by Dan Rix
Amy answered the door.
The sight of her made me flinch. She tilted her head—her blonde hair glistening with a healthy sheen—and regarded me with an icy stare. “Yes?”
I searched her eyes for signs of crossover sickness, but aside from narrowing under my scrutiny, they revealed no malaise.
“Is Charles home?”
“Daddy,” she called over her shoulder. “There’s someone here to see you.”
Charles came down a moment later. When he saw me, he pushed his glasses up his nose. Not a flicker of recognition, though. “How can I help you?” he said.
I swallowed. “I need to talk to you.”
“About what?” he said.
“Broken symmetry.”
He froze on the bottom step, and his skin paled. Once again, his gaze travelled up and down me, and this time his eyes widened. Amy glanced between us, apparently confused by the reference.
“Daddy, who is she?”
“Come up to my study,” he said, motioning me upstairs. “Amy, this is Blaire. She’s the daughter of an old friend.”
***
“So you never started ISDI?”
“I needed your father’s help,” said Charles, seating himself behind his desk in his study. “He had already lost your mother, and when he lost you too, he lost his will to live. We went separate ways; I think he was trying to track down that mirror. In either case, we shelved that project a long time ago”
“So you don’t crossover anymore?”
“Haven’t for years,” he said. “I prefer the academic exploration of symmetry breaking rather than the . . . ah, practical application. I do my work from my study.”
“Do you know where I could find Damian Silva?” In the few days since my return, I had scoured every single phone book and internet listing site I could find and come up short.
“Never heard of him.”
Of course he hadn’t heard of him. Damian would have been six. “He’s not listed anywhere,” I said. “I’m wondering if he’s listed under a different name.” Or dead. “He can crossover too.”
“Blaire, if he’s someone you knew, he won’t remember you. Even if you could find him, he’s a different person. In twelve years, a person’s life diverges completely . . . and I mean completely.”
I nodded. “I think I’ve bothered you enough. I’ll go now.”
“Do you have a place to stay?”
His question surprised me. “I was . . . I was just going to go home, why?”
He shook his head. “It won’t be there. Your father moved.”
“Then I’ll stay with friends,” I said.
“Not an option. They don’t know you.”
“But—Josh. He’ll put me up. He’s my . . . my ex-boyfriend.”
“Not up here, Blaire.”
“He’ll put me up,” I repeated.
“Will he? A girl he’s never met?”
I stared at him, and the realization finally hit me. Every person I knew, every thing I knew, as I knew it, had ceased to exist. My entire life had ceased to exist. A shiver crept down my spine, leaving nothing but cold.
“Then where do I go?” I said.
“You can stay here as long as you like.”
No. It occurred to me right then, as I gaped at Charles. There was someplace I needed to be. Damian’s note. The three words he had left for me: his final instructions.
Blaire, go home.
***
The taxi dropped me off in front of my house. Under the glaring May sun, heat waves boiled off the hood of the yellow Ford Mustang GT parked in the driveway.
And there he was, shirtless, a pair of jeans slung low off a gleaming, bronze torso. He polished the car’s frame, his back muscles flexing, his eyebrows knotted in their typical brooding fashion. If anything, he looked to be having a bad day. But there he was . . . untouched. Flawless.
Alive.
At the sight of him, my breath choked off in a gasp, and my hand shot to my mouth.
He heard me, and his hand froze on the rag, his jaw tensed. He swung around, and for an agonizing second his coal black eyes locked on mine.
My heart gave a final nervous throb and shrank back, quivering in its cage, as if he had reached all the way inside me to hold it still.
He dropped the rag and started toward me. I couldn’t move, couldn’t run . . . couldn’t resist the force of his gaze anchoring me to the sidewalk as he approached. Then all at once, he was upon me.
Without a word, he gathered me in his arms, hugged me. The heat of his skin burned me through my T-shirt, and suddenly I wanted it off. I wanted skin on skin. I looped my arms over his shoulders, around the back of his neck, and dug my fingernails through his hair. Cheek pressed against his chest, I drank in his scent. The smell of his hot skin made me dizzy, euphoric. My eyes lulled shut.
“I worried you hadn’t made it,” he whispered, his breath setting fire to the sensitive skin inside my ear. “Welcome back.”
I tilted my head back so I could look him in the eye, and I kissed him once, quickly. To see if he was real. He tasted real.
Mesmerized by the perfect, cupid’s bow shape of his lips, which I desperately wanted to kiss again, all I could say was, “How?”
“I overlap. I was with you the whole time.”
Overlap. Of course. “You remember everything?”
“Right up until that last crossover.”
I pushed him away. “But you’re not him,” I said. “You can’t be. It’s impossible”
“Then why do I remember every single thing we did together, Blaire? Isn’t that impossible? I’ve never met you.”
His words made my heart race, but I couldn’t believe it. Not yet. “Your lives diverged, Damian. You’re different people now . . . I mean, you have an entire life up here I know nothing about.” I already felt myself giving in to him, felt his presence filling the void in my heart.
His pitch black eyes held me captive. “You have no idea how hard it was to dream about you every night,” he said. “Dreams so vivid, I could smell your hair, taste your lips, feel every inch of you. And then to wake up every morning and have no way to get to you. No idea where to even search.”
I stared at him, suppressing a shiver. “But I buried his body,” I whispered.
He smirked. “That’s what kept you going, wasn’t it? I knew it would.”
