The Last Adam (Romance Books on Kindle)

by Olivia Wild

  I reject the thought of giving up, and as soon as I do, we meet the juncture, which disperses the water quite a bit, but AC’s strong hold on my lower half still pulls me perilously close to drowning.

  I see the hand breakthrough the darkness, with knuckles that land straight on AC’s nose through the water’s surface.

  It repeatedly punches him across the face and cheeks and head until he releases his hold on me.

  I look up. It is Adam, shinning like a royal purple beacon in all that pitch-blackness, having treaded his way across the water that now halfway fills the tunnels in a calming manner.

  “You can back for me,” I say to him, coughing and spewing water through the words.

  “I came once and for all,” Adam says, holding out his hand to lift me to safety, and then extending the same hand that punched AC out to him, as he still lays half-conscious and aware in the rising tide. “Come on, man,” Adam says.

  AC wipes the water mixed with blood off of his face and spits. “Leave me alone.”

  With that rejection, Adam turns his full attention to me, his hand still strongly gripping my left hand, and pulls me forward towards a tunnel.

  “I found a way out,” Adam says. “I can show you the door to safety.”

  I heartily follow him, done with AC’s proud and arrogant self, too haughty to admit defeat and follow us toward safety. I steal one last glance back at AC before turning the corner with Adam, the two of us still hand in hand, and I discern AC still in the same spot, only he has found the wherewithal to stand up against the curved wall of the tunnel to perhaps gain his bearing.

  The way he is slumped downward, however, almost looks to me like he’s given up. The farther we make it away from AC, the harder it becomes to make out his form. I can’t tell if he has allowed himself to slump farther down in the water and let the coming waves overtake his head, or if his scary shape as found new energy, and has turned around to follow us in the deepening light.

  Either way, I feel safer with Adam, just holding his hand and following him to whatever safe door of escape he has found. I wholeheartedly believe him, and tell myself that I won’t doubt his word anymore – I mean obviously my own thinking had gotten me in a lot of trouble with that devilish AC.

  “Thank you for saving me,” I say, able to speak more clearly as we make our way out of the chest-high water to safer levels.

  Even when he turns around to smile at me in the subdued light, I can see his probing blue eyes sparkle. “It was my choice and good pleasure, Olivia, always remember that.”

  Adam always had an odd way of speaking phrases like that, but just like my grandmother used to talk to me, almost like an adult at times – even when I was a mere 9-year-old – I seemed to really get what he was saying. His words resonated deeper within me in some part that understands things beyond words, like when an Alzheimer’s patient who can’t remember their own families’ names comes to life upon hearing a favorite song from yesteryear.

  With Adam, a calm feeling of amazing peace numbs my body from head to toe in a good way, as if someone has just injected a huge dose of Valium in me. Without yet seeing the door of escape he has promised, I already believe without a shadow of a doubt that it is there, and that we’ll be okay, whether AC has chosen to “give up his ghost” and drown himself, or whether he’s still hot on our tails, renewed with angry fervor seeking revenge on Adam for punching him.

  No matter what, I know I’ll be okay, wherever Adam leads me.

  “Just a second,” I say, not breaking my stride forward, but pulling my hand out of Adam’s grip.

  “What?” he asks, looking at me.

  With great flourish, I make a big show of twisting the small gold band with a teeny diamond on it that represents the wedding ring AC presented to me – one that I’d sneaked and found in his suitcase during one of his visits before he’d presented it to me, and found it lacking, just like the relationship and marriage – until it finally gives way past my knuckle and off my finger.

  I throw it behind me until it lands God-knows-where in the filthy water.

  “It’s about time I got rid of that,” I say.

  Adam smiles.

  There are no hindrances now when he takes my left hand in his right hand once more, with no scratchy diamonds from other men in the way.

  “Will you marry me?” he smiles.

  “Yes,” I answer.

  It is all I ever wanted to hear.

  Chapter Five:

  The Red Door

  We are sopping wet and exhausted as we slog down the abandoned hallway, meeting the dip of a staircase in the pedestrian walkway that shows a glimmer of freedom and hope in the way that the sunlight filters through it in one specific spot.

  “That’s where the escape door is that we found,” Adam says, pointing toward the beam of light.

  “Oh my goodness, it’s so close,” I say. “I should’ve followed you from the start.”

  “It’s okay, you’re here now. I propped it open so people could get out,” he says, allowing me to walk in front of him when we reach the door.

  “You see, it has a crimson frame,” Adam says, touching the top and sides of the door’s frame, which has indeed been painted a distinctive hue – a seemingly darker red than I remember most emergency exit doorframes have been painted.

  “Makes it easy to remember,” I say, dipping out, looking above into the brighter sky. Even with the flotsam and smoke and ashes in the atmosphere, the outside air feels one thousand times fresher than the water soaked tunnels to my lungs.

  “It’s safe on this side,” Adam says, “I went out this way with the others earlier, and we were able to cross without anything falling on us.”

  “And you came all the way back for me,” I muse.

