Blood on the Moon

by Jennifer Knight

  “Well, yeah. But you look like you’re in pain.”

  And he did. His face was rigid and the veins in his neck were pulsating. He looked away quickly.

  “Do you want to come or not?” he asked stiffly.

  I looked at his profile for a beat—took in the hard set of his jaw, covered in dark stubble, the tension surrounding his mouth and his perfectly straight nose.... I was worried that if I said no, I’d upset him. Make him explode.

  And despite the fact that he was rude, brusque, and generally miserable, there was a part of me that wanted to go with him. I remembered the way he’d mentioned the meaning of my name the way so many people had before, but with that gentle, almost hopeful tone. And the moment outside my dorm when he’d asked me about track. Could there possibly be more to this guy then he was letting on?

  For inexplicable reasons, I wanted to find out.

  “Okay,” I said.

  To my delight, he actually smiled.

  Lucas and I walked over to the Union together. The sky was deep blue above our heads and, for once, I didn’t need my jacket. As we passed through the crowded, noisy yard in front of the Union, a lady walking a Chihuahua crossed us. I curled my lip at it—I couldn’t stand dogs.

  I heard Lucas mumble a curse underneath his breath and he slowed his pace considerably, eyeing the tiny dog with unease. I slowed down with him, halfway hiding behind his giant body. As the lady came closer, her dog began to growl at Lucas. It barked loudly, which drew a lot of attention our way. I gasped and danced away from its tiny snapping jaws. Lucas narrowed his eyes at the dog and sped up. I scurried behind him, casting a last glance at the animal to make sure it didn’t follow us. They’re like miniscule gremlins, I thought with a shudder.

  “What was that about?” I asked, holding in a smile. “Are you afraid of dogs or something?”

  Lucas let out a short laugh that actually sounded somewhat like a bark.

  I stared; it was the first time I’d ever heard him laugh.

  “I’m not scared of them,” he said. “But they’re scared of me.”

  “That dog didn’t look scared. It looked like it wanted to bite your head off.”

  “Please,” Lucas scoffed. “I could field goal that thing.”

  “You looked scared,” I teased.

  “No, you looked scared. You got a thing against Chihuahuas?”

  “Oh, it’s not just Chihuahuas. I hate all dogs.”

  Lucas snorted with laughter.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he said, lips spread into a little grin.

  “No. Why?”

  “Nothing, it’s just . . .”

  “What?” I asked. I searched the side of his face as we walked. “Oh,” I said, suddenly clueing in. “You’re a dog person, right?” I must have offended him with my anti-dog agenda.

  Lucas smiled broadly, revealing a set of straight white teeth that stood out nicely against his tanned skin. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you could say that.”

  He held the door of Panda Express open for me, but I was still staring at how cute he looked when he smiled. He should really do it more often. Much more often.

  “You going in?” he asked, his smile fading.

  I went through the door, tripping on the sticky linoleum as I did so. We ordered our food and sat down at a table by the window. At first, neither of us said anything. I stirred the fried rice around on my plate and then decided I couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  Lucas grunted and took a humongous bite of his egg roll. He had about ten of them piled on his plate.

  “Why are you angry all the time?”

  Lucas’s angular brows drooped into a frown. “Who said I was angry all the time?”

  “Nobody . . . it’s just. You seem angry whenever I see you, so I—”

  “Well, you don’t see me all the time, so how would you know whether or not I’m always angry?”

  I looked down at my plate. “I wouldn’t. It’s just that ... I can tell you’re angry whenever you’re around me.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “Well, you’re rude to me, for one thing.” I gave him a pointed look. “But also . . . you have this angry vibe about you. Like you’re bursting out of your skin or something.”

  “I have an angry vibe?” he asked incredulously.

