Fissure (25 page)

     I kept myself angled towards Emma because I knew I’d find the strength in her I needed when every fiber of my survival instincts begged to be set free.

     She’d called the cops after the first hit. I’d heard her brothers advising her not to, and I’d heard her succinct, one word answer, but we both knew Palo Alto’s finest wouldn’t be here before the two minutes was done.

     She never stopped fighting against her brothers. I don’t know what she thought she’d do once she did break free, but I hoped she was seeing a piece of the woman I saw when I looked at her. She was a scrapper, courageous to the core, yet she didn’t see it.

     As Ty completed making a punching bag of my head, she threw herself hard against her brothers, getting the closest she had to busting loose.

     “Just a walk in the park, Em,” I called over at her, spitting the bitter taste from my mouth again. This time, there was blood. I hadn’t bled real, red blood since 1806. Russo-Persian War. Long Story.

     “A walk in the park,” I repeated, bracing myself as Ty threw his fist into my stomach.

     I curled over, wondering if time had decided to slow to a crawl so it could have a good laugh at Patrick Hayward getting his butt handed to him. Vulnerable, Ty charged into me, hoisting me into the air with his shoulder. And then I was flying, but not in the cool, trippy way I did in my dreams. In the this-is-going-to-hurt-like-hell kind of way.

     I skidded across the sidewalk face first. The pissant had thrown me onto concrete.
Face
first. I wanted a piece of him so badly I had to wind my hands behind my back and lace them together so I wouldn’t be tempted. At my current level of anger and agony, I’d kill him with one strike.

     Ty’s feet came into view, although my eyes were glazed and no longer able to open all the way. They were swelling closed. Ty seemed to have picked an excellent day to throw on a pair of steel toed boots, at least that’s what I had a good internal laugh about before they started taking turns bashing me in the face.

     I hadn’t felt pain like that ever. Not even when I’d been shot close range in the stomach my last day of Mortality. Immortals experienced pain on a superficial level, if ever, but I was feeling it like it was cutting me open and spilling my insides out in the process. I’d never felt so human. Couldn’t have picked a worse day to feel Mortal.

     I kept my hands locked behind me, not about to act the part of a coward and protect myself when the seconds were ticking to an end. I wouldn’t go down as someone who ran out of courage at the last minute. I didn’t want that to be my legacy.

     Black dots were just beginning to cloak my vision when I heard a chorus of shouts. “Time!” most yelled. “Your two minutes are up, Ty!” some called. “Get him the hell off of him before he kills him!” a couple called.

     “Patrick!” one voice screamed—the only voice that mattered.

     Releasing their sister, Austin and Tex charged Ty, each one grabbing a shoulder and pulling him away from me, but he still managed to get a few last kicks in.

     “Stay down, punk” he sneered, fighting against the Scarlett brothers’ holds.

     Two minutes was up, I’d taken it like a man, keeping my promise and honoring my deal, and I was hurting hard core. My body felt like it’d just gone through an assembly line of heavy weights throwing their top-notch, grade A TKO punches. I could have curled up and gritted my teeth until my body did the Immortal thing and recovered itself like a new shiny penny, but because he’d told me to stay down, I did the opposite.

     Trying to right myself with as little hobbling as my busted body could, I had to spit out the warm fluid trickling in my mouth before I could reply. More red, lots more red.

     “That’s it? Just a wham, bam, thank you ma’am and you’re gone?” My body was broken, but my voice carried just fine. “No cuddling after or anything?”

     The crowd’s eyes did a unified amplification, like if they hadn’t been before, they were now looking at a dead man. The humor in that was that I’d been a dead man before their great great grandparents had been born.

     Ty fought harder to free himself, but the only thing more hulking on campus than him was the Scarlett brothers. He’d have better luck freeing himself from Alcatraz. I didn’t know if he was incapable of responding because his quivering red face was taking up all his energy or if he didn’t have a comeback worthy enough to speak, but I was relieved I’d managed to shut him up.

     He wouldn’t look at Emma as he was dragged out of the circle, and I realized I’d never heard him disrespect her around her brothers. He must know all gloves came off if he talked that way to their sister. My estimation of the Scarlett boys increased two-fold.

