“Is that why you never tell me much about you. You know, before?” Now he was the one with the guard up, I felt his muscles tense, his voice shift into a curt professional tone.
“There’s really nothing to tell honestly. I was insignificant in that world.”
“Well you definitely aren’t in this one.” Nesting into his chest I held him tight, taking a deep breath into his coat, Cole reminded me of Dial soap, clean and fantastic. Calming, clean and fantastic I should say.
“What am I going to do?” I whined, the sound muffled by the thick layers covering his chest.
“Tell her you're sorry and mean it. Try harder to get to know her.”
“Are you...staying here for the winter?” I asked, listening to the gentle thump of his heart.
“I should, keep my mother company and all.”
“But I’ll miss you.” I blurted out, dropping my arms to my sides I took a step back.
He beamed, positively grinned from ear to ear. In a rush he leaned down, tilting my chin up with his forefinger until our lips met.
It was moments like this that time froze; the world, the struggle, faded away until I was just a girl like thousands before me, standing in the pending winter with a boy who made her heart beat fast.
“You know...since you’re here. We never had our dinner at my place.”
“No we didn’t. I have to be home later though for my own house prep.”
“Would you like to stay for lunch?”
“With your Mom?”
“Yep.” I frowned.
“With me looking like this?”
“You look fine.” He gently touched my swollen lip. “Maybe a little dinged up, but she won’t ask.”
“So how about it?” Despite the fact that lunch with his mother scared me more than the undead, I couldn’t deny him.
“Alright.” With my consent, he led me through the wood maze to the door to the house. It opened into a small linoleum landing pad that gave a view of the large family room decorated with oversized worn leather mauve sofas sitting on-I guessed it-beige carpeting. Off of the living room there was a three step stair to a dining room just above us that connected to the kitchen. A prelude to the open floor plan movement. I could make out two grey haired women obsessing over what appeared to be a pot of stew on the fire. From what I could make out they were in their early sixties, maybe late fifties, neither one resembled Cole.
“Hey Mom.” Cole called out. Neither woman turned around, maybe his mom was deaf?
“Just a sec.” Came the quick reply from around the stair, not from the two in the kitchen.
A moment later Cole’s Mom turned the corner into view. I did my best to keep breathing and ignore the pounding in my chest caused by anxiety as she approached. I had never met my-sorta-guy’s parents before, unless you counted Caius. Which I didn’t. Further I had never met the mother of a man I had clearly put in death’s path on more than one occasion.
Proper reason’s for anxiety? Yeah. I think so.
“This is Liv.” He announced with pride, while his mother stuck her hand out.
“Nice to meet you Liv! Cole’s told me so much about you.” She bubbled happily, flashing a wide smile that revealed well maintained teeth in a neat little row.
As I shook her hand I found myself genuinely surprised by Cole’s mom. When I think of parents, I think of my dad, my mom and the folks that ran around with them. Conservatively dressed older folks with a lot of wrinkles and a keen eye. Cole’s mom was nothing like that.
She was thin, muscular, long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, wrinkle free and wearing the kind of thing I expected Candice to break out for a workout-black hip hugging sweats and sneakers-rather than a 40-something mother.
Perhaps I needed to rethink my stereotypes.
“Mom...” Cole groaned from beside me. My face flushed slightly, wondering exactly what he had said. Always the quiet man when it came to personal items I never saw him as one to yak it up, especially with his mother.
“It’s nice to meet you Mrs. Marshal.” I responded in my very best pleasant-I’m a good influence-tone.
“Please, just call me Linda, no one has called me Mrs. Marshal in years.”
“Well come on in and have a seat! Look at you two loitering about by the door like a pair of coat racks. Sit!” She practically shoved us up the steps to the dining room. The two other women who had been helping with lunch made noise about having to prep this or that for the pending lockdown and disappeared out of view. I was quite certain the real reason was to give us alone time. Which in itself scared me.
I obliged her direction and parked it at the bleached oak table directly across from Cole. Linda did not sit with us, instead she made herself busy over by the stew pot, spooning out a few portions into bowls.
“I hear you’re on the council now. Congratulations.” She set the first one down in front of me with a smile. I had to admit, for vegetable stew it smelled amazing. A rarity, when we made the dish it tended to smell like feet.
“Thanks, it’s a bit overwhelming at the moment.”
“I wish Cole would get into a job like that, I worry for him.”
“You know you shouldn’t.”
“I’m your mother, I always will.” Linda set a bowl in front of Cole, then went back to her cooking fire. “So what do you do when you’re not making important decisions?”
“I...” Hmm...What did I do? It had been so long since I had thought about hobbies. We fought, we drank, we lived to fight again, and there had never been much time for interest cultivation. “I used to play the piano and draw a lot. Now I pretty much just read when I’m not working or helping around the house.”
“Do you cook?”
“Not really.”
“Sew?”
“Nuh uh.”
“Mom!” Cole looked mortified, the blood rushing to his cheeks.
“Okay sorry! I’ll back off.” She put her hands up with a laugh.
