She scoffed, taking the glass of cranberry juice from Dane. “This from the girl who doesn’t watch TV at all!”
I smiled sheepishly at her and followed my dad into the kitchen. He pulled a Bud Light from the fridge. “You want?” At my nod, he grabbed another, popped them both and deposited mine before me as he took a seat opposite me at the old oak table.
“Boyfriend, eh?” He gazed at me lovingly from behind his thick black framed glasses, his skull and crossbones nose stud glinting in the afternoon sunshine coming through the French doors. His requisite silver hoops were dangling from both ears.
“I thought you were sleeping!” I admonished with a laugh. “He’s a really sweet guy. You know, he kinda reminds me of you.”
“Then I suppose he’s alright for my girl,” he answered, taking another long draw from the beer. We sat in silence, the faucet dripping in the kitchen sink behind me, and Mom’s show droning on quietly from the other room. The beer was cold between my palms. American beer. It was good. I guess we do alright as a people.
“I have to ask you something,” I said softly, tracing the letters on my can, unable to meet his eye.
“What’s that?”
“Edward.” I didn’t elaborate. He knew what I meant.
With a heavy sigh, my father set his beer on the table and leaned back in his chair. I noticed gray at his temples with a bit of affection. “Punk, I had found Edward by the time you were five years old. We needed someone to lean on for all you could do, and he was the man. He was ecstatic to have you move; hell, he found you the apartment.”
“Pretty big coincidence I ended up in his neck of the woods.”
“For that,” my father said, his eyes catching mine. “I have no explanation.”
We took a moment to ponder that, a shiver traveling my back.
“Thanks. For the job and the apartment.” I caught his eye over the table. His face was full of pride.
“Don’t thank me, punk. I’m so proud of you,” he told me, reaching across to place his hand atop mine. “Theresa and I, we went our own way. We married young, against our parents’ judgment, and we raised a child we had no idea about at a time in our lives when all of our friends were getting high and speaking in haiku.” He laughed, a sheen of memory over his eyes. He pulled off his glasses and swiped the back of his hand across them. “We did what felt right.” Putting them back on, he looked at me seriously. “You are doing what feels right to you. I never would have had the guts to move to another country. Or to be able to handle all the things you’ve had to handle in your life.”
“If you were born with powers, it wouldn’t seem so weird,” I argued, trying not to break into laughter or burst into tears over his unusual monologue.
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Don’t argue with me, girl. I helped raise you into this world, I can take you out of it,” he warned jokingly, wagging a finger at me. Taking his hand back from mine, he drank down the rest of his beer. “Want another?”
I leaped to my feet before he could and opened the fridge. The familiar inside made my stomach clench with longing. A saran-wrapped bowl of homemade cookie dough, a crisper full of fresh veggies from the garden, dirt still embedded in skin, and every type of juice available. No sugar added, all natural. Like my parents.
Grabbing two more beers, I opened them as Dane had done for me. When he picked his up, I offered mine for a toast. “To family. And comfort,” I told him.
We cheered to that.
Chapter 18
I could still hear the twang of its strike reverberating through the room. The crimson-feathered end of the dart had fluttered back and forth with the force of my throw. Even checking my strength and throwing as gently as possible, it had buried up to the red plastic hilt in my parents’ living room wall.
The dart had been destroyed; I lost count over the years of things I destroyed because of my super-strength. But, the hole was still there. Just below the city of York, the wall map was torn, an edge hanging down forlornly. I pushed it up with a finger to cover the hole, so that my finger lay across Quicksilver. It wasn’t on the map; hell, it wasn’t even in Google. A town stuck in the past, unable to move into the future.
I threw a dart and gained a home.
I threw a dart, and found a mystery.
I shivered. It was probably the air conditioner.
“Hey,” Macy said from behind me. I turned to see her propped against the doorframe leading to Dane’s office. Pulling my hand away from the map, I smiled.
“Nobody ever patched the hole, huh?”
“We used the rest of the putty when you punched the wall last spring.” She quirked an eyebrow at me with a smirk.
