“Maybe that’s the place your dreams take you to.”
“Well, that’s comforting.”
I turn to face the back of the store. The shadows there are a perfect match for the darkness clamoring inside me. All but possessing me.
“I need to know, Sarah. Christ, I deserve to know.”
The brass doorbell jangles loudly, jarring me from our conversation. I turn and blink at the brightness of the sun pouring in the open door.
Sarah winces too before whooshing out, “Oh, thank God.”
The answering laughter, issued from the middle of that invasive sunburst, instantly—but not shockingly—soothes me.
“Do I need to be amused or afraid by that?” My mother folds her arms, tugging at the sleeves of her thick work sweater, halfway covering her pink nursing uniform pants and flower-printed Crocs.
“If I say the latter but comp your chamomile, will you still stay?” Sarah answers.
“Uh-oh,” Mom murmurs, fastening her stare on me. The brilliance of her blues has my gut twinging with guilt. Nobody should look so ready to help someone else, even their own son, after doing the same thing for twelve hours.
But I shove the feeling aside for another day. That “day” has become years, and those years now exceed a decade. And I have to find out what lurks inside me. What scratches to get out whenever Kara Valari’s within reach.
“Does somebody need to talk?” Mom prompts, earning her a grateful smile and a small tea tray from Sarah. There’s a ball of chamomile ready to go in the cup and steam wafting out of the small pot at its side.
I don’t bother voicing an affirmation. Nancy Kane has read me like a proverbial book for as long as I can remember, which isn’t as long as I’d like.
“Let’s go to the back,” I suggest. “We can have some privacy.”
“Ooh, this requires privacy, huh?” Mom tugs free the thick tie that’s held her hair in a tight ponytail. “Oh God, that feels good.” She adds a groan, shaking out her thick blond waves. Though she gets the roots touched up every few weeks these days, the brushed gold color is definitely where my predominant shade comes from. But what about the umber that’s mixed into my mane? And the separate blue ring in my eyes?
And the fact that I can warp metal—or break anything else that gets in my path—without thinking about it?
“I guess this was a fortunate coincidence,” she says a few minutes later, as we settle together onto the contemporary couch that Reg has installed into this new annex of the store. There’s a long black coffee table in front of us, with a pair of mismatched papasan chairs on the other side.
“Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.”
“Well, thank you, Albert Einstein,” she teases before lifting her teacup and taking a sip. After letting her Crocs drop to the floor, she curls her legs up and leans a shoulder into the couch. “So now do I get a few Maximus Kane originals? Like an explanation for why you’re here a good couple of hours earlier than usual? I thought you and Jesse were doing a grading marathon last night. You should be exhausted and sleeping right now.”
She’s not done. I get that already. Still, I attempt to cut in. “Mom—”
“Oh, my word. You are exhausted.” She rubs a thumb beneath one of my eyes. “So dark already. This shallow into the semester. What’s your course load this time? Did they finally talk you into adding the intensive Shakespeare class?”
“No. Mom—”
“Wait.” She pauses, her gaze seeming to sear right past my tired features. “Wait a damn second.” She sets down her cup absently. “Max. Is this about…a girl? Are you seeing someone?”
I pull in a long breath. “At my age, they’re usually called women.”
She grabs my hands with eager glee. “Tell me about her. Tell me everything.”
“No.” I twist out of her grip. “Everything is what I need from you right now.”
Her face contorts with confusion.
“Mom…I need you to tell me the truth. The truth. About me. About why I’m like…this?” With that last word, I turn my palms heavenward. Except I’m settling for anything but surrender now. I’m lost, yes, but no longer content to be that way.
Suddenly she’s on her feet again. She whirls from me but tries to make it look breezy—the same way she brushes at small tears streaming her cheeks, expecting me to believe she’s just clearing off stray hair strands. It’s her trademark casual-but-not-casual move that she thinks she’s perfected. But I see through her thin act. All of it. She’s desperately trying, and failing, to hide her quiet grief.
