Zero Power (Book 2): Trying To Survive

by Lockwood, Max

There was a moment of stillness before they were both started moving. Clara pushed away from Cooper and got to her feet, rushing inside with Cooper at her heels. They found Dante in the living room, and it took a second for Clara to piece together what had just happened.

  Dante had punched a wall. There was a very visible dent, and his knuckles, when she looked, were bleeding. He stood still, breathing heavily, and it was almost impossible to believe, with how frozen he stood, that he had lost his temper so violently. She had never seen this side of him before.

  Clara was torn. Dante was hurting, and it was part her fault. He didn’t deserve the treatment he was getting from Michelle because his children meant more in the world to him than anything. She wanted to do something, try to comfort him like he had tried to do for her, even though that was what ruined everything.

  But he didn’t look like he wanted to be approached, for any reason. His chest heaved with every breath, his eyes staring at the wall where he had just put his fist through it. There was a wildness in his eyes that held her back, and she was pretty sure he hadn't even noticed they were in the room with him. Then he struggled to take his ring off, and it was the first that had hit the wall. Clara winced in sympathy, but he didn’t seem to feel the pain he was causing himself.

  He got his wedding ring off and threw it down, storming out of the house.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Clara sat by Tessa's bed, watching her sister. They had been sitting there, locked in a silent argument for a while. Clara was trying not to lose her patience. It wouldn’t be fair of her to do so, but she had too many things to worry about without adding this. It wasn’t fair of her, to take out her bad mood on her sister, which was why she was holding herself back.

  Her patience was pretty much shot. No patience and Tessa were always a bad combination. Her sister made it hard for her to maintain control of herself, and she had thought that the best way to not say the wrong thing was to keep her mouth shut. Only Tessa wasn’t talking either, and she was growing sick of the stiff silence.

  Finally, she sighed. "Tessa, you need to take your pills if you want to get better."

  Though she had been excited when Clara first gave her the drugs, her excitement had died pretty quickly. Clara assumed she now regretted begging for the medication, even if it could take her nightmares away. The nightmares she was used to, she had one nearly every night since the death of their parents ten years ago. Clara could only imagine that the side effect made her feel so bad that her former state was preferable.

  Tessa had yet to tell her what it was, though. Clara had just entered to give her another dose, only Tessa glanced at her and at the drugs in her hand, and promptly turned her back on Clara. Every attempt to talk to her had yielded no results.

  There was silence for a moment, and then Tessa moved to eye Clara out the corner of her eye.

  "No," she refused, point blank.

  Clara frowned. "Why not?" She couldn’t hide her frustration, and she wasn’t even sorry. "Didn’t you want this? You asked for it, and Barbara was nice enough to not only bring them all the way here, but she offered them for free. So now what's the problem?"

  "The drugs make me feel empty inside."

  From someone else, Clara would have been a skeptic, or not taken it seriously at all. It did sound a little overdramatic. But this was her sister, Tessa. She was prone to exaggeration, but she said it so flatly, so demoralized, that Clara could only take her seriously.

  She hadn't asked Barbara about the side effects of the drugs. The other woman had implied it would be visible in her sister's behavioral changes, but Clara really should have asked for more specific information.

  Clara was uncertain, but she said, "It's probably a side-effect that will pass soon. You wanted this, remember? No more nightmares. As long as you keep taking the pills, you'll get what you want."

  Tessa took a few moments of deliberation. Clara made herself wait patiently for Tessa to make up her mind. Then Tessa turned a little more so Clara could see more of her face through her hair.

  "If it doesn’t, I may as well be dead," she muttered and sneered. "You don’t even know what it's like, but you keep pushing me to take it. You're drugging me to stop my visions, aren’t you?" she accused, her eyes narrowing.

  She just frowned at her sister. Surely Tessa didn’t really believe that. She was just being dramatic. In a way, it was true, she wanted her sister to stop having those visions. But Clara would never drug her for such an inane reason. Maybe Tessa just didn’t remember that she had asked for the medication, but Clara wasn’t going to let someone's goodwill go to waste over her sister's whims.

  "The visions aren’t a good thing, Tessa," Clara tried to explain. "I can't be around to help you all the time. What happens if I leave and then come back to find you in the state you were in just a few days ago? It was bad, wasn’t it? Having these visions can't possibly be helpful to you if they can push you to that level."

  "No, it's a trick. Of course, it is, this is you. You're just trying to take away my 'powers'," Tessa muttered to herself, speaking her inner thoughts out loud. Then she glared at Clara. "You're just jealous that I'm the 'chosen one' and my power is the one thing that makes me better than you."

  At those words, Clara's bad mood evaporated. It rankled, the suspicious attitude Tessa seemed to have about her, but this part just confused her more than anything. Because it made no sense whatsoever.

  She still found it impossible that her sister thought of her that way. No one thought of her that way—except maybe Cooper, but he was nice to everyone. Nothing about Clara was better, she was just healthier, though even that was debatable. Clara had her own way of dealing with things, and that was to bottle it up until she couldn’t anymore. It wasn’t a good mechanism, but it worked for her. If she ever let go, she could end up worse than her sister was acting.

