Ruby Rising (7 page)

“I’ve never…” I was so embarrassed I was grateful for the soft candlelight. “I’ve never, um, had one of those before. Did you…”

Sensing my utter embarrassment Scott didn’t wait for me to finish speaking, instead he leaned in and kissed me, stopping me from trying to find the right words through my embarrassment. “No I didn’t, but I didn’t want tonight to be about me. I figured you’d never had an orgasm before.”

He trailed his finger down my chest, my shirt still gaping open my breasts exposed. My body still tingled. He spoke so easily about sex, I wondered how many people he’d been with. I wondered how long he would wait for me. Seeming to anticipate my question he answered it before I asked.

“Just one. And it wasn’t anything like the way I feel when I just kiss you.” I sat up and pulled my bra back on before Scott slowly did up the buttons. “I’d better get you home, before I break my promise to you about leaving your pants on. I just need to go to the kitchen. Be right back.”

I sat up and looked over at the blank TV. I really had wanted to see that movie too. I smiled at myself and stood up staring at the curtains. The stars suddenly began to shake and flowed together to form a large star filled with little ones and all held inside a single large circle. I blinked and it was gone.
Get a grip, Ruby
, I thought to myself,
you just stood up too quickly
.

I heard Scott pick up his keys. “Are you ready?” He leaned against the door frame looking sexy and relaxed. It was all I could do to nod.

He dropped me home at ten to eleven. The few hours had flown by, it had felt more like an hour. He walked me to the door and gave me a short kiss.  I melted into his embrace, my body remembering what he had given me only half an hour before.

“I’ll see you on Monday at school. I hope you had a good time, I know I did.” He smiled and I blushed, both from the smile and from what he’d said. How could I not have had a good time?

“I did, you
know
I did.”

I stood there composing myself for a few minutes after I watched him get back into his car and drive away. The rose bush he’d picked from earlier caught my eye in the street light and I remembered what I thought I’d seen. I shook my head dismissed it as a trick of the light.

I headed into the quiet house, my parents were already in bed. I heard them talking quietly so I went to their door and told them I was home and was going to bed.

I flicked on the light to my bedroom startling Phoenix who was curled up on my pillow. I smiled as he sleepily wagged his tail at me. My face fell when I looked at my bedside table. Sitting in a small vase next to my bed was a single black rose.

CHAPTER 8

I woke up late and still tired on Sunday morning after staring at the rose for hours after I got home from Scott’s. I had even ripped off a petal to see if it had been coloured on the outside and ripped it in half. It was black! Not just a dark black, but dead of night black, all the way through.

I knew Scott hadn’t put it there, he hadn’t even come into the house. So
who
could have done it? And more importantly,
why
? What did it mean, what did it represent?

At eleven my mother came into see if I was okay as I rarely slept in so late. I told her I hadn’t slept well and was just going to rest for the day and catch up on some reading.

As she was leaving she noticed the rose in the vase. “That’s unusual Ruby. I’ve never seen a black rose before. Where did you get it?”

“Um, I found it, around the lake when I was walking the other day.” I wasn’t even sure why I was lying, but I didn’t really have the truth to tell her.

“Well someone will be disappointed they lost it. You can’t grow black roses you know, they are coloured. I’ll bring you up some lunch and a coffee soon.” She shut the door quietly and went downstairs.

I stared at the rose until she came back I hadn’t even realised that any time had passed. She sat the food down and asked if I was okay, if something had happened with Scott on our date.

I told her again I was just sleep deprived and thanked her for the food. Reluctantly she left, taking a bored Phoenix with her.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the dark flower, it was so beautiful and enticing and yet ominous and menacing as well. I had absolutely no idea who would have left it for me. Only two people had been to my house from school, and I had been with Scott when the rose was left. That left Mikayla. Why would she do something like this? And, if it was Scott, then when did he have time to put it in my room?

With more questions than answers I fell into a restless sleep, not waking until late in the afternoon. I switched on my laptop and waited for my emails to load.

There was an email from someone I didn’t know, again it was filled with more questions than answers.

Have you figured it out yet Ruby?

I sat staring at the screen, the cryptic questions were getting increasingly frustrating and I could feel myself getting angrier by the minute.

If you want me to know something then tell me otherwise just stop with the cryptic crap. I hit send with more force than was needed sending the laptop flying off my legs. Within seconds I heard the tell-tale ping of a new email message. Sighing I picked up the laptop and gently sat it on the bed to read the next message.

You are the only one who can figure it out. You have more than enough clues. I won’t message you until you do
. It was signed
A Friend
.

Some
friend
I thought, my anger building further. What the hell was going on? I thought about everything that had happened since the move. Krystal’s death, Mikayla, Scott, even my parents had changed dramatically in the way they treated me.

How was it all connected? Was it all even connected? Was someone just enjoying messing with my head, and if so, why? I started pacing in my room, letting out a deep growl of frustration as I threw my arms up into the air. At the same time my bedroom window smashed, falling into hundreds of sharp pieces on the ground outside.

I squealed in shock and was still standing staring at the open window when my mother came in to find out what the noise was.

“Ruby? Oh my! What happened?” She went over to the window and looked outside to wear the glass had fallen. There was no glass on the floor, anywhere, it had all fallen outside.

“I was just sitting here and it just smashed!” My face was red with anger and confusion as my eyes filled with tears that I refused to let spill over.

“It’s okay Ruby, it was probably just faulty glass,” she rubbed my shoulder. “It is a bit odd the way the glass shattered out like that, saves us cleaning it up in here though.” She paused for a minute and an odd expression came over her face. “It almost looks like…doesn’t matter. I’ll call someone to come and fix it, hopefully they can come today.” Her hand moved from my shoulder to my back. “Honey, are you feeling okay?”

