It was always there. It was always swirling around her biding its time until she had a weak moment where it could overwhelm her. The brushing ever closer movement of the grey was all she could bring herself to think of these days. There was little room for anything else even if she had the energy to bring it to mind. She was tired. She was so tired. She thought she could remember a time when the fog that sought to envelope her had been less relentless. She thought she could remember a place where it didn’t seek to intrude. There had been a boy with kind eyes who had once wandered into that sanctuary. Or, perhaps, her mind was simply playing tricks upon her. She took a deep breath and focused once more on keeping the grey at bay. Connor Ridley, Shadows Fall
December had come at last. Whether it had come soon enough remained to be seen. She had had high hopes for December. The word itself had become a sort of mantra in her head over the previous weeks. When she was tired of being carefully unresponsive at all times in public, when she had forced her hand to stop creeping up to the pendant of her necklace for the third time in a single class period, when she was sure that she had forgotten something important that she was supposed to be remembering, and when she was heartily sick of the sound of her own voice inside her head, the word December was where she focused her thoughts. She just needed to get to December. Things would change when it was December. Well, it was December, but she wasn’t sure that things had changed in the manner that she had expected.
It was safe to say that Lia Lawson had been having a rough few months. In fact, she thought that the use of the word “rough” might be woefully lacking in expressiveness when it came to defining the extent of what she had been dealing with since the prior spring. “Rough” implied not smoothly. “Rough” implied little bumps in your path. “Rough” somehow didn’t quite seem to cover the type of shattering of the status quo of her life that she had been experiencing. After all, it wasn’t exactly par for the course for your older sister to completely uproot your life because you presented some sort of an existential threat to the order of her universe. In most people’s lives, that simply wasn’t the done thing. Of course, in most people’s lives, the presence of a sister with tendencies toward world subjugation would have merited more than the casual acknowledgement that Meri was just being Meri. Was it any wonder that she found her present circumstances really rather trying? She thought not.
She thought she had been rather graceful under pressure about the whole ordeal. She, after all, hadn’t collapsed under the strain (yet, anyway, she wasn’t making any promises about a lack of banging her head against a wall if something didn’t shift soon). She was still fully functioning and doing her best to use the situation in which she found herself to her advantage in what ways she could. She was meeting the surmounting obstacles placed in her path and doing her level best at attempting to go over them when possible (and through them when it wasn’t).
Lia chuckled softly to herself in a darkly amused sort of a way (it wasn’t a very pretty sound); she was becoming quite verbose in her mental phrasing these days (not that she hadn’t had a certain predilection to that previously, but it seemed to be growing steadily more entrenched as the weeks went by). Her internal monologues were becoming progressively more lengthy (and complex and disturbingly heavy on the standard British words -- they just seemed to flow better somehow), and she found herself repeating them and reconfiguring the sentence structure to get the words just right. It was becoming quite the hobby. That was probably not entirely unexpected. Her options of late had been lacking. How many things could she actually do without drawing any attention? The safest things were the ones that were contained solely inside her head, and internal monologueing happened to match that qualification. She had had plenty of time to spend over the previous few months doing nothing but conversing with herself. The words in her head had been all she had been able to count on; was it any wonder that they had expanded to fill up the empty space of her life?
Oh, goody! Now she was being positively maudlin on top of being overly wordy. Clearly, the only thing better than obsessing over lengthy internal lectures with herself as her only audience was to obsess over self-pitying lengthy internal lectures with herself as her only audience. It was a good thing that she was her only audience --she would be driving anyone else into depression. She shook off the thoughts and worked the pendant of her necklace back and forth across the chain. The motion was inherently calming; it felt right. It felt good to be able to openly engage in the habit (or, you know, as open as you could consider it when you were sneaking through a darkened house in the wee hours of the morning).
Clearly, suppressing some habits for extended periods of time didn’t make them into any less of a habit when the restrictions were lifted. She hadn’t even been thinking about her fidgeting habit (overly emotional display of weakness was what Meredyth had always called it), and it had returned full force the minute she knew that she didn’t have to avoid it. She didn’t mind despite the fact that that particular train of thought left her feeling as if her necklace chain habit was some sort of an addiction that she had failed to recover from after a period of rehab. There was that maudlin touch to her thinking again. She should probably do something about that. Was it possible to censor one’s thoughts for appropriate emotional content before one actually thought them? She decided that she would ponder that later as she continued to worry her pendant back and forth across the chain. At the moment, she was up for whatever comforting familiarity that she was capable of getting from the gesture.
