Skygods (Hydraulic #2) (21 page)

I trailed a fingernail along the line of my calf, where a multitude of little bruises from rock climbing faded to green. As I slipped into my pants and sleep shirt, my mind ventured to the last time Samuel and I had sex, before he’d left for New York. The disconnectedness, the aggression of it had left me cold, sobbing in the bathroom. I’d escaped to Lyons for the weekend because I’d felt used by my own husband, a means to an end rather than loved and cherished—just as I felt now.

The Dream was relentless in its stalking. It dragged over my temples, down my arms in a frozen trail. I saw Samuel’s blue eyes as cold as ice, his body single-minded and hungry for something I could never sate. I wrapped defensive arms around my middle, but it was too late. The last Other had left my dreams. It painfully jabbed me in the ribs to get my attention.

You have to get over yourself, Kaye
.

So I thought…Seven years ago I never confronted him about what happened. Instead I hid, and then he left our marriage two days later.

History has never been your strong subject, because what are you doing all over again?

Hiding in my hotel room, expecting him to knock on the door and send me packing to Colorado.

What are you afraid of?

I pressed my fingertips to my forehead, as if they could pull answers from my mind.

You know this; it’s simple. You don’t want Samuel to leave you again.

But rejecting his advances isn’t exactly an incentive for him to stick around.

You believe he’s going.

Was I rejecting Samuel before he could reject me?

You see the changes. Already his mind is turning away from you.

Yes. In the most vulnerable part of my heart, I thought he’d leave me again.

But there’s more to it. Something has a hold on his mind, doesn’t it? You see it in his eyes. His words.

And in The Dream. Holy hell. I fell back on the bed as the truth socked me.

Even now, the last Other leered as Samuel and I slipped apart.

Ten minutes later, the door to Samuel’s room slammed shut. I flew to my own door and whipped it open. He wasn’t there. I peered into the hallway just in time to see him pace in front of the elevators in a ratty T-shirt, running shorts and sneakers.

Jogging at eleven? I moved into the hall to call to him.

“Samuel!”

He stared straight ahead and hurried into the elevator before I could catch him. I frowned. