by Roxie Ray
I had stolen something from each one of those people; if it hadn’t been their lives then it had been their freedom. I felt chokes claw at the back of my throat and my hand reached out for the third bottle. My finger touched the top of the cork and froze in place.
Eight years of sobriety. That was how long I’d gone without turning to drugs or drink. I had thought I had put that need behind me, but there it was, rearing its ugly head to remind me that no one ever truly stopped being an addict. That need was always there inside you; it might be buried deep, but it was always there.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered out loud.
I wasn’t sure whether I was apologizing to myself or to all the people I had let down.
“Rosa?”
I gasped and turned to my right. Quatix was standing there watching me; I hadn’t even heard him come in.
“Quatix,” I said, my hand poised over the bottle of wine.
I thought he was going to fling an accusation in my face, but of course, he didn’t know enough about my past to be able to do that. That thought struck a memory, one that had only recently been made. I saw Sophia sitting next to me telling me to share my past with Quatix.
“Sometimes confessing is good for the soul,” she had told me only moments before she had died.
“Can I get you a glass?” Quatix asked.
He was asking if he could get me a glass? I shook my head and sank to the carpeted floor. Then I patted the space next to me, and Quatix sat down, crossing his legs and angling his body towards me.
“Which bottle would you like to open first?” Quatix asked. “This one is —”
“I shouldn’t,” I said, the words bursting from my lips like an avalanche.
“What?” Quatix asked, taken aback by the emotion in my tone.
“I shouldn’t be drinking at all,” I whispered, glancing at him through my eyelashes.
Silence settled between us, and in that silence, I sensed Quatix becoming aware of a deeper truth, one I had yet to share with him. He put his hand underneath my chin and pushed my face up so that it was at eye level with his.
“Tell me why?” he asked gently.
“I don’t want you to hate me,” I said weakly, internally acknowledging my own cowardice.
“There is nothing you could say that would make me hate you,” Quatix replied.
His words were reassuring, but I didn’t trust them just yet. It was easy to make promises before you had all the information.
“Do you know what an addict is?” I asked.
Quatix frowned. “I have heard the term in passing, while I was on Earth.”
“It describes people who crave a particular substance. This substance can take many different forms, either different types of drugs or alcohol. And when the person is addicted, they crave that substance. They will do anything to get their hands on it. They don’t act like themselves when they’ve had it.”
Quatix frowned as though he were trying to wrap his head around the concept. “Why do they do it?” he asked.
“Because it’s a way to push back pain,” I explained. “It’s a way to cope when you feel there’s no way out. It’s a way to drive back the demons in your own head. But the problem is that human beings aren’t able to withstand the effects of drugs that strong. They hurt your body, and if you consume too much at one time, it can kill you.”
Quatix’s fingers twitched slightly, as if he wanted to touch me but was unsure if he should. I tried not to let that distract me. Now that I had started down this path, I had to see it through. I took a deep breath, trying to remember Sophia’s last few words to me.
“I’ve never mentioned my parents to you, have I?”
“Not really, no,” Quatix said.
I leaned in and kissed him softly on the cheek, hoping that wouldn’t be the last time I kissed him.
“My parents were both addicts,” I started. “They had no hope of leaving the lower sectors, and I think they comforted themselves by drinking and doing drugs. Sometimes they would have friends over, but most of the time, it would just be the two of them, sitting on the couch, passing a joint between them and swapping stories.”
As I spoke, my memory weaved a picture so clear that it almost felt as though I had travelled back in time. I could see the faded floral sheet that served as the wall between my parents’ bed and my own. I could see the stained walls of our kitchen, little smatterings of old oil and crude etchings that I had made as a toddler.
I could see the worn out brown couch that dad had nabbed off the sidewalk two blocks over. He and a couple of his friends had dragged it all the way to our single unit apartment, four stories up.
They’d celebrated the couch by opening up two bottles of cheap booze and lighting a joint apiece. The weed had burned so strong that it made my eyes water through half the night. Of course, weed was the drug of choice only when there was nothing harder to fall back on, but I still preferred it to the other drugs.
When mum and dad were high on weed, at least they still felt like themselves. Cocaine made dad tearful, and ecstasy made mum belligerent. They both had problems with me when they were on the hard stuff.
I spoke in a low voice, explaining to Quatix as best I could the story of my childhood and my adolescent years. He listened calmly, patiently, and every so often he inched towards me, closing the space that lay between us.
“I used to steal old joints off the floor as early as eight,” I told him. “But I tried my first hard drug at twelve, and then my life fell into the same pattern as my parents’. But I thought I was being smart. I didn’t use nearly as often as my parents did. I was happy to get high on weed, and I saved the harder drugs for special occasions. And then, just after I’d turned fourteen, I stopped doing drugs. I smoked pot occasionally, but I didn’t think that counted.”
“Why did you stop?” Quatix asked. It was his first question in thirty minutes.
A small smile crept its way to the corners of my mouth. “My sister was born,” I said. “And I didn’t trust that my mother would be able to take care of her. So I did. I changed her diapers and sterilized her bottles and soothed her when she woke up in the night. She made me feel important, like for the first time in my life, I had something real to do, something worthwhile.”
