The Irreversible Reckoning

  ***

  “Don’t touch me.” I had told James as he pulled me onto my feet. It had been three long years of fighting with him. It had been three years of him taking me to and from the Warden’s room. It had been three years since we had arrived.

  I was in the Warden’s room, but he was not there, and once again, I could remember only bits and pieces. Even the tiniest memories made my stomach turn, and when James placed his hand on my back to roughly flip me over before I vomited all over the Warden’s bed, the pain left me crying out.

  “Get up.” He said gruffly, “Get dressed.”

  Though I had been moving slowly into a sitting position, when his hands grasped my upper arms hard, and that sharp, searing pain ripped through me, I collapsed back onto the bed.

  There is tradition that must be upheld. There are rules. For nuisances like you, this is the punishment.

  I remembered the Warden’s voice, and finally, the nausea in my stomach intensified to a point that I could vomit.

  Don’t worry. The child is his. But you are not.

  I was choking, and yet I felt purified. The bile spewed from me, and I realized that I was on my stomach only after I felt James’s hands leave me. He was still sitting beside me, holding my hair back. Maybe. He moved so quickly that I could not be sure if he had really been there at all, or if I was simply projecting some imaginary scenario in which I saw what I wished he would do. I remembered the night of Tony and Tom’s wedding three and a half years earlier, when I had had too much to drink, and I had told him that I was going to be very sick in the morning.

  And I’ll take care of you. He had said.

  “James.” I said, because I could not see where he had gone. I heard the shower running, maybe. I could not be sure of anything. My mind was connecting, becoming hyper-aware of every sound and movement in the room, and just as quickly it was disconnecting, leaving my ears ringing in the dense silence and my body shaking as I tried to find my way back to reality.

  “Stand up.” He said, and he found spots on me that they had left miraculously untouched when they had tortured us—my hands, my hips, and my butt, mainly. Carefully, he maneuvered me onto my feet. “Alright, I’m going to put my arm around you slowly. I will stop if it hurts you too badly.”

  I nodded, and he only somewhat slowly slid his arm around my shoulder. My skin burned in response, and I bit my lip to stifle a cry, but the fact that he did it slowly made the pain subside more quickly. Looking up at him to make sure that he was tolerating it, I wrapped one of my arms around his middle and allowed him to usher me into the bathroom.

  The smell of him was all around me. Nostalgia stole me for a few moments; I remembered every morning, waking up beside him, in our first house there and in our second, on the ship as we sailed through space, in the car back on Earth, on the street corner in the city in front of that bar… I remembered cuddling up next to him when we were asleep, burying my face in his neck, sitting perched on top of him as we talked and laughed well into the night, or clutching him to me as we made love.

  “Don’t.” He whispered fiercely, and he went to break away from me, but when my knees began to give out, he stopped and held me tighter.

  “I am sorry.” I told him.

  “Don’t put those memories in my mind.” He snarled at me as he sat me down on the sink in his bathroom; somehow, we had ended up there in his private quarters.

  “I didn’t mean to, James. I am sorry.”

  “They don’t mean anything to me anymore.” He continued, just as furiously, “It’s like they happened to someone else.”

  “Then why are you being so kind to me now?”

  “Because you’re sick. You’re…” He looked down at me, at my stomach, with such a look of disgust on his face that I was simultaneously besieged by a desire to slap him and an urge to cry.

  “Adam’s or the Warden’s?” He asked.

  “Adam’s.”

  “I’m sure you’re thankful.”

  “I am. Of course I am.”

  He reached down, and I flinched terribly and flung backwards in an instinctual effort to avoid the touch of his hand, which caused me to hit my head on the mirror behind me. His arm came up around my shoulders to cradle me, I writhed and reached out instinctively to grasp his upper arm and stop him from touching me, his knees buckled, and he fell into me.

  His thoughts rained into my mind stream, causing the tides to turn. His heart was not far behind.

  The nostalgia I felt was amplified two-fold in him, and together with his guilt, he was almost ill. Though they cannot do so literally, hearts can break, and when they do, it can be lethal. For every race, it is lethal. James was wasting away, being eaten by the guilt he felt over all he had been forced to do to me to keep up the charade. He was being eaten by his longing for me that grew stronger with every day that we were apart. He would not cry for me, the same way that I would not cry for him. But he wondered sometimes if there was a maximum threshold of pain, if there was a breaking point. Some days, he was sure he had reached it. Other days, he knew he had just a little more fight left in him. But right then, as our hands rested on each other’s bodies for a prolonged period for the first time in so long, he could not fight. He could not pretend.

  Very tentatively, I put both hands on his face and stroked his clean-shaven face with my thumbs. He winced for a moment, but his eyes held fast to mine. Still just as tentatively, I closed the space between our lips and kissed him lightly, though I held my lips to his for quite a while. He did not pull away in pain, and his lips did push back against mine for a moment, but then, he stopped.