She wasn’t in the best of places at the moment. She had plowed through the tension of the last few months by always keeping herself focused on what she could be doing, what she had to be doing, and the hope of December arriving to create a break in the pattern. That didn’t mean that the tension hadn’t been there. It was, and it still had to be dealt with somehow. If you added in all the stress that her temporary leave from school in the long awaited December had thrown at her, then she was pretty much a walking bundle of high strung.
She shouldn’t be this nerve wracked just walking through her own house. It was her house. She should be able to walk through it without being reduced to being a necklace pendant shifting basket case. She made a conscious effort to slow the movement of her hand. She was going to wear a hole in the chain if she kept this up (okay, probably not as it was metal and all, but still). Even if she was technically not supposed to be wandering around in the middle of the night (which she wasn’t, but she didn’t particularly care what it was that she was supposed to be doing), what was there to really be afraid of in her own house? It was, she repeated to herself, her own house. She didn’t want to answer that question for herself (hence the reemergence of her necklace habit). Everything just felt as if it was wrong. It was her house, but it was also Meredyth’s house. That seemed to be the defining point from which her nervousness was springing. It didn’t feel like she had any sort of a home court advantage here. It felt like it was Meredyth’s game on Meredyth’s playground. There were plenty of reasons for her to be feeling that way, but the truth was that Meredyth had her somewhat rattled at the moment. She was just being so disturbingly unMeredyth like.
It sounded almost silly for her to admit to herself that Meredyth was creeping her out (after all, shouldn’t the whole drug induced descent into zombieism have been enough to accomplish that) with the way she had been treating her these past few days. The truth was that she had gotten used to the whole drugging thing (which was a disturbing thought in and of itself), but Meri’s behavior when she had gotten back from school was another jolt out of her established mindset. There had been a lot of that going around lately. She just didn’t think that this one was going to settle itself into part of her new “normal” any time in the near future. The unexpected shifts (the school switch, the realization about the medication that her sister had had her put on) had upset her. They had caused her to be temporarily angry. Then, she had a
djusted and found ways to work it out. Meredyth’s current behavior didn’t upset her or make her angry. It just made her feel on edge. It gave her a strange feeling that she was tiptoeing around some lightly sleeping, dangerous thing, and she would very much regret waking it. Those thoughts were bizarre because she had already been locked up in a boarding school and put on heavy duty psychiatric meds, what else was there? She kept waiting for the next shoe to drop because what was going on presently just didn’t make any sense.
The never ending sleepover was something that she could understand. She didn’t like it; it was annoying as all get out, but she understood exactly why Meredyth was doing it. It made sense for Meredyth to be keeping close tabs on her (that was part of the purpose of the whole boarding school fiasco in the first place). It made sense that Meredyth had had her moved to a guest room (that was far easier than communication proofing Lia’s own bedroom would have been). Meredyth had no way of knowing what she might have stashed there. Having the staff strip and dismantle it would likely raise far more eyebrows amongst them than the alternative (and why raise eyebrows when you could get around it) -- that alternative being to move the both of them into one of the guest rooms under the plea that the two of them needed to spend “quality time” together.
It gave Meredyth the ability to watch her at night. When she went to bed, Meri was there. If she got up in the middle of the night, Meri was there. When she woke up, Meri was there. When she got out of the shower, Meri was there. Sometimes, Meri was tapping on the door while she was taking a shower telling her to hurry up because they needed to get going. During the day, she went where Meri took her. There was never any distance. There was never any space. If Meri was not available to stand over her for some reason, then there was always a contingency plan in place to prevent her from being alone.
Was it obnoxious? Yes (oh, my, yes). Was it grating on her every last nerve? Of course. (She had been walking down the stairs the day before when the thought that if she threw herself down them she might get lucky and break her ankle and get the temporary respite of a doctor’s office had occurred to her. She had quickly realized that Meredyth would simply have come with her and set up camp in said doctor’s office, but the fact that the thought had been momentarily appealing should be a clear indication of just how shot her nerves were.) Could she with ease follow the path of logic that Meredyth had been pursuing by instituting the arrangement? She could. It made sense in a manipulative, scheming, villainess of the piece sort of a way. In other words, she could see why it would make perfect sense to Meredyth. That made it an aggravation not an invitation to be thoroughly creeped out. It was the other part of Meredyth’s behavior that was causing that particular lovely little addition to the situation.
