Locked (The Heaven's Gate Trilogy) (17 page)

Could it have really
happened? Or was it all part of the hazy nightmares that had plagued me last
night?

I smiled, nerves on edge
as I began to spin my combination.

He leaned toward me,
nonchalantly, but his tone when he spoke was demanding.  “Where were you last
night?”

I remembered the neat
stack of messages my mother had left on the kitchen counter and felt a surge of
guilt, like a child who has been caught playing in her mother’s makeup drawer.

“I was busy.”

“Where?” he pressed. 
“You weren’t at Tabitha’s, I checked.”

Indignation swelled
within me and I fumbled my combination.  Frustrated I turned to him.  “You’re
not my father.  I don’t need you checking up on me.”

“But it seems you do,” he
said, his eyes narrowing as he closed the distance between us to mere inches. 
“You were at home but you didn’t want to be disturbed.  What was so important
you couldn’t talk to me, Hope?”

His stern eyes were shot
through with anger.  I looked away, but he gently took my chin in his fingers,
forcing me to meet his gaze.  “What are you hiding?  Or are you just hiding
from me?”

The bell rang for first
period and I jerked away, startled, but not before a wave of warmth had spread
from his hands, enveloping me. 

My laugh sounded hollow. 
“I’m not hiding from you.  I was just busy.”  I tried my lock again with
mechanical stiffness, willing him to look away.  My locker door opened and I
studiously examined its contents, waiting.

Eventually, I heard him
sigh.  When I turned from my locker, he was gone.  Out of the corner of my eye,
I saw Lucas and his friends approaching.  Hurriedly, I closed my own locker and
headed for Art.

Why hadn’t I just told
Michael?  As I worked over my pinch pot in art class, I turned the question
over and over in my mind.  Was it because I didn’t want a watchdog on my tail
every minute of the day?  Or was I trying to build a wall to keep some distance
from the one person who knew my deepest secret, and knew it even better than I
did?  Maybe I was hiding from him, after all.  Or maybe I was just scared.

Frustrated, I squashed
the pot with my fist.  Whatever complicated reasons I had, it was going to be
hard to avoid him.  Our blissfully comingled schedules now loomed ahead of me
like a series of traps.

The day exhausted me. 
Every class I diligently avoided Michael’s probing eyes, pretending I could not
feel them watching my every move.  I hung on each teacher’s word and found
endlessly fascinating tidbits of information in the footnotes of my textbooks. 
And I took every excuse I had to leave, running notes to the office and staying
through lunch period for extra help.  But through it all I was acutely aware of
the closeness of his body.

So I was on already on
edge when Michael approached Tabitha and me during Contemporary Issues.

“Can I join your group? I
was absent when we chose topics and need to catch up.”

Tabitha smiled a smug, self-satisfied
smile, taking her time as she stacked her notebooks and folders neatly on top
of each other.  She crossed her hands carefully on top of the pile, examining
her long black nails with feigned intensity.  The new coldness between me and
Michael had not been lost on her, and she was relishing putting Michael on the
spot. 

“It’s fine with me, but
you have to ask Hope.”

With that she sank back
into her chair, her rows of bracelets jingling as she folded her arms behind
her head and rested her feet on the desk. She grinned even more widely, getting
ready for the anticipated fireworks.

Though my mind was
screaming,
No! No! No!
I couldn’t bring myself to let him know how he’d
gotten under my skin, how much things had changed…how scared I really was.

“Sure,” I shrugged,
deliberately doodling on my notebook to underscore how little I cared.  “Suit
yourself.”

Tabitha’s brow wrinkled. 
This was not what she’d expected.   She dropped her feet to the ground and
sulked. “You can’t change our topic,” she stated flatly, challenging Michael. 
“We’re already too far into it.”

Michael held up his hands
in protest, his eyes twinkling.  “Of course not.  It wouldn’t help me catch up
if we had to start from scratch, would it?”  He pulled his desk over to ours
and straddled his chair.  I noticed the ripple of his thighs and felt myself
weaken. 

