Flutter

“Well, maybe if you start telling me what exactly happened, I can help with the why,” he suggested coldly.

  “We kissed!” I shouted, feeling exasperated already. I just wanted to get to the part where I sobbed and apologized, and eventually, he forgave me.

  “Who kissed whom?”

  “I-I don’t know,” I stammered and looked down. I pulled my knees up my chest, and I wanted to bury my face in my hands.

  “Really? You have no idea? Just one minute you’re standing there and then next you’re making out with him? That seems pretty spontaneous. ”

  “Nobody was making out. ” I couldn’t even look at him. This was much harder than I thought it would be.

  “So… who kissed whom?” Jack repeated, and when I still didn’t answer, he got louder. “Alice?”

  “I think… I-I might’ve,” I mumbled and swallowed hard.

  I could’ve lied but I knew he’d see it on me, and that would just make things worse. I rested my hand on my forehead and leaned on my knees. He had to take a few moments to process what I’d told him, and his hurt was even rawer now.

  “Are you in love with him?” His voice was so low I could barely hear it.

  “God, no!” I shouted fiercely and looked at him. “No! I love you, Jack! And that’s all!” A wayward tear slid down my cheek. I wanted to crawl over to him and kiss him, but I knew he’d push me away.

  “So why would you kiss him? After everything we’ve been through!” He was almost pleading with me now, and it made me cry.

  “I don’t know! Honestly, Jack! I wish I did!” I wiped at my cheeks. “I was really thirsty, and I was trying to hold off on eating so I could get more self-control. And I just went into his room to talk, to distract myself, and … I don’t know. We were talking, and I just… I just kissed him. It was only for a second, and then I stopped it and I said that I couldn’t do it.

  “And I am so sorry, Jack! I am so sorry! If I could take it back I would! I never wanted to do anything to hurt you!”

  “I’ve just been thinking about it over and over in my head. ” He rubbed his temples and looked at the ground. His eyes were moist, but he wasn’t crying. “I kept thinking, if you kissed him, could I forgive you? And if you slept with him, could I forgive you?”

  “I never slept with him!” I insisted and sat up on my knees.

  “No, I’m just telling you what I was thinking. ” He shook his head. “And you know what I realized? I’d forgive you of anything!” What he was saying sounded good, but he didn’t feel good. He was completely agonized, and I had done this to him.

  “I’m not giving you permission, but you could do anything, and I would just forgive you. I couldn’t not. ” Jack stared off at nothing, thinking. “I don’t know if you know what that’s like. Even if what you do kills me, I would…” With bated breath, I watched him.

  “You could kill me, Alice,” he looked at me seriously. “That’s how much you mean to me. As foolish and masochistic as that makes me, you are so much to me that even if it destroys me to be with you, I’ll be with you!

  “And I don’t care why you kissed him or what you did. I don’t even really wanna know. But I am begging you to please never do anything like this again. Because I love you so much, and I am trusting you with far too much, but I don’t know how to be any different! You just… you can’t do this to me anymore, okay? Please?”

  “I promise! I’ll never do anything!” I got up off the bed and ran over to him, unable to contain myself anymore. Putting my hands on his cheeks, I looked into his wounded blue eyes. “I am so sorry. I never wanted this, and I’ll never, ever do it again. I promise you. I love you so much, Jack. ”

  Page 60

  “You better,” he whispered.

  Finally, he kissed me. I had thought that I had truly lost him, and there was this panicked insistence to the kiss. I wrapped my arms around his neck and held him to me. His mouth was warm and wonderful, and I knew nothing in the world tasted better than he did.

  My thirst peaked at that, and my heart pounded hungrily in my chest, but I denied it. I just wanted to be with him, physical and present, in the moment.

  “Run away with me. ” He rested his forehead against mine and knotted his fingers in the thickness of my hair.

  “What?” I asked, thinking I’d misheard him.

  “Run away with me,” he repeated and moved back a little so he could look me in the eyes. “I don’t wanna stay here anymore. Everyone lied to me. Peter is still going after you, and Mae tried to kill me. There’s no reason for me to stay. Let’s run away together. ”

  “What about Milo?” My mind scrambled. There was something exciting about the idea of just running off with him, but I couldn’t just pick up and leave like that. “And Jane?”