What Lia didn’t understand was why Meredyth was insisting upon treating the whole situation as if they were both absolutely delighted to be spending so much time with each other -- even when it was only the two of them present. She could grasp the fact that Meri would be keeping up a pretense whenever there were other people around. That, after all, was part and parcel of the whole thing. She needed to keep up appearances. She needed everyone else to think that there was a perfectly valid reason for the two of them to be attached at the hip (even if anyone who knew them would know that this sudden need to be the best of friends had come out of left field). Otherwise, someone might start asking questions about why Meredyth was finding it necessary to watch her so closely. Lia had no doubt that her sister had some sort of explanatory story ready to be rolled out if it was needed, but she also knew that Meri would avoid that if possible. These weren’t complete strangers like the staff at a school that had never met them before. These were people who might ask awkward questions. Meredyth wouldn’t want to be bothered with that. If she could make the sisters determined to spend their last days together before one of them got married pretense fly, then she would hang on to it.
The logic (or Meri’s logic anyway) of that should not apply to the times when there was no one around to watch her put up that pretense. The fact that Meredyth continued to act that way when there was no one to see it except for Lia was the cause of her current discombobulation. The latest example of that being the night before when Meri had insisted upon brushing out her hair. Brushing her hair! For like a half hour! What was that all about? It made no sense. It served no purpose. It wasn’t like anyone was going to walk in on them and think “oh, what a cute sister bonding moment.” Meredyth was acting flat out weird (and not in the normal weird way that Meredyth had always acted). She had thought it before, and she would continue to think it for the foreseeable future -- it was downright creepy.
She was sure that Meredyth had probably brushed her hair out for her at some point in time when she was little. Someone had to have taught her (and the kindly old ladies that enjoyed spending quality time with children that peppered the pages and screens of fiction in the capacity of domestic help hadn’t been a part of her household). She could just barely remember the au pair that had been dismissed when she was three, and none of those memories indicated a woman that was patient enough to spend time playing with her hair. She couldn’t remember for certain, but it was likely that Meri had helped her with early pony tails and braids. It was a practical skill, and someone had to have done it. Meri would have been the logical one. This sitting and brushing just for the sake of brushing was something else entirely. (Again, it was creepy.) It was like her sister was trying to recreate some sort of childhood memories, but they weren’t any memories that Lia happened to have in common with her.
It was awkward, on Lia’s part anyway (Meri was acting as if she was right at home), because it didn’t feel right to have Meredyth trying to pretend that they were all close and sisterly. They weren’t. They hadn’t been for a very long time. Lia wasn’t sure that they had ever been (even in her memories of better times) anything that would justify this display in which she was currently engaged. “Hanging out” was not something that she and Meredyth did together. “Hanging out” was not something that Meredyth did at all. This was not what she had expected to find when she got back from school. She had expected there to be warnings. She had expected there to be some sort of open acknowledgement from Meredyth as to what had been happening. She had even expected to be greeted with threats as to how she was to behave around the wedding guests. She was all mentally prepared for warnings and threats and maybe even a little bit of gloating (she had had plenty of time, after all, to plot out various scenarios). She had not been mentally prepared for this.
Meredyth seemed to be taking the track that there wasn’t anything to warn her about because there wasn’t anything amiss going on between the two of them. It was, quite frankly, more disconcerting to deal with than an open confrontation would have been. If Meredyth had been counting on her thinking that she was going insane, then she would have been going about it in the right way. That thought did nothing except to agitate Lia all over again. Despite everything, she didn’t want to think that that was what Meredyth was doing to her. It might have been childish on her part, but she wasn’t ready to go there yet. She might never be ready to go there. It took more fortitude than she had at the moment to let herself believe that her sister would actually try to make her believe that she was mentally ill.
