Ignited

by Desni Dantone

CHAPTER 19

  I would recognize its roar anywhere. I’m standing alone, on the bank of the river. Broken glass and shards of twisted metal litter the ground at my feet. A ray of moonlight illuminates the horror in front of me perfectly, and I watch as the car disappears beneath the surface.

  I hear him before I see him and climb over the rocks, following the sounds of despair, until I find him, bathed in the moon’s soft glow. I divert my gaze to my feet on the ground and remind myself that I am safe. It’s only a dream. The girl laying on the ground isn’t me. It can’t be.

  This girl is dead.

  I inch closer as Nathan leans over her, presses his mouth to hers, and breathes air into her lungs. “Come on....” He grunts as he thrusts his hands down on her chest.

  I drop to my knees, unable to take my eyes off him, his anguish tugging at my own breaking heart.

  “Don’t you die on me,” he chokes.

  I reach out to touch him. I want to let him know it is okay. I am okay. He doesn’t have to do this. My hand touches his shoulder, but he doesn’t feel it.

  “Please. Kris.”

  I close my eyes and listen to the smooth sound of his breath as it slips between her blue lips. It’s calming even in the presence of death. Even my own death. A violent cough breaks the peace, and I open my eyes at the same time the girl on the ground’s eyes snap open.

  The rest plays out as I remember.

  Nathan rolls her over as she spits up river water. He promises her that help is coming. She grabs his arm, pleads with him not to leave. He turns to say something.

  That was when everything would always go black.

  Now, I watch as Nathan presses his lips against the corner of the girl’s unconscious mouth. He hovers there, his forehead resting against hers, and whispers something I can’t hear...

  One second, I was watching something gut-wrenchingly painful and beautiful, and the next, I stared up at a stained white ceiling. A few rapid blinks brought the shabby hotel room into view around me as faint light seeped through the curtain in advance of the approaching dawn. I pressed my palms to the rumpled sheets around me as I steadied my breaths.

  A dream. It had been another dream. Different from the others, but still a dream.

  Or had it? I lifted a finger to my lips. It had felt so real. Was it like the others? Dreams spurred by memory? Had my subconscious found a way to communicate the missing pieces of that night? If so, if it were real, then...

  He brought me back.

  I rolled my head in the direction of the soft breathing beside me and saw the steady rise and fall of Nathan’s back as he slept there.

  He was curled on his stomach and hugged a pillow in one arm, tight enough that his bicep was taut even in his sleep. The sleeve of his shirt had crept up, allowing me to see most of the tattoo on his arm. I saw four lines, each with three letters followed by a series of numbers in the form of month-day-year.

  I traced my fingers over the markings, and wondered how he had come to get them and what they represented. His skin was smooth, the muscle underneath hard as stone, and I lost myself in the feel of him at my fingertips. It took me a moment to realize what I was doing and, once I did, I pulled my hand back hastily.

  A glimpse of silver and blue nearly startled me right off the bed.

  He hadn’t moved a muscle to alert me that he had woken up, but his eyes were open and he was watching me quietly. He was so still I started to wonder if he was sleeping with his eyes open—he struck me as the type that could do that—when his mouth parted to say something.

  “I’m sorry,” I interrupted quickly. I wanted to touch you, I almost added. Instead, I said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  He hesitated only a second before he lifted his sleeve to expose more of the tattoo. “It’s okay. You can look if you want.”

  I wondered what he had almost said before I cut him off. Since I couldn’t go back in time and do the moment over, I took him up on his offer and leaned close to examine the marks. I saw a total of five rows now, all with the same three letters and month-day-year pattern. The lettering was uniform, except for the last row that had a more elaborate font with additional symbols next to it. It was a simple, yet hauntingly beautiful, tattoo.

  What did it symbolize? My throat constricted and I swallowed hard to clear it. When I glanced at Nathan, he was watching me.

  “What are they?” I asked hesitantly.

  He lowered his eyes to his arm. His voice was soft when it reached my ears. “The initials of a few important people, and the dates they died.”

  When he looked at me again, I saw that he was okay with talking about it. Maybe more than okay. Maybe he had never talked about these marks before, and wanted to. Even tough guys like him needed someone to talk to sometimes.

  I propped up on my elbow to face him. “Who are they?”

  He pointed to the two top rows. BMM 5/3/99 and RCJ 11/20/99. “These two were my best friends, Brent and Ryan. We went through development together, trained together, did everything together.” There was a glint of mischief in his eyes when they lifted to mine. “We got into a lot of trouble.”

  I tried to imagine a young rebellious Nathan. The guy I knew was tightly wound and almost always serious. It wasn’t easy to picture him with an ornery side.

  “They were both killed our first year,” he continued and pointed to the next row. AJY 4/12/00. “This was my brother, Andrew.” He chuckled softly when my mouth gaped open.

  “You had a brother?”

  “I had two brothers,” he said and pointed to the fourth row. STY 1/22/01. “This was my oldest brother, Shawn.”

  I fought back tears as I stared at the dates. He had lost both less than a year apart, and a year after he lost his two best friends. No wonder he was wound tight. The poor guy lost everyone he loved. I wondered about the remaining set of initials. Was it another sibling? A parent? It was obviously someone special to him. I was afraid to ask.

  “Was it just the three of you?”