     “Thanks again for the rub down,” I yelled over the diminishing crowd to Ty, because I never knew when to quit. “You really worked all my kinks out. Same time, next week?”

     I heard another growl and surge of effort, but Ty didn’t bust through the crowd to take another swing at me. Too bad, because one solid round house to the mouth would have been one of the few things to make me feel better.

     Well, that, and one set of arms wrapping around me like she was trying to put me back together. God, I could have melted into a puddle of slush from those arms.

     “Why did you do that?” she cried into my chest. “What the heck were you thinking?”

     I dropped my stiff arms around her, trying not to wince. “I thought you would have noticed by now I don’t think too often.” My humor was still intact—that was a sure sign I was going to make it. However, I did not want to see my mutilated face before the magic fairy dust of Immortality had done its work and repaired me back to good as new. I’d never be the same if I did.

     Sniffling, she looked at me. “That’s not true,” she said, her hand skimming over my face like she was trying to erase the swollen, bloody, bruised, gashed, meatball of flesh. “You’re the most thoughtful person I’ve ever known. I know you did that because you thought it through, not because it was an impulsive, testosterone fueled decision. And I’d thank you, but I can’t be thankful for something that did this to you.”

     Tears were skiing down her face unchecked, but her voice gave no sign of them. If we were in a dark room, I wouldn’t have guessed she was crying the tears of a new widow. She wouldn’t give herself more than one release of sadness, her strength ran that deep.

     “You don’t have to be thankful, Em,” I said, seeing two of her every other heartbeat. Trippy. “I’m thankful enough for the both of us that your monster of a boyfriend shut up and left. But I meant what I said,”—I looked at her as hard as a pair of swelling shut eyes could—“if that bastard says so much as he doesn’t like the color of your shirt and I hear about it, there’s not going to be a time limit and I’m not holding back. You understand?”

     She nodded, her face forming around a different kind of sadness. The kind that ran deep and couldn’t be fixed. “I know, Patrick. I know,” she said, her voice as sad as her face. “That’s why I meant what I said earlier.”

     My blood battered brows rose in confusion; she’d said
a lot
earlier.

     “You need to leave me alone. Alone, alone. I can’t have you and Ty in my life at the same time. One, or both of you, is going to wind up dead.” She paused, swallowing a rock in her throat. “Just forget about me, Patrick. It won’t be hard to do. I promise.”

     “Emma, what the hell?” I felt numb from the hit I’d just taken to my heart.

     “The ambulance will be here soon,” she said, pressing a lingering kiss into my cheek. It was so rich in emotion, history, and goodbyes it choked the words right out of me. The first time I’d felt her lips on my skin was the last time I’d see her again if I did what she was asking and left her alone and forgot all about her.

     I might have cried my first tear in a long time just then. So much warm fluid was flowing from every surface inch of my face I couldn’t be sure, but that familiar burning feeling in my eyes was there. And everything inside me certainly felt like crying.

     “Goodbye, Patrick,” she whispered beside my ear, before winding out of our embrace and pushing herself through the couldn’t-get-enough-of-this-train-wreck spectators, running in the opposite direction. I’d seen too much of Emma’s fleeing back today.

     The pain surged in a fresh wave with the healing balm of her touch now removed. I would have collapsed to the ground and let the pain, pity, and regret eat me away until I was swallowed by the ground, but I heard the wail of approaching sirens.

     I didn’t want to explain why their needles couldn’t puncture my skin or why every wound on my body would be vanished like it’d never existed in a couple hours.

     “Run,” I told myself, feeling like I was going to need to whip myself to leave this spot where Emma had just held me like everything was going to be all right, like everything I’d gone through wasn’t for nothing, like I was going to be all right.

     She took all my hopes when she ran away.

     “Run,” I repeated under my breath, the sirens turning the corner. The crowd was already parting so the men with their boxes could sew up the bloody blob who used to look like a man five minutes ago.

     “Dammit, Patrick Hayward. Run!”

     It took a slow inhalation and my forearm thrust to my chest, but I did. I ran. I ran away from the sirens, away from the crowd, away from my problems, away from everything that had the potential to hurt me.

