by Amber Stuart
“OH MY GOD!” she yells. “I thought you were dead don’t you ever do that to me again what the hell is wrong with you and where the hell have you been!”
“Uhm,” I manage to say but it’s muffled by the lack of air in my lungs and my face being buried in her hair.
She loosens her grip then holds me at arm’s length staring at me. Then, as if she hadn’t noticed him despite his massive size, she looks at Vin.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hello,” Vin responds.
“Kelley, we need to talk,” I say. “Can we go inside?”
“Can you! Come on in. Do you want something to drink? I have… whiskey or… whiskey?” she asks.
“I’m fine thank you,” I say.
“Yeah, I think I will take one,” Vin says.
I lead Vin to her living room and we sit on her couch while she gets the drinks. When she comes back she gives Vin a tumbler half full of brown liquid and sits down with her own.
“So, you’re pretty much my only friend and all,” I say.
“Yeah, we really need to expand your circle,” she says, her eyes locked on Vin dance with delight.
“Yeah, well first off I’d like to introduce you to Vintares,” I say.
“Vintares, is that Greek or something?” she asks leaning forward and taking his hand.
“Or something,” he says, smiling and taking her hand.
“Oh, sexy,” she says looking at me. “Strong grip, I like a man with a strong grip.”
“Kelley I’m going to be going away, for a long time,” I say.
“Uh-huh?” She leans back in the chair and looks skeptical.
“Yeah, you see, Vin has made me an offer and well as it turns out, well I can’t turn it down you see.”
“What kind of offer? This isn’t some weird like indecent proposal thing or something is it? Or a Taken thing? You’re not being abducted are you? Cause I’ll totally kick this guy’s ass I don’t care how big he is. I’m warning you big man I’ve studied martial arts for a long time. I can take care of myself and my girl here.”
“I’m quite sure you can,” Vin says barely suppressing his laughter.
“Damn straight,” Kelley says.
“Kelley no, it’s not like that. At all, this is… much harder than I’d expected. Kelley I’m pregnant.”
“No effing way, wow! That’s so awesome. It’s not Douchebag’s is it? Dear god please tell me it’s not.”
“No, it’s not!” I exclaim, my cheeks burning with embarrassment. “But it comes with some problems. Ones that I have to go away to deal with.”
“Oh my god are you like a spy or something? Or are you like, royalty? That’s it isn’t it! You’re royalty and you can’t let it be known that you knocked up a local so you’re going to take care of her right? Put her up like a mistress! Oh my god I’m so right and damn I’m jealous!”
I look at Vin debating if this lie is the one I want to leave her with. I start to tell her more but what’s that going to do? Nothing good so I decide to let her believe what she thinks is right. It’s not really all that far off after all is it?
“Yeah,” I say at last.
We talk a while longer and then comes a tearful goodbye with promises to stay in touch. We leave and my heart is heavy until we’re back in the shuttle and I see the stars growing bigger as we return to the ship. They’ve already told Vin the orders to come home have been issued. Once we dock we’ll set course for his home world.
I rest my hands on my belly looking at the small bulge that is already starting to show. It’s only been days and I’m showing but no one knows what to expect. I feel a flutter under my hand like he’s kicking and I smile. Our child is special. I can’t wait to meet him.
We dock with the ship and Vin and I stand at the door ready to go to the airlock. As it opens Vin walks ahead of me. I’m preoccupied with thoughts of our child and the future. I’m walking behind him when I feel like something is off so I stop and look around. The officers of the ship are standing at attention in a line on either side of the airlock. Vin stands at the end of them facing me with a grin on his face from ear to ear.
“Vin, what’s going on?” I ask, butterflies dancing in my stomach.
Vin steps closer to me then drops to one knee. He reaches his right hand out to the side open palmed and Benji places a box in it.
“Abby of Earth,” he says. “Many years ago you took my heart. It’s been yours ever since. While I waited for you, by returning to me you prove that we are meant to be together. That our hearts should be one and that no power in this universe, not even death itself, can keep us apart. Would you, Abby, the love of my life, commit to me for eternity?”
He opens the box in his hand and the most beautiful diamond ring I’ve ever seen sparkles at me.
“Oh my god!” I exclaim. “Yes! Oh yes!”
Tears stream down my face as the crew cheers and Vin takes the ring out of the box and places it on my finger. He stands up and we kiss in front of everyone.
I don’t know what the future holds for us or our child but I do know that we’ll face it together and I couldn’t be happier.
THE END
RESURRECTED
By
S.M. SCHMITZ
PROLOGUE
It should have been raining the day I died. At least, that’s what I always thought. Rain would have given me some better explanation for what happened. It would have given me something tangible to hate, even if it is completely pointless to try to fight the rain. But it hadn’t been raining that day. It had been sunny. Clear. Beautiful, even. It wasn’t too hot yet, as Houston often was, but it was only April and a rare spring cold front had moved drier air into the city so even the humidity was bearable.
I found myself repeatedly distracted by that impossibly blue sky and kept looking out the window of my office, thinking Lottie would inevitably make some comparison of it to my eyes later, which just made me want to go home so I could see her, even at the risk of listening to her eye analogies. I am almost positive she only did shit like that because she knew I suffered from a complete lack of romanticism and I never knew how to respond, even after all these years.