I didn’t like the tone of her smirk, but I laughed. “It was punch the wall or punch Tommy Tucker. Which do you think Dad would have preferred?”
She wandered closer, her bare feet silent on the old shag carpet, the color of stout beer. “Knowing our father?”
“Don’t answer that,” I cut in, shaking my head.
“Are you happy?” she asked me, touching England with the tip of a fingernail.
“I’m happy,” I answered truthfully, but I avoided her eye. I didn’t want to talk about the Hunt or missing guards, or even Brett. I just wanted to be home for a while.
*********
Three hours in the farmhouse, and I couldn’t help myself. I took the spiral staircase at the end of the upstairs hallway, where the dust was heavy on old wooden floorboards and the walls got closer the higher I walked. A thunderstorm was rumbling in the distance, but the late afternoon sun was still pushing through the two streaky windows flanking the attic. It was hot and musty.
It was a room I knew well. Slanted ceilings, short walls, and all sorts of odds and ends of my family’s history. As long as I could remember, only a single walkway was open to traverse, so full of history was the room.
I found the basket right where I’d left it. When I pulled it from its crevice beneath an old school desk, dust motes whirled around me like fairy dust. The little green dress was folded neatly on top. I pulled it out, the hand-sewn fabric like clouds between my fingertips, dark green with bell sleeves. The blanket beneath it was a quilt of fairy tale scenes—unicorns, satyrs, and nymphs on a background of ivory. I smiled at the little green booties and the ribbon that had been wrapped around my little infant head.
My birth certificate had been tucked beneath me, but it’s in Dane’s safe in the cellar. There was no father or mother listed, and my memories can’t even begin to find the woman who gave birth to me—I was just too young. The certificate holds my parents names now.
Laying out the blanket, I curled up on top of it and napped.
*********
“Come on, go to the bar with me,” Macy pleaded, rolling around on my bed as I flitted about my old room, packing a couple of boxes with things I’d left behind. Old school yearbooks fit alongside photo albums and cat figurines I’d collected from various friends and family members over the years. The breakables I wrapped and taped in five hundred sheets of newspaper. No need to expect the airport to heed a FRAGILE marking.
"I’m exhausted. I got like five hours of sleep in the hospital last night. And I’m full of spaghetti!” I lifted my cast, though lightweight, still a hindrance. “And painkillers.” I tossed an old paperback copy of 1984 into a box. It had lost its cover years ago.
“You’re only here for a couple days. Go see your friends!” She looked less like a fairy princess in her tight blue jeans and belly baring halter top and more like a Siren. I wasn’t used to seeing her in something that wasn’t bell-sleeved, layered, or swishy. “Put on your dancing shoes and let’s go!”
“Dancing shoes? When have you known me to dance?” I put a hand on my hip and frowned at her.
“Boots, bitch, boots! Now!” She flopped off my bed and over to my closet, yanking out a strapless black number I’d bought in a fit of insanity a couple years back. She held it out pointedly, using one foot to kick forward
a pair of black cowboy boots I’d left behind.
“That doesn’t fit me,” I argued. She shook the dress at me, mouth set in a tight line. Defeated by my sister’s stubbornness, a fight I should have forgotten long ago, I yanked off my T-shirt and reached for the dress.
*********
Frog Lick was as dirty and run down as Quicksilver was brightly colored and clean. I saw my hometown with new eyes as Macy drove through the industrialized town center, crinkling my nose at the dark, dingy store fronts and the trash floating around lit and empty parking lots. Quicksilver was passed up the past three years for “Prettiest Town” and everybody thinks it was rigged. A beige Kohl’s, dark and silent, made me yearn for the purple and red consignment store in Quicksilver. Frog Lick was an old man, stuck in his decaying twilight years.
The Rodeo was a hole-in-the-wall, cheap drink, good music, honky-tonk kinda place. If a night passed when the entire building wasn’t on the floor doing the Boot Scootin’ Boogey, something was wrong with the town. I tugged self consciously at my dangerously dipping dress as we walked in, having the very rare thought I wonder if this dress makes me look fat.
