by Eden Butler
“No! No, Mama! Mama!”
But she couldn’t hear me. I held onto that chain like a lifeline, afraid that if I loosened my grip even the tiniest bit I’d join my mother in the flames below.
“Sookie! Sookie look here…”
My momentum had swung the chain so that it listed towards the open window. I tried to see into the street below, and moved my body to make the chain move in even wider arcs, aiming for the opening and freedom. Even through my terror and the roaring of the flames below, I could hear screams, some angry, some scared, but I couldn’t tell which ones I knew or which ones cared if I lived or died. I did catch sight of Uncle Aron on his knees, that hat scrunched up between his hands as he cried something fierce into the fabric. The chain creaked with each swing I made, in and out, flames and air, back and forth as my body felt heavy and my lungs full.
“Sookie! You look at me right damn now!” That was my brother, he sounded so angry. I could see him across the street, angled so he could watch what was happening inside where I was clinging for dear life to the swinging chain. His face had gone near white. And next to him Dempsey moved his attention to me, looking like he was working something swift and clever to get me down.
But I was so tired. My head throbbed and my fingers ached.
Sylv had blood on his lip and Dempsey’s left eye was again a black bruise.
I loved them. The pair of them. I knew that just as sure as I knew that my mama had always loved me. She died to see me out of that building.
I blinked when one hand slipped from the chain, my gaze falling onto Dempsey’s face, to that round, perfect mouth. I reckoned I did love him and not just because of his sweet mouth and sweeter kisses. He’d been my best friend since I was little. I supposed I’d always loved him.
Funny thing about love, ain’t it? Sometimes it saves you and sometimes, like right then, even love isn’t enough.
The smoke billowed up, choking me, so thick I couldn’t breathe. So thick there was nothing I could do but let it swallow me whole.
Nash
I felt like a mourner. The only thing missing was the black clothes. Instead I wore a suit, something obnoxious, designer that Duncan insisted I let him buy me. Five pieces in this suit and I recycled and restructured them with ideas Daisy grabbed from Pinterest. Still, a cream button up and green tie didn’t exactly say “mourner,” but I felt like that’s what I should call myself.
The dream had not transferred into events that shaped my daily life. It went beyond the sleeplessness and how their recurrence made me feel and act and see the world. Now it had become something that left me desperate and sad and too damn mixed up by all the feelings I had to make sense of anything other than the sadness that wrapped around me like a noose.
I wanted to let it all go; Willow, Sookie and the second-hand memories that people I didn’t know had in D.C. Part of me wanted to believe Willow, that it was the lives we led before that drew me closer to her, that reasoned why I couldn’t get her out of my head.
“Mr. Nation?”
Daisy’s voice pierced through the fog surrounding me, the one that had me forgetting that I had to get ready for a second investor’s meeting, this one to determine if I was smart enough and Duncan slick enough to fatten up our bank account. I only had three hours to pull it all together.
“Yeah?” My answer was sharp and fast, like Daisy had scared me awake in the middle of Mass. But I didn’t go to Mass and had never been a Catholic and Daisy, with her shrill voice and expectant tone was only doing the job I paid her to do.
“Mr. Phillips asked I remind you of the lunch meeting. It’s on your calendar.”
“Um…hang on Daisy.”
I made no commitments. Not to Willow and damn sure not to Duncan, not even with our lunch where we were supposed to go over what needed to be done before the presentation. But my thoughts weren’t on the presentation or the final work that needed to be done on my code. The program was through beta testing and we had clients who were willing to test the products but there was still a lot of work to muddle through before we could go live. That would take more focus than I had, something I knew Duncan would yell at me about during this lunch meeting. But I wasn't ready.
“Daisy, tell him I’ll need to reschedule.”
“But, sir he said…”
“I don’t care what he said.” She was quiet on the other line, but then she would be. The walls were glass and Duncan was loud when we fought. It wasn’t like someone walking by couldn’t tell when we argued, something that had been happening a hell of a lot lately.
Daisy had seen it all. She’d even doctored my knuckle last week when Duncan pissed me off so bad that I punched my wooden desk like a total idiot. She didn’t like hearing the fighting, and patching up my torn flesh when I was being a Neanderthal wasn’t in her job description. Of course she’d argue about me canceling the meeting. It would only lead to drama she likely didn’t need to hear. So I cut her off before she could say anything more.
“Daisy, listen…” I stood, stretching my shoulders and arms, “there’s a…family situation that’s come up and I’ll need to cut my day short. Tell Duncan I’ll be in an hour early in the morning.”
She waited a half a second longer than I thought was necessary and then cleared her throat. “Yes, sir.”
My office was a round, giant thing with a modest desk in the center of the room and two small sofas on each side. As programmer, I didn’t do Duncan’s dirty work, instead stretching out budgets and timelines until my software was perfect; until it was ready for a live date and multi-million dollar clients. But the long hours and worry and concentrating on how to finalize all the hard work I’d put in for the past ten years had become something small and distant to me since Willow had yanked me into her life. Months had gone by and everything had shifted with her open door, her wide eyes and the pull of her small fingers on my arm. She had ripped apart everything I knew, spilling open the chasm of focused peace I’d cultivated for myself with whatever game she’d played on me that first night. She’d loosened something and that something had ushered in the dreams…the memories…the past that would not leave me be.
