corner of his mouth lifted sardonically. “Depends which parts we’re talking about, Red.”

  I felt my face flame. “Do you have to make everything dirty?”

  “I don’t have to.” He grinned. “But I like watching that blush make your face match your name.”

  I glared at him.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, sitting up and sliding closer to me on the bed. “I didn’t come here to tease you.”

  “Why did you come?” I asked, my voice snarky.

  He reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out a tiny red drawstring bag. I felt my breath catch in my throat when he passed it to me. “Here,” he said softly, pressing it into my hand.

  Full of curiosity, I opened the small bag and watched, stunned, as the gorgeous handmade black bracelet I’d spent hours admiring at the festival earlier tumbled into the palm of my hand. With one finger, I traced the delicate beading and intricate horsehair weaving. It was even more beautiful now than I’d remembered it.

  I lifted watery eyes to glance at Wes. “How’d you know?”

  He stared at me with an intent look. “I know you, Red.”

  My stomach clenched as I stared back at him, feeling the air around us begin to crackle with everything that short sentence implied — and everything else we’d still left unsaid. With his words wrapped warm around me like an invisible blanket, I suddenly stopped worrying about my mussed hair and my messy bedroom. I didn’t care that it was the middle of the night and nothing was perfect. This wasn’t a fairytale — it was my life. And it was about time I started living it.

  I uncurled my knees and inched closer to Wes on the bed, until our sides were pressed tight together — like we were one, singular being.

  Any amount of space between us felt too far.

  “Put it on for me?” I whispered, handing him the jewelry and holding out my left arm. I watched as his hand lifted to take the woven bracelet, entranced as his fingers hooked the tiny clasp against the pounding pulse point in my naked wrist. Wes’ hands were gentle, barely even skimming my flesh as he turned my hand back over. With a single fingertip, he began to trace length of my fingers one-by-one in an achingly slow exploration.

  Thumb.

  Index.

  Middle.

  I tried not to squirm, unwilling to reveal how much he affected me. How the simple act of touching my hand was enough to set every atom in my body on fire.

  When Wes reached my ring finger, his progression halted. Instead of moving on, he stroked the thin cord that resided there so delicately, so reverently, it nearly reduced me to tears. He made a kind of choked sound I couldn’t put
words to, and when I looked up to meet his eyes, I saw plainly in his gaze the confusion, lust, conflict, and love that were warring for space in his head. I easily recognized his struggle for control — inside, I was battling those same feelings.

  Neither of us spoke as the silence dragged on and the air grew thick with tension. I opened my mouth to say something, then shut it again; Wes swallowed hard and seemed to be gathering his thoughts, but none of them escaped his tight-pressed lips.

  The night was made for spilling secrets. But, sometimes, there aren’t any words.

  Only actions.

  The joining of two bodies in the darkness. The melding of two lost souls in the night.

  My hands dropped to the hem of Wes’ shirt. He turned to face me, lifting a finger to toy with the thin strap of my tank top. Our eyes locked. Held. Burned.

  And then, we were kissing.

  Violently, suddenly.

  A kiss that blasted open the floodgates — so powerful it was just as terrifying as it was beautiful. And like a lightning strike sparks an unstoppable wildfire in the heart of a vast forest, the mere brush of his mouth against mine set off a consuming fire within our interlocked bodies, that no amount of reason or restraint could douse.

  His lips slammed down on mine — imposing, possessing, demanding, domineering. His kiss was a coup d'état. He seized every one of my senses, invaded every part of me, took control over my entire body with a few strokes of his tongue, a few nips of his teeth.

  It was no hostile takeover. I surrendered to him willingly, with open arms and a white flag.

  But Wes’ walls were higher than mine — harder to scale and fortified with dynamite. This was a man who’d never known love. I knew he wouldn’t yield to me so easily. So while his overthrow was overt, mine was the Trojan horse. A mission of stealth. I didn’t wait for his permission — I didn’t demand it. Instead, I snuck past his borders while he was distracted obliterating mine. I slipped inside his walls, inside his soul, and planted my flag in the flesh of his heart.