She would actually rather focus on the whole creepiness factor of her sister’s behavior than think about that. She was fully cognizant of the fact that it was unreasonable of her to resent the fact that Meredyth was treating her like she was an idiot. She had, after all, carefully cultivated the image in her sister’s mind that she wasn’t overly bright. While she had been going for strictly average, Meredyth seemed to have taken it as mentally deficient (although, for all she knew, in Meri’s head those two might be one and the same). The fact that she knew that it was unreasonable (and even that it all worked in her favor) did nothing to help eliminate the constant annoyance she was feeling
at the way her sister was patronizing her. All of that talk about allergies and what not had been utterly ridiculous. She didn’t even have allergies! Did Meredyth think she was too dim to know that?
Her quest to avoid detection as she wandered through the house was going well so far. She had reached her first goal. She slipped into the sitting room and hoped that Meri hadn’t been doing any rearranging of the furniture. She hadn’t made it in here since she had been back, and she definitely didn’t need the so far carefully avoided security personnel rushing in because she had knocked over a table lamp. There was a little light coming in from the window; she should be able to notice anything out of place before she walked into it.
Lia had to force herself to refrain from mentally huffing when her eyes processed that she was, in fact, seeing what (or rather whom) it was that she had thought she was seeing. After all, it wasn’t completely reasonable to assume that she was being watched by proxy -- even if it felt an awful lot like it. In reality, Wyatt had likely collapsed where he was because that was where he was when he had collapsed. There wasn’t any strategic methodology being employed. It was just a rotten (for her anyway) coincidence. It didn’t change the fact that that unsettled feeling of being hemmed in had taken hold again. She had taken an ardent dislike to that feeling. By the time this all was over (and she had caught herself chanting in her head more often than she was comfortable with during those last couple of weeks of school that it would someday be over), she would probably have developed some strange sort of emotional claustrophobia. She was sure that was possible.
She had thought she would be less trapped here than she had been at school. That had been part of her never ending focus of getting to December. It wasn’t as though she had been counting on Meredyth backing off enough that she could run amuck and accomplish whatever she wanted (she was hopeful, not negligently naive), but she had been counting on being able to find the occasional loosening space in the net. That hadn’t happened yet, and she was on the fourth day of her seven day window. She was starting to think that she wasn’t dealing with a net so much as she was dealing with a box (and boxes were infinitely harder to get out of). She wasn’t any less trapped here than she had been at that school; she was just trapped in a different way.
At school, she felt as though she was drowning in solitude. Here, she felt as though she was drowning in people (or, at least, in one person in particular). Even now (at two o’clock in the morning), when she had been absolutely positive that she would be able to do something such as find a workable phone or an open internet connection or anything really (that didn’t require dependence on Will Walsh and his uncanny ability to be a no show for every prewedding event that she had attended), she was being foiled by her sister’s fiancé’s apparent need to over indulge and camp out in the sitting room. It was enough to drive her from nerve wracked to flat out indignant. What was he even doing here? What was she going to say to him? What was he going to report back to Meredyth? There was nothing for it now. She couldn’t back track or sneak through. He had already spotted her.
It was bad enough that there were new and extra security guards that were blocking her means of exiting the house on the one night that Meredyth was “out.” Why she was out was something that Lia couldn’t even begin to fathom. Theoretically, it was a party, but that type of occasion was generally something (as Lia understood it) that one did with one’s friends when one was about to get married. Meredyth, she knew, didn’t have those kinds of friends. Meredyth had acquaintances. Meredyth had business associates. Meredyth had people she knew that were useful to have around at certain times.
Meredyth did not have the type of people in her life that took you out on the town before you got married. Meredyth found having that type of people around superfluous. She was really very self-sufficient. She liked to talk to Wyatt and enjoyed having him around (enough to make it permanent), and she liked for Lia to be around somewhere in the background (although most of the time Lia hadn’t the faintest notion why). Otherwise, Meredyth seemed to exist in her own little universe without much depth of interaction with other people -- not even with their father. Not that Lia was in a position to comment on that -- she wasn’t sure that she had ever had any true one on one interaction with their father, and she had been fairly self-sufficient herself for quite some time. That was until Connor had made his reappearance (bringing Anna and Kyle along for the ride).