“What are we writing
about?”  Michael asked.

“Human trafficking,”
Tabitha said, pushing some papers toward him.  “Here’s our outline and some
notes I made from our interview yesterday.”

Michael peered at the
pages, swiftly turning them as he scanned with machinelike speed. 

“You talked with an
actual victim?”  He lifted his head and fixed me with his gaze, boring his eyes
into mine.  I squirmed in my seat.

Tabitha answered for me. 
“She’d been kidnapped and sold as a sex slave.  Her sister is still out there
somewhere, probably in Atlanta.”

Michael drew his lips
tightly together, never breaking his gaze.  “I see,” he said softly.  “So this
is what you were doing last night – you were doing more research, weren’t you?”

Tabitha didn’t notice
that this admission seemed significant to Michael.  Instead, she squealed with
glee and dove into my stack of papers.  “You did more research, Hope?  Let me
see!”

In her enthusiasm,
Tabitha kept up a running monologue, only pausing momentarily to get our
agreement to her latest plans.  We gave it automatically, our eyes locked on
one another’s, knowing that our conversation was not over.

*****

“Don’t you think it’s a
little funny?”  He demanded, slamming the car door shut behind him with a
hollow metallic thud.  He didn’t wait for my answer.  “Of all the topics in the
world, you picked the one that would dredge up your own past?”

Michael’s knuckles were
white on the steering wheel, his anger barely in control.  The car lurched
forward as he put it into gear.  I shrank into my seat, wishing – not for the
first time – for the reassurance of a seatbelt.

My chin lifted
defiantly.  “Tabitha picked the topic.  It’s just a coincidence.  Besides, what
happened to Maria isn’t at all like what happened to me.”

“Is that so?” he
demanded, darting me a glance.  “Then why wouldn’t you tell me about it?”

I blushed, knowing he’d
pinpointed the source of my own confusion.  “I don’t know.”

“You
do
know!” he
shouted, slamming his hand on the wheel.  “You know it feels wrong, is wrong. 
With everything that is going on, the last thing you need to be doing is
putting yourself in more danger!”

“Maybe I just need to
understand what could have happened if…”

“If what?” he interrupted
tersely.  “If I’d not been there to stop that man?  Do you really need to put
yourself through that?”

I wheeled on him,
straining to keep the shakiness out of my voice.

“It’s easy for you to say
– you wiped him out and then put me from your mind for over eleven years.  Did
you ever stop to think what it was like for me, all those years?  It broke up
my parents’ marriage, Michael.  More than anything else, it defined my
identity, and I can’t even remember it!”

My words hung in the
air. 

“I didn’t,” he whispered
gruffly, breaking the stillness.

“Didn’t what?”

“Push you from my mind. 
Not ever.”

I sucked my breath in,
not sure what to say. 

We rode the rest of the
way home in silence, the only sound the occasional tick-tock of Michael’s
blinker.  When he’d pulled into my driveway, he put the car into park and shook
his head as if to clear it.

“Understanding this other
girl won’t help you remember, Hope.  It won’t change what happened,” Michael
finally spoke, his voice weary.

 “I…” I fumbled for the
right words, all my anger gone.  “I know it won’t.  But maybe if I can tell her
story, it will help me put aside mine.”

He leaned his head back
and rubbed his eyes.  “I don’t like it.”

I felt a flicker of
annoyance.  “Why, Michael? Why? Because you have some ‘feeling’ that I am in
danger? But from what, God only knows.  God doesn’t even want you here to
protect me, you said it yourself. Henri has been totally silent – you know he
wouldn’t do that if I was in trouble.”

Michael scoffed at my
logic.  “Henri’s behavior means nothing.  He’s just pouting, trying to prove a
point.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” I
pressed on.  “And you know it.  Even my father said he feels I am meant to be
here.”