Willow had taken off without so much as a glance over her shoulder. Like I was nothing. Like she could drop me, forget that minutes before I had been inside her, that I had made her moan and scream and laugh all at the same time. The jasmine from her hair still lingered on my pillow the morning after we’d slept together. There were a few strands of her hair on the mattress and the hem of my sheets were smudged pale pink from her lipstick. Willow had come into my apartment wanting me, taking me, letting me take her back and had left traces of herself behind. Then she’d been gone before I could stop her. She’d left and it seemed like hours afterward I could still feel her everywhere in my room.
And then…Sookie died in my dream.
There was a lot for me to mourn.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” Duncan’s loud question erupted as he thundered through the doorway, the brass doorknob slapping against the glass wall. It happened so quick, with such a force I was surprised the glass hadn't broken. “You cannot cancel on me. Not again.”
He didn’t bother to ease into this fight. Duncan had been gripping so tightly to the thin hold he had on his patience that this one canceled meeting had him losing it completely. His face was red, like he’d just contracted rosacea and hadn’t bothered to treat it. Duncan’s already small, beady eyes had taken on a wet, glassy look and the rims around both were blotchy and red. He looked exhausted, old and out of breath and I knew it was my fault. I had let everything in my head destroy the company we were trying to build. He took a moment to close the door, and then turned on me.
“You are fucking with my patience and you’re threatening everything I…”
“You?” I said it because it occurred to me that Duncan, no matter how upset he was, didn’t have any real claim on the work I did. He made phone calls. He took rich assholes out for rounds of gol
f or for fancy meals I couldn’t pronounce at restaurants I’d likely never be able to get a table at. But the work? The idea? The plan for it all? That had been me, not Duncan. “You, man? Your work?”
“Don’t start with that again. I’ve pulled my weight.”
It took me a minute, but I stood, slowly, hands resting on my desk because I wanted to give him time to calm, to restate what he’d said. But Duncan didn’t apologize or backtrack. In fact, he only got redder in the face and his eyes grew glassier. “Maybe you wanna try that again?”
I wasn’t a jock. Despite my size, it wasn’t in my nature. I was fit and large but that was Nation genetics. I looked like my dad and my granddaddy—big and brawny with not a lot of neck and too much lip. If I needed to, and sometimes you just damn well needed to, I could move my shoulders a certain way or pop my neck at just the right time and look intimidating as hell. But I rarely needed to use it.
Just then, I need to strut a little because Duncan looked a lot like he might lose his entire shit.
He ignored my question, mouth quirking like he wasn’t sure how intimidating he could look if he curled his lip and bared his teeth. We weren’t dogs and I had a good four inches on the guy—I also knew that without me Duncan had no deal. He had zero leverage. That asshole didn’t scare me.
“You need to check yourself,” he said, voice high and cracking, but he didn’t seem to notice and leaned forward, copying my stance as he glared at me. “I can make your life fucking miserable.”
I stood up, flexing my arms a little when I crossed them. “That right?”
“You better fucking believe it.” He straightened then, but kept his hands at his side. The red splotches over his cheeks and across his forehead lightened just a little. “I can call in favors, of which I have a shit-ton. I can pull your business license and make it impossible for you to get rental space or staff. Trust me, Nash, without my help you’re just a code monkey with no way to get your product to the public.”
“And you’re just a rich prick scratching your ass until someone smarter than you, more creative than you, comes along so you can ride their coat tails.”
“Fuck you…”
“I don’t think so.” My laptop shook when I slammed the lid closed and I came around the desk to glare down at Duncan. “You can’t fucking intimidate me, man. I might not have your connections, but I have a product that a lot of people want and you have zero legal claim to any of it. You pull my license and I’ll go somewhere else to get another one. You block me from renting and I call a few favors of my own. You think I went to MIT and didn’t network? Man, please. Code monkeys stick together.”
I knew I’d flaked out on Duncan. My life, my distractions, my damn dreams had split apart the work I’d done with him like a sledgehammer, each blow fracturing another split, each dream cracking apart what I knew as normal. It was my fault, I knew that, but something had always been unsettling about Duncan. Something had always told me that with him, I’d always have to watch my back. And now it was time to cut some ties.
When he went on glaring, unable, maybe unwilling to answer back from my insults, I decided right then he wasn’t worth the drama. There might not be a Nations with Duncan, but I knew for damn certain there would still be a Nations on my own.
“You know what? I don’t need this.” I stepped back, grabbing my laptop and a few notebooks I kept in the top desk drawer.
He watched me as I moved around the office, picking up chargers and books, a few Post-Its with shorthand notes I’d made to myself before stuffing them all in my backpack and loosening my tie.
Duncan watched me in silence until I had grabbed the doorknob and opened the door. It was only when I’d stepped over the threshold that he decided to speak.
