Page 43 of Come in with the Rain
I open my eyes, and the light of the kitchen, momentarily blinding, shakes me out of my frenzy. I shove on his shoulders until he seems to blink awake too, letting me slip to the ground. As soon as my feet hit the tile, I take a few big steps away from him. I can’t think when I’m too close to him. I press my fingertips to my swollen lips, trying to anchor myself to the earth again.
“I think I just need some time to myself,” I finally say. It’s been sitting on the tip of my tongue, right against my teeth, since he walked into the condo. “I think I made a mistake jumping from one person to the next without stopping to spend time on myself. This job, whatever it looks like, it needs my focus.”
He’s got both his hands on his hips, a confused expression on his face. “So, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you got what you needed out of this deal, and I got what I needed, so maybe we need to go our separate ways.”
A gust of air bursts from him. “Come on, Stella. You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do.”
He runs a hand through his hair, and then both of his hands come up and he grabs it like he needs to hold on. “I don’t want to be without you,” he says, and I feel the lump rising up in my throat. He lets go of his hair and looks at me, his bright eyes shining and desperate. “Stella, everything inside me was empty and dead before I met you. I feel alive for the first time in a decade. I can’t just let it go.”
I grit my teeth. “I’m not giving you an option. I’m telling you that this is done.” The words burn coming out, but I have to hold my ground. He looks completely different to me now, and maybe I never really even knew who he was. I don’t even know who I am. And that’s why I need him to leave.
We stand like that for a long time, and I feel the stillness in the air around us, like one of us has pulled the pin on a grenade and we’re waiting for it to go off.
“I need to breathe,” I tell him, hand at my throat. “And I can’t do that if I’m always wondering whether or not you’re judging me. You were right: everyone is always going to see me as Mickey Kline’s ex-girlfriend. Especially you.” He’s already opening his mouth to speak, but I shake my head. “It’s okay, Adam. We did what we needed for each other. It’s time to let go.”
He has a hand curled into a fist on the countertop, but he still turns and walks to the door. When he’s got it open and is standing in the doorway, he turns and looks at me one last time. “I’m not letting go.”
As soon as he’s gone, I lean back against the kitchen island and take a few deep breaths, even though all I really want is to scream. I still can’t breathe. It feels like the ground has split open beneath my feet, and I can’t decide whether to try to save myself or throw myself in.
I go back to my cutting board where my zucchini sits, waiting for me to return to it. But all I can do is stare down at it. All the rage bubbles up into the tips of my fingers, and I reach down, pick up the cutting board, and throw it at a cabinet behind me. And immediately, I regret it. Rushing over to the cabinet, I examine it, finding the dent the cutting board just made in the surface. The surface of the brand-new cabinet that Adam put in for me. Now ruined.
CHAPTER43
ADAM
The nightmare starts the same as it always does, the heat of the summer, the sun shimmering off every surface, blinding in its intensity until it’s like a white ray blanketing the world. When I have the dream, I don’t feel active in it anymore. Instead, my body is frozen in place, waiting for what I know will happen, like watching a movie I’ve seen a hundred times.
The bomb falls, the one that takes out half the camp, even Ford and Dani lying dead at my feet. I look down at them and feel the twist of my stomach, but I can’t move. I never can. No running for cover, no screaming for help. Only me standing in the middle of it all, watching it happen. That part is real. That part happened. Six years ago, the force of the bomb knocked me down, and I watched, unable to move, as the camp burned.
Except this time in the dream when the next bomb hits, the one that never came in the real story, someone else falls at my feet. I can feel the pressure of their body pressing into the tips of my boots. Stella looks up at me with lifeless eyes. She looks the way she did the morning we first met, bare except for the sheet wrapped around her body. It’s soaked through, red spreading until there’s no white left on the material at all.
This is usually the part of the dream where I wake up. It’s the part where I start to scream, and then the nightmare melts away and I’m alone in my bed. And that alone is a horror, but at least there are no dead bodies, no dead faces of my friends looking up at me, like I could have somehow saved them. Just me and the dark.
But I don’t wake up. I look up at the sky, see the comets starting to streak through the atmosphere, and I wait, all the panic starting to rise up in me like a wave ready to cascade over my head. But I don’t wake up. I don’t wake up. I don’t wake up. I’m stuck, like someone has locked me in my own mind. I can still feel the weight of Stella at my feet, but I don’t want to look down, don’t want to see her that way again, empty and stiff.
But I’m still here. The world refuses to end and take me with it, so I bend down to press my hands to Stella’s face. I can’t feel her skin, the warmth that’s always just under it, her pulse beating at her neck, right where I like to kiss her. It’s like my hands aren’t even real, moving right through her, a mirage. But she’s the real one, the one made of flesh and bone, and I’m the one who goes through her like a ghost.
“Stella,” I whisper. I reach down to grab her, and this time we’re both solid. I wrap her in my arms and lift her off the ground into my lap. Her head falls back on her neck, and the next time I say her name, it comes out a scream. “Stella! Stella!” I’m shaking her, trying to bring her back, trying to get her to breathe with her perfect lungs. “Stella! Stella!”
And then, like someone has unlocked the door I was pounding on all this time, I come out of the nightmare, screaming Stella’s name into the night, my throat raw and my body drenched in sweat. I press my hands into my face, and I let out a shudder before reaching out for Stella.
My hand meets open air, empty sheets. I turn on my side, and the reality of my situation hits me like a fist to the face. What I said, the way she looked at me, the fact that the best thing I’ve felt in years is over. Stella is gone.
CHAPTER44
STELLA
I’m sitting in the parking lot of Berserkr, watching people go in and out. Through the big front windows, I see Ford talking to a guy in the entryway who’s almost as big as he is but with dark skin and dreadlocks. They laugh, and part of me itches to go in, to get back to what Dani was teaching me a week ago.
God, has it only been a week?
This is Adam’s territory, and I know that, but I already made this appointment with Dani and I want to follow through on it like I’ve never wanted to follow through on anything. Tomorrow I start at my new job, and I know that being here, feeling the rush of learning how to maneuver my body, the power of learning how to use my fists to defend myself, is exactly what I need.
But I don’t know if it’s really an option anymore.
