Coveted

  Chapter 10

  Thursday passed slowly. Michael invited me to join him and Maria at lunch but, despite my acceptance of them, Maria had not lost her reluctance when I was nearby. I declined just to avoid causing Michael problems. I already had to beg him to cancel his plans with her that night so he could walk me home after rehearsal.

  Instead, I hid in the library where I pulled out To The Ends of the Earth and flipped it open. My physics worksheet could wait until later, when my brain had returned to normal functioning. What I needed now was the escape of someone else's life.

  "There are those who cannot stand to see the success of true love. They scheme and fight and even convince themselves they are serving the greater good in their sabotage. They self-righteously glorify breaking a bond that should never be broken. It was just such people that tore my love from me.

  "I searched the highlands and the moors. I searched through privilege and poverty. But they had taken her from me in the worst of ways. They had convinced her that she never wanted to be found. But I could never forget her. My search may never be concluded. This is the story of the most tortuous tragedy to curse my existence.

  "One thousand years ago, she was betrothed to a man she did not know..."

  Over the next several pages, I read how the protagonist had tried to convince his love to flee from the arranged marriage but that she had been too scared to escape her responsibilities. Instead, he was forced to see her every day as the wife of another and then, one day, as the mother to the man's children. He watched her in misery and vowed to break her free from her prison.

  The bell rang and I yelped. I had forgotten where I was. I crammed the book into my bag as I sprinted for Math.

  As I sat writing down notes about probabilities, I glanced down at my bag. I wanted to keep reading. A story of tortured love fit my mood much better than schoolwork. Life had other plans.

  Mrs. Montgomery looked positively crazed after school. Her grooming practices seemed to have taken a back seat to her stress. Her attempts at a bun resembled a pinwheel and her blouse had a large mustard stain down the front.

  She informed us she would be recording our playing, but I couldn't figure out why. She never played it back to us.

  She kept us until nine, which had even Michael disgruntled by the time we left the school. "Some of us have lives," he whined.

  "At least she wasn't yelling at you," I countered. "Just two more weeks of this abuse and I'll be able to breathe again."

  Despite the fact it was dark, it was warm. I should have been appreciative but I still had an English paper to finish and I was feeling too disgruntled about Bran to appreciate anything. I took a deep breath and tried to comfort myself with the fact that he would be back in the morning.

  At home and too exhausted to work, I pulled To the Ends of the Earth out of my bag and collapsed on my bed to read.

  "My pathetic efforts to free her were soon noticed and taken as a nuisance. But their nightly floggings and withholding of food had not controlled me in my youth, so their threats of imprisonment and execution were laughable when I was not so easily caught and had so much to gain. With their attempts to trap me failing and with my attempts at freeing my love coming closer to success, they chose to send her away in secret.

  "Desperate, I wandered, following only the directions demanded by the angry beast inside my chest. I could feel I was close and yet found no trace of her. As the years past, the villains who had worked so hard to keep us apart had thought they won. What none of the fools could have known was that the bond I shared with her could not be so easily broken. If the rules of men would try to keep us apart, the will of the gods would bring us back together.

  "The internal beast nearly devoured me for giving up on my immediate search but I knew this new journey was my last hope. I travelled north to Ben Nevis. After months of braving the wind, the cold, and the bandits, I made it to the mountain, though with more scars, both visible and not, than I had intended.

  "I climbed to the top. Only at the highest peak did I believe the gods would hear me. I screamed their names one after another, calling them out. They ignored me. I begged and pleaded for them to help me. I renounced men and all their wrongs. I lauded the gods and, lastly, promised to devote myself to them if I could just have the power to get back what had been taken from me.

  "It was Morrigan who answered. She was as tall as a giant and beautiful. Most men would have done her bidding just to see her beauty. I did not care. I wanted my love. It was she, the woman meant for me, that I needed.

  "The Morrigan looked down at me. Her ravens circled us; one remained perched atop her shoulder. She was unimpressed with me but not entirely uncompassionate. With a voice of many that boomed as thunder, she offered me a chance. The Morrigan is the goddess of darkness, revenge, and death. She rules the battlefields and decides who wins and who dies. As expected, any payment she demanded had to be paid in blood. If I brought her the heads of one hundred undefeated warriors, she would listen to my pleas and consider helping me..."

  I closed the book and set it on my nightstand. I was feeling a bit queasy. I wasn't sure Bran had picked a good book for me after all. It was becoming a little too rough. I'd give it back to him in the morning. I turned off the light and went to sleep.

  The tickle on my eyebrow woke me. I tried to brush it away. The gnawing in my chest was being particularly bothersome this morning. It had regained its talons and was scraping my insides with its tantrum. It was normally only this active when Bran was around. I smiled to myself at the thought of him. His scent was so indulgent.