I couldn’t focus on work anyway, so I tossed my iPad onto my desk and tried to think of some equally nonsensical analogy for hazel eyes, which was a lot harder because not many things in nature that people want to be compared to are light brown with green flecks scattered throughout. Somehow, I didn’t think she would want to hear that her eyes sparkled like damp Spanish moss.
I had just crossed through my Spanish moss idea when my boss, a middle-aged man with thinning hair and wire framed glasses that magnified his dark eyes, which most definitely reminded me of the gray-brown mud of South Texas, quietly opened my door and stepped into my office, shutting the door just as quietly behind him. I knew that expression on his face. Gaunt, serious. Grave. I had seen that look before. Someone was dead.
I immediately started going through a mental checklist of who was in the field. I stood up and waited for him to tell me who it was.
“Daniel?”
I motioned toward a chair because he hadn’t moved since walking through my door. Daniel glanced at the chair but didn’t budge. He just stood by the closed door, staring somewhere between the empty chair and me.
Eric, my best friend – ok, my only friend – was in the building. I knew he was safe. But the longer Daniel stood there without speaking, the more I wanted to leap across my desk and beat the words out of him. What the hell did he think he was doing anyway? I tried speaking again, in case I snapped and really did beat the shit out of him.
“Daniel, I’m not your fucking therapist. Talk or get out.”
He finally looked up at me. And that’s when I saw the tears he had been trying to keep from falling trapped behind those thick lashes and pooling around those muddy brown eyes.
“Dietrich,” he choked on my name.
God.<
br />
What could have happened to make my asshole of a boss cry in front of me – the same guy who once told me with a smug smirk that the job he was sending me out on was probably going to get me killed but I was German, so he didn’t mind taking the risk? I didn’t bother pointing out that I had moved to the U.S. when I was fourteen and was an American citizen because he already knew that. Just like he knew I was one of the best damn agents on his team and he resented me for that because I hadn’t been born here and spoke with an accent he didn’t like.
He cleared his throat and wiped sloppily at his eyes.
“Dietrich,” he started again, this time speaking so softly I had to sit down. Nobody ever delivered news that wouldn’t completely destroy you in that tone of voice. “Your cell phone. Why don’t you have it on?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t even make sense of his question.
“I’m sure it is. It’s…” I glanced around my office and remembered tossing it in my gym bag that morning. “Oh. It’s probably in my locker.”
My stomach was ice. There was a pounding in my temples that made my head feel like a bomb was about to detonate in there. I couldn’t breathe. My cell phone. My personal cell phone. There was only one person this could be about now. Not just one person. The person. The only person. The only person this man, once a pathetic abandoned, loveless child, had ever loved.
My world. My life.
“Lottie.”
It was a question. At least I meant it as a question. I don’t know how it came out. I couldn’t hear my own voice anymore. I was dying. It had started then, even though I didn’t know it at the time. He was talking. What was he saying? He was speaking words, English words, words I should understand, but none of them made any sense.
My office suddenly seemed both terrifyingly small and overwhelmingly enormous at the same time, both boundless and constrictive, and the names for everything around me vanished. How can I just get him to shut up, just get him to stop saying these words? Can I even walk? How do I walk? And what is he saying? Listen, Dietrich. It’s English. You speak English. Listen.
“…the car… red light… Jamie… driving… so fast… on Kirby… Dietrich?… listening?… Lottie… dead…”
Lottie.
My world. My life.
******
That pounding. It wouldn’t stop. I slowly opened my eyes and realized it wasn’t in my head anymore. Someone was knocking on my door. I knew that knock. Not many people ever knocked on my door, so of course I knew it was Eric. I wanted to ignore him but how could I? He had gone to the hospital morgue with me to identify her body. He had gone to the funeral home with me to pick out a casket. He had talked for me when I had no voice as the funeral home director asked about open caskets and rosaries – what the fuck did that even mean?
Lottie was Catholic but I had never thought to ask my twenty-five-year-old fiancée if she would ever want people to pray the rosary at her funeral, and why did people even do that? – and if we wanted a mass. Her mother was there, as numb and useless as I was, and so Eric had taken charge.
I don’t even know what kind of funeral my best friend arranged for my dead girlfriend. It didn’t matter. I saw her body in the hospital. Lifeless. Cold and broken with deep purple splotches under the paper white skin. I guess, then, that’s when I knew I had actually died. Her chest didn’t move, didn’t allow her lungs to fill with air – so how could I breathe? Her heart didn’t beat, didn’t push blood through her bruised and shattered body. Whatever heart of my own I had discovered the day I met her vanished when her heart stopped beating. My body moved, reacted. But I was dead.
Eric was still knocking. He knew I was inside. I had to be. We were burying my fiancée today.
I pushed the blankets off of me and sat up slowly. My head was pounding viciously. Apparently, several days of not sleeping will create one hell of a hangover. The clock told me it was almost 8:00 a.m. Her funeral was at 1:00. And Eric kept rapping at my door. I was pretty sure he would knock the damn thing down soon if I didn’t open it.
