by Nora Flite
“What?”
“You saved me. You did it again.” She laughs weakly. “I hope you don't expect me to repay you. I'll never be able to, at this rate.”
I let myself return her smile.
What I really want is to tell her that she doesn't need to try to repay me.
She's alive.
That's more than enough.
- Chapter 17 -
Dominic
“How's your cough?” I ask.
Laiken is curled up in a thick blanket, sitting in front of the fire I've made. I'm glad I chopped all that wood. Trying to do it while panicking about how cold we're both getting would have been difficult.
She clears her throat, smiling sheepishly. “Better. Thanks.”
I drape my wet shirt and pants on the mantle over the fireplace, right next to hers. I have no other clothes, so I sit next to her with just a towel around my waist. “Good. We'll keep an eye on it. I won't let you push yourself too hard, exacerbating your lungs when there could be fluid in them still . . .” I shake. “Pneumonia is the last thing you need.”
Laiken rocks side to side, as if she can't get comfortable. Finally, she stops moving and stares right at me. “Bad lungs can really ruin things.” I tense up, studying her warily. “Dominic, did you know your father was medically discharged from the army?”
So that's what's going on. “I did, yes.”
Her eyebrows arch high. “Oh. Did you know before he put you in boarding school?”
“No, after that. It's amazing what you can find out on the internet.”
She's thrown—she expected this to be huge news to me. “Silas pushed you into military school, tried to steer you towards enlisting like you had to live up to his achievements, when he didn't even have any! Doesn't that piss you off?”
“It wasn't something he could control. I know it haunted him, being unable to serve the way his own father did.” I think about the nights he'd stumble his way to my room, drunk on his feet, coughing all the while. That sound would echo everywhere. The first time he tried to drag me to his study like that, I'd fought back. He was much bigger than me, more violent.
Fighting made it worse, so I stopped.
I shrug, suddenly very exhausted. “It changed nothing for me. If anything, I understood him a little better. He was under a lot of pressure to be as amazing as his father. But he couldn't be, not with his health. I think his hope was that I'd exceed his accomplishments.”
“Except he accomplished nothing.”
“More than me,” I mumble. “I never started basic training. I didn't even enlist, at least he did that much.”
She's staring at me. I predicted sympathy, not suspicion. “Did you plan to enlist?”
I pause, trying to get where she's leading me. “Yes.”
“Then what stopped you?”
Biting my tongue, I look away. “This conversation is over.”
“It's not. Not yet. You're nineteen, right? You would have enlisted right after school, a year ago, yeah?”
I don't respond. I know where she's going and I wish she'd stop.
“And a year ago . . . that's when Bernard died,” she says.
“Laiken, don't.”
“Kara said it happened on a ski trip. I know you spent time with him, lived at his house on holiday breaks! How could you hurt him if you were friends?”
Sweat blossoms along my throat. “You should know that friends can become enemies. Look at us.”
She leans closer, daring me to push her away. “Yes, look at us. Do you really think we're enemies?”
Her sister's scathing words enter my mind. I don't think Laiken will ever let you out of her heart. The kindest thing you can do is remove her from yours. “It would be better for you if you thought of me that way.”
“No! What's better is you telling me the truth!”
“The truth isn't going to make you hate me less!” I roar, throwing my hands up. My voice echoes around us. It whispers the words back in my face, my ears ringing as I breathe heavily. “If it was murder or not, Bernard is still dead! Why does this matter so much to you?”
Though her frown remains, her eyes begin to water. “Because I need to know if I'm so broken, so twisted and full of self loathing, that it's possible for me to be in love with a killer.”
My heart stops beating. I had to have heard her wrong. “You're in love with me?”
“Of course I am,” she whispers, and her laughter is tormented. It darkens me down to my soul. “Dominic, I've loved you since the moment I met you. I didn't know it then. I wasn't sure until it was too late to tell you, because you'd left for school. I waited for that first winter break, working myself up, corkscrewing my brain over how I'd tell you my feelings.”