  The soft touch on my cheek startled my eyes open. Bran was smiling down at me. "Morning, sleepy head," he said.

  I blinked and looked down. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, still wearing his jacket.

  "Where is my mother?" I wheezed around morning congestion. This explained the talons.

  "Said she had to leave for a day shift," he explained with a shrug. "She left right after I showed up."

  He leaned close. I refused the temptation only because I was sure I had morning breath. I held him at bay with one hand and covered my mouth with the other. He pouted. Unsympathetically, I slid off the opposite side of the bed, keeping my eyes on him and guarding against him lunging at a perceived opportunity. He watched me as I grabbed some clothes and left for the bathroom.

  "A fine morning," he said with a playful growl through the door.

  "You had nerve running off to Scotland without telling me," I called as I slipped one leg into my jeans.

  "It couldn't be helped."

  "Everything alright now?" I pulled my grey t-shirt over my head and stared in the mirror. If I ever got any money, I would buy some new clothes. I sighed.

  "Fine," he said, "She just needed me to bring something back from Scotland for her."

  "Like a bag of stolen diamonds or something?" I asked as I put toothpaste on my toothbrush. I was trying to make light of the situation to make it seem less strange but his inadequate reply did little to help.

  "Yeah, sure," he said with a chuckle.

  After I finished brushing my teeth and combing my hair, I opened the door. He slipped an arm around me and pulled me against him. In the millisecond it took to close the distance between us, the gnawing erupted into a full monster, thrashing its wings and talons inside me and threatening to consume my innards with the tearing of its beak. I could not handle it. I would have pulled away if it weren't for the equally promising tingles that caressed the wounds the monster left behind. I welcomed him as Bran pressed his mouth against mine. He brought with him the promise that if I just surrendered, all this pain would be replaced by ecstasy.

  I felt unashamed of my whine when he pulled away. How dare he have so much more control than I did!

  "School," he whispered, creating a teasing caress across my flesh with his breath.

  I wanted to be closer than we were. Even these molecules between us were too much. I ached inside. I felt like all
meaning was lost to me until I could somehow become whole with him. Yes, I had lost all sense of myself.

  My mother had said teenagers go insane. Bran had launched my brain into its own padded cell. I took a deep breath in my meagre attempt to convince myself that I retained control.

  He let go of me. My muscles were weak. Walking down the hall took far too much concentration.

  As we walked out to his car, he reached back to take my hand in his. It was another temptation. I would never learn how to cope if I didn't try. I took it and did my best to force the growing warmth inside me from my mind. It was like the previous days hadn't happened. There had been no horrible separation. Life had continued exactly as it should.

  He let go of my hand only to open the car door for me.

  "Oh, you're my chivalrous knight now?" I teased, trying to regain our less intense and less complicated friendship if even for one moment. I felt like a drowning person trying to get that one all-important gulp of air at the surface. I was failing.

  He wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me close again. "I'm your Scottish warrior," he said, letting the full strength of his burr come through. "No pompous knight could best me."

  I melted against him, which only broadened his playful smile. I could see the inferno behind his eyes. Despite any torture he might have been feeling, he was still in control. I envied his power.

  He lowered me into the car and placed a quick kiss upon my lips.

  "Don't start anything we can't finish." I had attempted a scolding tone but it had come out more as a breathless gasp.

  He whispered against my neck, "But that's half the fun." He was evil. If ever there were evidence for his being a demon, this was it.

  Despite the taunt, he pulled away and did not try touching me again until we were at school. By the time we arrived, I had regained my senses... mostly. I was at least able to endure having his arm around my shoulders as we walked to homeroom. I tolerated this agony willingly even though the obvious PDA turned several heads. Amanda and Samantha looked more murderous than usual.

  "Don't mind the rabble," he whispered in my ear.

  "I don't mind at all," I teased back.

  I furrowed my brow. I had lied. I had not even thought about it. It had just come out as easily as saying my own name. What confused me more was that I was noting this with the same detached observation I would have shown during a lab experiment.

  As the normalcy of school took over, I was able to act like myself again but, inside, I was very much not. With every touch from Bran, the gnawing shrieked its demands. Surrounded by mundane things and crowds of people, I was able to keep a grip, though tenuous, upon reality.

  Samantha and Amanda kept their distance in the cafeteria at lunch. I suspected they knew they could not keep their snide comments quiet and did not want to risk Bran overhearing. Their frequent glares from behind him proved they were not going to let this new development go.

  "So it finally happened," Michael said with a smile as he flopped into the seat next to me.

  Maria hesitated before settling in on his other side. She didn't look at me.

  "I guess so," I said, unable to supress a smile. Bran reached across the table to squeeze my hand.

