Clearer in the Night (10 page)

“Mom,” I said, approaching her like I approached a kid crying at drop-off time—hands out, and with a soft smile. “I’m sorry you were scared, but I just went for a run, and then I went into town to check in with Sarah, and make sure everything was okay.”

“You could have disappeared. Just like them. Vanished, no trace, and everyone thinking you’re dead.”

I stared at her for a long minute, then reached out a hand and put it on her arm. She jerked it away, and the pictures rattled on the wall again. “Mom. Dad and Sophie are dead. They died when Dad drove his car into the lake.”

She gave me a look of pure and total disgust. “Their bodies were never found.”

“Because our lake is silty and impossible to search. When you swim, you can’t even see your feet at the end of your legs. The coroner said that there was no sign that anyone got out of that car alive, Mom. They died. A long time ago.” I put my hands on her, and she shrugged them off, harder.

“That’s because someone stole them from us, Caitlyn. I thought you knew that. No wonder you’ve hated me all this time. You thought I drove them away, but they were stolen. Stolen from us.” She was smiling now, earnest and lit up from the inside. My stomach, however, was in knots.

“Mom. You sound crazy.” I tried to keep the fear out of my voice, but I was pretty sure I didn’t manage it.

Mom didn’t notice; she laughed. “Don’t leave again without letting me know, Cait. Better yet, don’t leave at all. If you don’t leave, they can’t get you. I promise.” She reached out and hugged me tightly, her head pressing into my shoulder. And then she went into the kitchen, humming happily to herself. An old show tune that Sophie had loved. When she’d been alive.

I sagged against the wall. What in the name of God had I walked back into?

I went upstairs to shower off the sweat from the run, and the stress. I turned yesterday’s underwear inside out and pulled on jeans and a shirt. Next order of business was going by my apartment and getting clothes. A few days’ worth. Or more.

I didn’t know if Mom had always been like this, or if it was a new development. Maybe she’d always been crazy, convinced that Dad and Sophie were out there, somewhere, instead of under a hundred feet of water, and I’d just never been able to see the forest for the trees. Or maybe this was some kind of new development, brought on by the stress of—what? As far as I knew, her life had been fine. I mean, not that we talked about it or anything. But she hadn’t told me anything was wrong.

Yeah, maybe that wasn’t the best measure of her mental health.

The plan had been to walk in, reassure her that I wasn’t dead, and walk out again. That seemed impractical now. Whatever was going on was…devouring her. Destroying her. My mother had never been all that well put together, but she’d been a bastion of sanity compared to the woman who was downstairs right now.

I wasn’t going to abandon her like she’d abandoned me. It was that simple. It had to be.

I threaded my way through the piles on the stairs; that would be the first order of business. Most of it looked like junk mail, but there were threatening-looking red stamps on some of the upper strata. As I turned to head into the kitchen, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. I glanced towards the sliding door off the living room, which lead out into the backyard, and the strip of forest beyond our acre plot. There were thick shadows under the trees, even in the daylight, and as I watched, one of the shadows shook itself loose and resolved into a man, walking towards the house. With features far too handsome for someone you actually saw in real life, the man peered into the house like a bad horror movie villain.

My stomach twisted and tried to rise up into my chest. I took a deep breath to choke it down again, and straightened my shoulders. “Mom, I’m going outside for a minute, I’ll be right back.”

She hummed something noncommittal from the kitchen, and I took that as permission. Acknowledgment. Whatever. I walked out the door, my hands clenched into fists. My chest was tight and swollen. My ribs ached, like something was pressing out from inside, a constant rush and push that made me dizzy.

Wes didn’t even try to hide. He even nodded at me as I closed the door carefully behind me.

“Normal people knock,” I said. Breathing was difficult. I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum, rubbing fiercely. It felt like I’d pulled all the muscles in my torso, and they were all seizing at the same time. But that was impossible, all I’d done was run half a mile and then walk down the stairs. I sagged a little, slumping down onto the stairs off the back deck. I could hear myself gasping, hear Wes speaking, but it was like I was underwater. No, that wasn’t right, because if I were underwater, the pressure would be outside pressing in, and this was definitely inside pressing out, pressing on my skin, my bones, my flesh, trying to—what? Change something? Move something? Make me—what?

I squeezed my eyes shut. The sun was so bright, too bright, but I could smell sweet grass and pine needles crunching and the soft, gently rotted smell of loam. I could feel it between my fingers and my toes, and I wanted to run, oh God, I wanted to run until I ran out of space, and then find somewhere new to go. I wanted to scream. I’d been wanting to scream for eight years, but I’d never done it, because once I started, I wouldn’t stop. But I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream so loudly. I wanted to scream until my bones creaked, because then the monster, the whatever that was twisting inside my guts would be out, it would be done, and if I could just stop fighting, it would all be over, so why fight, if winning was impossible, winning was always impossible.

From galaxies away, two hands caught mine and clenched them tight. “Caitie,” he said, his voice quiet and soft and somehow perfectly audible in the maelstrom. “Just breathe, Caitie. You’re going to be okay. Just keep breathing.”

Air was moving in and out with a faltering wheeze, but I couldn’t get my eyes open. How do you make your lungs breathe? How do you make them go? I didn’t remember. It was one of those things that had just always happened. Thinking about it was impossible.