We made light small talk over lunch, I told Linda about the family that lived with me and my dad; the twins, Zoe, Mark and Candice. She was particularly interested in the twins and my interaction with the twins. Traits that screamed of a hidden desire for grandchildren. By the time our plates were cleaned I was fairly comfortable around Linda, she was what I’m going to call the three S’s of awesome motherhood; smart, sweet and sincere. The kind of Mom mine had been. The kind I hoped to be someday.
I found myself regretting how long I had put off meeting his family. I had figured after I had almost gotten him killed she would absolutely hate me. That I’d show up and she’d chase me down the street with a broom screaming I was a home wrecking vampire lover and likely a witch. I found myself grateful that at least one of my fears was unfounded.
“Hey Cole, I need a hand.” A forty something man called out poking his head in from the garage.
“Sure thing Gary.” Cole got up from the table, giving me a quick grin-he obviously thought today was going well too-as he disappeared to help his housemate.
Then I was left alone with his Mom.
She was still cleaning up dishes, I offered to help but was shot down with a friendly smile and a mandate to relax and take a load off. Several further attempts to help got me ordered to ‘go sit’. Like a polite guest, I took the command to heart and searched out a place to park my rump.
On the other side of the kitchen was a once formal living room with fancy leather couches, and a bookshelf lined with classics and knickknacks that didn’t seem to fit the marshals. Little metal planes and antique toy soldiers, a strange looking ceramic chicken and a few ballerina figurines. I parked my butt on the couch and tried to appear like I wasn’t sitting on edge. For whatever reason I found it hard to get comfortable here. Be it the first time I met his folks, to the odd scenery to his housemates. Whom for the record were perfectly nice and non-combative. There was honestly nothing to put me on edge. Not. One. Thing.
So why was I holding onto the couch cushion lik
e a cat in the bathtub?
I forced my hands to flatten out, taking a long deep breath. Then another for good measure. On the third inhale my eye caught a familiar face in the framed photo above the piano. A younger version, with a whole mess of hair.
Drawn to it, I walked across the room to the oak console piano. The 5x7 photograph was in a brass frame, but the picture itself was worn at the edges. I picked it up, running my finger tip over the face I had grown to...love?
“That’s Cole when he got his black belt. His father had never been so proud.” Linda mentioned from behind me. Funny, I had been so enthralled I hadn’t heard her sneak up.
“Are these his brothers?” The four boys although varying in height looked so much alike. The older two kept their hair short and screamed football player by their thick necks, Cole looked as he always had to me even with his hair was somewhat long, hanging over his eyes almost down to his collar. The youngest one looked like he was in early middle school.
“Yes. Jimmy, Dan, Eli. All the Marshal boys.” I felt horrible looking at that picture. Cole had lost so much...
“Must have been hard on him.” I found myself murmuring.
“I’m sure it was. He never showed it though. Through everything, he just kept moving forward.” She smiled proudly. “He saved my life. More than once.”
“Me too.” I left it at that.
Linda turned to look at me, her eyes suddenly looking out of place with her perky features. They were flat, listless, as though the happiness she projected as simply a facade. A mask to get through the hell she had been dealt. A phenomenon we knew all too well.
Junction was home to many masks, unknowns hidden beneath was what truly terrified me. Each person reacts to their own personal hell in a unique way. For beneath the pleasantries some are violent, all shreds of real humanity stripped from their minds leaving them empty husks no better off than the dead at our walls. Some are broken, the pieces of who they were and who they are never able to form a complete puzzle. There are those that just slip into quiet madness draped in a friendly smile, able to snap at a moment’s notice to unspeakable acts. Finally there are a few whom endure, taking their pain and using it as a catalyst to continue on.
Linda Marshall was not just a friendly smile draped over a broken soul. Linda Marshall endured.
“I like you. I do.” Her mouth fell flat, her tone matching her eyes. “I was worried you were going to be a problem earlier this year, now that you’re off the wall I’m resting a little easier.”
“A problem?”
“He’s all I have left.” Her grim eyes focused on that picture. “If I lost Cole...”
“I promise you I will do nothing to put him in harm’s way.”
“Don’t make a promise you can’t keep. This world of ours has a way about it.” Her tone was sharp yet resigned. For a mother who had lost so much I was sure she had lost most hope for the world, I know I would have in her shoes.
“I won’t hurt him.” I rephrased my vow, absolute in the statement. Cole was the one guy I never wanted to cause pain. I did a mental replay of our last month’s together, so many happy times. So many uncomplicated days and nights-
Dimitri’s face flashed through my mind at that moment; ice blue eyes, his thick black hair and superior little smirk. His masculine scent strong in my nose as though he were standing next to me. There was a sense of foreboding that flowed through me as I thought of him, an unknown I could not explain. Fresh pain licked at my heart as I tried desperately to think of something else. Anything else. Linda put her hand on my shoulder.
“That one,” she gave me a half smile, “that one you can keep.”
As Linda regarded me with open acceptance, I wondered desperately if I could.
