The Billionaire's Muse

  It took me another hour to get up from my seat, mostly because it took that long for my brain to quiet down. I called my parents and let them know that I’d be renting a car and driving out. Neither of them seemed surprised that Bruce hadn't shown up. I didn't tell them about Vegas. They already weren't fond of my fiancé. I didn't need to add any additional fuel to that particular fire.

  Now that I'd decided what to do about transportation, I quickly found the closest Budget Rental, filled out the paperwork and gave the man behind the counter my driver’s license. He asked me about my trip, and when he found out I was stationed in Iraq, started bombarding me with questions. Apparently, his cousin was stationed there too. I didn't recognize the name but let him carry on a one-sided conversation while he entered my information into the computer.

  I took the keys and made my way outside, led by the man as he started to talk about why he couldn’t enlist, as if he owed me some kind of explanation. By the time I was behind the wheel and driving away, the throbbing in my temples had turned into a full-blown headache.

  I needed real food and sleep. Like two days' worth of both.

  My parents had a small house outside the city, a suburban haven where my father felt he was farthest away from the noise. After a childhood of moving from base to base, I'd been thrilled when we'd moved into a permanent residence.

  I'd often talked to Bruce about buying our own place in the same neighborhood, but he'd always shot the idea down. He'd grown up three houses down the street, but he now said he needed the life of the city to thrive. It was funny that how, only now, I was starting to clearly see the things I'd ignored about him before.

  It wasn’t like me to keep my head in the sand, to refuse to address what was right in front of me. I pressed my fingers to my temple. Why now? Why him? Was I so desperate to achieve my happy ever after that I’d clung stubbornly to the one man I’d always thought would share it with me?

  Every argument we ever had came rushing back. It was like my mind was re-playing everything for me, hinting at the fact that maybe, just maybe, it was about time to let this whole thing go. To let Bruce go. The thought of it made my stomach turn, but another part of me realized this was merely a prequel to the emotions I would feel if I actually went through with it.

  Maybe him not being here was for the best. Besides, I needed to spend time with my parents.

  It was only when I was on McClellan Highway that I finally rolled the window down and breathed in the Boston air. The Chelsea River whispered at me from my left, and I let out every ounce of negative energy inside me, finally allowing myself to smile. Bruce could wait, I thought to myself. For now, it was just good to be home.

  The screeching to my right yanked me from my pleasant thoughts, and I turned my head to see a blue sedan spin out of control. I slammed on the brakes and swerved, hoping to avoid a collision as I cut across the highway. I waited for the impact, but it never came. My car’s front bumper barely missed the other car as it skidded and flipped.

  Before I could swerve back, the loud screams of a horn told me the danger wasn't over. My turn had me right in the middle of oncoming traffic and drivers who were going too fast to stop. In front of me, a truck was trying to brake hard, but I knew there wasn't enough room.

  I braced myself as the truck slammed into my car, the force bending the driver's side inwards, the window and windshield showering me with safety glass. I closed my eyes to protect them, my hands holding tight onto the steering wheel as the entire car turned. Before I knew what was happening, I was upside down, the truck’s tires screaming behind me, my rental flipping once, twice, three times, until it slammed down on its wheels.

  I heard more screeching, and somewhere in the distance, a crash that told me things weren't over yet. It was going to be a pileup, and the only thing I could think of as I sat strapped into my seat, unable to move, was that these people would need a doctor and that I was the first on the scene.

  The world went fuzzy then, and I heard someone shouting in the distance. My eyes opened and closed as I tried to stay conscious. I felt a hand grab my shoulder, barely registering the man shouting at me, asking if I was okay. I looked at him, frowning as his face seemed to flicker and change. He tried to unlock my seatbelt, and for a second I saw the whole world around me shift, saw my car and the road disappear, morph into an empty, open field. And then things went back to the real world. Cars and blood and noise.

  “Can you move your legs?” the man asked me.

  I mumbled something incoherent, trying to tell him that he was working the wrong seat belt, when the entire world around me darkened, blurred. The last thing I felt were his hands under my shoulders, trying to pull me out of the car, and then...

  Nothing at all.

  Chapter Three

  I was never much of a believer in anything supernatural or paranormal.

  It had nothing to do with upbringing since my parents were both Catholics. They'd raised Ennis and me in the church, but it had mostly consisted of baptisms and holidays. They hadn't been overly religious, but if asked, they'd both have said they believe in God.

  I never had, not really. Maybe once I'd believed in the concept of a general higher power. Then I went to Iraq. The deaths I saw, the sheer incomprehensible darkness that man had towards one another, well, it made what belief I'd possessed falter.

  Maybe that was why I couldn't understand what was happening.

  At one point, I thought I saw a bright light, something along the lines of a tunnel, like the kind of images people talked about when they died. Then, in a flash, it was gone, replaced by only darkness and flashing lights, different colors, each blinking long enough to capture my attention, making me turn my head towards it before being captivated by another.

  “Honor?”

  I turned my head towards the voice, the image of Bruce materializing out of the darkness. The smile he’d always used to win me over flashed across his face as he seemed to float towards me, hand outstretched, welcoming.