  I begin to climb the short set of stairs to the outside, concrete steps that remind me of the walkouts of plenty a basement model home I’ve lusted over – but I turn around when I sense that Adam’s form isn’t close behind me.

  In fact, he is standing in the door, his arms splayed on either side of the doorframe, as if he has been waiting for me to notice he’s not following me.

  “What are you waiting for?” I ask, peering up at the sky. “It looks safe to cross now.”

  Adam stands there for a few seconds, not saying a word. It’s like his eyes are saying, “Come unto me,” with his mouth saying nary a word, simply a deep exhale that tells me everything I need to know.

  “Adam, no, please…” I begin begging. “This building could fall any minute. You know that.”

  “That’s why I have to go back in and show others the way to this door,” he explains calmly, with the resolution of a man who has made up his mind – one that there’s no talking out of his stance.

  I jog back down the stairs, and hold his slender body in an embrace, the first time I’ve ever reached out to him that closely. Hugging him is more pleasant than I ever imagined it would be on all those nights I’d fantasize about being his wife instead of AC’s. His body is sinewy but stronger than all get out, and the resoluteness of his decision is just as evident in his strong frame that can’t be swayed away from that door – matched only by the sweet manner in which he tries to dissuade me from worrying.

  “I came back for you,” he reasons. “I must see if there are more that can make it out before it’s too late.”

  “I’m coming with you,” I answer.

  “Let’s go then,” he says, seemingly pleased, not talking me out of it like AC would’ve done in some big manly flourish of showmanship to try and display to others how much he protects the woman he dogs out on the regular. “I won’t leave you,” Adam promises.

  I understand that those four words are more truthful than any of the four million words AC has spoken to me over the past years of marathon conversations that found us philosophizing about existentialism to agnosticism to atheism and beyond.

  “Who do you think is keeping your heart beating?” I’d ask AC pointedly, when all the
talk about no proof of higher powers wore thin beneath fancy-sounding philosophies and scientific arguments.

  There wasn’t much of a comeback on his part and frustration would hang in the air in that way that can when mindsets are separated by “a great chasm fixed.”

  But I don’t care much about that now. Though AC might be floating or flying somewhere through this very building we’re about to reenter, he already feels like a part of my past – like I’ve just inserted a “page break” between that old chapter of my life’s document and have begun a new chapter with Adam’s name all throughout the pages.

  I will follow him anywhere.

  “How do we know that’s a safe way to exit?” Harvey asks us when we reach him, walking in circles in his corner office like a trapped rat.

  “I saw the door!” I exclaim. “We can show you – it’s open now.”

  “Follow me,” Adam says.

  “No, the emergency personnel are probably on their way up – so we should just stay put until they find us,” he says, his eyes bulging, pacing to look out of his window.

  “This building could be rubble by then, Harvey,” I explain.

  We wait a few seconds but the man makes it clear he is not going with us. Adam has already his gaze to scan the empty landscape of cubes, his ear attuned to the definitive sound of a woman gasping and crying.

  He motions for me to follow him over to a cubicle against the wall – one that initially looks empty, but upon closer inspection, reveals the shaking frame of Karen, another one of our coworkers on the legal side of business. Her dazed look and crouched position beneath her desk, cuddled up by her CPU, makes it obvious that she is frozen in shock.

  “Come on, it’s okay,” Adam says, crouching down low to meet her level, extending his hand. “We can leave now.”

  His voice breaks through her dazed and catatonic state long enough for her to reach out a shaky hand in return. Karen stands and walks with us as we make our way to the stairwell and descend one floor.

  “I don’t believe you and I don’t trust you,” Robert tells Adam when we find him on the 9th floor near the mailroom where I normally spot this most flamboyantly dressed guy.

  I always liked the way Robert would brighten up my afternoon with silly jokes and the latest juicy gossip tidbits when he’d deliver mail and packages on our floor. But to see him in this bull-headed state is beyond me.

  “Come on, Rob, you know Adam,” I say.

  “He just started working here. Why should I trust him to show us the way out?” he asks, casting side-eye glances at Adam.

  “Because he saved me from drowning in the pedway,” I groan, getting frustrated as I point towards my still sopping wet clothing. “I showed me the safe way out of here.”

  “I’m not going nowhere,” he says, but then another growing rumble from above makes him shriek like a girl.

  “It’s okay, my friend,” Adam says, placing his hand high in the air, as if to offer Robert a high five.

  Odd move, I think, but that growing rumbling and Adam’s outstretched hand are just the ticket Robert needs to follow our motley crew down another flight of stairs.

  We’ve continued in this vein, stopping on every single floor till we all made it to the bottom, where a dozen of us have now converged at the crimson door.

  “There’s heavier chunks of concrete falling,” Adam says, sticking his neck out beyond the door to try and survey the lay of the land and debris raining down from above.

  “I told you,” Robert chimes in. “We should’ve just stayed upstairs.”

  “The building will fall soon and very soon,” Adam instructs. “We only need to make it across this street and into that other building to avoid the brunt of it.”

  “I’m scared,” Karen speaks. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go. I want to go home.”

  “Me too,” I say.