Lo and behold, Supergirl does have a feminine side.
I wasn’t in Quicksilver anymore. The smoke in the bar was so thick I could hardly breathe. Considering the place was a good two thousand square feet of open floor and equally open windows, that was sad. Briefly, I wondered if it’d be possible to hold my breath for the duration of my stay.
Macy trotted along ahead of me, waving across the bar where I could see Amy waving back, a huge smile on her face. Her skin tight sleeveless dress, while not as short as my own, still made me feel less alone in my quest for beauty. She grabbed me in a friendly hug. “I’m so glad Mace finally got you to come!”
A stab of jealousy hit me at hearing my nickname for my sister come from her lips. Glancing over at the blonde in question, she was leaning over the bar ordering us drinks. I forced a smile to my lips. “Yeah, she’s persuasive that way.”
My first drink, a whiskey sour, slid down rather nicely, helped along the way by the two shots of Bourbon a couple of old friends bought me. It wasn’t long before my inhibitions were dropped and I was laughing and joking with the youth of Frog Lick like I’d never left.
Three drinks in, a big hand slipped around my stomach from behind and I felt myself hitched up against a very long, very lean body. “Vale Avari, you shouldn’t stay away for so long.”
"Jason Hart,” I laughed, turning in his grip and coming nose to Adam’s apple to the man with whom I’d spent a year of my life. I gave him a hug, the scent of his Abercrombie and Fitch cologne tickling my nose and bringing back memories I hadn’t considered in quite some time.
Jason was the guy I considered my high school sweetheart, despite the considerably short length of our relationship. His skin was deeply tanned from his work with his father’s construction company, the faintest trace of a tan line along his forehead, covered by his hair. Blonde hair, blue eyed, he looked like he belonged on a surfboard in the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, he’d never left Frog Lick. Not even for a weekend. Maybe that’s why I always knew we wouldn’t work out in the real world.
“Can I buy you a beer?” he asked, lifting a hand in the direction of Mary Harper, the Dolly Parton look-a-like who’d been barkeep at The Rodeo for as long as I could remember. Her bright blue eye-shadow was enough to blind a person. “Mary H! Give us a couple Buds!” Turning his face back to me, he grinned, a big, white grin that made me gooey and wide-eyed.
It was amazing, the feeling of his arm around me again. While Brett was still first and foremost the man on my mind, I couldn’t forget that he’d dropped out of town twice on clandestine trips of which he shared not a word or explanation. Nor could I get past that having sex with someone does not mean you know them, and a killer was targeting women at my place of business. Jason brought a strange feeling of warmth, comfort, and home that I’d forgotten since we’d parted ways. His smell, a mixture of cigarette smoke, Abercrombie, and homemade pumpkin pie was so familiar it brought tears to my eyes. For a split second, through the alcohol haze, I wondered what happened to the “us” we once were, and Brett was firmly filed away in the back of my mind.
Senior year, Jason and I shared eight class periods together, which was every class of the day. Not only that, his locker was my locker’s neighbor, so it seemed that we were destined to decide to give each other a chance. Jason was on the football team, a name known by everyone in school because of how many times it was announced over the loudspeaker on Friday nights. With his alluring good looks and Southern gentleman hospitality, the first thing he ever did was charm me right out of my blue jeans in the back of his pickup truck after a game.
For as young as we had been, we were good together. The kind of good that trickles back in your mind when your only source of enjoyment is a discreet vibrator named Thor.
I chugged my first beer the minute it was in my hand, Jason whistling at me, one strong hand right above my ass. Universe and all that is holy, help me, I was putty in his hands, just like I’d been five years ago.
With a knowing grin, Macy pressed a rocks glass in my hand, filled to the brim with an amber liquid on ice. One strong whiff of the poison, and I frowned at her. Jack on the rocks, known to make me lose my clothing like a whore. She snickered at me, turning to wrap her arms around Amy.