“You’ve never spoken about your sister before,” Quatix said.
“No. I don’t like talking about her. I don’t even like thinking about her.”
“Why?”
“Because every time I do, I have to think about the reason she’s not here,” I said, a sob catching in the middle of my throat. “She’s not here because of me.”
“Rosa, my love. Tell me why you’re saying this.”
Could I? Could I say the words out loud? It would give new life to my old crimes, and I didn’t know if I was strong enough to hold myself together afterwards.
“Give me your pain, Rosa,” Quatix whispered, as though he knew exactly how I was feeling. “Give me your pain so that I can help you bear its weight.”
I lifted my eyes to his. There was warmth in the icy blue I saw there. If I were going to trust anyone with my secret, it would be Quatix.
“She was six years old when she found my old stash,” I said, my voice shivering so violently that I wondered if Quatix would be able to understand me. “She swallowed pills, so many pills…”
The memory took shape in front of me. I was in the bathroom, wondering why she was so quiet. I called her name as I left the bathroom.
“Ducky, ducky,” I’d called. She’d loved that name. She could never be quiet if I called out to her that way. But there was no sound. “Ducky, ducky!”
I pushed back the sheet that separated the living room from our parents’ bed. I saw the open drawer where I’d stashed my pills. She must have seen me putting them there an hour ago. I’d thought she was sleeping.
Her body lay like a painting, arms and legs flung about the floor in artistic contours, her ash-blonde hair thrown across her cheeks, obsc
uring her features from view.
My knees had given way first. Then I threw up on the floor in front of me. I had sat there trembling, unable to move or speak or touch her. I knew what those pills were. I knew she was dead without having to check. When my parents came home, that was how they found us.
“Rosa, Rosa! What did you do?”
I didn’t answer — I couldn’t speak. Tears kept flowing down my cheeks, and I kept hearing her laughter in my head. Her dead body lay in front of me but I had kept seeing her ghost on the bed, flicking at the thin mattress with her bare feet and shooting cheeky smiles at me. I remembered wondering: Was this what going insane felt like?
At some point I’d become aware that Dad was back in the apartment. His voice had grated at my ears, saying words I couldn’t understand. Neither one of them seemed to understand that she was dead. She had swallowed my pills, and she was gone.
Then I saw Mum’s face in front of me, hanging like a pale moon, her lips moving fast. I’d tried to look past her, but she’d put both her hands on my face and forced me to look her in the eye.
“What?” I demanded.
“The police are on their way, Rosa,” Mum had told me.
“Move,” I’d replied.
“Is she all right?” Dad had asked. Was that worry in his tone? An hour before I would have been made buoyant by that knowledge. But after the unthinkable had happened, it didn’t matter at all.
“She’s in shock, I think. Michael, she’s nineteen… we can’t let them take her.”
“They won’t take her.”
Their conversation had infuriated me. Their daughter lay next to their bed, and they sounded like they were trying to hatch a plot.
“Rosa?”
“What?” I’d demanded.
“When the police come, you need to tell them that the drugs were ours,” Mum said.
I frowned. “But they’re not.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dad said. “Lie to them. They can’t know the drugs were yours. Do you understand?”
I had stared at my parents. Something was going on, I just didn’t care enough to ask. I remembered nodding slowly, and how my parents had glanced at each other with worry. I saw a tear slip down Mum’s cheek. I saw Dad reach out for her.
“Can you move?” I had asked. “I need to see her.”
I blinked, and the memory dissolved. Quatix was holding my hand tightly, and I liked the pressure. It was almost painful, but not quite.
“It felt like I was sleepwalking,” I told him. “I didn’t even realize that they were trying to protect me until the cops slammed the cuffs on both of them. I stood there and watched my parents being driven off in a police car, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I had lost my whole family in the space of half an hour.”
“You were alone?”
“The police called social services,” I explained. “But since I was legally an adult they couldn’t really do anything for me. I was ordered to see a therapist, but I never even made one session.”
I looked down at our entwined hands and remembered that moment on the Destroyer, just after the Sives had attacked us the first time. Quatix had run his fingers over my arm and had discovered my scar.
“This scar was not an accident,” I confessed. “It was deliberate.”
Realization dawned in Quatix’s eyes. “You did this to yourself?”
“I didn’t think I deserved to live, not after what happened to —”
Her name stuck in my throat, and I swallowed the last word. “So now you know the truth,” I said. “You know my whole past. I killed my sister. She’s not here because of me, just like Sophia’s not here because of me.”
Quatix grabbed me gently by the shoulders as the sob broke free from my throat. “Sophia’s death is not your fault.”
“I should have just told them,” I cried. “If I’d told Bis’er what he wanted to know then they would’ve let Sophia live. They got what they wanted anyway, and now her death is all for nothing.”