     Problems, no matter big or small, had a way of running faster than you and could be counted on to be waiting for you, rested and ready to pick up right where they’d left off, by the time you got to wherever you were running. I knew that, I’d learned that lesson a million times over, but it didn’t stop me from trying.

     I ran all the way to the edge of the Pacific, to the beach house where Emma’s sunny sweet smell assaulted me when I stepped in the door. She still lingered here, but once the scent was gone, no part of her would be here again.

     The two hour run had done me good. Teleportation could have gotten me here in a blink, but when I ran, when I really let myself tear the ground apart, my mind emptied, and that was just what I needed. I ran until I couldn’t remember my name.

     But no matter how furiously I surged ahead, I couldn’t forget hers.

     I tore my battle ruined clothes off as I entered the guest bedroom and took a full length investigation of my body in the closet mirror. I was almost good as new, except for a couple of gashes over my brows that felt like they’d split open to the bone. They might take another hour to heal like they’d never been there.

     But I knew, once I was fully healed, while my skin wouldn’t bear the scars of this day, the stuff that ran just below the skin would hold every scar like a mother holds a baby. I’d never fully heal from this day.

     Accepting my fate by punching a fist-sized hole through the mirror, I cleared the bed of all things Emma, everything I’d picked for her, everything I’d wanted for her. I crawled into the covers, naked as the day I was born, broken as the day I died, aching to feel her arms around me. Aching to feel her anyway I could.

     It was in that space between awake and asleep that I found her. She was waiting for me—she’d been waiting for me all along. She’d only needed me to look for her in the right place.

     I didn’t let myself slip into sleep. I stayed in this space, caught in between worlds, belonging to neither. I stayed with her and she stayed with me. If we couldn’t be together in this world or that, we’d create our own to be together.

     It was, perhaps, the most meaningful epiphany of my life.

I laid low for a few days, despite it nearly killing me. Every other second I wanted to go find Emma, so the seconds in between I convinced myself to stay put. It was driving me mad, feeling like I was being torn down the middle. So I communed with the waves to find the solace I was lacking, and when they grew tired of me, I tucked a blanket around myself and lounged beneath the stars beside a fire I couldn’t seem to give much life to. Even the embers missed her.

     I lay beneath that vast night sky believing Emma might be doing the same thing, and this small thing was perhaps the only right I had to claim of a girl that wasn’t mine. I even tried to give perspective to my problems the way Emma could when she viewed the night sky, but no matter how long or hard I looked, it didn’t work for me. My problems didn’t seem any smaller, any less significant, and their weight didn’t lighten.

     I knew what I had to do before I could say goodbye. Before I could “just leave her alone.” I had to tell her how I felt. Holding nothing back. Leaving nothing to interpretation. Tear open my chest and expose my soul to her. That was the only way I could move forward with no regrets.

     If, after laying it all on the table, she still wanted me to disappear from her life . . . well, it would rip my beating heart from my chest, but I’d do it. I’d do anything for her, even if the last thing was saying goodbye. I didn’t know how I was going to look at the girl I loved and tell myself the only thing left to do was walk away, but I prayed I’d find the strength to do so when and if that moment arrived.

     By Thursday night, I hoped my face—that had healed as if a pair of brass knuckles hadn’t beat it to hell—wouldn’t cause too much alarm. Three days after taking a beating of that caliber, the swelling and bruising should have just begun to peak, so I was a fool for hoping Emma wouldn’t notice this if I didn’t give her something bigger to think about. I was counting on my tell-all profession to do the trick.

     A few minutes away from the campus, I punched a number in my cell, hoping I still had one ally on my side.

     Four rings, and then a click. “What?”

     “Jules, it’s me.”

     “Hey, Me,” she said, turning down the grunge rock raging in the background. “I heard our favorite person in the world went all VanDamme on your pretty little face. I hope he didn’t do too much permanent damage.”

     Running a yellow light, I said, “Don’t worry. My face is just as breathtaking as before.”

     “Thank the gods.”

     “Where is she, Jules?” I asked, drifting around the corner of the campus’s entrance. “I messed up. I need to see her.”

     She sighed into the phone, no reply coming.