“So, sweetheart, how’s English life treating you?” Jason sat on the only open barstool, recently vacated by a very drunk sheriff’s deputy, and gently pulled me to take a seat on his lap. His ridiculously sculpted thighs beneath my bottom set my temperature raging.
I was in trouble.
*********
The dirt path to the Temple stretched before me, sunlight beaming through the canopy of trees above my head creating shifting patterns of shadow on the forest floor. I couldn’t hear the noise of my steps or feel the wind on my face as I moved forward; my senses were dulled into oblivion.
As I was beginning to panic from claustrophobia, someone fell in to step beside me, and I looked over to catch inky dark eyes sparkling at me from a face of agelessness and porcelain skin. A long braid, salt and pepper, hung down her trim back to the dropped waistline of her ankle length, sheer sleeveless gray dress. Glancing down, I saw bare feet walking softly along the ground. I knew her.
“Cerridwen,” I stated with a nod, tucking my hands into my pockets. I could feel the rough material of my pants, hear the birds singing, and taste the honeysuckle in the air. It was as if the cotton had been withdrawn and the veil over me tossed aside with her appearance.
“Vale, we need to have a talk,” she said, sounding way too much like my mother. She linked one strong arm through my elbow and we leaned on each other, still walking. “I’m disappointed in you.”
“What’d I do?”
“All the help I’ve given you, all the signs I’ve set up to help you and you let your hormones rage.” She tossed her braid over her shoulder with a flick of her head and regarded me with an amused, mother-knows-best look.
“Is this about Jason? It was just one last time, I swear. I was drunk.” A fox scampered across our path, stopping for an exchange of glances with the woman at my side.
She chuckled. “You are human, after all. Maybe it’s time to start thinking with your head and heart, not your libido. You have a good many people who depend on you.”
“I know, that’s why I came home.”
“Theresa. She’s a lovely woman, so faithful, so strong. I picked her especially, you know.”
There was something so peaceful about being beside her, letting her take the lead and walk me down the path. Fleetingly, I hoped I could remain with her, let her guide me forever. “She’s the best,” I agreed.
Cerridwen sighed dejectedly. “Your loyalty to your family is an asset, my love. I couldn’t have hoped to raise you better myself.”
“I love them,” I told her simply, shrugging. It was just my nature to care fo
r those who care for me.
“You belong with Brett, love,” she whispered softly, motioning for me to sit on the log at our feet, completely changing the subject, in the manner of Theresa. There were days I couldn’t keep up with my mother’s constantly chugging train of thought.
“I don’t believe that. Plus, I don’t trust him.”
“Don’t believe what? In Soulmates? That’s preposterous. Of course, there are Soulmates. Everybody has a half of their whole. Even I.” She took on a distant gaze, love in her eyes, two perfect circles of blush on her pale cheeks. “Everybody also has secrets, Vale. Give it time. Learn to trust inherently, and let people give you the reasons to mistrust them. To live your life afraid of others and deny them a chance to come close is to not live at all.” A cool hand caressed my cheek and I smiled at her. “One more thing, my child. You have everything you need, and the answer is staring at you. Put the pieces together before it’s too late.”
Chapter 19
The sun shining on my face woke me up. I stretched my arms above my head on soft jersey sheets, my body covered with a lightweight blanket. My mouth was cottony and my body ached in all the right places. Thinking of my aches, I remembered my strange dream and had a wave of teenage rebellion sweep over me. There was no way I was going to be told by some mother figure in the guise of a goddess who I could or could not screw. The night came back to me in snatches, and was it a night.
It really came as no surprise that Jason’s head was nestled snuggly between my breasts, his slow and easy breathing tickling my skin. He’d always been a breast man. I eased myself from underneath him, lowering his head to the bed inch by inch so as not to wake him. I stumbled, still half drunk, into his bathroom and sat on the toilet for the longest pee I’d ever taken, before standing before the sink and splashing my face and drinking enough water to quench my thirst.
Jason hadn’t moved by the time I picked my way across the messy floor, searching for my clothes. I found my dress draped over the back of an armchair in the corner, and my boots scattered in two opposite corners of the room. No underwear.
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