“You spoke with your
father?” he asked, bolting upright and looking at me in surprise.

I nodded, trying to bury
the sense of unease and inevitability that my father’s admission had created in
me.  I ventured a smile, trying to soothe Michael’s concerns – and my own fears
-- away.  “You see, it makes no sense.  I have nothing to be afraid of,” I
argued as much for my benefit as for his.

“I know,” he said,
sagging back into his seat and closing his eyes. He was as still as a statue,
worry etching sharp lines into his face.

Emboldened by his
admission, I unbuckled my seat belt and turned to him, brushing my fingers
against his.  “You don’t have to protect me from my own emotions.  And a
research paper isn’t going to put me in any physical danger,” I cajoled. “I’m
not saying I have to, but even if I go back to the Center, it’s like Fort
Knox.  Nothing could get me there.”

He took my hand in his
and sighed. I felt a thrill.  Whether it was from knowing I was winning the
argument, or from the sheer pleasure of his touch, I wasn’t sure.

“Promise me you won’t go
back there,” he said quietly.  “At least not without me.  That’s the only thing
I ask.”

As the warmth of his
touch spread from my fingers, I gave his hand a squeeze.  “I promise.”

He opened his eyes then
and looked at me.  “That’s all I can ask,” he smiled, a sad, peculiar smile
coming to his full lips.  Squeezing my hand back, he released me.

*****

My mother was waiting for
me when I came through the door.  She eyed the clock as she carefully wiped a
dish.

“Seems you two had an
awful lot to talk about,” she said with studied indifference.

I chose my words
carefully as I plopped my backpack on a counter stool.  “He missed a lot of
school last week.  I needed to catch him up.”

“Is that why he called
you last night?” she asked, pointedly staring at the pile of messages still on
the counter.

I swept them up and threw
them in the trash, shrugging.  “I guess so.”

She tried to hide her
grin.  “He never struck me as the studious type.”

I blushed.  Why was I
blushing all the time whenever the topic of Michael came up? Just asking the
question made me blush even more deeply.

“It’s not like that,” I
protested, the words feeling wrong on my lips, choosing that moment to dive
back into my backpack.

“Like what?” flashed Mom,
whom I could still see out of the corner of my eye, her grin ever-widening. 
Then, she seemed to take pity on me, changing the subject.

“You never told me how
your interview went,” she opened.

I pulled out my agenda
and perched myself on a stool.  She continued to wipe and put away dishes,
waiting for my answer.

“It went well, Mom,” I
said, reaching for a pear out of the fruit bowl.  “Thanks for setting it up.”

“That’s not why I’m
asking, Hope, and you know it,” she said, her watchful eyes on me even while
staying in perpetual motion.  “How are you feeling?” She asked, sending out one
cautious probe into my emotional state.

I rolled my eyes.  “Not
you, too.”  I didn’t even bother trying to hide my exasperation as I rolled the
pear around in my hands.

She stopped in her
tracks, arching one brow in surprise.  “You told Michael?”

Oops.  I clamped my mouth
shut and simply shrugged.

She skewered me with her
stare.  “When did this happen?”

“I dunno,” I mumbled.

I could see the wheels
turning in her mind as she reappraised the situation.  Slowly, she nodded. 
“That’s what you were talking about in the driveway.”  It was a statement, not
a question.

I nodded dumbly.  Her
face was a mask as I waited for her reaction.

Slowly, she nodded. 
“That’s good,” she said, approvingly.  She started rubbing at a dirty spot on a
dish and I sighed with relief, thinking I was off the hook, when she spoke
again.

“You still haven’t
answered my original question.”

“I’m fine,” I said
tersely, choosing that moment to bite into the pear.  “I’m tired of talking
about it.  It’s just a research paper,” I continued, my mouth full. 

The pear was juicy, and I
slurped just enough to annoy Mom with my bad manners.  She playfully swatted at
me with her dishtowel.