“You walk out of this building, Nash and I’ll sue your ass. You’re in breach. I don’t like people who walk away from me.”
I laughed then, pulling up my backpack on my shoulder. Outside in the lobby Daisy and the contracted programmers we had hired to pound the code paused their conversations and hung up their calls to listen to us.
“Sue me for what Duncan? I got nothing to my name. I don’t have a damn thing to lose.”
I left him standing in my office, that face still angry and red. A nod to a few of the staff that had been with me from the beginning, a couple who followed me into the elevator, and I left Duncan’s building, leaning against the wall wondering why I didn’t feel worse. Wondering why I’d been able to lie so easily. Duncan may not realize it, but I did have something to lose. Something I thought could never be mine again. But it had nothing to do with investors, or programming, or even my precious code. It was something a lot more personal.
Sookie had been scared. Up there on that chain, watching the people she loved most in the world stare up with her frozen in fear, in terror, I realized I wasn’t sure if I’d ever loved anyone like that. Nat, maybe. My mom, once. But now? Did I love someone enough that losing them would shatter my world? I wasn’t sure.
I thought about that the entire way home when the homeless man on the train farted and snored at he fell asleep against the broken subway window. I kept thinking about it when I gave my seat, the last one on the bus, to an exhausted-looking pregnant woman who seemed like she held a bowling ball under her shirt and the damn thing weighed a ton.
Love was for suckers. I’d always thought that. It had been a mantra I kept on a loop in my head anytime a female got a little too attached. Anytime I had the inkling to get that way too.
Until Willow.
Until that night in my apartment. Until the entire room smelled and felt like her. Until a week had passed since she walked out of my apartment and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d lost her. Had I even had her to begin with? I had no clue. But damn if it hadn’t felt like I had.
She occupied my thoughts all the way to Brooklyn. She stayed there as I made it to my apartment, as I changed into my gym clothes and got in a five-mile run through the park, even managed to make as far as the Old Stone House, knowing she wouldn’t be there, not on a Thursday, not during the week. Still Willow invaded my thoughts until I couldn’t see the sidewalk in front of me. Until I stopped running altogether and shuffled back to my building like a punk too winded, too worn out by the day to do more than remember the taste of her skin and just how sweet her laugh had sounded.
Midnight, three hours later and a shower, a decent hoagie and two Blue Moons still didn’t manage to make me sleepy or wear me down. I thought about Sookie and what she felt as she died. That had been lodged in my chest like a spear-sized splinter. Funny thing about those dreams; they didn’t seem like dreams at all. Not the ones about Sookie. Not the ones about the library and the big son of a bitch in love with that redhead. I felt it all—that fear, that love, that powerful lust. It came at me like a wave, sticking me in the chest, constricting my breathing until my eyes burned. Then Willow took over, wrestled away the dreams and filled me up like a spirit, taking away the voice that tried in vain to remind me I didn’t need anything or anyone. I’d walked away from one person today. God knew I had no problem doing that. But Duncan and his slick ways were nothing like Willow. He didn’t haunt me. His smile, his laugh, the gleam in his eye did nothing for me; not like Willow. She overpowered me like no one ever had.
“Shit,” I said to myself, sitting up in bed because that faint jasmine scent still hung onto the sheet and pillow. Something came over me then. It was the urgency to be rid of her, to exorcise her from that room. I stripped off the sheets, pulled the pillows from their cases and grabbed the comforter. Willow had been wrapped up in it, her naked body against the thick fabric and I wanted her gone, just then. I wanted her out completely.
I ran down to the laundry room and stuffed everything into the washer, and poured in bleach and detergent, determined to eradicate her. I promised myself I wouldn’t think about how much that jasmine had comforted me, how the smell of it got me sleepy, kept me there. I wouldn’t think of how the night b
efore I’d missed her so much the pillow got tucked under my chin, how I’d fallen asleep smiling from the smell on the fabric.
Didn’t matter now. Now there would be nothing for me—no business, no Willow and I’d have myself back. There wouldn’t even be dreams, not with Sookie being gone. Not with her story at an end.
The machine rumbled to life, rocking me as I leaned against it, closing my eyes at the rhythm and I scrubbed my face, wondering why I couldn’t get the sick feeling, the regret from my stomach.
Returning to my apartment, I found the living room dark and quiet when I walked into it. I grabbed the tennis ball on the console and the remote to let Coltrane speak to me. That should work. It had before, though not that first night. Not when Willow interrupted my entire world and tugged me into her apartment.
“Shit.” Another recall and I was back where I’d been in my bedroom, thinking about that first night, and the others afterward, thinking about that kiss on the roof and the sting of her leaving my place.
She was a witch. I’d known that for months. She worked some kind of wonderful spell on me, and no matter how I fought it, I loved being under her power. Outside, the night was inky black and perfectly still. No wind, no rain, nothing that would keep her from the roof. Nothing in that apartment would keep me from it either.
My chest ached a little as I climbed the stairs and I didn’t think it was because of the exertion. Some part of me knew when I took my last step and opened that roof deck door, that I’d find her out there, so when she wasn't there, that ache in my chest tightened even more.