“You don’t know Bis’er like I do,” Quatix said emphatically. I could see it in his eyes. He desperately needed me to believe him. “He would have killed her either way just to send a message to me, to the Protectors. He is not practiced in mercy. Sophia’s death is Bis’er’s fault, and your sister’s death was an accident.”
My eyes glanced up at him tentatively. “You don’t hate me?” I asked, like a scared child.
His smile was tender. “I love you even more now than I did before. Thank you for sharing your past with me.”
I felt a fluttering in my heart. It felt alien for a moment, and then I recognized it as joy. I hadn’t even thought it was possible to feel joy again, let alone so soon after a tragedy.
“You don’t think less of me?” I asked, trying to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood.
Quatix put both his hands on the sides of my face. “I used to think Svantians were strong. I am humbled and chastened by your strength, my love.”
I could feel that strange fluttering in my stomach once more. I sighed deeply and realized that it didn’t hurt to breathe anymore. Quatix had offered to share my pain, and now that I had opened myself up to him, I felt lighter and freer. I was still exhausted — grief was a tiring demon — but at least I hadn’t lost myself to the abyss again. I didn’t know if I could come back from it a second time.
“Rosa?”
I looked up at those ice blue eyes that made me feel warm all over.
“You don’t need the strong wine,” he said.
“No?”
“No,” I assured me. “You have me now.”
I almost smiled. Did he even realize how much those words meant to me? Maybe one day, when I could articulate my feelings a little better, I would tell him.
“I think it’s time we get you out of those clothes,” Quatix said.
I glanced down at my bloodstained shirt and nodded slowly. Before I could stand, Quatix got to his feet and lifted me up into his arms. He carried me into the bathroom with ease and set me down beside the large bathtub. I watched as he filled the tub and tipped in a variety of different bath salts. Then he started to undress me.
His fingers peeled off the sweat-soaked fabric that felt like it had fused with my skin. He was gentle as could be, his fingers grazing my skin and leaving trails of fire any time we made contact.
Was it wrong to feel this way so soon after losing Sophia? Was it okay to want Quatix, to crave him in this lustful, carnal way? My mind said no, but my body was screaming yes. His fingers lingered at my breasts for a moment, before he picked me up again and lowered me into the tub.
He bent to his knees and started scrubbing the blood, sweat, and tears off my face and body. I had never been looked after this way before. It was enough to reduce me to tears, and I might have started crying again in earnest if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d used them all up crying over Sophia.
His hands ran up and down my body, rubbing away all the dirt and grime and blood. I felt as though he were cleaning away the marks on my soul, as well. When he got to my arms, he turned them over, and his fingers paused over the scar above my wrist.
“This wasn’t an accident, was it?” he asked, lifting his eyes up to mine.
I couldn’t look away from him. I shook my head slowly. “It was after my sister had been buried and my parents had been sentenced to life imprisonment. I was in rehab, trying to get clean. I was going through withdrawal and I didn’t know how to cope with my guilt. I thought this was my only solution.”
Quatix’s eyes were sad and filled with a fear I recognized. He bent his head down and kissed my scar, just like he had the first time, when we’d still been strangers.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” I said softly.
“Don’t be,” Quatix replied. “You didn’t know me enough to trust me with that part of your life.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Quatix smiled. “Can I ask you one thing?”
I nodde
d. “Anything.”
“What’s her name?” he asked. “Your sister’s?”
I hesitated. “I haven’t been able to say her name since… it happened,” I admitted tiredly.
Quatix kissed my soapy hands, one by one. “You’re stronger now. It’s time you said her name.”
His eyes were clear and confident. He believed I could do it, so that must mean I could.
“Sara,” I said, and I didn’t stumble.
“Sara.” Quatix smiled.
And it hurt, but not as badly as I’d imagined.
“Sara,” I said again.
22
Quatix
She was made of contradictions. Her nature was delicate, pure and sweet, but her will was iron. She was sculpted from soft curves and delicate lines, and yet she was made with steel and strength.
My mind was wracked with guilt and shame. My friend and brother had just lost his mate to our enemies, and here I sat in the comfort of my solar, imagining all the ways I’d make Rosa scream with pleasure.
I suppressed the bitter need and kept rubbing her body down with soft sponges. Once she was clean and the tub had been drained, I made Rosa stand and lifted her out of the tub. She stood before me, naked and vulnerable, and all I could think of was bending down to kiss her nipples, perhaps even take one into my mouth. She liked that, and I liked it more.
I dried her body slowly, moving in a concentric rhythm that I hoped would be comforting to her. I lingered slightly on her thighs and breasts, spending an inordinate amount of time making sure she was dry. Several times during the process I had to pause to control the erection that was pressing against the crotch of my trousers.
Stop it. You need to be there for her in other ways. This is not the time. She will not thank you for it.
When I could no longer prolong the process of wiping her dry, I moved toward her clothes chest and pulled out a sheer, white, one-shouldered sheath. She raised her hands, and I slipped it over her head. It fell into place easily, but it did nothing to tame the erection I was still fighting to control. I could see her every curve through the gossamer fabric, and it made me want to rip out my eyes just to keep from doing something impulsive and insensitive.
