by Alice Bell
Kiss the Stars
Devon Slaughter Book 1
Alice Bell
For Ryan
Copyright © 2015 Alice Bell
All rights reserved.
Edited by D.S. Taylor at ThEditors
Cover Design by Sara Eirew Photographer
Thank You
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.
Table of Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Three
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
About the Author
A Note from the Author
Part One
THE NEARNESS of death didn’t feel like I thought it would. It wasn’t heavy and cold. It was like butterflies in your stomach, like looking down from somewhere high, like driving too fast, like kissing.
1. Devon
THE ANNOYING squeak of a wheel, somewhere in the distance, caught my attention. Honing in, I picked up the sound of breath. Excited, female.
I was on the edge of town, walking under the full moon, hands shoved into the pockets of my jeans. I passed a lone car with a rear flat parked under a burned out street lamp. The car was a real beast from the last century, a pink Cadillac de Ville with jutting fins, whitewall tires and a certain monstrous gleam.
When I rounded the corner, I found her.
She wore a short pink dress and fishnet stockings. Platform shoes added about six inches to her height. Her legs were slender. She pulled a pink suitcase over the cracked sidewalk. Wow, you don’t see that every day. Her hair was bright and high, piled up and ratted into a fuchsia cloud. She hurried. Her shadow, cast by the moon, evoked the Bride of Frankenstein.
I slid behind a tree, in order to watch her and maybe track her. She whirled around, her eyes probing the length of the block. “Who’s there?” she called. I was nothing more than a sudden breeze. And yet, her gaze landed on me, as if I’d been clumsy. She came straight toward me, the wheels of her suitcase whirring. “What are you doing?” her voice stretched thin.
She wore too much paint. Bright red lips, black smudged around her eyes.
“Just headed home,” I said.
She backed away.
“Wait…”
Her already wide eyes grew wider. Any second now, she would notice I was sexy. “You shouldn’t be out here this time of night,” I said. “Are you scared?”
She emitted a scornful pssht and seemed about to say something but checked her watch, instead. It was a slender gold bracelet. She grasped the handle of her suitcase. Her nails were painted blue. They were very short. “I have to go,” she acted like I was holding her up.
She walked away, pulling her suitcase. The squeaky wheel complained.
“Bye,” I whispered, when she stopped at the corner.
She crossed the street, in a hurry again, but trying to appear otherwise. I realized it was her pink Cadillac and she’d been too afraid to ask for help. Women were never afraid of me. I was built to rip bodices.
Questions about her came one after another. Why was she dressed like a clown in a skirt? What was in the suitcase? Couldn’t she just call Triple A? A cab?
“Hey, wait up,” I went after her. “I can change a flat,” I said, when she turned to me.
Behind her, a porch light went out. It must be around midnight, I thought. As if reading my mind, she checked her watch again.
“It’s your car parked back there, isn’t it?” I ran my gaze over her. “Just a wild guess.”
“You look like someone,” she said, as if we were having separate conversations. Her hand flexed on the handle of her suitcase. “Heathcliff. From Wuthering Heights?”
That’s right, I’m sexy.
“It’s a book,” she said.
I knew the story. There were a lot of things I remembered about books and culture. My own personal memories were more elusive, like shadows.
“About star-crossed love,” she said.
“It’s about revenge,” I said.
She didn’t like that. Her lips pouted. Beneath the goop on her face, she was pretty. “It can be whatever I want it to be about,” she said.
I shrugged.
She studied me. “It’s so weird…”
You’re weird.
“I love Heathcliff’s dark passion,” she said.
“He was an asshole.”
She sucked in her breath. “You look exactly how I always pictured him. In my mind.”
Was that what scared her? She had seen me before in her mind?
“I don’t understand,” her voice trembled. “How you can exist.”
Amen, Sister.
I told her my name, assuming she would tell me hers. She didn’t. As we walked back to her car, I offered to carry her suitcase. “Oh, no, it’s very ergonomically designed,” she said, like that explained everything.
After a few beats, where the only sounds were her breath and the rattle and squeak of her suitcase, I said, “Do you want me to guess your name?”
She tittered. “Okay,” she sounded as if she genuinely considered it a fun idea.
“Why don’t you give me a hint?”
“I’m a gem.”
I glanced at her. “Diamond?”
“Nooo…”
I rifled quickly through my mental list of plausible gem names. “Ruby,” I said, because of her hair.
She giggled and didn’t say yes or no, so I figured I was right.
When she checked her watch again, I said, “Are you late?”
She stiffened and didn’t answer.
She chewed her nails, while I jacked up her car. The spare was a real tire, white walled, like the others. There was something else in the trunk, under a velvet cover. I lifted it, though I had already guessed what it hid—another tire, ready to go.
She caught me snooping. “I would hate to drive around with a tire that didn’t match,” she said.