The fire ripples beside us. It turns her blue eyes purple, reminding me of the night sky after the first time we'd slept together. She doesn't blink. Neither do I.
She pulls her blanket tighter. “You never came. I was so sure you would, and you didn't. I spent years feeling my heart jump every single time I heard a car pull up in the driveway, or the front door open. Still, you weren't there. And when I finally thought I was over you - over the idea of you - you came back into my life and picked at my heart until you had more of it in your palm than I had in my own chest.”
“How?” I whisper, my voice drier than the crackling logs. “After everything I did, not just the things you heard, but things I actually did to you, how can you love me?”
Laiken splits the blanket and towel open, enough so I can watch her fan her fingers over her ribs. “Because as much as you've changed, this part of me hasn't. It remembers the real you. Even now. That’s why . . .” She can't finish, a sob ending her beautiful words. Tears turn into more coughing. She’s falling apart inches away from me.
I'm the only one who can keep her together.
“I'll give you what you want,” I whisper, my shoulders sloping from the weight of what I'm about to do. My voice cracks when I start again. “I promised him I'd never tell a soul what happened that night on the mountain.”
Laiken's eyes glisten. She doesn't move closer, yet I feel her hanging onto me with every atom of her consciousness.
Looking into the fire, I say, “Bernard had been struggling with boarding school since the beginning. It wasn't easy for him—the drills, the rules, the decorum. I adapted to it, he didn't. I knew he was having a hard time and one day, right before we were both supposed to go home for holiday break, he confided in me that he wanted to quit.” I grimace, knotting my fingers in my lap. I need to squeeze something.
“I didn't come home because I knew he needed me. I thought I could cheer him up, keep him excited for going back after the break. And, I worried if I wasn't there watching over him, he'd feel less guilty about quitting. He respected me, you know? He couldn't back out so easily if I was constantly at his side.
“I should have been supportive, but I wasn't. I was so fucking caught up in my own drive for my parents' approval, that the very idea he'd bow out made me sick. I was obsessed with success. Him leaving would mean he'd failed, and I cared about him too much to let him fail.
“For five years I pushed him. Day in, day out, I hovered over his every move to make sure he passed his classes. That he didn't dare give a whiff of giving up. I watched him so closely that he couldn't hide anything from me.”
A memory splices its way between the gaps of my ribs. I unclench my hands, gripping my scalp. “The first time he started using heroin,” I mutter, “I caught him. And I told him . . . I fucking told him to stop, or he'd be expelled when a teacher discovered it. All he did was hide it better.”
Laiken cups her palms over the lower half of her face. The only sound is the occasional pocket of air exploding in the fire. Gathering myself, I keep talking, because it's too late to stop anymore. “Since he was performing better, working harder, I turned a blind eye. I pretended I didn't notice all the signs of depression.
“The ski trip was his idea of a
graduation gift for us before we enlisted. I was excited to be done with school, ready to join the military for real and show my father what I was capable of. I was also ready for a much needed break. We flew out for a week, reveling in every aspect of our youth - and my naivety.”
Visiting Switzerland with Bernard was wonderful.
I didn't know it was his way of saying goodbye.
“That night, he told me he wanted to go for a walk. There were so many stars out, just miles and miles of glittery hot spots. We shoved through the snow, all the way up this path through the trees. I told him we should go back, there was no reason to hike up the mountain. We could do it in the morning. Bernard kept pushing me, throwing my words back at me about not giving up. I climbed that trail to the top.”
Inhaling, I remember the burn in my lungs, like I'm still on that mountain. Part of me was definitely left there. “It was beautiful,” I say softly. “We stood on the ledge, gazing out over the trees, nearly blind if not for our flashlights. I was freezing, said we should head back. Bernard said he wasn't going back. Not then, not ever.”