“Sure Mum, I’m fine, I think I just got a fright. I’m going to have a shower.” I turned my back on her facing the wardrobe before she saw the first of my tears fall down my face. Quietly she left the room without saying anything else and I silently thanked her for it.

Eventually the tears dried up and I grabbed some clothes and went to leave my room, with my hand on the door knob I decided to go and low out the smashed window. I’m not great with heights and I would normally have steered clear of an open window, but something made me want to look.

I cautiously looked down to where the glass had fallen and suddenly knew why my mother had seemed so confused. In the garden bed below, the fallen glass had formed a star with a circle in it. 

I looked up at the sky before taking in a shaky breath and looking down again, my hands shaking as they gripped the window sill so tightly my knuckles were white. This time when I looked down all I could see was a mess of glass on the ground below. There was none directly under the window though, it was all further into the lawn, about five metres from the house. The shards of glass had fallen away from the house, like the window had exploded instead of shattered.
What the hell
? I knew I what I had seen just seconds before, but yet here it was, just fallen glass. No stars, no circle. As the tears threatened to form once again I pulled myself together and decided I needed some answers and I knew just where to get some of them.

I stayed in the shower until it went cold, my muscles easing and relaxing in the flow of the water. I washed my hair and lathered myself up with body wash. I shaved my legs and under my arms and trimmed my bikini, I was overdue for waxing. I tied my hair up into a high pony tail as tight as I could get it and pulled on my running gear. I was going to work off this anger and clear my head so I could think properly.

I told my mother where I was going, grabbed my iPod and strapped it on, only stopping to find my running playlist. I jogged slowly for five minutes, giving my body the chance to warm up before I pushed it as close to my limits as possible. As the songs started to increase in tempo so did my running speed. I was halfway around the lake and still wasn’t puffing hard. I felt my heart pumping in my chest, a feeling I relished, and the reason I had become so addicted to running in the first place. It grounded me, helped me think clearly and made me feel alive. I pushed past where Krystal had died without stopping or looking to the spot on the grass where I had seen the light fade from her eyes. A flash of a memory hit me from the seconds before she died, reminding me that her eyes had turned green just before she collapsed on the ground.

After I’d done a full lap of the lake I pushed my legs harder, feeling them burn. I was drawing air into my lungs faster now but knew I needed to push it further. After hitting the halfway mark again I pushed even harder hitting my stride at full speed I couldn’t go any faster. I ran the last half and kept pushing and pushing until I couldn’t breathe anymore. I slowed down and bent over at the knees drawing in deep rough breaths. After a few seconds I threw up into the reeds on the side of the lake, heaving until my stomach was empty. Catching my breath, I sat down on the grass and stared out to the lake, sweat still pouring off me.

My head still wasn’t clear, my life in Primfield was swimming in circles inside my head. After twenty minutes, I figured I’d had enough, the sun was starting to fade and I’d run as far as my legs were going to take me. I was glad for the pain as I stood up, feeling every step as I slowly walked home.

I was quiet during our family dinner, my parents trying to engage me into conversation but eventually giving up. I thanked Mum for dinner, cleared the table and told them I was going to bed. On the way up the stairs I heard my father’s voice.

“That boy had better not hurt her J, I hate seeing her this torn up and not know why. For goodness sake he must have done something!”

“Robbie,” she said using her nickname for him. “She’s not a child anymore, we can’t protect her forever. She needs to experience love and hurt for herself, even if that means she does get hurt. She will come to us if and when she needs us.”

I went into my room without hearing the rest of their conversation. My mother sounded so wise, settling my father wasn’t as easy task and I thanked her for managing to do tonight. I wasn’t about to go back to the over protective parenting style my father had used when we were in the city.

Scott hadn’t hurt me at all, quite the opposite. I was so drawn to him physically, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was just lust. I knew in my heart it wasn’t, I was falling for him hard and fast, and I didn’t know if I could stop. Not sure I could stop myself even if I wanted to.

I dressed into my pyjama pants and a singlet top, and went to my desk with my laptop, barely noticing that the window had been fixed.

I opened my emails and while they loaded I opened the internet browser and clicked on
Google
. In the search field I entered
black rose
, hit enter and waited.

There were over three hundred and sixty million results.
Great
I thought,
this is going to take forever
. I started to scroll through the various links. There were so many that were completely unrelated to gardening or flowers. Some made reference to bondage and S&M, cafes, Goth online shops and much more. I clicked on a link for a gardening site that stated there is no known true black rose, most of the ‘black roses’ were in fact dark reds. To get a black rose you needed to dye them, paint them or burn them. In my head I saw Scott near the rose bush when he had picked me up the previous night.

Clicking in the search bar I changed my search to include ‘meaning of’ and got over eighteen million results. At least that was slightly less time consuming.

Surprised I found sites that had me interested almost immediately, from
Yahoo
,
Wikipedia
, and lots of unknown sites.

Words flew around in my head as I researched, death, new life, sacrifice, sadness, mortality, immortality, tragic, love, hate, magic, voodoo, grief, impending doom, rivalry, and new beginnings were just a few. After hours of pouring through various sites, I closed the laptop without remembering to check my email. From what I had discovered only the giver of the black rose determined the context of its meaning. So unless I knew who left it for me, there was no way to know for certain what it meant.

As I lay in bed, I stared out the open curtains into the clear sky that was filled with stars. There was a small knock on the door and my mother came in quietly.

“Ruby, I thought you might want some company.” She placed a very excited Phoenix on my bed, kissed me on my forehead like she did when I was little and left the room.

After a play and a cuddle my gorgeous puppy fell asleep on my feet. I had neglected him all day and would make up for it tomorrow.

With my head still full of the things I had read and the things I still needed to figure out, I eventually fell into a deep sleep, my run having drained me of all my energy.