  “We can’t.” He said.

  “You can’t protect me, James.” I told him, “Haven’t you seen that? Hasn’t taking me to and from his room shown you that?”

  “They can’t hurt you by threatening me anymore.”

  “He knows I still love you. I told him I would always love you, and he has threatened you countless times.”

  “I won’t be able to pretend. I won’t be able to fight back with you. I won’t be able to lay a hand on you. I won’t be able to close my eyes and pretend you’re someone else when I have to fight you.”

  “You can, and you will. In that way, you will still be protecting me.”

  “Brynna…” He said quietly.

  “Say my name again.”

  He looked back at me, and his eyes were warmer, though still guarded. Regardless, the tears rushed into my eyes when I saw even that tiny hint of the warmth I knew.

  “Say my name again, James.”

  “Brynna.” He said, somewhat breathlessly as he came back to me slowly.

  He was in front of me, and very gently, I touched his chest. He exhaled deeply and grasped my wrist gently, because it hurt him, but then, once the pain subsided, he let go and took my other hand.

  “Look at me.” He told me, and I did. “Let your eyes change back over.”

  I did, and the past merged back into me. Brynna Olivier was resurrected, and it did not feel regressive or dangerous; it felt utterly natural. James was one of the sole blessings that I had counted when I was her. He was hers, and she was his. At the sight of my blue eyes, he expelled a breath in what sounded like a very soft cry and laugh simultaneously. His hands came up and grasped on my face, and his forehead rested against mine. Without another word, his mouth was on mine, and his tongue was inside, and I was holding him again, kissing him again, pressing my body to his again, feeling his lips down my neck again, down my chest, feeling my breasts in his hands again, in his mouth, his face buried deeply between my legs, my voice moaning the way he loved… He came then, without me touching him, just at that sound he had missed so terribly, and I came, because I was looking down my body at him, watching as he moved between my legs, licking and kissing me in the way he knew I loved.

  He kissed his way back up my stomach, over my breasts, back up to my lips.

  “You don’t know how long I have wanted to do that. God, I hav
e ached to do that, Brynna.” He whispered, and I laughed softly. We stayed there, him over top of me, kissing me, and me raising up to kiss him back. I grasped his face, ran my fingers through his hair, and gently scratched my nails down his back, just wanting to hold him, wanting to touch him, and wanting to feel him holding and touching me, even in the places where it hurt.

  “You don’t know how often I have thought of you doing that.” I told him, and he kissed me a little deeper. Tentatively, I pressed a hand to his chest, and gently, I said, “I don’t think we should… I feel like if we…While I’m pregnant, and it’s Adam’s, it’s just…”

  “I know.” He said instantly, “Baby, of course not! I totally understand.”

  “Well, you have to let me return the favor.”

  “Whatever you want. But not yet. I just want to look at you. I just want to hold you for a second.”

  “I want you to hold me for longer than a second, James Maxwell.”

  He chuckled and kissed me again.

  “How does me holding you for six years straight sound?”

  “Very nice, actually. Thank you. Make it twenty years, and I will say that we have a deal.”

  “Twenty years it is.”

  His hand came down and rested on my lower belly, and he turned his hands until he could feel her there. I watched him smile, and when he looked at me, my smile brightened, because the warmth in his eyes was so genuine. But my heart was worried; I loved Adam, and I loved him, and I was carrying Adam’s child, and I knew that if I wanted it to be so, Adam would allow James to play a large role in our daughter’s life; Adam had promised me that he would make peace with James if I wanted him to do so. But would James be so accepting, so understanding of my needs? Would he be able to put aside his envy and love the baby? Would he be able to love me, knowing I was carrying his old nemesis’ child? If he could not love this child, I could not love him, I knew. She was everything. But I wanted him to love her. Desperately, I wanted him to love her the way he loved our daughter.

  “James…” I started to say, because I was going to ask him, I was going to make him decide then and there if he could be a second father to my child.

  He kissed me deeply again, and when his lips broke from my lips, he kissed my nose and both of my cheeks.

  “She’s yours, so she’s mine, too.” He whispered, “You hear me?”

  I nodded, tears beginning to fall from the corners of my eyes. I sat up abruptly and kissed him hard. At first, we both winced, because the contact had come on too suddenly, and it hurt terribly, but then, the pain subsided, and he was kissing me back and holding me. Then, he whispered, “I love you so much, Brynna Olivier. I never stopped.”

  I looked up at him and smiled again.

  “I never stopped, either. They told me you were gone irreversibly, and I still loved you.”

  “Nothing could ever take me away from you irreversibly, sweetheart. I promise you that. I’m yours for as long as you want me to be yours.”

  I grasped his face, pulled me to him, and kissed him gently.

  “And I am yours, James Maxwell. Until the end of time.”