  “Jane?” His brow furrowed. “What about Jane?”

  “She’s here, in Peter’s room. ” I had forgotten that Jack hadn’t been around. “Milo saw her on Halloween, and she was doing really terrible. So we’re helping her out, I guess. ”

  “Peter’s room?” Jack looked appalled.

  “Yeah, he’s sleeping in the den. Everyone is playing musical beds,” I waved it away.

  “This house is too small for this many people,” Jack pointed out. “And that’s just another reason why we should move out. ”

  Running away might be too extravagant for me. I didn’t have a job, and Jack worked with Ezra and Peter. I didn’t want to leave Milo, but I didn’t think that Jack couldn’t support the four of us, since I’d probably have to include Bobby in the equation. Maybe he could, but if we were running away from Peter and Ezra, I wasn’t sure if that meant he’d quit his job too.

  Not to mention I was still having issues with bloodlust, ones that could prove potentially fatal to everyone.

  “What are you thinking?” he pushed a strand of hair off my forehead.

  “I don’t care if we leave Peter, but I don’t think I’m ready to leave everyone else,” I said finally.

  “I can’t live with Peter anymore, and I don’t think you should either,” Jack said. “And I don’t really want to be around Mae. ”

  I chewed my lip and looked up at him. He’d just come back, and I really didn’t want to lose him again, but I wasn’t ready to sacrifice everything else just to be with him.

  “Okay,” he said. “How about this? I keep working with Ezra, and we start looking for a place of our own in the Cities, with room enough for Milo and Bobby to stay with us as often as they want. We’ll still be close to everybody, and Milo can go back and forth if he wants, but me and you will finally have some privacy. ”

  “Okay,” I nodded, but the idea made me nervous.

  After seeing what Milo did to Bobby and Jonathan did to Jane, I wasn’t so keen on the idea of privacy with Jack. Yes, I really, really, really wanted to do things with him, but I loved him too much to kill him.

  “I have barely slept in three days,” Jack yawned. “And it’s not even noon yet. What do you say we get some sleep?”

  “Sounds good,” I smiled and gave him a kiss on the lips.

  He pulled off his tee shirt and shorts, opting to sleep in his boxers, which was fine by me. Few people in the world looked as amazing in their underwear as Jack did. I crawled into bed, and he climbed in after me. He lay on his back so I could curl up in his arms, resting my head on his chest.

  “I missed you so much,” he said, running his fingers through my hair.

  “Me too. ” I squeezed him tightly, then thought of something. “Where did you sleep for the past three days?”

  “Hotel,” Jack chuckled a little. “I just got a room at a hotel downtown, and I didn’t leave until an hour ago. I couldn’t take being away from you anymore, so I came home. ”

  “You should’ve came home the first day. ”

  “I know, but I had some thinking to do,” he sighed. “And it worked out okay. I mean, I’m here with you now, aren
’t I?”

  “That you are. ” I kissed his chest, then lay my head back down.

  Jack must not have been kidding about not getting any sleep, because within seconds, he was sound asleep. I stayed awake longer than him, thinking about all the things he said, and trying to come up with a solution.

  I promised him that I would never hurt him again and living with Peter might be too great a temptation for me. I couldn’t explain it, but that made it all the more dangerous. If Jack thought it was best to leave, it might actually be. And even if it wasn’t, it was what he wanted, and after everything I’ve put him through, didn’t I owe him that much?

  Nobody seemed that surprised to see Jack when we got up. Unlike me, they had all known he was coming back. Jane greeted Jack with a shocking amount of indifference, and that’s the same way Jack treated Mae. Mae rushed over to apologize, and he all but pushed her back. Her face crumbled afterwards, but I couldn’t really encourage him to forgive her. He had to do it in his own time.

  Peter had stepped out for the evening, but nobody really knew where. I suspected that he had known Jack was around and disappeared before things got ugly.

  Jack took Ezra back to the den so they could “discuss” things in a very mysterious fashion. It was probably business talk and about moving out, but apparently, Jack didn’t want everybody else to know of his intentions yet.

  Mae got over being snubbed by Jack because she had Jane to distract her. In the dining room, she had thrown down a giant towel on the floor and set up an impromptu hair salon. Mae always cut everyone’s hair.

