NOCTE (Nocte Trilogy #1) (6 page)

“Come here often?” he quips, as he
sprawls out in the booth.
 
I have to
chuckle, because now he’s just going down the list of cliché lines, and they
all sound amazing coming from his British lips.
 

“Fairly,” I nod.
 
“You?”

“They have the best coffee around,” he
answers, if that even
is
an answer.
 
“But let’s not tell anyone, or they’ll
start naming the coffee things we can’t pronounce, and the lines will get unbearable.”

I shake my head, and I can’t help but
smile.
 
“Fine.
 
It’ll be our secret.”

He stares at me, his dark eyes shining.
 
“Good. I like secrets. Everyone’s got
‘em.”

I almost suck in my breath, because
something is so overtly fascinating about him.
 
The way he pronounces everything, and
the way his dark eyes gleam, the way he seems so familiar because he’s been in
the intimacy of my dreams.
 

“What are yours?” I ask, without
thinking.
 
“Your secrets, I mean.”

He grins.
 
“Wouldn’t
you
like to know?”

Yes.

“My name’s Calla,” I offer quickly.
 
He smiles at that.
 

“Calla like the funeral lily?”
 

The very same.”
 
I sigh.
 
“And I live in a funeral home.
 
So see?
 
The irony isn’t lost on me.”

He looks confused for a second
,
then I see the realization dawn on him.
 

“You noticed my shirt yesterday,” he points
out softly, his arm stretched across the back of the cracked booth.
 
He doesn’t even dwell on the fact that I’d
just told him I live in a house with dead people.
 
Usually people instantly clam up when
they find out, because they instantly assume that I must be weird, or
morbid.
  
But he doesn’t.
 

I nod curtly.
 
“I don’t know why.
 
It just stood out.”
 
Because
you
stood out.
 

The corner of his mouth twitches, like
he’s going to smile, but then he doesn’t.
 

“I’m Adair DuBray,” he tells me, like
he’s bestowing a gift or an honor.
 
“But everyone calls me Dare.”

I’ve never seen a name so fitting.
 
So French, so sophisticated, yet his
accent is British.
 
He’s an
enigma.
 
An enigma whose eyes gleam like
they’re constantly saying
Dare me.
 
I swallow.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I tell him, and
that’s the truth. “Why are you here in the hospital?
 
Surely it’s not for the coffee.”

“You know what game I like to play?” Dare
asks, completely changing the subject. I feel my mouth drop open a bit, but I
manage to answer.
 

“No, what?”

“Twenty Questions.
 
That way, I know that at the end of the
game, there won’t be any more.
 
Questions, that is.”

I have to smile, even though his answer
should’ve annoyed me.
 
“So you don’t
like talking about yourself.”

He grins. “It’s my least favorite
subject.”

But
it must be such an interesting one.
 

“So, you’re telling me I can ask you
twenty things, and twenty things only?”

Dare nods.
 
“Now you’re getting it.”

“Fine.
 
I’ll use my first question to ask what
you’re doing here.”
 
I lift my chin
and stare him in the eye.
 

His mouth twitches again.
 
“Visiting.
 
Isn’t that what people usually do in
hospitals?”

I flush. I can’t help it.
 
Obviously.
 
And obviously, I’m out of my league
here.
 
This guy could have me for
breakfast if he wanted, and from the gleam in his eye, I’m not so sure he
doesn’t.
 

I take a sip of my coffee, careful not to
slosh it on my shirt.
 
With the way my
heart is racing, anything is possible.
 

“And you?
 
Why are you here?” Dare asks.
 

“Is that your first question? Because
turn-about is fair play.”

Dare smiles broadly, genuinely
amused.
 

“Sure.
 
I’ll use a question.”

“I brought my brother.
 
He’s here for… group therapy.”

I suddenly feel weird saying that aloud,
because it makes my brother sound
less
than
somehow.
 
And he’s
not.
 
He’s
more than
.
 
Better than
most people, more gentle, more pure of heart.
 
But a stranger wouldn’t know that.
 
A stranger would just slap him with a
crazy
label and let it be.
 
I fight the urge to explain, and somehow
manage not to.
 
It’s not a
stranger’s business.

Dare doesn’t question me, though.
 
He just nods like it’s the most normal
thing in the world.

He takes a drink of his coffee.
 
“I think it’s probably kismet,
anyway.
 
That you and I are here at
the same time, I mean.”

“Kismet?”
 
I raise an eyebrow.
 

“That’s fate, Calla,” he tells me.
 
I roll my eyes.
 

“I know that.
 
I may be going to a state school, but
I’m not stupid.”

He grins, a grin so white and charming
that my panties almost fall off.

“Good to know.
 
So you’re a college girl, Calla?”

I
don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about why you think this is
kismet.
 
But I nod.
 

“Yeah.
 
I’m leaving for Berkeley in the fall.”