  “Pretty much,” he said with a slow nod. “Our dad was a Kala. He was killed when I was five. I don’t remember much about him.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She took off shortly after I was born. She was human. I think knowing what we were freaked her out.” He looked sorrier for me, at my reaction to his life story, than for himself. “We lived with Gran until we reached development.”

  Again, my jaw dropped. “Gran raised you?”

  His eyes lit with memory. “In fact, your room was the one we all fought over. Shawn got it because he was the oldest. When he left, Drew got it, and then I finally got it.” He stopped to look at me knowingly. “I know all the tricks to sneaking out of there.”

  I grinned, wondering if he knew about the times I had snuck out. That would mean he had been there, in my life, checking up on me a lot more than I had known. More than he had admitted to. I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously and he stared back, giving nothing away.

  I decided not to pursue it. Not now. I didn’t want to halt his candid demeanor. Learning that he had been raised by Gran made me feel closer to him. I bathed in the tide of intimacy that swelled between us and didn’t want it to end.

  LMF 5/18/06. The remaining initials were like a beacon on his arm, and I was unable to avoid them any longer. Nathan’s gaze followed mine and he brushed a finger over the letters.

  “This one’s a little different,” he said.

  “What do those symbols mean?”

  “It’s Hebrew. It means forever in my heart.”

  I suspected why this one was special, and sensed that I was close to trespassing on a part of Nathan’s heart no one had been in a long time. At least not since 2006.

  “This was my girlfriend,” he continued softly, “Lillian.”

  I was aware of the sound of my own ragged breathing and nothing else. Silence smothered us as I stared at the letters on his arm. I felt his eyes on me, but I
didn’t know what reaction he expected.

  I was stunned. I was saddened. My heart ached for him.

  Of all the times for my smart wit to abandon me, it would be now and so, for no good reason other than it was the first thought that popped into my head, I said, “It was her clothes in the cabin, wasn’t it?”

  With the trace of a smile on his face, he nodded.

  “I thought you said...”

  “I said I didn’t have a girlfriend, meaning currently. I didn’t say I never had one.” He hooked a mischievous eyebrow. “I’m not a saint.”

  “Technicality,” I chided with a teasing tone.

  “I didn’t want to talk about it.” A silent ‘then’ hung in the air between us.

  I shifted and placed my chin in my hand. “Do you want to talk about it now?”

  He studied me for a few heavy seconds. “What do you want to know?”

  I picked at a loose string on the bedspread between us, and thought of an easy question to get him started. “How did you meet?”

  “We started development around the same time and were in a lot of the same classes.”

  I rolled my eyes at the vague response. I wasn’t expecting graphic details, but geez, that was the bare minimum. Maybe he wanted to keep some memories for himself?

  “How long were you together?”

  “Almost six years.”

  Wow, that was an eternity. He must have really loved her.

  “What happened?” The question was out before I could stop it. I held my breath, wanting to take it back, afraid he might not want to open an old wound, but he shrugged easily.

  “Nobody really knows. She got sent on a mission to Chile. I was in South Africa when word started coming in about a failed mission. I didn’t know it was her team until I got back. By then, a recovery unit had already been sent. They returned empty handed. Her whole team was gone.”

  Gone, as in dissipated. Vaporized, as in no bodies to bring back. He must have been devastated.

  “It was a long time ago,” he added unnecessarily.

  Seven years. Long time or not, I didn’t think losing someone you loved was something anyone ever truly got over. He was indifferent to portray toughness. Why did guys think they had to do that?

  Instead of digging for the emotions I knew he was suppressing, I put on a teasing grin. “How about girlfriends since then? You did inform me you weren’t a saint, after all.”

  He looked like he already regretted telling me that and raised his eyes to the ceiling, either to count the number of girls in his life or to question why him. I hoped it wasn’t the first.

  Not that I cared.

  “Nothing…serious,” he said carefully.

  I had always suspected that expression was guy code for nothing more than one night stands. Seeing as how Nathan was avoiding eye contact, I was surer now than ever. Sometimes I hated being so perceptive.

  I dropped my head to focus on the loose string in the bedspread. After a moment, I felt Nathan’s eyes on me and glanced up. If only for a second, I saw a look on his face I had seen once before—the one where he looked at me like I was a puzzle he was trying to solve. Before I could ask him about it, he shifted and distracted me in a major way.

  He pushed up, with his arms straight under him and his rigid forearms in my face, and peered at the clock on the night stand behind me. His shirt drifted, permitting me a peek of bare skin between his navel and the waistband of his track pants, which were hung appealingly low on his hips.

  “Six-fifteen.” He flopped to the mattress and buried his face in the pillow with a groan. “You never get up this early.”

  What could I say? Waking from that dream to find him asleep beside me had jump-started my reflexes. I hadn’t made it thirty seconds without touching him.

  “We have a big day ahead of us,” I offered as explanation.

  “If only I knew what to do.” With a good deal of reluctance, he rolled out of bed. As he collected his watch from the nightstand, he said, “I’ll go get us something to eat and find a phone to call Travis.”

  I sat up and crossed my legs in front of me. “Why don’t you call from here?”

  “I’d rather not, in case we end up staying here another night. Wherever I call from, I don’t plan on returning to.”

  I tried to appear indifferent at the thought of spending another night here, in the same bed, with Nathan. Fortunately, only I knew the real reason for my flushed skin. Thank God mind reading wasn’t a specialty he possessed.

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  He sat at the foot of the bed to put his shoes on and glanced over his shoulder. “You stay here. I won’t be long.”