  Jane sat in a chair with foil and dye in her hair, and she languidly flipped through an issue of Cosmo. While waiting for Jane’s hair to set, Mae cut Milo’s hair. For the first time in weeks, Mae seemed to brighten up. A discussion about lip-gloss had done what the rest of us couldn’t.

  “Would you like a haircut too, love?” Mae smiled up at me over the top of Milo’s head. Her own hair was clean and pulled back neatly. Jane made some comment about shoes, and Mae laughed, her eyes sparkling. “What do you say, Alice?”

  Page 61

  “Um… no, I’m good,” I said.

  “Girls’ shoes are so much better than boys’ shoes,” Milo lamented. He lifted his head to steal a glance at Jane’s magazine, but Mae gently pushed his head back down so she could trim his hair.

  “At least you don’t have to wear heals,” Jane said.   “I mean, they may look fantastic, but they kill to walk in. They’re like little feet torture chambers. ” Mae laughed again, the second time in two minutes.

  Taking in the scene in front of me, it finally occurred to me what was happening. Mae had a daughter, and a granddaughter, and a sick great-granddaughter, but all she ever took care of were boys. Peter and Ezra needed nothing from her at all.

  When I came around, she had been so thrilled because she thought she’d finally have a girl to pal around with, but I spent most days lounging around in jeans. Jack was back, so I tried to look extra pretty today, and I had still gone for jeans with a fancy green top.

  Maybe that was why Mae had bonded so much more with Milo than she did with me. He was probably more feminine, and in a weird way, needier than me, even though he was also far more self-sufficient.

  Enter Jane, the walking Barbie doll. All clothes, boys, fashion, and a constant need for attention, the exact thing Mae needed. I’m not sure if this solved Mae’s crisis over what to do about her terminal great-granddaughter, but it lifted her spirits for a while.

  For her part, Mae seemed to be making a massive improvement on Jane as well. She had already put on some weight, not enough for Jane to complain, but enough where she could almost pass for someone that wasn’t anorexic.

  The wound on her neck had healed, leaving a mangled scar. Vampire bites usually don’t leave scars or marks of any kind, but if the tissue is damaged often enough, it’s going to scar. Eventually, her father would probably have to pay for some cosmetic surgery to fix that, but for now, even she wasn’t whining about it.

  I felt weirded out watching the three of them laugh and titter about boys and clothes. Mae and Jane getting along I could understand, but I had never imagined that Milo and Jane could really enjoy each other.

  One of the positive side effects from Jane spending so much time in the company of vampires was that she had grown more immune to the charms of our pheromones. She wasn’t tripping over herself to be with Milo or Jack or Ezra the way she would’ve been before, although she did seem to be nursing a crush on Peter.

  I moved onto the living room to wait out Jack’s discussion with Ezra. Bobby sat cross-legged in the middle of the living room with a sketch pad on his lap and stared up at the television intently. This was the first time I’d seen anyone watching the new flat screen, other than the dog. Instead of watching some action packed blockbuster that got the most out of the HD, Bobby had the TV on CNN.

  I assumed he was trying to seem smarter in some way. He had on thick black glasses that I had never seen him wear before. On closer inspection, I saw a fairly nasty black eye from the fight the other day, and he tried to mask it with fashion glasses and side bangs. He had another smaller bruise on his chin, but the worst of them were hidden under his shirt on his chest and abdomen.

  “What are you watching?” I flopped back on the couch. The news wasn’t my favorite thing, but it had to be better than watching the re-imagining of Steel Magnolias going on in the dining room.

  “Anderson 360,” Bobby replied absently. “It’s for school. ”

  “How is it for school?” I raised an eyebrow. “And I didn’t think you still went to school. ”

  “I go to school during the day, when you’re sleeping. A whole lot of things happen during the day that you don’t even know about,” Bobby said. Still staring at the TV, he sketched furtively on the pad. A box of charcoals lay next to him on the floor, and he had the sleeves pushed up in his shirt, so he was getting black smudge marks all over his tattoos. “I’m supposed to watch the news for an hour and draw how it makes me feel. ”

  “How does it make you feel?” I asked.