  I blushed. “Yeah, that’s what I call it. I’ve always been able to tell a lot about a person just from being near them. I get these vibes, like waves of emotion that shoot off from people. Nice people have gentle, sweet vibes. Mean people have pointy, jagged vibes. And people like you—angry people—have raging, crushing vibes that make me feel small and smothered.”

  “So you read peoples’ vibes? Their emotions? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I blushed harder, worried that he’d start laughing at me. “No,” I said. “Well, yes, sort of. But it’s not like some psychic ability or anything. I don’t believe in that stuff. I just get these feelings about people sometimes.” I studied my plate. “I’ve never told anyone about it before.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was scared they’d think I was crazy.”

  Lucas cocked his head to the side. “So why’d you tell me?”

  “I don’t know, maybe I don’t care whether you think I’m crazy or not.” I crooked a wry smile at him.

  He nodded and leaned back in his chair, twirling his chopsticks between his fingers.

  “So what did you feel when you met me?” he asked. “Just anger? Nothing ... else?”

  I wondered at his melancholy tone. Did he want me to have felt something else? But that would mean ... “Don’t tell me you actually believe any of this,” I said aloud. “I don’t even believe it.”

  “Of course I believe it,” Lucas said. “You wouldn’t lie to me.” He didn’t say it like a question or a warning. He said it as a fact.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I agreed. “You’d be able to tell if I did, anyway. I’m a horrible liar.”

  “So what’d you feel?” Lucas asked, ignoring my nervous chatter. “Or was that it? Just violence . . .”

  I stirred my fried rice some more. There it was again. That sadness. I wanted to know more, so I told him the truth in the hopes that it would get him to open up to me in return. “Well, like I said, you were angry. But there was something else. Something I’d never felt before. Like ... this bright, effervescent energy. It was odd.”

  “Energy,” he repeated slowly. He seemed a little upset by this, but nodded to himself as though he’d expected it all along. “That makes sense.”

  “It does?” It made no sense to me.

  Lucas looked up at me as though just noticing that I was in the room. He averted his eyes and said, “Never mind.”

  “Aw, come on. I told you something, now you have to tell me something back.”

  His expression was noncommittal as he looked down at his hands.

  “Why are you so angry when you’re around me?” I asked stubbornly. “Did I do something?”

  Lucas looked up again, but his eyes didn’t meet mine. “No. You didn’t do anything. I just find it . . .”

  “What?” I urged. I felt like he was on the verge of spilling something and I didn’t want him to stop himself before I heard what it was. If he wasn’t angry like this around everyone then I wanted to know why he was like this around me. “Tell me,” I said gently.

  Lucas stabbed an egg roll with his chopsticks. “I don’t know,” he grumbled. “It’s just hard to look at you.”

  I felt my mouth drop, partly from rage and partly because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “What? You think I’m ugly or something?” I asked, hardly able to get the words out through my outrage.

  Lucas’s lips twitched, almost like he was hiding a grin. “Nah, that’s not it. It’s just ... I don’t know. I don’t wanna talk about it, all right? Can we just eat?”

  I purse
d my lips and said, “Fine.”

  I glared down at my plate, but my appetite was gone. I couldn’t get his words out of my head. It’s just hard to look at you? What did that even mean? Just because he looked like a freaking European underwear model didn’t mean he could make the rest of us normal people feel bad for not being as devastatingly perfect as he was.

  The silence stretched between us, but I’d be damned if I’d be the one to break it.

  “So how’s track going?” Lucas asked awkwardly.

  “It’s fine,” I forced out.

  “Have you won any heats?”

  Though, I still felt like punching him in the face, I could tell he was making an effort to be nice, so I tried to get over my anger. “Yes. I won one at the last meet. But the other girls were scrubs. Anyone could have beat them.”

  “Or maybe you’re a better runner than you give yourself credit for.”

  I frowned at him as he carefully avoided my gaze. “Why are you being nice to me?”

  “I’m not allowed to be nice?”

  “Not if it’s because you feel bad for saying it’s hard to look at me.”