“There’s nothing to tell, Max,” she rasps. “You were born different.”
“You’re lying.” I coil my fists atop my thighs, not trusting them to leave the new couch’s cushions unharmed. I’ve spent so long—too long—ordering myself to stay controlled, collected…concealed. For the first time in my existence, someone has given me permission to ignore all of that.
To seek out answers.
“This isn’t just about Jesse.” How long have I longed to blurt out those words? They’re cathartic but agonizing. “You have to know that I’ve been fighting against it ever since then. My strength. This…curse.”
“Stop.” She drops her hands. Her face is twisted with fresh anger. “It’s not a curse. You are not a curse!”
“Then tell me what I am,” I shout as I stand too. I don’t want to. Being in this state means I’m a step closer to hollowing a wall or wrecking one of Reg’s fancy new bookcases. But fury and impatience brew too hot in my veins.
Mom expels a long sigh. “Why now, Max? Why do you want to—”
“Was my father ever there?” It’s a question I’ve asked before. I ask it again—I have to—with the desperate hope of getting an answer. Maybe this time. God, please. This time. “Was he ever there, Mom? Does he even know about me? Is he alive?”
She turns and braces her hands against a bookcase. Her knuckles are white. Her shoulders are hunched.
“I’ve already told you. We met when I was in Egypt, volunteering for Healers with Heart. Your father was there too. He was…unlike anyone I’d ever met. Larger than life. He could sweep a woman off her feet with a well-timed look.” When she turns back around, there’s a tear-streaked smile at the edges of her lips. “And that’s exactly what he did. I fell in love with him, but it was fleeting. He was gone in a few weeks, before I even knew we’d created you.”
“And you never figured out where he went? Or where he came from?”
Her smile fades. “It was a whirlwind affair. There wasn’t time to share a lot about our pasts. I’m not proud of having to tell you that, but things sometimes…happen…in the heat of the moment, at the pace of mindless passion. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t thrilled when they told me you were on the way. Before I even felt you kick in my belly or held you in my arms, I was utterly in love with you.”
“I know, Mom.”
I finish it by clenching my jaw—not because I don’t believe her. Because I really do. The woman does love me. Would do anything for me. If burglars blew in through Recto Verso’s front door with guns, she’d take a bullet in my place. But I can’t understand the bizarre cosmic force that holds her back from giving me every detail of my identity. The gigantic missing chunk of my truth.
I right my stance and plant my feet, tucking my hands in my back pockets. “Things happen. You were a long way from home. Falling for a stranger in a strange place.”
“Alexandria,” she whispers with a note of wistfulness.
As soon as the word falls out of her mouth, the bottom falls out of my world. I go still. Very, very still.
“Cairo. The last time, you told me it was Cairo.”
A gulp moves down her throat. “It was so long ago.”
“Was it even Egypt?”
She stops and juts her chin. “You’re peppering me with questions, Max. You’re not being fair.”
“Sabah al-kheir,” I growl.
She searches my face.
“What? What are you—”
“Sabah al-kheir,” I repeat. “It means ‘good morning’ in Egyptian Arabic. If you’d spent any amount of time there, you’d know that.”
Her eyes flare. “Why are you doing this? Why are you pushing me like this?”
“Why are you making it necessary to push?”
I’m back to a shout, and I don’t care. There’s no one else in the store or at the coffee bar—Sarah’s made herself conveniently scarce—so I let it fly with the same volume Mom’s gone to. We’ve never fought like this before, but nothing’s ever felt more important to me. Especially now. Especially seeing her escalate into an outright fume.
I’m getting ready to royally hate myself for the new sheen of tears in her eyes, but with a couple of her hard blinks, they’re gone. Her jaw falls. A strange huff escapes her.
“Who?” she demands.
“Who…what?”
“Who. Is. It?”
“Who is what?”