It was probably sad that that situation gave Lia some perspective on why Meredyth didn’t seem to want relationships with other people. They got to be kind of addictive. Lia was living through the consequences of that sort of withdraw at the moment. Given the option, she would still pick the discomfort of missing having them around over the never knowing what it was like to have them in the first place. But she was herself, and Meredyth was Meredyth. Meredyth was not a fan of having people who were close to her. Which brought Lia’s thoughts back to where they had originated -- whom exactly had Meredyth gone out with tonight with the codicil that she wouldn’t be back until in the morning? Lia had no idea, but it didn’t really change the situation at hand one way or another except for the fact that it added to her frustration level. She had thought that with Meri out she might be able to work out something. Instead, Wyatt had apparently decided to spend the night in her house. The man had a perfectly good apartment of his own. Shouldn’t he be there? Was this some sort of weird basking in Meredyth’s presence because he couldn’t actually be in her presence thing? That might just make her gag.
Granted, he hadn’t done anything but stare at her yet, and she felt like she had been standing in the doorway thinking for a really long time. Maybe he was enough out of it that she could walk away, and he wouldn’t realize later that he had actually seen her wandering around the house when she was supposed to be shut up in her room (her no phone, internet connection disabled room with no writing utensils to be found).
After all, spending any time in a room alone with Wyatt was not on her list of activities that she cared to repeat. The last time that had happened had hardly ended swimmingly. She hurriedly brought her arm back down to her side -- it had been shifting upward without her thinking about it. It had been moving to rub a spot on her scalp that she was remembering the soreness of after Wyatt had been yanking on her hair. Touching the place would be a tell (Meredyth had delivered more lectures to her on that topic during the course of her childhood than she had spent on any other topic of conversation). Besides, it wasn’t like she wanted to give Wyatt any ideas about a repeat performance. If she could just slip back out the door, then everything might be fine.
“It’s my sister to be,” Wyatt announced sounding slightly slurry as he did so. Lia didn’t think that required a response. He, apparently, did because he seemed to be waiting for her to make one. She edged further toward what she was considering the safety of the hall. He surely wouldn’t remember this in the morning, right? She just needed to make her exit.
“Stop right there.” That was that plan destroyed. He even stood up to emphasize the words (not that that lasted long, he lost his balance and sat back on the sofa -- hard).
This was going to be lovely. Conversing with Wyatt Walsh was already such a fun experience; let’s just make it that much better by making it an extremely intoxicated Wyatt Walsh. She went ahead and let the eye roll happen. It wasn’t as if he was in a position to notice. Besides, it was too dark for it to be seen anyway. She might as well indulge in the luxury.
“You’re awake,” he stated as if it was a noteworthy observation. “I’m awake,” he added. She wasn’t certain if that was supposed to be a clarification of some kind or just some general information. He shook his finger at her. “We’re not supposed to be awake.” He chuckled like a child who was pleased that he was getting away with something.
Lia kept silent. She wasn’t going to be pulled into this any more than she could help. He hadn’t made an
y more moves in her direction, and she would like to keep it that way. Her feet were practically itching with the compulsion to make a run for it. She did not want to be alone with Wyatt, but she did not want to give him any reason to chase after her (if he could even manage). She also didn’t want anything noteworthy to stick in his memory. She, quite frankly, didn’t know what kind of a drunk he was, and that did nothing to quell her nervousness. She tamped down on the desire to run for it and hoped he would finish up whatever it was that he had decided to say quickly.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” he informed her. He leaned toward her as if he was sharing some secret. “I’m supposed to be sleeping.” He looked at her for a moment before adding. “At my place, not here. Meredyth said so.”
He made a come closer gesture with his hand which Lia ignored. It didn’t deter him. He just changed his volume level to that of a stage whisper. “Shh,” he told her. “I don’t do what she tells me sometimes.” He looked around the room as if to make sure that he wasn’t being overheard. “Shh!” He repeated.
Lia found herself having a sudden compulsion to laugh. Maybe it was the absurd picture he made looking absolutely terrified while he shushed her when he was the one doing all of the talking. He settled back against the sofa and began swirling the ice around in the glass he was holding. She could hear it clinking softly against the side. If he was not paying attention to her now, then she might as well keep edging away.
“You don’t do what she tells you either,” he announced -- so much for him not paying attention to her. He was staring at her intently as he reached over and flipped on a lamp. That was a mistake on his part. The hand not holding the glass flew up to his eyes. “Ow! Stupid. Bright.”