“Good choice,” he takes another sip.
 
“But maybe kismet got it wrong, after
all.
 
If you’re
leaving and all.
 
Because apparently, I’ll be staying for a while.
 
That is, after I find an apartment.
 
A good one is hard to find around here.”

He’s so confident, so open.
 
It doesn’t even feel odd that a total
stranger is telling me these things, out of the blue, so randomly.
 
I feel like I know him already,
actually.

I stare at him.
 
“An apartment?”

He stares back. “Yeah.
 
The thing you rent, it has a shower and
a bedroom, usually?”

I flush.
 
“I know that.
 
It’s just that this might be kismet
after all.
 
I might know of
something. I mean
,
my father is going to rent out our
carriage house. I think.”

And if
I
can’t have it, it should definitely go to someone like
Dare
.
 
The mere thought gives me a heart
spasm.
 

“Hmm. Now that
is
interesting,”
Dare
tells me.
 
“Kismet prevails, it seems.
 
And a carriage house
next to a funeral home, at that.
 
It must take balls of steel to live there.”

I quickly pull out a little piece of
paper and scribble my dad’s cell phone on it.
 
“Yeah.
 
If you’re interested, I mean, if you’ve
got the balls, you can call and talk to him about it.”

I push the paper across the table,
staring him in the eye, framing it up as a challenge. Dare can’t possibly know
how I’m trying to will my heart to slow down before it explodes, but maybe he
does, because a smile stretches slowly and knowingly across his lips.

“Oh, I’ve got balls,” he confirms, his
eyes gleaming again.
 

Dare
me.
 
  

I swallow hard.
 

“I’m ready to ask my second question,” I
tell him.
 
He raises an
eyebrow.
 

“Already?
 
Is it about my balls?”

I flush and shake my head.
 

“What did you mean before?” I ask him
slowly, not lowering my gaze.
 
“Why
exactly do you think this is kismet?”

His eyes crinkle up a little bit as he
smiles yet again.
 
And yet again,
his grin is thoroughly amused. A real smile, not a fake one like I’m accustomed
to around my house.

 
“It’s kismet because you seem like
someone I might like to know.
 
Is
that odd?”

No,
because I want to know you, too.

“Maybe,” I say instead. “Is it odd that I
feel like I already know you somehow?”

Because I do.
 
There’s something so familiar about his eyes, so dark, so
bottomless.
 
But then again, I
have
been dreaming about them for
days.
 

Dare raises an eyebrow.
 
“Maybe I have that kind of face.”

I choke back a snort.
 
Not
hardly.

He stares at me.
 
“Regardless, kismet always prevails.”

I shake my head and smile.
 
A r
eal
smile.
“The jury is still out
on that one.”

Dare takes a last drink of coffee, his
gaze still frozen to mine, before he thunks his cup down on the table and
stands up.

“Well, let me know what the jury
decides.”
 

And then he walks away.
 

I’m so dazed by his abrupt departure that
it takes me a second to realize something because
kismet always prevails
and I’m
someone
he might like to know.
  

He took my dad’s phone number with him.

SEX

Finn

Nocte
liber
sum
 
Nocte
liber sum

By night I am free.

Alea
iacta
est
 
The
die has
been cast.
 
The die has been
cast.
 

The die has been fucking cast.

Serva me, servabo
te
.
 
Save me and I will save you.

Save me.

Save me.
 

Save me.
 

“Hey, bro.”
 
Calla
walks into my room, abruptly, unannounced, and I instantly close my journal,
hiding my thoughts behind its brown leather cover.
  
“
What’s up?”

I smile, swallowing my panic, hiding
everything carefully and completely behind my teeth.
 

“Not much. You?”

“Not much. Just restless.”

She hops onto my bed, sitting
next to me, her fingers immediately tracing the letters on the front of my
journal.
 
She knows enough not to
open it.
 

I shrug.
 
“We should do something.”

Act normal.

She nods.
 
“K.
 
Like what?
 
Wanna drive to
Warrenton beach?”

To
see the old Iredale wreck?
We’ve seen it a million times,
but whatever.

“Sure,” I answer simply.
 
Because sometimes saying
fewer words makes it easier to conceal the crazy.

We climb off the bed and Calla
turns to me, grabbing my elbow.
 

“Hey, Finn?”

I pause, staring down at
her.
 
“Yeah?”

“You’ve seemed…
.off
this whole week.
 
I thought when you went to group a second time it’d help, but you still
seem strange.
 
If something’s wrong,
you’d tell me, right?”

Youcan’tYoucan’tYoucan’tYoucan’t.
 
You’re crazycrazycrazycrazy.
 
Don’tTellHerYourSecretSecretSecret.

I swallow back the voices.
 

Act normal.

“I’m fine,” I lie.
 