Laiken makes a tiny sound that her hands muffle. She knows how this story ends, but I think, as I told her, she almost forgot.
“Bernard admitted he never quit using heroin. He was never going to get into basic training. They'd drug test him, then he'd be blacklisted - an embarrassment to his friends and family. He was so calm as he told me this. Just this far away smile. I begged him to go back with me. I swore everything would work out and we could get him clean. He could start over.”
Heat builds in my skull. I rock forward, splitting open from the migraine. I won't cry. I refuse to cry. Monsters like me don't deserve tears. We get nothing. “He said that he wanted to be strong like me. After all those years of doing his best, he realized he wasn't. It was a revelation he couldn't live with. He couldn't even see a reason to go on, and I tried to tell him he had . . .” I slow down, catching my breath. I shouldn't be telling Laiken any of this, but at the very least, I can keep some of my cousin's private life a secret.
I press on, my head throbbing the whole time. “Nothing I said could convince him. He sat on the ledge, just dangling his legs over the abyss. Since he'd done me the favor of sticking it out through school, he wanted a favor from me.”
I'm sweating now. I wish the fire was gone. I fight the urge to rush out into the icy evening outside the cabin. Pulling in more air, I wait for it to give me strength. It doesn't, as if I have a pinhole leak somewhere inside of me. “He was going to jump,” I say, “But he didn't want anyone to know he'd committed suicide. It would be my job to tell the police that it was all an accident . . . that he’d just slipped and hadn't meant to.”
“No,” she moans.
“What was I supposed to do? I promised him. I don't know why, because here I am, breaking my word now.” I laugh and my throat constricts, like my body is reminding me I don't deserve laughter of any kind. “The second the phrase ‘I promise’ was out of my mouth, he tipped forward off the mountain. He didn't even scream.”
Tears slip from Laiken's wide blue eyes. There's enough for both of us.
I touch my shoulder, tracing the tattoo that reads Faith. “Bernard and I got the same ink at the same time while on that trip. Faith, because he told me I should remember to have as much faith in myself as I had in him.”
“The Faith project,” she whispers.
I smile grimly. “My dedication to Bernard.” It hurt so damn bad when Joseph used that project against me. I'd been furious that I was tricked, but more than that, I'd felt like I'd betrayed Bernard, too.
“Dominic. If all of that's true . . .”
“It's true,” I say sharply. I pinch the bridge of my nose, but nothing relieves the pressure in my head, in every cell. “You're the first person to know every fucked up aspect of my life. Every mistake. All the selfish ways I pushed others to be as dedicated as me, because it was the only thing I thought that mattered.”
“Why wouldn't you tell everyone it was an accident, like Bernard said?”
“I tried to. When I told the police he'd slipped, they became suspicious. They wanted to nail me for his death, saying it was a potential homicide. But there was no proof. They couldn't charge me.” Thinking of the hours I spent in that tiny jail cell makes me cringe. “My uncle cornered me when I returned to the States. He asked me what happened. I started to say it was an accident, but the accusation in his eyes, the goddamn sadness . . . I couldn't say anything at all. He started calling me a murderer. And I couldn't deny it, because it's the truth. Bernard jumped, but it was my fault he thought it was the only answer.”
Again, I relive Kara's tear-filled phone call. Murderer, murderer, murderer!
Laiken reaches out, grabbing my forearms. The towel slides away, her skin pink and perfect but all I can see is new stars being birthed in her eyes. How can she look at me like that still, with so much tenderness? “Dominic, listen to me. You aren't a murderer.”
“I am. Weren't you listening?”
“I heard every damn word!” she insists, digging her nails in. It hurts, but I don't shrug her off. Her voice is plaintive. “Bernard died, but it wasn't because of you. You cared about him so much! And he cared about you.”
My head swings side to side, I can't stop shaking it. “No, no, no. You're wrong! It's my fault, all of it!”
Her mouth trembles. “All this time, you let people believe you killed him. You suffered for his legacy. Dominic, that's not something a monster would do.”