  “Well that’s not why.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Nothing,” he snapped.

  “Tell me,” I demanded, furious with him now. First he insulted me, then he was nice to me, and now he was back to being irrationally grumpy. I couldn’t keep up with his mood swings.

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” Lucas yelled with what looked like a shiver. I looked around furtively, embarrassed by his outburst. The cashier glanced at us worriedly, but busied himself with the register when he saw me looking.

  I heard Lucas take in a deep breath.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Bad temper.”

  I reigned in my own temper and said, “Me, too.”

  “That’s a bad combo,” Lucas said.

  “What is?”

  “Two people with bad tempers.”

  I looked down at my plate and realized I’d made a heart shape out of my rice. I took my fork and broke it up quickly. “Well, it’s a good thing we don’t have to be together for very long.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas muttered. “Good thing.”

  I took a bite of my now cold, fried rice and decided we needed to change the subject.

  “So,” I said. “I heard you went to high school in Fort Collins? This guy I know, Mark Gates, went to school with you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Have you always lived here?” I knew his family had supposedly lived here forever, but was trying to make polite conversation.

  “Just over a year.” Lucas took a bite of his eggroll, and I watched the muscles in his jaw move as I took in his answer.

  Someone was lying. Mark said Lucas’s family had lived in some creepy town in the woods for years. But Lucas was saying he had just moved here little more than a year ago.

  “Where’d you live before you came here?” I asked in what I hoped was a casual tone.

  “Russia.”

  I made a face. “Russia? As in the country, Russia?”

  “Is there another Russia I’m not aware of?”

  “Shut up,” I said, smiling at my idiocy. What kind of person moves from Russia to Fort Collins? And why didn’t he have an accent? There was definitely a story here. I only wished I had the guts to pry further. Instead I just said, “That’s pretty cool. Did you like it there?”

  “Yup. Tons of good hunting ... nice and cold and remote. Not like here.”

  “I came from San Diego. It was nice and hot and full of people.”

  “Yeah, you’ve got the tan of a Californian.” His eyes fell to my arms, sweeping down them like he could see my tan through my shirt.

  I felt my heart rate climb. He’d actually paid enough attention to me to notice my tan?

  “Yeah, well, it won’t last long, here,” I said. “Not with all these layers I have to wear to keep my toes from turning blue.”

  Lucas chuckled deeply and took a gulp of his drink.

  “I heard you had an accident,” I said delicately. I didn’t know if it was okay to ask him about that. If he was still shaken up about it.

  “You’ve heard a lot about me,” he said, sounding slightly amused.

  He avoided my question. I tucked that info away.

  “Mark likes to gossip,” I said, curling my lip.

  “You don’t?”

  “Not really. Not if it’s mean.”

  Lucas leaned back in his chair, fiddling with his chopsticks again. “What’d he say that was mean?”

  “Nothing. Just that you got hurt, but that you healed really fast. Like ... too fast or something.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It sounds like dumb gossip to me. Except everyone seemed pretty certain that you were on the roof of the gym.”

  He remained silent, spinning his chopsticks.

  “Were you on the roof?” I pressed.

  He just nodded slowly.

  “Why?” His evasiveness was making me apprehensive of the answer. I almost wanted to drop the whole thing. Almost.

  “I was drawing,” he said at last.

  I felt my eyebrows rise, betraying my shock.

  “Drawing,” I repeated with more than a hint of skepticism.

  “It’s . . . peaceful,” he said quietly. “Above everyone. No noise. No chaos. It’s almost like you’re in a different world. A different time.”

  I frowned, put off again by his sudden openness. “But you fell,” I said. “Why?”

  He exhaled, then, seemingly annoyed at my interrupting his thoughts. “I tripped,” he grunted.

  I narrowed my eyes at him, disbelieving.

  “Wasn’t as bad as everyone makes it out to be,” Lucas went on. “I just got knocked out is all.”