When I got home I had to sneak in the back door. Ben had stopped to say goodbye to
Candice for the season apparently. The screaming that flowed from the front yard let me know I had my work cut out for me in repairing my friendship with her. It didn’t help that Ben feigned ignorance, causing her to get all the more worked up about the entire mess. She even threw my name out several times, I knew once the snow thawed and The Garage reopened I was going to have to deal with his anger as well. Serves me right for not minding my own business. No. Screw that. I was being a good friend now, I had been an asshole before. A good friend would have said something day one. A good friend would fix this.
I just wasn’t sure how.
Thanksgiving came and went and Candice was still giving me the cold shoulder. A week after Christmas and I saw no signs of that letting up. Even in our close quarters winter living she found a way to make me a ghost. I knew I needed to patch things up with her, I didn’t know where to start. I’m sorry didn’t quite cover it. Maybe that’s what I needed to lead with, I’m sorry. Then maybe she could kick me in the shins for a few hours and feel better.
Since Cole had elected to pass the season with his mother and his communal household, it had been almost two whole months since I had laid eyes on him. I knew it would probably be a good month more till the spring festival. I found I missed the big guy a ton. At least five times a day there was something that occurred I wanted to share with him, or a joke I had to tell that I knew only he would get. Perhaps that meant I was falling for him in the serious forever kind of way, or maybe I was just lonely because of the Candice situation. Neither scenario seemed to be the clear winner in my mind, good thing was I had another month to think it over.
As we all huddled around the living room, I tried to get her to make eye contact with me using telepathic abilities. Unfortunately I possessed no such superpowers, her eyes remained on the fire and my ass remained plastered to my forehead in the minds of females present. Zoe never told me she was upset with me, but I felt it in the undertones. Her words seemed a bit more forced than usual, eyes focused so pointedly on the knitting in her lap. My only sanity saving this winter had been the men since they were as oblivious as humanly possible. It gave me a few faces to exchange words with and remind myself that I was only a partial house pariah.
When I wasn’t feeling like princess assface of the apocalypse, I tried to pass the time by reading. Adam had stopped by-knocking first- and brought me a few here and there, but overall I hadn’t seen him much since the bleak blanket of white nothingness blanketed our town.
I wish I could say the same for his elder. Caius had...come calling I suppose was the best way to put it. Every Friday without fail.
I’m not sure how to explain it. I would fall asleep in the living room with everyone else by the fire, then I would wake up...somewhere else...with his large dark form looming over me. There was no moonlight in that room, I knew I was elsewhere based on the smell and feel of the furniture beneath me. I assumed it was their farmhouse but who knew it was so very dark.
There was no conversation, only feeding.
I’d try to speak sometimes, to protest or move, but it was like I was in a lull. That weird state between consciousness and unconsciousness where my mind functioned but my body would not follow any commands. The next thing I knew I’d be waking up on the couch, just where I had fallen asleep, usually in a pretty similar position and feeling like I hadn’t slept a wink.
Some nights I wondered if I had dreamed it, if cabin fever had finally gotten the best of me after all these years or it was some kind of post-traumatic stress. I had been through an extra special dose of hell in the last year, maybe my mind was just working out the tremors through sleep. It was a theory I could easily fall into if I didn’t find myself with physical abnormalities as well. The soreness in my neck and the scent on my clothes kept me grounded in reality. Once in a while I’d catch the slight hint of bruising or little bumps made by twin scabs. We did not have really big bed bugs that traveled in pairs. Those were from fangs with a capital F.
I thought of the deal I had struck with Caius about not removing my memories, it seems he had stuck to his word. On both counts; using me and making sure I remembered it. If I wa
s anyone else, that meant I could be plucked from my home, used as an appetizer the deposited without a memory of the affair. How often was that done?
That fact rattled me to the core. Dimitri had often acted like he needed to feed more than every other day. Was the blood liaison just a front? How many survivors were dined upon from their homes at night? Or perhaps it was just me and I was his meal of choice for the winter. After much internal turmoil I figured the only thing I was doing was stressing myself out. After all, the only one with the answer wasn’t talking to me about his motives.
Rather than worry about my reality I tried to lose myself in books. I figured even I deserved some down time, mandatory as it may be. I read the spooky ghost novels Adam had brought me cover to cover three times I moved on to my ‘in town’ stack; everything from more agriculture books to east Asian history. I tried to borrow a section of books this year that I had to read for my ‘job’ combined with a set I hadn’t touched that looked interesting. After a decade, the percentage I hadn’t read in our tiny town was seriously starting to dwindle. Sometimes my eyes would get sore, especially in the evening when my only light source was the flicker of a candle. It was late at night that I yearned for a movie, something that required little effort on my part to enjoy. Just popcorn and shinies on the screen. Instead I read on until my eyes hurt, keeping to myself in the crowded room.
I was working my way through the Princess Bride-again-my eyes drifting from line to line where Buttercup discovers her dear Wesley was still alive when I found myself picturing Dimitri in the role of the hero. Not that he had ever muttered anything subtly romantic like as you wish...
You’re mine. His voice-or the closest recollection to his voice I could muster-overtook the words on the page, putting me in my own fantasy of the poor princess thrust upon an evil prince yearning for rescue from her true love. Visions of riding on a white horse holding onto his back as my long hair flowed in the wind.
The Blood Bargain (Book 2): Breach Page 10