“Whoever’s putting these demands back in your head. Somebody’s got to be doing this to you. Making you reopen this wound. A wound I can assure you I share. In more ways than you can possibly imagine.”
I shake my head, wanting to tell her my imagination’s vaster than she thinks. Instead I say, “It’s never healed. Because I’ve never known the whole truth.” I can hear the sadness beneath my declaration, despite how my senses are oddly detached from it. If I let those synapses connect right now, I’ll lose my thin thread of control.
“Just tell me who it is,” she presses.
“Nobody.”
Shit. If Mom wants to continue keeping her truth locked away, I’m justified in doing the same. On top of that, everything about Kara—her status in my professional life, her dominance of my inner life—feels too much like my metaphorical thread right now. Fragile. Special. And strung too tight for comfort.
“Nobody, huh?” Mom tilts her head and folds her arms. “That’s a lot of floor gazing for ‘nobody,’ son.”
“Okay, tell you what. You give me all the truth I’m asking for, and I’ll show you the same courtesy.”
“This has nothing to do with courtesy!” Her punctuation is an angry sob. “And everything to do with keeping you—”
She cuts in on herself with another sigh. It stems from places even deeper inside her. It sounds almost…panicked.
“Keeping me what, Mom? Just tell me!”
She sways in place for a long beat. Her breaths are like hurricanes of emotion. As I force my stare to fully meet hers again, I fight to discern the meaning behind her frantic expression.
Holy crap. She’s really terrified.
“I—I have to go.”
“Where?” I blurt. “Why? Mom?”
“I’m sorry, Max,” she rasps. “I’m so sorry…if I’ve failed you.”
“Failed me?” The words sound preposterous, even now. I’m furious, to be sure, but no way do I consider her a failure.
But I don’t get the chance to say that. Not when she turns and sets a direct course for the front door. Part of me still yearns to run and stop her, but another part knows that won’t make a difference. We both need to cool off, yet that’s not happening when neither of us will surrender ground—or information.
Right now, maybe that’s for the better. At least from where I’m standing.
I have no idea how to talk about Kara, especially to my mother. When I contemplate doing so, there are either too many words or not enough. All of them are abysmally inadequate for describing the woman’s cosmic-level force over me.
But how? Why?
I still barely know this girl. Even now, after I’ve tasted every inch of her tongue and groped her lithe little body like my life depended on it, that certainty is like a knell in my mind. A toll that grows even louder after Mom pushes her way outside and the store’s bell stops jingling…
Leaving me alone with the chaos of my anger. The black holes of my memory. The ongoing obsession with a woman who keeps defying me with her fire, her honesty, and her truth…even when she’s not in the same room with me.
I jack my head back and close my eyes. With any luck, a few minutes of exhausted sleep will finally hit me. But something tells me that’s wishful thinking. Something attached to the fresh image of Kara that blooms behind my eyelids.
I guess I can call this conclusion official.
I’m pretty much fucked.
Chapter Eleven
Kara
Sitting in the front row may have been a mistake. The murmurs and whispers throughout the lecture hall are more relentless than ever. Am I really surprised, though? The answer, from deep in my gut, is a resounding and disappointing no.
What’s more distracting is how hard Maximus tries not to look at me. When he does, the force of his gaze is an assault on my senses. It nearly matches his passion for the cantos as he reads, his fingers flowing over the air once more. And his silent turmoil when he asks a question and passes over me. Again and again and again.
I quell a rise of frustration. Why would he push for me to come out of the shadows in the back just to ignore me? Half the class passes this way until I resign myself to being as invisible as he seems to wish. He’s lobbing easy questions and getting easy answers.
“The souls who’ve been relegated to the second circle of hell betrayed reason to their appetites. Their sin was giving in to their passions. Now they’re doomed to an eternity in this whirlwind. What does the great gale symbolize?”
No one volunteers to answer this time, likely because the answer is sexual. I roll my eyes and raise my hand.
He clears his throat after a pregnant pause. “Kara.”