And then my body was crushed into something hard and solid and burning hot. He stole my mouth away, and I let him, I was eager for it, my hands twisting into his hair and pulling him against me harder, opening my mouth to him as he groaned and lifted me up into the air to twist me tighter against him. His hands were solid and liquid at the small of my back, and the thing inside of me rushed up and through my mouth and into him, and he was laughing as I growled. We fell in slow motion into the grass, and I was on top of him, and I could feel again, as his head dipped down, his tongue tasting my cleavage and his hands roaming down to my ass, pulling me tighter and tighter against him. There was already no space between us, how was he pulling me tighter? I nipped at his neck, kissed his collarbone, and caught his lower lip between my teeth. I slid my hand between us and cupped his bulge, catching his groan on my tongue.

Slowly, the space inside me that had been empty for a moment filled up again, still twisting and turning, but no longer with that sense of unbearable pressure. My hands slowed and stilled, my mouth on his was less desperate. His hands went from groping to caressing to soft stroking. I was still painfully twisted up, but the tension had shifted slightly. One wrong touch would send me careening over the edge into madness. The urge to slide against him, to seek the sweet release I kept denying myself with him, was powerful, but I fought it down. Mom could come to the back door any second, and I’d already done enough to piss her off today. No more was necessary.

I withdrew from him, sitting up. The overwhelming power was back as soon as I stopped touching him; my hands pressed into my skull to stop it from exploding. He caught my wrists in his hands, speaking softly again. “Easy,” he said. “It’s overwhelming at first. Don’t rush. It won’t help.”

“What’s happening?” The note of panic in my voice wasn’t encouraging. I was climbing the walls of my own brain, trapped and scared.

“Right now, what’s happening is that you’re panicking, and you’re making things harder for yourself. Try and relax, okay? It’s not that I don’t love touching you, but I’d rather do it because—well, not because it’s the only thing keeping you from tearing yourself apart. If you see what I mean.”

I didn’t see, not entirely, but he was right that panicking never did anyone any real good, and I tried to…not do it. Successful? Probably not, but the sense of being choked from the inside out retreated to a dull roar. “I was infected by something. Right? In the woods. Something the doctors couldn’t detect. Some sort of—what, biological weapon or something?”

He shook his head. “Right idea, entirely the wrong genre. Still, I’m impressed. I didn’t think you would’ve gotten that far yet. I thought you’d still be at the ‘oh God oh God please save me’ phase.”

Good thing he couldn’t read minds, huh? “I’d rather channel Oz than Cordelia. Whatever is happening is clearly happening, so what’s the point in pretending that it’s not? They scanned my brain enough times in the hospital—if I had a tumor or something, I’d know. So there’s no point in pretending that reality isn’t real.”

The look on his face was wonderful. Soft and slow and incredibly turned on. More so than he’d been when we’d been tangled up and crawling inside one another. That was certainly interesting. “So what happens next?”

“Do you know what’s going on? How to make it stop?”

His laugh was low and dirty, and everything inside me tightened up in a fast run. I reached out for him and caught his mouth on mine again. He pulled me into his lap, straddling him, and there was energy between us, burning energy, how did our clothes not catch on fire? I wasn’t sure you could slip a sheet of paper between us. He was lovely, so lovely to look at, and his hands took away my choices, giving me what I already wanted. He smelled like clean earth and pine needles crushed underfoot, but this was wrong, this kissing in the sunlight, where anyone could see. Where it might be interpreted to mean something more than an itch scratched. I said it to myself, over and over again, and I looked into his dark eyes to say that we had to stop this, that it was just hormones, but he smiled softly at me, and oh, how I itched. I tipped my chin towards him, and he smiled as he kissed me. My hands, clenched in his hair, fell open and slipped down to lay on his upper arms, alighting like doves. Something deep and dark inside of me burst open, and something rushed through me like a summer breeze. I sighed into his mouth, and he laughed again. “You taste like strawberries,” he said, his voice full of need and lust and dark things that made me shiver.

I could think of nothing to do but kiss him again.

It wasn’t a fairytale kiss. My foot didn’t pop, and it wasn’t recorded in a list of best kisses of all time. It wasn’t attended by woodland animals or shooting stars. The average sixteen-year-old would not have swooned at the bright feel of Wes’s mouth over mine. Hell, I could think of a dozen kisses in my own past that were more passionate, more urgent, more talented, without even trying all that hard. But I’d never been kissed like this before. Not in the sunlight.

He held me gently for a while, cradled against him, his hands wandering through my hair. I could feel that he wanted more—the evidence of that was pressed firmly into the inside of my thigh, and in the tension in his fingers as they massaged over my scalp—but he didn’t ask, didn’t try to push us towards anything in particular.

“So do you?” I asked into the silence. I heard his curiosity, even though he didn’t say anything. “Know how to make it stop?”

“I don’t know,” he said, hugging me gently closer. “I like this part, though.”

“Okay,” I said. “But the bit where I kind of lost my mind? The part where it feels like my stomach is trying to crawl out my belly button? Those parts are significantly less awesome.”

He sighed, and moved slowly away from me, clearly watching me to see if I was going to lose it again. The pressure increased as he moved away, but no worse than it had been the last few days. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

He was lying. Lying carefully, too, but I couldn’t find the exact words of the truth. There was that slippery wall again, and the pain in my head that said I was pushing too hard, or the wrong way. “Yes, you do.” I’d always made it a practice not to directly argue with people, because intuition was just intuition, but the words came out faster than I could stop them.