  “Like the whole world is coming to an end. ” He didn’t sound that upset by it. I sat up straighter, trying to see what he drew, but I was at the wrong angle to really see his sketch pad, so I flopped back on the couch.

  The TV, I could see, so I watched it to see what had Bobby worrying. The screen had been divided into two boxes. The smaller one had news correspondent Anderson Cooper explaining the story, which took place in the big box. It showed a giant boat, like an ocean liner or a tanker, that appeared to have crashed into the shore. The boat tilted to the side as helicopters and smaller boats swarmed around it. The bottom of the screen said “Cape Spear, Newfoundland,” but other than that, I didn’t really understand what I was looking at.

  “So what’s going on?” I asked Bobby.

  “An oil tanker crashed into Canada,” Bobby nodded to the screen. “The hull was ruptured, but hardly any of the oil leaked out. They’re saying it’s a miracle, because if it had, it would’ve been like four times as bad as the Exxon Valdez cause this boat is much bigger. ”

  “I don’t know what that is. ” It sounded familiar to me, and considering the context of the conversation, I should’ve gotten it.

  “It was an oil tanker that crashed by Alaska in 1989. ” Bobby glanced back at me. “I didn’t really know that off the top of my head. They were just talking about it a lot. ”

  “But there isn’t an oil spill, is there? Not really?” I squinted at the TV, trying to see a sheen on the water around the tanker. “So what’s the big deal? How does that make you feel like the end of the world?”

  “Because of why the tanker crashed. ” He stopped sketching and stared at the TV in kind of amazement. “The whole crew died. ”

  “What do you mean?” I sat up more. “Like when they the hit land?”

  “No, they were all dead b
efore that. Nobody was driving it, and they just crashed. The radio transmissions coming from them weren’t right, and they sent boats out to check up on them, but nobody knows what happened. Finally, two days ago, they lost all contact with them, and then boom! It drove right into the island,” Bobby nodded at the screen. “It’s the creepiest, most bizarre thing I ever heard of, like in Aliens when they go to rescue that deserted ship or whatever. But real. ”

  “What are you talking about? How did the crew all die? Did they run out of food or oxygen or something?”

  Page 62

  “They didn’t run out of oxygen. They’re on Earth. You don’t run out of oxygen,” Bobby rolled his eyes at me. “But nobody knows why they’re dead. Some of the crew is still unaccounted for, but both the lifeboats are still attached, so they don’t know how they could’ve gotten off.

  “Officials are trying to keep it under wraps, but rumor has it that they were all mutilated. Like really gory, horror movie stuff. Throats ripped out and all that. Anderson was talking to a guy that had been there, and he was just about puking talking about it. ”

  “Holy hell. Really?” I leaned forward, staring more intently at the TV. “No way. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life. Do they think the crew had something to do with it?”

  “Maybe, but they’re not counting on having any survivors at this point,” Bobby said. “They had a crew of thirty, but only twenty-four bodies. ”

  “That’s pretty messed up. ” A chill ran down my spine, and I shook my head. “It’s really creepy. ”

  “Yeah, I know,” Bobby agreed somberly.

  “Where was the tanker coming from?”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby shrugged. “I think like Europe or Russia or something. ”

  “Okay, so be honest,” Milo said, walking into the living room and breaking up our intense fascination with the television. “How does my hair look?” He ran a hand through his dark brown hair and did a little twirl, but it didn’t look that much different than before. Mae had mostly just done a trim.

  “Sexy, as always,” Bobby grinned at him. He set his sketch pad aside, momentarily forgetting about his homework assignment. Milo sat down on the floor next to him, and in between kissing and flirting, they started talking about the tanker crash on the television.

  Personally, it creeped me out too much, so I decided to go outside and play with Matilda. I had to bribe her with three dog treats to get her to leave Jack’s side, and I was starting to think maybe she loved him more than I did.

  The stone patio out back was slick from a slushy snow that was coming down. It was November, and this was the first snow of the season, so I knew it wouldn’t last long. Matilda skidded through it, but she didn’t seem to mind. Very little in life seemed to upset her, other than Jack’s absence.

  I couldn’t shake the news story. I glanced back through the French doors at Mae and Jane talking and laughing, and spending time with them might’ve been almost as creepy as hearing more about the dead crew. I let the snow flakes melt in my hair and tried to forget all about it.