“You selfish bastard—”
“I did it to save you, Blaire. I couldn’t let you give up.”
“So you . . . I mean, he . . . knew you existed?”
“That’s why I didn’t let myself fall in love with you down there. I knew I wasn’t the source, and I already knew I was going to die. All I wanted to do was get you back to the source so you could find me.”
“And you couldn’t do better than ‘Blaire, go home?’”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“How?” I asked again. “I thought overlap only worked one way. How’d you get a message to your reflection?”
“I didn’t. My reflection sent that message to me. When I wrote it, I knew my source would overlap and be able to meet you here. Your house was a safe place you would remember.”
I glanced past him at my former house. “And what . . . you bought the place?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “Actually, I think the woman who lives here is pretty fed up with me tuning up my Mustang in her driveway. We should probably go. Come on.” He released me and waved me over to his car, where he packed his rags and wax into the trunk.
I slid into the burgundy colored leather bucket seats next to him, feeling the familiar giddiness wash over me. “You even buy the same car as your reflection?” I sneered.
“You got it backw
ards. He copied me.” He cranked the ignition, gave his Mustang a rev, and peeled out into the street.
“Do you still crossover?” I asked, fearing the answer.
His jaw tightened. “Not anymore,” he said, “Once I realized what it was doing to my reflection, I quit cold turkey.”
“Good,” I said, facing forward. “Don’t ever do it again. Where are we going?”
“My place.”
“Why’d you die right after I told you I loved you?” I said.
“It was all I needed to hear.”
“I guess this means I don’t have to explain anything, then?” I asked. “You’re all up to speed?”
“Unless you want to repeat what you said to me after I died.”
“Definitely not.”
He glanced over at me, a hint of daring smoldering at the edges of his eyes—now my whole world—hiking my already racing pulse and setting fire to every inch of my skin. “Actually, I think you’re the one who needs to be brought up to speed,” he said. “In this version, things played out differently. In this version, Blaire, I didn’t stop myself from falling in love with you.”
At his admission, my heart hovered in free fall. I studied the contours of his perfect face, mesmerized, and right then I knew I could. I could fall in love with him all over again.
But I felt like a stranger in his car. I had loved him in a reflection, in a dream. I had watched him die, dug his grave. Buried his body.
Yet here he was. The same boy . . . only different. Who now loved me too.
I didn’t know how to feel about that.
I just didn’t know.
***
I reenrolled in my old high school for the last three weeks of junior year, which meant I had to start my climb up the social ladder all over again. Strange, considering I knew the names and faces and mannerisms of every single popular kid in school. I just couldn’t let on.
Actually, I didn’t really care about popularity anymore. Ever since my return—and now that he had allowed himself to love me back—I preferred Damian’s dangerous, electrifying universe to any other, source or reflection.
On my second day back in school, I strolled into the quad for lunch. A wall of students had formed ahead of me, giggling and pointing. I pushed through the crowd and craned my neck to see the source of the commotion.
In the center of the quad, I glimpsed a naked male body—an exquisite one—reclined on the grass, hands cupped over his private parts.
I recognized Damian, and a smile tugged at my lips. He got to his feet leisurely, spotted me in the crowd, and gave me a wink. The girls in front of me giggled and nudged each other.
Sorry girls, that one’s not for you.
Then he sprinted through the crowd and off campus, and the last I saw of him—until after school, at least—was a pale pair of deliciously sculpted butt cheeks, now a little tanner.
And right then I knew he was the same Damian I fell in love with. Maybe not made of the same molecules, but made of the same soul.
A Message from Dan Rix
Thanks for reading Broken Symmetry! If you enjoyed the story, the greatest compliment I can receive is a review on Amazon. I love to hear from readers, so feel free to email me at [email protected]. Also, be sure to check out my other YA thriller, Entanglement. You can turn the page to read more about it.
Entanglement - out now
What if someone else’s name was coded in your DNA?
In a world like ours, humans are born in pairs. When a newborn boy takes his first breath in the coastal town of Tularosa, the exact time is noted, recorded in the Registry, and later compared to the birth times of other newborns around the globe. There will be one identical match—his half. They will meet on their eighteenth birthday and they will spend their lives together. Except this time, there is no match.
Hotheaded heartthrob Aaron Harper is scheduled to meet his half in twenty-nine days, and he doesn’t buy a word of that entanglement crap. So what if he and his half were born the same day and share a spooky psychic connection? Big deal. After breaking one too many teenage girls’ hearts, he’ll stick to brawling with the douchebag rugby players any day.
Until the day a new girl arrives at school and threatens everything he takes for granted.
Cold and unapproachable, Amber Lilian hates the growing list of similarities between her and the one boy she can’t read, Aaron: born the same day, both stubborn, both terrified of meeting their halves. . . . All the more reason not to trust him. That she would rather die than surrender herself as her half’s property is none of his damn business. But once lost in Aaron’s dangerous, jet black eyes, she’s already surrendered more than she cares to admit.
Tangled in each other’s self-destructive lives, Aaron and Amber learn the secret behind their linked births and why they feel like halves—but unless they can prove it before they turn eighteen, Aaron faces a lifetime alone in a world where everyone else has a soulmate . . . and he’ll have to watch Amber give herself to a boy who intends to possess not only her body but also a chunk of her soul.
Click here to check out Entanglement on Kindle: http://amzn.to/YRJmPX