  “Come to Vegas,” Bruce said.

  I frowned at him, and just like that, he disappeared. It was like his entire being broke apart into tiny particles that blew away as if he'd been made of pure dust that sparkled and shone as it flew around me in a whirlwind of tiny colors.

  “Who are you?”

  Another voice, one I couldn’t make out. Far away, yet close at the same time. I felt a pressure on my shoulders, and then it was gone. I was floating in an ocean of nothingness, my legs kicking out slowly. I remembered videos of astronauts in space and how they floated about their space stations in zero gravity and wondered if this was how they felt.

  Was this what death was like? Was I in space?

  “Honor?”

  I looked around, swimming to adjust the rest of my body toward where the sound was coming from. I saw Bruce again, but he was younger now, the boy I'd first met before sixth grade. He was barely eleven then, with his ruffled hair, Pacman t-shirt, and high-tops, sitting on his BMX as he looked at me.

  I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. He was looking past me at someone else, and before I could turn my head to see who, a little girl ran past me. Dressed in jeans, and a ridiculous green shirt and braids, I instantly recognized my middle school self the first day I'd met Bruce.

  “That is so cool,” she – I – squealed as she grabbed Bruce’s bike. “Can I ride it?”

  I smiled. I remembered the first day I tried the bike, Bruce running beside me as I raced down our street, the wind in my face, my eyes closed as I enjoyed the feeling of flying. We had spent the entire day together. The first of many days together.

  I felt a small ache on the right side of my knee, and I looked down to see something glowing there, a reminder of a day Bruce and I had snuck out after dark and had tried to ride the bike down the hill behind our houses. I'd fallen, I remembered, scraping my knee against a rock, the blood coming from the wound scaring both of us, but not enough to run home and face our parents. Bruce had t
ried to stop the bleeding as best as he could, and I'd done everything I could not to scream bloody murder.

  I smiled. We'd been so innocent then, the only worries in our lives being what our parents would do if they caught us outside when we weren’t supposed to be.

  “You should get one,” child-Bruce told the little girl by his side. “Then we can race!”

  I grinned.

  “Grow up, Bruce!”

  I almost laughed as I heard the snarky tone that was my go-to voice for the first two years of high school. I saw the teenager I'd been then, my long hair tied back in a ponytail, kicking at Bruce as he tried to shoot at me with a water gun.

  “Come on, Honor!” he teased. “Show me what you’re made of.”

  I remembered how much I'd held back from hurting Bruce that day, my feelings for him mixed and perplexing. The boy who was sometimes charming and sometimes a complete ass. I'd fallen for him hard even though we'd both agreed to keep things casual for a while – so what we had didn't go against his “one-month policy.”

  “One girl for one month,” Bruce had told me once. “That’s all the energy I have.”

  I'd hated that about him, how he made me feel special while at the same time assuring me that he had no intentions of making something long-term work.

  Then he'd made it official on my sixteenth birthday, moving us from a casual friendship to an exclusive couple.

  Except now I wondered how much of his original attitude had always been beneath the surface, hovering in the background. How much of it was still there.

  The teenagers disappeared, disintegrating in the same cloud of smoke that had taken him before, and for a few minutes, I was surrounded by nothing but darkness. I floated about uneasily, my eyes waiting for the next set of images, memories to fill in the blankness about me. I felt pressure on my shoulders again, as if someone was trying to shake me awake, and I shook it off. In the distance, I heard gunfire, loud and threatening, and a shiver ran through me. Something exploded farther away, and suddenly I felt hands grab me by the arms, pulling at me, my body moving through the empty space around me as if on their own.

  “We need to find shelter,” I heard a man's voice say, and I quickly looked about to locate the source of the voice.

  To my right, something flickered into view, hazy at first, a figure I couldn’t recognize. A man. I squinted for a better look, but he quickly disappeared as the hands on my arms loosened.

  I was floating again.

  “Go slow.”

  My voice this time.

  I watched as my bedroom assembled itself around me. I watched the teenager in my bed, under the covers, with Bruce on top of me. I remembered that night clearly, the first time we'd slept together, a week before senior prom. My parents had been visiting my aunt in Connecticut, and Bruce had come over to spend the night.

  Despite the awkwardness, despite the initial pain, it had been a good night. Many of my friends told me that the first time was never good, but my first time had been okay. The touch of his hand, the heat between us, the way his lips had caressed me. For the first time since we'd become a couple, I felt a true connection between the two of us. It made the wrong between us better.

  “Marry me.”

  He'd proposed the next morning, two high school kids sitting at the kitchen table in our underwear, sipping coffee as we smiled at each other. It had been a strange proposal, sudden, out of the blue, and we'd laughed it off as us being too young, but Bruce had continued to make comments about our future as if it'd been set. When he proposed for real a little over a year later, I'd accepted without a second thought.

  My father had been against it, voicing his opinion about Bruce loud and clear – sometimes in front of Bruce – but eventually, I'd made him come around enough to at least be civil to my fiancé.

  Not that I would've changed my mind. I could be stubborn when it suited me.

  The scene from my past disintegrated, and I was left alone again with my thoughts, floating in my endless nothingness, wondering when it would end. There was more gunfire, another explosion, but this time, no hands pulled me.