  “Mark said you were in a coma.”

  He sat forward and the chair hit the tiled floor with a loud smack.

  “That’s a lie,” he said sharply.

  “Okay,” I said in a small voice. My eyes strayed to his hands lying on the table clenched up like rocks. My gaze roamed upward, along his bare forearms. They were so smooth and muscled. Not too muscled, like I’d first thought, but long, lean, graceful muscles. I gazed at the shadows and contours of his skin and then saw something unexpected. He had a thin, white scar in the crook of his elbow. There were two of them, jagged and short like puncture wounds.

  “Is that scar from the accident?” I asked, pointing to the marks on his otherwise perfect arm.

  He shoved his sleeve down.

  “Nah,” he said. He gave me a playful smile that showed just a little bit of teeth. “Dog bite.”

  I smiled back, feeling the tension between us release. “Do you have any soy sauce left?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said and handed me his extra packet. As I reached forward to take it, my fingers brushed his. I gasped as his skin zapped me.

  Without warning, a flash of fear surged through me, consuming all thought, all reason. Only one thing penetrated my mind: Get away. Now.

  But as quickly as it happened, it was gone and I was staring blankly up at Lucas as he sprang out of his seat. I could see that his eyes were silvery even though he wasn’t looking at me. “I gotta go,” he said. He threw his hand to his forehead to shade his eyes.

  “What?” I asked, alarmed. “Why?”

  “Migraine. Bad one.” He grabbed his pack. “Sorry.”

  He flew through the door and I watched him race out of the Union, almost stomping on the Chihuahua. I heard its high-pitched barking even from inside the restaurant.

  I was confused by the flash of fear I’d felt when his skin brushed mine. It had left me with a sensation similar to a head rush—I was dazed and disoriented. I couldn’t understand where the irrational fear had come from. I wasn’t afraid of Lucas. . . .

  At least, I thought I wasn’t.

  6

  STONE

  Not long after Lucas left,
I set out for my dorm room. It was already close to dusk and the temperature was dropping fast, so I hustled through the frigid courtyard in front of my building. I was just about to stick the key into the lock when I heard my name. I turned around and saw Heather jogging toward me. She was clothed in mesh shorts and a tank top. Her arms were full with a water bottle and a black instrument case.

  “Hey,” I said as she approached me.

  “Hi,” she said breathlessly. “I’m glad I caught you. I just came from marching practice and I don’t have my cell phone with me.”

  “What’s up?” How could she be wearing shorts in this weather? I was so cold my nose was freezing off.

  “Pete and I are going to Zydeco’s tonight and I wanted to invite you and Derek like we talked about before.”

  I felt my face fall at the mention of Derek, but I picked it back up quickly. “Ahh . . . I don’t know.” I bounced on my heels, eager to get away, to get inside, to get warm. To spend the rest of the night trying to figure out why contact with Lucas’s skin had made me want to run away screaming.

  “Oh, did you have plans already?” Heather’s face fell too, but she didn’t pick it up like I had. She let it hang down to the floor, sad and crestfallen.

  Immediately, I felt guilty.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have plans.” Other than possibly taking a run at the gym to shake off my jitters....

  “So you’ll go?”

  I looked around at the evergreen trees, benches, and deadened flower beds, hoping that somehow one of them would give me an excuse.

  “Yeah, I’ll go,” I said at last. “But Derek can’t come. He’s got ... some football thing.”

  “Yeah,” Heather said. “Pete told me you two are having ... problems.”

  I cast my eyes away. I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Hey, listen,” she said, “I’ll get my roommate’s brother to come with us so you won’t feel like the third wheel or whatever.”

  “No,” I said loudly. “No, please don’t do that. I won’t feel like the third wheel.”

  Heather rolled her eyes at me and juggled her water bottle and the case around. “Don’t be dumb,” she said. “You’ll love him.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  Heather’s face spread into a sly smile. “Live a little, why don’t you?”