“Don’t move,” he ordered. That was a bit uncanny as she had just taken another step backwards. “Wanna talk to you. We never talk.”
That was true enough. Lia and Wyatt did not make a habit of conversing -- particularly in a one on one situation. She was very sure that there was a reason for that.
His eyes were open (even though they were blinking rather rapidly). “You sit down.” There was no denying that that was an order and not a suggestion. She decided to humor him for the moment while she figured out how to extricate herself from the situation. She was pretty sure that Meredyth wasn’t going to be hearing about this from him. She just needed to get away from Wyatt and find an unoccupied room in the house with a phone. She sat herself in the nearest chair and waited for him to continue.
“Meant on the sofa,” he muttered, “but that’ll work.” On the sofa? As in next to him? Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. “Know why I’m here?” He asked her.
She shook her head.
“Miss her,” he told her. “Miss her lots. You, you, you all week long,” he said. Was he actually pouting? He so was. “No time for me. No time for Wyatt. Lia, Lia, Lia.” He looked confused for a moment before adding. “No time for you either tonight. Both of us got ditched.” He sighed.
Lia’s first instinct was to bite down on the question that was forming in her mouth, but she decided not to do it. He wasn’t going to remember this. There was no way that he was going to remember this, so what did it matter? Besides, she was a little sick of having to stick to never asking questions.
“You really love my sister, don’t you?” She asked him. It was one of those things that she hadn’t ever put too much thought into before. He turned his head in her direction and rolled his eyes at her.
“Duh!” He exclaimed. She had to bite her lip to keep herself from laughing out loud at the enthusiasm with which he endowed the word. “She’s . . .,” his voice trailed off as his eyes seemed to focus on something on the ceiling. Whatever it was must have been pretty impressive if the expression on his face was any indication. “No words,” he told her with a shrug of his shoulders. “Not good enough with words.”
Wow. If there had been a list of things that Lia wasn’t expecting tonight, then that would have been at the top of it. Whatever he had been staring (or not staring) at on the ceiling seemed to lose its appeal, and he focused back on her.
“Meredyth loves you,” he informed her sounding a little disgruntled to be saying it. “She loves me too,” he added sounding a little happier. “She likes us. She wants us around. We should get along.” He leaned toward her again. “Okay?”
She just looked at him. He couldn’t possibly seriously be having this conversation with her, could he? Of course, she still didn’t quite believe that she had actually had a conversation with him about how he felt about Meredyth either. She half expected to wake up any moment to find that this whole Wyatt interlude was some bizarre dream sequence (only she didn’t think that she was creative enough to have dreamt it up).
“I said ‘okay,’” he repeated. “You should say ‘okay’ back.” She didn’t have time to formulate a response because he kept going. “I don’t like you. You never talk. It’s creepy. You just always sit there watching everything. I don’t like it. Why you got to be always watching? Meredyth doesn’t need to be watched. She knows what she’s doing. I don’t like you. You don’t like me either. I don’t care. Meredyth likes us both. I care about that. We should be that one thing where you are polite and stuff even if you don’t like them. What’s it called?”
“Civil?” Lia supplied the word he seemed to be searching for before she realized that she had opened her mouth. She was a little bit distracted by the fact that Wyatt Walsh was displaying insight (and into her of all people).
“Yeah, that’s it,” he agreed actually smiling at her. Wyatt was smiling at her. It was a smile -- not a smirk, not that self-satisfied little grin that he was always throwing around. It was a genuine, sincere smile. She hadn’t even known that Wyatt was capable of that particular form of facial expression.
“Civil,” he repeated. “We’re going to be civil. ‘Cause I love Meredyth, and I like her too so I’m going to marry her. And you love Meredyth even though you don’t like her. So, we’ll both be civil and stuff. Okay?” He waited looking at her expectantly, but he didn’t have to wait for very long.
“Okay,” she agreed. There was nothing to be gained by not being civil. There was nothing untoward or trouble causing in his suggestion. It was a bit disconcerting, but she was on a first name basis with all things disconcerting these days. She was actually more disconcerted by the observations about herself and the interpersonal dynamics of the three of them that the man in front of her had so casually thrown about.
Wyatt Walsh had insight, who knew?
Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy Page 30