“Lust,” I answer flatly.
A few people snicker behind me.
He purses his lips with a nod. “Correct. Of course Dante recognizes several key residents. Semiramis, Dido, Helen, Paris. Finally, Paolo and Francesca, who find just enough reprieve from the endless storm to tell their sad tale. Some of these are familiar stories to most of you. Some not. On first glance, they all seem to carry the same thread, right? Passionate love affairs gone wrong.” He pauses, dragging his fingertips down his beard until they join at the tip. “Did anyone notice one wasn’t like the others?”
The room falls silent. I scan through all the characters’ histories in my mind. Adultery, betrayal, passion, lust, war, a very dramatic suicide on a self-made funeral pyre.
Oh, that’s it.
I shoot my hand up. Maximus makes a show of surveying the rest of the hall for any other takers. Not a chance in hell someone is going to figure this one out, though. Finally he returns to me, his lips tight. His nostrils flare slightly before he calls on me again.
“Dido.”
He pauses. I know I’m right, but I wonder if he’s silently hoping I’m wrong one of these times. The challenge feeds something in me. A dormant instinct, perhaps…or maybe something deeper. I just know I like having it stoked. A lot.
“Why Dido?”
“She’s a suicide,” I say. “She had an affair, but when Aeneas left her, she killed herself.”
“Which means?”
I shrug. “I guess Minos got it wrong when he assigned her soul to eternal torment. Otherwise she got off on the wrong floor. Suicides go to seven.” I smirk when I see him struggle not to.
“Or maybe Dante just has a soft spot for lovers.” His gaze fixes on my mouth, then my eyes. Finally. “We haven’t gotten to the seventh circle yet. Did you read ahead?”
I tuck my hair behind my ear and lean forward on my elbow. “No. I studied the map.”
“Of course she did,” someone calls out in a nasty tone.
Maximus shoots a pissed-off glare in the general direction of the heckler, but I can tell from the darting shifts of his eyes that he can’t figure out who said the offending words. He may as well get used to it. Though I’m not exactly sold on the first-row seating yet, so maybe he won’t have to.
He circles the podium and picks up a thick stack o
f papers. I sink back into my seat with a sense of relief as he begins distributing his printed critiques for the assignments collected from the class I missed.
I catch a few outraged gasps from around the room and smile. I guess Maximus is a hard grader after all.
“As most of you can tell, there’s some room for expanding your view of the work and improving your grade. I’d suggest reading through my comments several times. Nobody enjoys being edited, but my purpose is to make you all better critical thinkers. It’s a life skill worth developing. These summaries are due weekly, every Friday. Late delivery is an automatic incomplete. No exceptions. If you have any questions, I’m happy to discuss them during office hours.”
Then he dismisses the class. My smug smile fades because I don’t have mine. I thought delivering it in person might make up for the fact that I delivered it late, but I guess not.
When the hall empties of people, I walk down to him.
“Maximus?”
There’s no answer from him. Not even a nod.
“Professor?” I prod. “I didn’t get my assignment back.”
He avoids eye contact, shoving his copy of the Comedy and some other papers into his leather satchel. “I said any questions about the assignments can be addressed during office hours.”
I let out a dry laugh. “And office hours start right after this class. What’s the difference?”
He looks up. “The difference is you’re not my only student, Kara. And office hours take place in my office.” He arches his eyebrow, like I’m clearly an idiot for thinking I can demand answers from him the way I have been.
I lock my jaw and force a smile. “Very well, Professor. I guess we can walk over together.”
He releases a tense sigh and strides past me. I struggle to keep up with his pace as we make our way to the Archer Building. When we finally arrive at his office on the fourth floor, I’m delighted to find the plastic chair next to the door empty.
“Wow,” I say, following him into the little office. “I really thought the line would be longer.”
He drops into the chair behind his desk. “Close the door.”
Blood of Zeus: (Blood of Zeus: Book One) Page 8