     “Please, Jules,” I said. “If she still hates me when I’ve said what I’ve needed to say since the day after I met her, I’ll leave her alone. I promise.” This, despite being a promise I didn’t want to keep, was one I knew I could.

     “All I can say is you two better name your first child, girl or boy, after me,” she said. “It’s against my kind’s policy to be a purveyor of all things of a mushy, lovey dovey variety and you’ve made me a regular Yenta.”

     “You’re an angel among goth chicks, Jules.”

     “She’s at a study group in the library. She’ll be done at eight.”

     “I’m buying you your first place out of college,” I said, jerking the Mustang around the corner, heading to the library. Heading to Emma.

     Julia laughed. “I’m holding you to that. And don’t think you can get away with a fifth wheeler rotting away in a trailer park. Don’t let the clothes fool you—I’m a girl who enjoys the finer things in life.”

     “Whatever you want, Jules. I owe you big time,” I said, pulling into the first available parking spot. “Gotta go.”

     “Go get her, sexy buns,” she said with a purr before hanging up.

     I could see the library from where I was parked. I imagined I could see Emma through its brick walls, leaning over a book, tapping her forehead with a pencil in concentration. It was every day moments like these I wanted to live a lifetime of. Every day moments I was minutes away from possibly losing forever.

     I bowed my head against the steering wheel, calming myself, saying prayers to whoever would listen, thinking positive thoughts. I’d never lacked for confidence, and I’d always felt grounded in who I was and proud to be that person. I was a man who knew what I was made of, but I was an instant away from finding out if that man was good enough for Emma Scarlett. If everything I’d made of myself was anything she wanted.

     Slamming my hands against the dashboard to release some tension, I threw open the door and took the first step in closing the physical and, fate willing, the emotional distance, between Emma and me.

     It was a few minutes before eight, so I focused my nervous energy on jogging around the lamps lining the sidewalk when what I really wanted to do was rip each one out and heave it as far as I could throw it. Now that would have been a tension reliever, but I didn’t need Emma to add any more evidence to the proof I was a “wild card.”

     Like some bloody chick flick, it started to rain. I was going to tell a woman—
the
woman—everything of a mushy quality that went against every male instinct to divulge in the middle of a rainstorm under the cover of night. Under the light of a line of lanterns glowing yellow.

     Insert wrist-slitting sappy music here.

     I’d dressed for the occasion, three piece suit and all. I figured I’d worn one the better part of my life, why shouldn’t I on the day I told Emma Scarlett the way I felt? Too bad it was now drenched and clinging to my body like spandex. Expensive, silk spandex.

     Running a hand through my hair, trying to get it to stay out of my face, I heard the library door open. I knew it was her before I turned around. That was what happened when you tied your soul to another’s—you were aware of them on a subconscious level that could never be turned off.

     She didn’t see me. Drenched, desperate, drowning under the light of a lamp, she didn’t even look my way. It was clear to me now her feelings did not mirror mine. Her soul hadn’t done any reciprocal tying. She didn’t sense me before she could see me. She didn’t even see me.

     I was still going to say what I’d come here to say, even though I knew I’d be hanging my head when all was said and done. I was at the summit and I wasn’t going to let all that climbing be for nothing.

     “Emma,” I shouted at her back as she jogged through the rain.

     She stopped mid stride, turning like she was moving through mud.

     “Don’t be upset,” I said, taking slow steps towards her. “I’m just here to tell you something and that’s it. I’ll leave you alone after that if you still want me to.”

     The rain was painting dark streaks down her dress, running streams down her face, but she didn’t duck beneath the nearest tree—she walked towards me.

     “I’ve been worried about you,” she said. “Someone told me you ran away before the ambulance came. And you missed class.” With the two of us closing the space between us, we were standing in front of each other with one last step keeping us apart. “Are you all right?” she asked, looking up into my eyes first, before taking in the rest of my face.

     “No,” I answered, “I’m not. But it’s not because of what Ty did to me—it’s because of what you did to me.”

     She nodded once, like she knew just what I was talking about. “I’m sorry. For everything. I’ve done nothing but make a mess of your life.”

     I took a half step forward, placing my arms on her arms. “It’s not really your fault at all. It’s mine.”