  The loudest of rumbles stops all of the talking in its tracks.

  “Now!” Adam shouts and bolts out a little bit onto the sidewalk, but pauses to wave us across the street like a personal trainer encouraging his crew to run one more mile. Only our obstacle course isn’t comprised of old oversized tires and ropes – instead the twelve of us duck and dodge all manner of limbs and carnage that reminds me of a war zone I’d only seen before on TV.

  Karen’s foot slides on a pool of blood, and she falls in it but quickly recovers back to her feet, as all of us instinctively place our hands over our heads, as if that very act could somehow stop a sailing brick from knocking us out cold.

  “We’re almost there!” Adam shouts, but it’s hard to see where we’re going. Dust, falling glass and people running in every direction have transformed this mundane downtown street into a hellish ghost town scene.

  “Where are we?” I ask, trying to feel along the glass dome shape of the building that I’ve entered countless times to grab lunch.

  “Here’s the entrance,” Adam says, heaving the heavy door open long enough to let our group begin to file inside. As people limp and hobble their way in one by one, the building across the street gives way, with a loud deafening sound that belies the smoke plume of the top floors beginning to crumble onto the floors below.

  I think of Harvey, and of the sheer stubbornness of some people. Why didn’t he just come with us? What if Robert had made the same choice to stay inside?

  I hustle in behind Karen, making me the penultimate of our small group to enter into safety. Adam turns around to pulls the door closed behind him, and as he does, a large chunk of a brick bounces off the sidewalk and ricochets straight to the back of his head, causing him to fall flat straight to the ground, his head seeping blood onto the floor.

  I can’t even scream.

  What is life?

  Some cruel joke played on us to get through every waking moment until our death date arrives?

  Why now that I’ve finally found the man I know unequivocally that I want to spend the rest of my life with – why must he be taken from me?

  Adam’s body is still warm as I hold him on his hospital bed. It’s been three days since the tragedy, and I’ve spent much of that time here next to him by his bed – as his family as so graciously allowed this strange woman who they never met before to be so close to their son.

  Every single channel – even cooking show networks and music channels – has been filled with some kind of tribute to the tragic terror attack. I keep watching the footage over and over again, incessantly, as if that will connect my brain to tell my heart that yes, this actually happened in real life.

  But none of that explains why Adam has been sitting on life support these past few days, and how his mother and father had to make the heart-rending decision to take him off of it today.

  It’s unfair. Why do some people live and some die?

  My pain is nothing compared to what his parents and loved ones must be feeling right now – but I’m Adam’s loved one, too. In that short span of time we knew one another, I’d planned a lifetime with us – one that I knew would come to pass and was so real.

  How could he go now? A billion AC’s couldn’t make up for one Adam. My only Adam that mattered. The last Adam.

  I’m sure they’ve seen this before, the people who don’t want to go, the types of grieving folks that hang out to the dead body an inordinate amount of time that they must be dragged away or put on sedatives.

  This isn’t me, and it’s not that I’m the kind of person who goes a little cuckoo and can’t separate reality from fiction. It’s just that there’s this deeper side on the inside of me that is telling me not to give up – even after they have transported his body to the morgue.

  “I need to say one last thing to him,” I tell the attendant, who is so overworked from the flurry of activity at the hospital, all the man can do is wave a hand at me as he pulls out the drawer with Adam’s body as if to say, Let’s get this over with.

  “I remember all the things you told me, Adam,” I begin, pressing through the tears. “
Like when I’d tease you for reading all that stuff I didn’t understand on lunch breaks – instead of hanging out with us more.”

  I pause, as if he will open his mouth and respond any minute.

  “I’m ready and I believe it now. By the blood of Christ, rise up and walk. The power of God makes you able, Adam,” I sob.

  The attendant gives me a woeful look then says, “Okay, hon.”

  Suddenly, an ethereal type of cloud seems to appear over in the corner, beyond Adam’s stock-still body lying on the cold drawer. The hardened attendant can sense it, too, and my knees begin to shake as the figure becomes more evident, like a snowy TV station tuning into a new frequency.

  I fall straight down on my knees but don’t feel a thing, only the presence of something so powerful in the room. I’m aware that the rotund attendant is splayed out on the ground next to me, but I’m also aware that I didn’t hear a sound when he fell.

  We remained that way for a time, or a “time and a half time,” as Adam used to say in his weird way of speaking. Before long, I stand up and hear the non-audible words deep in my gut, “It is yours.”

  Adam’s body is still motionless on the drawer, and as the attendant finally rises and slowly closes the drawer shut, I’ve received a whole message in those three simple words from heaven.

  I get the message all in one fell swoop – that Adam is okay, he’s in a better place, and yet he is still here with me all the time. I will eventually move on, marry, birth kids and do all the things I thought I was looking for within him.

  And they will be in him, I realize, because Adam’s mission ended up being to teach me a lesson I needed to learn at the exact moment I needed to learn it. He may have left this earth in a tragic way, but through his death, I realize that I’ll never be alone again.

  John 14:6

  Next, read a sneak preview of…

  “With Every Temptation”