I stiffen, unable to let myself believe her. I've been told so many times in my life that I'm nothing, that the world would be brighter without me. I was always the worthless boy working so hard to prove his heart had a reason to beat alongside everyone else's. After losing Bernard, taking on the burden of my promise to him, the fearful stares, the scowls, the hatred. I let it all root in my body until it became my armor.
No one had broken through. No one had even tried, except for her.
“You're not a killer,” she says firmly, pulling at me, trying to get me to collapse against her. “I couldn't love a killer. I know it. I always knew it. And I love you with everything I have, Dominic. I love you.”
As I fall forward into her arms, the pressure finally releases from my skull. It fades through my pores, heating my forehead, shoving at my temples. Laiken wraps her hands in my hair, kissing me, and the energy exits like steam from my lips.
And still it goes on, slipping from my lungs, my bones, until every muscle is limp from the exhaustion of my own existence taking hold. The only part of me that doesn't go slack is my heart.
It swells.
It burns.
It kicks at my ribs until I become nothing but a single beating rhythm.
“I love you,” I chant against her mouth. Salty, warm tears leave tracks down my cheeks. “I love you so much, Laiken. So damn much. I always have, ever since the start. I've always known deep in my bones that it was you. Always you.”
If my claws are buried in her heart too deeply to remove, then hers are sunk in my soul and beyond, forever a part of me.
- Chapter 18 -
Laiken
Watching Dominic sleep used to be like watching a volcano waiting for it to erupt. Something in him has changed. He's always been so explosive; a man who shuns predictability, while maintaining a consistency earned from years of hard work.
Now, though, there's peacefulness in his breathing. His eyelids aren't twitching restlessly and his mouth is a smooth, half-open shape begging to be kissed.
When I think about how much he's been through, how much he's fought against being loved while desperately wanting me, wishing for me, my heart squeezes. I love him so much it scares me.
I was relieved to learn he hadn't murdered Bernard.
I'm worried that, even if he had, I might still love him.
In my relief to be free of the conflict, I let myself forget about my near drowning yesterday. I hadn't told Dominic that once,
when I was five, I'd had a similar incident. It was spring, the river full and the air warm. I'd been confident I could jump the rocks like Kara always did. I wanted to be everything that she was. Sometimes I ached to be better.
I'd fallen in and hit my head, bowling down the river until my sister caught up to me and yanked me out. I owed my life to Kara.
Now I owe my life to Dominic.
But when I think about them both, at the same time, it's like someone has mixed pickle juice and milk in my belly. The two people I love the most hate each other. Or, maybe Dominic doesn't hate Kara, but he doesn't get along with her. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.
“What's wrong?” he whispers, and I startle. He's staring at me from the pile of blankets and towels we fell asleep on. “You've got this pained look in your eyes.” He reaches over, stroking a fingertip across my brow, like he can soothe away whatever is haunting me.
Smiling, I snuggle against him. “Nothing is wrong. Everything is better than I hoped it could be.”
His arm wraps around my shoulders and belts me against him. I'm strapped in, naked chest to naked chest. I can see nothing but the tattoos that traverse his collarbone and those black feathers that spread like a dark angel's. My angel. That's what he is.
I think back to the day that the clouds split apart. How the sun teased over his upturned face, then shut away, as if it had denied him entry to Heaven. Now I know it's not that he doesn't belong up there, it's that he's needed here. I need him.
And he needs me.
THE NEXT MORNING, WE head back to the river.
Dominic is strong enough to wade under the bridge without being tossed into the rapids like I was. He spreads his legs, becoming stable as he aims his phone towards the wood overhead. He takes some photos.
Tucking the device away, he stands tall, gripping the handle of the knife. With a grunt, he rips it free. Quickly he strides out of the river, making his way up the slope. He spots me watching and comes my way. “Well?” I ask anxiously. “What was under there?”