“Do you get a lot of flats?”
She didn’t respond. She seemed to ignore what she didn’t like.
After I’d finished, she gazed up at me. “Gosh, you’re…you’re just…” she blushed hard enough for the color to show through her make-up. “You’re just so nice. I mean, that was horribly nice of you. Can I pay you something? Do you need…” her eyes flitted over my faded ragged T-shirt and biceps. She flushed an even deeper shade. “Do you need money?” I watched her hand move down to the zipper on her valise.
“No,” my tone was harsher than I intended.
“Oh, please, let me,” she fumbled with the zipper.
I
grabbed her wrist to stop her. Her pulse beat into the palm of my hand. I caught an image of a boy picking up a baby bird to put back in its nest. I guessed the boy had been me, a long time ago.
“I don’t need money,” I released her. There was a ringing in my ears, like a warning. “I was just being nice,” I said, which was a lie.
Horribly nice, she’d said.
Interesting choice of words.
I watched her car go down the street, never picking up speed. I followed.
When she turned the corner, I quickened my pace, faster than the human eye could see.
Street by street, the houses got bigger and bigger. I didn’t like this part of town, the quiet neighborhoods with their big old trees and flowery yards, the occasional porch light.
I followed her to a regal Victorian surrounded by a wrought iron fence. The yard was vast, thick with thorny rose bushes and dead lawn overtaken by weeds. It gave me a funny feeling to see the roses dried on the stem.
Everywhere I looked, things were dying and that’s what I saw. The minute you’re born, you start to die.
She waited in her car. A creaky gate opened. Watching her car glide along the drive, I felt like we’d gone back in time. To the mid-century of the last century. She pulled into a garage that matched the house, painted white with black gingerbread trim. The gate clanged shut long after I’d slipped through.
I lost sight of her. A moment later, I heard the squeaky wheel, and she came around the garage, pulling her suitcase. She snapped closed the handle and carried it up the stairs to the wrap-around porch.
Soon, a thin light seeped from the edges of the curtains.
Did she live alone in such a huge house? I remembered a toy. A purple eight ball. You asked it questions and shook it to get an answer. I imagined the eight ball saying, All Signs Point to Yes. I glanced up at the dark windows on the third floor.
I tried the door. It wasn’t locked but it didn’t matter. A flimsy lock couldn’t hold me back. I made myself invisible and stole inside.
I was in an old-fashioned kitchen. I caught mostly her scent in the house. She didn’t have any pets. Maybe a cat at one time, though not anymore.
The walls gleamed dark, paneled with hard wood, like the floors that were laid with Oriental rugs. I cast a glance through the doorway, into the next room where a crystal chandelier twinkled from the cathedral ceiling.
Ruby, in her short dress, went around the room lighting tall white candles. She was nicely shaped even though she wasn’t tall. As I watched, she lit the gas fireplace and swept a pile of paperbacks off a red velvet sofa. Books were everywhere.
She’d parked her suitcase next to the piano. Had she come back from a trip? Why couldn’t I imagine her on a plane, traveling through the skies of the modern world? I was unable to envision her on a road trip either. At the speed she drove, she’d never get out of town.
There was no TV. I didn’t blame her. I didn’t have one either.
A vintage record player sat on a cabinet made of cherry wood. The lid was propped open. Record jackets were strewn across the floor. Automatic by The Jesus and Mary Chain lay at my feet. It reminded me of something but I didn’t know what.
She sat down on the sofa, leaning against its arm. A black rotary phone perched next to her on the end table. She stared at it, like it might bite her. She checked her watch and tapped her foot three times, and picked up the phone, only to hang it up.
She tapped her foot again. And checked her watch.
Her anxiety raised the hair on my arms.
Finally, she dialed. The sound of the dial clicking into place after each number was ominous. Who would she call at this hour? Her lover? It was difficult to picture her doing any of the ordinary things people did. But surely she didn’t exist solely to be weird. She must have some semblance of a normal life.
What was in the suitcase?
She didn’t even let the phone ring on the other end, before slamming down the receiver.
She stood up with obvious agitation and paced the room. She sat at the piano and opened it. Her back was to me now. She began to play. Her slender fingers danced over the keys. She didn’t use music and changed tunes mid-song.
She bobbed her head and mumbled the lyrics. “Makes you wanna…” she shook her head and started over. “Makes you wanna try…” she banged a few keys. I recognized the song as being from the album whose cover lay at my feet.
There was a framed portrait on the piano. Of a cat. There were no pictures of people. Just the white cat with two different colored eyes, one blue and one green. Not the best looking cat either. His whiskers curved down, like walrus tusks.