A blissful lie to spare her worry, to
spare my pride, to spare me the humiliation of being dragged away to a padded
room, to a place where keys are thrown away and the crazy people are forgotten,
replaced by medicated shells.
 

“Promise?”
 
Calla is hesitant, her red hair standing
out like fire against my white curtains.
 
She almost always accepts my word, but this time, she knows me.
 
She knows I’m lying.
 

“Repromissionem,” I assure her.
She rolls her eyes.

“You know, sometimes, Latin just
complicates things.
 
That took you
five syllables to say what you could’ve said in two.”

I smile and shrug.
 
“It’s a dignified language. It has
character.”

“If by dignified, you mean
dead
, ok.”

She laughs and I pretend to, because
honestly we’re shells anyway, medicated or not.
 
We’re not the people we used to be.
 
We just look like it on the
outside.
 

We clatter down the creaky steps
of our house, bickering back and forth, doing our best to seem normal because
mom always said fake it ‘til you make it.
 
We’re definitely doing our part.
 

As we round the corner into the
large, elaborate foyer, the distinct roar of a motorcycle splits apart the
serene atmosphere of the funeral home.
  
We stare at each other.

We don’t typically get mourners
on motorcycles this far up the mountain.
 

Dad steps past us, eyeing Calla
curiously.
 

“Thanks for referring someone to
me for the carriage house. I wasn’t expecting your help with that, considering
how much you wanted it for yourself.”

Calla stops still, frozen in
place, while she stares at dad.

 
“He called?”

He?

Her voice is filled with anxiety
and happiness and hope.
 
I stare at
her.
 
What the hell is this?

Dad nods.
 
“Yeah.
 
This morning. That’ll be him now, to
look at it.”

Calla spins around and stares
out the window, and I look over her shoulder.
 

A black, aggressive motorcycle,
a Triumph, is parked on the circular drive, as a tall dark-haired guy stands in
front of it, removing his black helmet.
 

Calla is so absorbed in watching
him that she doesn’t realize how closely I’m watching
her.
 

She smiles a beatific
smile.
 
“It’s been days since I told
him about it.
 
I thought he didn’t
want it.”
 

My dad raises his eyebrow.
 
“He still might not.
 
He’s just here to look at it.
 
Really quick—how did you meet him?”

She pauses.
 
“I met him in the café at the hospital
the other day. I’ve bumped into him a couple of other times.
 
He’s been there visiting someone. He
seems nice.”

Nice.

Dad doesn’t push her because the
guy is already walking up the porch steps.
  
“Excuse me while I go show him
around.”

I don’t bother to ask her who
the hell this guy is, or why she chose to invite him into our life by renting
out the apartment that both she and I wanted for
ourselves
.
I don’t have to ask.
 
I can see it
written all over her face.
 

She’s glowing as she looks at
him, an expression I’ve never seen on her face.
 
She’s interested in him.
Very
interested.
 

Apprehension builds in my belly
as I watch my father shake his hand, as they walk side by side down to the
carriage house.
 

The guy looks decent enough, but
there’s something about him. Something unsettling, separate from the way my
sister is staring at him in rapt fascination.
 
  

GetRidOfHimGetRidOfHimGetRidOfHim.

I ignore the voices, and watch
the carriage house door close behind them.
 

A heaviness
settles around me, something
dark and oppressing, because even though I want to save my sister from me, I
don’t know if I’m ready.
 

I smile at her.
 
“Ready to go?”

She pauses, glancing back
outside, hesitant now as she stares at the closed door of the Carriage House.
 

“Um… let’s have a raincheck,
ok?”

I suck in a breath, startled
that she would ditch me for this guy.
 
I should’ve known from the new look on her face.
 
The look of
intoxication.
But having it actually
slap
me in
the face for the first time is still shocking.
 

She
has an interest outside of me.
 
Something that
came between us, even though the moment is small… even though it’s just a
stupid drive to the beach.
 

Even though I want to be
unselfish, I don’t know if I can handle it.

We were outsiders our whole childhoods
and all the way through high school.
 
And while it sucked, it was also a hidden blessing, because since I was
all Calla had, she focused solely on me.
 
We’ve always been everything to each other.
 

Bile rises up in my throat as I
watch her descend the porch steps and walk across the lawns, her chin stuck
out, and her hands buried in her hair as she arranges it over her shoulder.

I need her. I need things to
stay the same.
 
But I can’t risk
her.
 
I can’t suck her down.
 
I can’t let my craziness swallow her
then spit her out.
 
But I need
her.
 

My thoughts are contradicting
and confusing and swirl around in my brain until I can barely focus.
 
I stagger to the window seat and stare
down, my forehead pressed against the glass as I try to catch my breath.

Serva
me, servabo
te
.

Save
me, and I’ll save you.
 

As I remember the dark-haired
guy’s confident stride, I have a feeling that he’s someone I won’t be able to
save her from.
 

But the die has been cast.
 

I see that now.