  But Tessa kept persisting. Because she was the one plagued with the nightmares and everything that went with it. The accident didn’t just take away their parents, it took away normal life for Tessa. Clara hadn't seen, or if she had her mind blocked it. If what Tessa said was true, she kept reliving the moment in her nightmares, and it had been going on for the past ten years.

  Clara couldn’t say she would gladly switch places with her sister. But she couldn’t say that her own life was that much better. Yeah, she could function day to day, had no problem walking around, doing work and generally acting normal, as was expected in civilized society.

  But she gave up most of her dreams to look after her sister, rather than let her be put in some facility. She used to work a job that she hated, and was always on the verge of depression. If she let herself go at any moment, she wouldn’t have been sure of her chances of getting out of it. She hated her work, but she still went even when she had to force herself. She gave up writing, her dream, but she made time for physical exercise, to keep fit and healthy. Life could have been a lot worse for her. It still could.

  Aside from Cooper, she had no friends. She never got along with her co-workers, her students never showed her respect and she always had to keep up the fight to prove her worth to the school or risk losing a job she didn’t even like. It wasn’t so different, only now she had to prove herself to her town, and that was a lot more pressure, and she did work to make herself more useful and to keep her occupied because that was what she was used to. She had already let people down, gotten herself arrested, nearly gotten herself killed several times.

  The situation between Michelle and Dante was also her fault, and all of it weighed on her. The only thing that weighed on her more, was the responsibility to her family that kept her going through everything. It wasn’t out of some self-righteous idea that she did all that she did. They were all she had left, and if she did nothing, even if stepping up had made her miserable, she would have lost them.

  Clara wasn’t perfect. She was maybe the most flawed of all of them. Because everything she did, was out of selfishness.

  Her dre
ams mattered, but she didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to bear the responsibility on her own, so she shared with Cooper because he had offered and she was weak. In her dark moments, she almost felt like she could hate her family, for the shackles the situation put on her, for the effects their mental illness had on her.

  She hated when Tessa acted up. It hurt every time her grandmother forgot her and she had to remind the older woman who she was. There were times when she hated everything, the times when she was most destructive. Emotions like those were the reason the thing with Dante even started, and all her other flings, for her to find a way to let it out without hurting anyone, and even in that, she had failed.

  If she hadn't had Cooper, she would have fallen long before then. How could Tessa not see it? Or was Clara not the only self-centered one in the family? Because all Tessa seemed to focus on was herself—what she saw, or thought she saw, and how she interpreted everything. Clara was always the one that had to meet her halfway; Tessa was never willing to cut her some slack.

  She almost wanted to be angry at her sister because of the way Tessa saw her. It was so far from the truth, something she might have even wanted if only so she would be more sure of herself, yet Tessa said it with such conviction like Clara was really this perfect person that she was not. But she couldn’t blame her sister, who hadn't asked for what life dealt them any more than she had.

  "You don’t need powers to be special—you're well-loved, funny, and intelligent. I know things haven't been easy for you over the years. But I'm trying to help, trying to make things better. For all of us. I know I haven't been doing a good enough job, Tess, but I am trying and I am still here. A lot of people would have bailed when the going got too tough."

  She had thought of it enough times herself, she just never let the thoughts go beyond daydreams of a future she could have had if things were different. A future that wasn’t possible for her, not now.

  Clara endured the narrow-eyed look leveled on her by her sister.

  "You are a snake in the grass and God will strike you down."

  Clara didn’t let herself show any physical reaction besides slightly pursing her lips. She looked down at her lap, not sure what more to do. She didn’t even have it in herself to be mad at Tessa's attitude. She just wanted this over and done with so she could leave and go do something else she wanted to. She was weary of all the negativity, and in this, she wasn’t sure how to approach it.

  "You need to take your pills," she repeated blandly, looking up.

  Their gazes held, Clara sitting still and keeping her expression blank. Tessa could keep arguing, but Clara wasn’t going to budge on this. Tessa needed to get better, and if the pills were the only way currently, they were going to use them unless it was dangerous. Tessa hadn't been taking them for so long. Surely the long-term effect would be better despite the short-term effects. For both their sakes, she had to keep believing that.

  She could still remember how Tessa had looked and acted around Barbara, actually begging for something when she acted so imperious most of the time. Her sister needed these pills, even if she'd forgotten why.

  Tessa glared at Clara as she took the pills with the glass of water that Clara brought. Clara watched long enough to make sure she swallowed, and then Clara left her alone.

  Cooper was downstairs; her grandmother was somewhere around the house, though likely out in the garden, considering the time. But Clara didn’t feel like being around anyone. And she didn’t want to be too far away from Tessa, just in case. So, she went back to her own room and sat on her bed.

  There wasn’t really anything to do at home. She could have picked something to read, but most of the books in the house were either in Tessa's room or Viola's since they were the ones with more leisure time. Aside from a few days ago, when she read to her sister, Clara couldn’t even remember the last time she read a book for pleasure. Usually, it was something to do with work.