I cringed when she kept hitting the wrong note. At last, she found her place and bent over in concentration. Her shoulders heaved and I felt her pulse racing inside me, pounding in my ears. “Dah de dah…wanna shoot the stars from the sky…” She sang in a strange wobbly soprano that stirred something deep inside me.
She stopped suddenly and whirled around, as if I had spoken. Did she see me? She’d caught me once before. Did I want her to see me? To be terrified?
She looked right at me, then turned back to the piano and closed the fold-down shelf and opened it. I thought she had decided to go on playing but she closed the shelf and opened it, closed it again. She checked her watch. Waiting, it seemed.
At last, she sighed and got up and left the room. Her platforms were heavy on the stairs.
When I heard water running upstairs, I thought of her body freed from the ridiculous clothes she wore. I could feel her wet skin under my hands.
I couldn’t resist looking inside her suitcase. It was filled with books. My gaze swept the room, taking in all the other books in the bookcase, stacked in the corners, overflowing from tables and chairs. Was she a book thief?
I found her wallet. I opened it and slid out her driver’s license. Ruby Rain, 5’4” 110, Eyes Blue. Her natural hair color was brown. At least, that’s what her license claimed.
She was twenty-one. Twenty-one. What was it like to be that young? I couldn’t remember. I felt like I’d been walking the earth for so long.
One of the books was slender. Tristessa, by Jack Kerouac. In Spanish, tristessa meant sadness.
When she turned off the water, the old pipes groaned. I heard her cross the floor above me, and then her footsteps came scampering down the stairs. I was no longer invisible and she would notice me in her living room.
I backed into the alcove under the stairs, just before she entered the room. I still held her book. She was wrapped in a white towel, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind her. Drops of water fell from her pinned up hair onto her shoulders. One long red tendril had escaped.
I was so filled with her heartbeat, I almost felt ignored when she headed straight for the sofa without even glancing in my direction. I expected her to sit down but she didn’t. She reached for the phone. The towel slipped and she caught it, as if she imagined someone watched.
Under the dusky light of the chandelier, I could picture her on a movie screen. She had that kind of old fashioned movie star quality, like Marilyn Monroe or Lauren Bacall, only more vulnerable.
At home I had a projector and a screen hanging down my wall. On the nights I couldn’t stand to go out, I played old movies. I wanted them to evoke something in me, some kind of human emotion but they never did. And yet, in her presence my heart thumped. I was revved up like a teenager.
She dialed the same number as before. I could tell from counting the clicks. I had perfect recall. Sometimes it came in handy but mostly it wasn’t as great as you might think. I was afraid I would go on forever, remembering the most useless things. I would be a computer, storing data, while my humanity slipped away year by year, eon by eon.
I wasn’t even sure I was immortal but it looked as if there wasn’t much that could hurt me. Once, I’d worked up the nerve to stab myself in the hand with a knife. Blood spurted but when I pulled out the knife, the wound closed, as if it had never been.
I could also leap as high as a three story building and move like a ninja, without making a single sound. I saw in the dark, like a cat. I could hear across miles, when I felt like it.
“Hello? Henry?” she said. “It’s me…Ruby!”
I tuned in to eavesdrop. But there was no one on the other end of the line.
“Um. Well, anyway,” she went on. “I was just thinking…of you.”
2. Ruby
I WOKE with his name on my tongue.
“Henry,” I whispered, lying in the dark, staring up at the ceiling. I turned my head to see the glowing face of my alarm clock. 6:01. Like usual, I couldn’t sleep. Only when the rest of the world was waking, did I begin to feel tired. It was like driving through life in the wrong lane. I had SPD (Sleep Phase Disorder) according to my shrink. Shrink was what my mother used to call her therapist to make us laugh.
By the time I had my own shrink (Dr. Ess), my mother was gone and my grandmother didn’t think it was so funny. “Darling, he’s a highly trained professional. Here to help you.”
So you don’t end up like your mother.
Personally, I thought not sleeping at night was just a bad habit. I couldn’t remember ever going to bed as a child, brushing my teeth and combing my hair, being tucked in, begging for a night light. I took long naps during the day, anywhere I happened to get tired—in the big velvet chair by the fire or on a soft patch of grass in the sunshine.
At night, my mother kept me awake with her. We looked up at the stars. It was only the black of the sky that made the stars so bright, my mother said. She was always looking for beauty in dark places.
Outside my bedroom, in the hallway, paintings of my mother still hung and probably would forever. Her lover, Javier, painted them. She had been his muse.
I didn’t like the paintings but I couldn’t take them down. I hadn’t done anything with the house since my grandmother died, except get rid of the help.
I forced myself to envision Henry kissing me under the marquee of the art deco movie theater. He had shaggy blonde hair, a strong jaw and light eyes. He wore Oxford shirts tucked into khakis.
Behind my closed lids, I saw the man who had changed my tire. His name whispered inside me. Devon.