  Without warning, the darkness around me begin to dissipate, replaced with bright colors of white and blue and yellow. I saw images I couldn’t make out, flashing quickly, randomly, appearing and disappearing just as fast.

  An old woman with grandchildren sitting in a circle around her as they smiled at her.

  A man walked into a hospital room, and my heart fluttered.

  Bruce standing by my side, his smile sad, his face aged.

  The images became sensations. Sounds.

  Someone held my hand and squeezed.

  A sweet and gentle kiss.

  A soft and loving touch.

  A hug.

  A scream.

  A baby’s cry.

  A child’s laugh.

  It was all so sudden, so overwhelming that I could barely breathe.

  The hands were on my shoulders again, pulling, this time, more desperately, and I lashed out. Hands grabbed my wrists and pinned my arms down. Someone hissed at me to calm down. I tried to move again, and the hands tightened.

  I was being shoved, as if a force had taken my entire body and was pushing it toward something. I felt the friction of the air against my body as the force picked up speed, and then suddenly, it was like I was being catapulted through the darkness, unable to stop myself. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Then, just as quickly as it started, it stopped.

  I opened my eyes.

  Chapter Four

  There’s this place between sleep and fully awake where, as a child, I'd often found myself lost, my mind trying to decide whether it should come into focus or just slip back into slumber. I hadn’t felt that feeling in a long time. Morning in the military didn't allow for that sort of reflection.

  I felt it now though.

  It took me a few minutes, long minutes that I relished in, but soon my mind made its decision and decided waking up was the best option. A part of me felt cheated out of some much needed rest, but I opened my eyes regardless.

  When the world finally came into focus, the first thing I registered were the stars. There were millions of them shining in the sky above me, a tapestry of little lights that looked like a large connect-the-dots picture that was begging to be drawn. I'd never seen this many before, not even in the desert.

  I remembered a time when my father had taken me and Ennis stargazing, something about being able to find our way if we ever got lost. I hadn’t paid much attention then, being more concerned with the upcoming junior dance than I was with stars. I found myself wishing I'd paid better attention, because what I was seeing not only amazed me but brought back childhood memories that seemed a little incomplete.

  “One day, Honor,” my father had said, “these little dots in the sky might be your salvation.”

  He was always saying things like that, my father, and I had always scoffed at it. He was a philosophical man, a part about his personality I'd never understood, especially with the military background. My mother said it was that part of him that had helped her see past the chiseled personality and no-bullshit attitude he usually carried around.

  I loved the man, but to me, he would always be Peter Daviot, ex-army, the man who still scared the shit out of Bruce. After what Bruce had just pulled, maybe he deserved to be scared.

  I blinked a few times as my eyes watered, the soft breeze around me picking up, brushing some hair into my eyes. My neck clench when I tried to move it, the sharp pain shooting upwards and giving me an instant headache that made me groan. I felt the back of my head, my hand pressing softly on a bump there that pulsated at my touch. I winced, hoping the nasty thing didn’t mean I had a concussion.

  In an instant, it all came back to me. The drive down the highway, the sound of the Chelsea River, the accident, the skidding, the crashing. Images of it all flashed through my mind, and for several seconds, I panicked. I felt around me, my hands touching soft
grass, wet with the night’s dew...and then I wondered where everyone was.

  There were no sirens nearby, no screaming or shouting, no hands on my head or under my body, trying to carry me to safety. It was like I’d been thrown out of the car and had landed where no one was looking. Was I thrown out of the car? I couldn’t remember.

  I tried to push myself up, but the headache mixed with dizziness and the world around me spun out of control. I closed my eyes and tried desperately to fight the vertigo as I laid back down, wondering just how much damage the accident had done. The bump on my head was definitely enough to make me think twice about immediately inspecting the rest of my body.

  My mind went back to the accident, how the truck had slammed into my car, how I'd felt my car do somersaults before stopping dead. It was a miracle I was alive, really, but it still bothered me that I was lying out in the open with no help. I didn't remember being thrown, but it was the only thing that made sense. Except I couldn’t hear any sirens or anything else for that matter. It was like the world had forgotten about me.

  A muffled gunshot made my eyes snap open, and I was back in Iraq. I sat up immediately, ready for the worst. My entire body screamed in protest. My head, angered at the sudden movement, felt like I'd taken a jackhammer to my skull. No matter what happened with the car, my body was warning me that I was in no way ready to face whatever it was I was getting ready to face. But, the adrenaline had kicked in, and the pain was slowly fading into the more manageable background.

  I got up slowly, pushing first onto my knees before I attempted to stand straight. Severe pain shot through my leg, and I quickly found myself on the ground again, the fire in my ankle scorching as I shut my eyes in frustration.

  Dammit!

  “I am quite surprised you are able to stand.”

  My head snapped around as I realized for the first time that I wasn’t alone.

  I couldn’t see him clearly, and it was definitely a him. The voice was masculine, with a hint of some sort of accent I didn't recognize. It was dark despite the starlight, and the corner he sat in threw shadows across him that made it impossible for me to discern any features.