“Goddamn, it, Eric, I’m coming. Stop making so much fucking noise.”
I glanced through the peephole, more habit than concern, because honestly, ISIS could have been outside my door at that moment and I wouldn’t have cared. He was holding two garment bags. Our suits. I had a sudden vision of a very different day – the day we were supposed to have – of Eric standing outside my door with those two garment bags, one for me, and one for him as the best man at my wedding.
I pulled the door open and let him in without saying anything. Without Lottie, I didn’t know how not to be an asshole again.
“Did you get any sleep?” he asked.
I glanced over at him, his usually carefully styled short brown hair was messy, unbrushed. He hadn’t shaved and he had dark circles under his eyes. He looked like shit. God, I probably did look half-dead.
I sighed. I was too tired to be a smartass about it.
“A little.”
“It’s raining, it may not stop...”
He had wanted to say something else but whatever it was, he stumbled, pressed his lips together and tossed the bags on my couch.
Now the fucking rain comes.
“Oh.”
What else could I say? Half the time, I couldn’t even remember to speak in English anymore. I sat down on the end of the couch that wasn’t covered in freshly pressed suits and rubbed my eyes and forehead. God, my head hurt… but it was a welcome pain. This physical pain I understood. It was a distraction from the complete hollowness that had swallowed me for the past three days.
I had tried to stay with her as much as I could. The visitation, the rosary – which I still didn’t understand but her relatives from Louisiana had all come with beaded necklaces in hand, chanting repetitive prayers and I waited for something revelatory to happen, some sort of spiritual awakening, but mostly I just watched with the same detached sense of curiosity I always had when Lottie talked about her Catholic upbringing.
And then, as people started filing out, wanting to shake my hand, or God forbid, hug me, as they made their way back to their hotel rooms or homes, her mom, Eric and I had moved back up front, alone with her at last. We sat in silence, except for the aching, strangling cries of a heartbroken mother and Eric’s mysterious occasional sighs and crossing himself. I had known Eric almost as long as I had known Lottie and never knew he was Catholic, too.
I wasn’t going to leave her, but around 4:00 a.m., Lottie’s mother finally asked us if we could give her a few hours with her daughter alone. And how could we say no? Before leaving, I leaned over her, kissed her forehead – so cold and smooth, like marble – and gently touched the ring on her left hand: that hand, delicate with a few perfectly placed freckles that formed a Bermuda triangle across the back.
Three freckles, that’s it. Nothing else inside that triangle, like any spot that had tried to emerge from the sun’s daily assault on her pale white skin just vanished inside those three. Her right hand sported scattered freckles, light and hardly visible unless she spent too much time in the sun, but they had covered all of her visible skin with so much makeup, I couldn’t see those tiny freckles I knew were there.
I knew every spot, every mark, every freckle and scar on her body. With an eidetic memory, I would have remembered anyway, but this was her body. I didn’t just remember, I knew her scent, her voice, the way her skin felt under my fingers, the way her body reacted and moved closer to me when I touched her. I knew the way she tasted, exactly how she felt when I was inside of her, the way she moved against me. No other woman would ever take her place. I also knew that the day I met her. Eight years later, looking down at this small body, her thin frame, wavy brown hair draped over her shoulders and falling loosely over her chest – I was even more certain now that no woman could take her place.
Eric had sat down in the armchair next to the sofa and rested his head in his hands. I doubt he had slept at all.
“I called Cathy for you.” Cathy was Lottie’s mother.
Shit.
Never even had the chance to be a real son-in-law, and I was still a terrible one.
“She wants us to go to the hotel and bring her clothes and makeup to the funeral home. She won’t leave,” Eric said.
I nodded. My head protested vociferously. “We should go then.”
Getting dressed for the love of your life’s funeral is probably as close as anyone can get to having an out of body experience. I had to pick out a dress shirt and a tie, but I don’t remember doing either of those things. As I slipped my feet into my newly polished black dress shoes, I caught a quick reflection of myself in the mirror. My stomach lurched from a memory of Lottie teasing me about being a poster-child for good “Aryan” breeding. Somebody had brushed my light blonde hair. I had shaved? Those dark under-eye circles didn’t seem quite as bad as I had imagined but against my pale, north German complexion, they looked like perfect purple semicircles.
I was dressed. Somehow, thirty minutes had passed and I was standing in our – in my – bedroom, getting ready to bury the only part of my life that had ever made it worth living.
Eric was waiting in the living room. He had shaved and combed his hair but still looked like shit. I probably still did, too. After all, doesn’t having one’s heart torn apart kind of mean your days of not looking like shit are over? I felt like I should say something. Some kind of thank you. Some, hey, not only do I literally trust you with my life – which is really saying something, because most of our colleagues are a bunch of incompetent jackasses – but you are obviously a hell of a lot more capable than I am of doing… the kind of stuff best friends should do but we both know I’d fail miserably at? I don’t think Hallmark makes a card for that.
“Eric,” God, I am the most asocial asshole on the planet.
But Eric knew me well enough to know that, and he knew I would have no fucking clue what to say to him.