     “No, nice try, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. You’ve done nothing but be wonderful to me. I’ll take all the blame for whatever you want to lay on me.” She shrugged off her backpack, letting it slide to the sidewalk, but her shoulders still hung with the weight of something.

     I could let this deter me, she could deter me anyway she wanted, but I couldn’t risk losing the limited time I had with her. I’d come here with one thing to confess. “Why do you keep running away from me?” I asked, not employing this wonderful communication skill known as tact. “Why do you keep pushing me away when I get close?”

     I wanted to know, because I knew she knew. I wanted to be able to circle one of the endless answers I’d come up with as to why she turned and ran at the very moments I’d been expecting her to run into my arms.

     “Why don’t you run away from me?” she asked, forcing her eyes to mine. “Why don’t you push me away? Can you even answer that?”

     I stared at that freckled, rain-dotted, sweet with a twinge of ever present anguish face, and I was staring at my answer.

     “Of course I can,” I said. “I like you, Emma. I like you a lot.”

     She exhaled sharply. “You don’t like me. You like the idea of me,” she said, like she’d been preparing this speech in her head for awhile. “You like the idea of saving the poor girl with a checkered past. The idea of having a girl who belongs to another guy. The idea of having a girl who keeps telling you no,” she continued, weaving out of the brace of my hands. “But then, when you’re done with me, what am I left with? Besides a broken heart and a future just like my past to look forward to?”

     I couldn’t reply right away. I hadn’t expected this from her, wouldn’t have guessed in a year’s worth of guessing that these fears plagued her. I wanted to put together a thoughtful rebuttal to the insanity recently verbalized.

     “Emma,” I said, finally. “I don’t want to conquer you. I don’t want you because of Ty. Or because you keep saying no.” I reached for her face to tilt it up to mine, but she twisted away from it. “I like you because of you and you alone.”

     She closed her eyes and tried to step away from me. I wouldn’t let her. Not now that we were getting to the heart of what was keeping us apart.

     “How do you know?” she snapped, still trying to pull away from me. “How can you be so darn sure you like me for wonderful me?” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

     “Because I know.”

     “You don’t know,” she replied.

     “Don’t tell me what I don’t know,” I said, pressing forward because there was no further left to go backwards with Emma.

     “I know because, before I met you, I didn’t have this gaping fissure cutting through my damn heart,” I said, thumping my fist over my chest, my voice elevating. “And now that you were kind enough to put one there, I know there’s no way of going back. No going back to pre-heart gaping fissure. And the hell of it is that no one can fix that fissure except for you. The one who made it.” Hair was glued around my face again and there was currently not a single scrap of me that wasn’t drenched, but the chill couldn’t cut through the heat coursing through me. “So that’s it. That’s how I know I like you, Emma Scarlett.”

     Her face gave nothing away, but then the corner of her lip began to quiver. “You like me?” she said to herself, like it was the most unbelievable thing.

     “No,”—her eyes snapped to mine like they were about to lose the game of staying unemotional—“that’s not exactly the right word.” I inhaled, willing the words I needed to say to come out right. “I kind of fell in love with you weeks ago and have been too scared of losing you to tell you.”

     Not the most moving profession of love one man had issued to a woman, but it was mine.

     “You love me?” she said to herself again, like it was even more unfathomable than me liking her. “Why?”

     “Because I do.” It was that simple to me. Love is a simple thing by nature, people just like to screw it up and make it heavier than it is meant to be. That’s why it’s earned such a bad name.

     “It doesn’t make sense,” she whispered, giving me a look like I was as unattainable to her as the angels in heaven.

     “Is love supposed to?” I replied, taking a chance as I pulled her to me, not sure if she’d let me. She didn’t just let me, she came of her own accord. “Because if you need some proof to believe it, I’ve got an ocean of it,” I said, angling my mouth towards her ear. “I could tell you how I didn’t know I was lost until I found you. Or I could tell you how I have this ache in my gut when I’m not with you because I can’t keep you safe. I could tell you there isn’t a single thing about myself I like so much I wouldn’t be willing to change it for you. Or I could just tell you loving you is the most certain thing I’ve ever known.”      Her hands clasped around my back, tugging me closer to her. “So, Emma, now it’s your turn. Why have you been pushing me away?”