  In any case, she had no intention of going back to Tessa's room until she had to, and she did not want to encounter her grandmother in her current state.

  She looked around her room. Everything was in place, so she didn’t even have the excuse of cleaning up the room. There wasn’t really anything to do, was there? No TV, no phone, and no computers… luxuries they would probably never have again. Somehow it only just hit her, the magnitude of the loss. Or she was just seeing a new angle of it now that she didn’t have anything else to keep her occupied.

  What to do then? Clara didn’t feel like just sitting in her room, bored. Maybe she could go out for a walk…? But then, she heard the door downstairs, and her interest was piqued. No one had gone out through the front door, she was sure. Cooper would have informed her before he left, and neither her sister nor her grandmother would just leave the house.

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs in a rush. They were heavy, and she looked up at the door expectantly. When the door opened, it wasn’t to the person she had thought.

  Dante had returned, having been gone all night and day. She had been worried when he just walked out, especially after he had injured himself. She felt responsible, so of course, she had tried to follow after him. There was no thought in her mind what she was going to do once she caught up to him, but Cooper stopped her from going. They had almost argued over it until he made her understand that Dante needed to be alone.

  Clara hadn't liked it. Instead, she had picked up his wedding ring and cleaned it up for him. It sat in the back of her nightstand's drawer, but she would keep it until Dante wanted it back. He hadn't come back, but there was no way she could go out to look for him once it got dark, no matter how much she wanted to. Responsibility to her family had settled back on her shoulders, and she couldn’t leave them and Cooper to risk herself going out to look for Dante. He somehow managed to fend for himself without her help once, and she had too many of her own worries, so she put him out of her mind.

  Seeing him in front of her was a surprise, though. Was he over whatever had made him run in the first place? Why had he headed straight for her room? Clara wasn’t sure he had eaten wherever it was he had gone off to, he could have gone to the kitchen to get something to eat first.

  He didn’t look much different from when she'd last seen him, his clothes a little scruffier. His hand was injured, and he must have washed it at some point, though it was still very much red. She could tell he hadn't had it properly looked after. His hair was wild like he'd run his fingers through it over and over.

  Clara wondered where he even slept. If he had slept, because he didn’t look any more rested than she felt.

  "Are you okay?" she asked tentatively.

  He sought her out on his own, so he must have been ready to talk. She took a small step forward. Dante took a deep breath, and slowly shook his head.

  Clara was confused. Why had he sought her out then? Or was he just there to borrow the bed, because he was exhausted and the couch was uncomfortable? She would have left the room for him to use, but not for long because Cooper would eventually walk in there to go to sleep. It was hours yet, but not far off enough for Dante to get a good sleep.

  Then, Dante spoke, and Clara was even more confused.

  "I just need to feel something other than hurt and anger for a while."

  Dante closed the door behind him. Then, he moved to Clara's curtains and closed them, too. Clara froze, a little unsure. What could he possibly want? And from her of all people? Clara had thought, when he left, that he had come to blame her, and hate her as much as Michelle did. Clearly, she must have been wrong unless she was reading his cues wrong.

  But then he was moving toward her, and she only managed to take half a step back before he was on her. Dante kissed her, hard, arms wrapping tight around her waist to drag her body roughly up against his. His erection pressed hard against her abdomen, and if the rough kiss hadn't clued her in, that would have.

  She hesitated a moment before kissing him back just as fiercely. He pushed her back until t
hey fell onto the bed in a tangle. After a moment of shifting, Dante had Clara on her back, hovering over her as he straddled her hips. He pulled back just when she needed to breathe, but he didn’t move far so that they were breathing each other's air, watching each other from an inch away.

  It was a bad idea. Falling into bed with Dante was what started the mess with Michelle, to begin with. But did it really matter anymore? The fallout had already happened, things couldn’t possibly be any worse between Dante and Michelle. So she shouldn’t worry about it anymore. Michelle had pushed Dante away herself.

  Clara was happy to comply. Because suddenly, everything she had been trying to keep at bay seemed too overwhelming. She would have loved the distraction from her usual problems, even though the new ones were so different from before. It was why she had fallen into bed with him in the first place, beyond his looks, beyond knowing someone so attractive paid attention to her, Dante had been an escape.

  Clara needed it.

  But it might not be what Dante needed.

  When he leaned down to take her lips in another kiss, she stopped him with a hand on his chest, pushing him back. He hesitated, but he didn’t close the space between them, moving a bit back so she could see more of his face than just his eyes.

  "What is it?" he whispered in the space between them like a sound louder would shatter the moment.

  "Are you sure you know what you're doing," she asked him seriously.

  He eyed her for a moment. He didn’t give her words, though. He responded by rising up on his knees to remove his jacket and T-shirt, before he was on all fours again, meeting her eyes.

  "I'm certain."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Dante and Clara lay in bed together, out of breath.

  It had been a while since they last slept together. Well, it seemed that way but it couldn’t have been three weeks ago. The situation just made it seem like it had been forever. Considering how she had been feeling about it nearing the end of their affair, Clara was surprised she had enjoyed it.