  "About time," Michael teased.

  I stuck my tongue out at him.

  He stretched his arm around Maria's shoulders. "Maybe we could go on a double date tonight," he suggested.

  Maria looked away. Maybe the idea of spending an evening with Bran and I bothered her. She said nothing. I was beginning to wonder if she ever talked. From what Michael had said, it sounded like they talked all the time but she had yet to demonstrate the use of her vocal chords in my presence. I would save her from the horror of our company mostly because I had to.

  "We have rehearsal tonight and pretty much every night until the concert," I explained. Mrs. Montgomery had demanded it during a fit of hysteria in our last rehearsal and this time refused to relent for any reason.

  Michael shrugged. "Maybe after that then. We'll be coming to the show by the way."

  I laughed. "You already saw the catastrophe first hand last night."

  Bran acted offended. "We've gotten a lot better," he countered.

  I pursed my lips. "How's Ben's bow hold doing?"

  He relented with a shrug. "Fine, there is still some dead weight in the group but we'll do fine."

  "You're not exactly selling this to me," Michael teased. "But, yeah, I know what you mean and we're coming anyway. I wouldn't miss it."

  "I need to go to the washroom," announced a faint voice.

  For a moment, I had not realized who had spoken mostly because I had not been expecting it, but Maria got up and walked away. I could identify an escape when I saw one.

  Michael nudged me in the ribs before gesturing down at my sandwich with a tick of his chin. "Eat up," he said. "You're looking sick."

  "Gee, thanks," I muttered even as I picked up a half-eaten slice of tuna salad and took another bite.

  As always, food did nothing to make me feel better and it had little to do with the cafeteria's Styrofoam bread. Especially with Bran around, I felt like food did not sustain me. Logically, I knew that made no sense. A girl couldn't survive off lust alone but eating was still so much of a chore. I ate only because I did not want to worry anyone and I knew Michael would worry and he would not keep that concern from my mother if I refused to eat.

  "You doing alright?" He pressed.

  My brow furrowed. "Of course, why?"

  He shrugged. "Just wondering."

  I did not get the feeling I wanted to know why he was wondering and so decided to change the subject. "How's it going with you and Maria?"

  He smiled. "She's great. I've gotten her into Bleach. She absolutely loves it. The poor girl has just been deprived having all the wrong friends. Her math grades have skyrocketed too. She's not as dumb as everyone thinks. She just needs the right influence."

  "You?" I mocked.

  He blew on his nails and rubbed them on his shirt. "When I'm good, I'm good. And what about you two? It's been obvious Bran has it bad for you."

  Bran shot him a smirk.

  "I've got it pretty bad for him too," I admitted with a smile.

  My eyes met Bran's and I could see the spark inside him awakening. It was those moments I liked best, knowing that we delighted and suffered together. He might be better at feigning control but that spark proved that was all it was. He was equally tormented.

  "Aren't you glad you took my divine advice?" Michael asked with a smug grin. "After all, I'm never wrong."

  I rolled my eyes. "Your ego could do with some deflating," I said flatly.

  He knew he had had nothing to do with what I had chosen but he would continue pretending otherwise for as long as Bran and I were together. He stretched and yawned. "I think my ego is just fine where it is. I've been right, haven't I?"

  I stuck my tongue out at him just because I hated giving him the satisfaction of admitting he was right. He looked across the cafeteria and his smile faltered. Pushing himself out from the table, he said, "Sorry, gotta go."

  I watched as he hurried over to Maria who was scowling in the doorway. She took his hand in hers and led him from the room.

  "Well, that was weird," I muttered, setting down my sandwich.

  Bran shrugged. "Teenagers," he muttered, "Always so petty."

  I could not help but laugh. "You sound like an old man. Next you're going to be yelling at people to get off your lawn."

  He smirked. "I guess I am a bit of an old fart at times." His smirk faded. "Have you read any of that book I gave you?"

  I looked down at my plate and debated whether to eat anymore. I also felt a little sheepish for not liking something that obviously meant so much to him. "I started it," I confessed, "It's just not really my thing." I decided to leave my sandwich. My insides were more volatile than usual, what I knew to be a direct result of Bran's proximity. Ok, truthfully, his proximity had nothing to do wi
th it. It was more the fact that he existed at all.

  He looked down at his hands. "I understand but I really think you'll change your mind if you stick with it."

  I had hurt him and felt like a complete jerk. Why couldn't I just get over these things? No one else had any problems with violent movies or stories. I had thought I was improving, obviously not.

  "Maybe you're right," I conceded. "I'll give it another try."

  I pushed my sandwich away. One way or another, I was going to have to push my hang-ups aside and just finish the damn thing. For Bran, I'd do it.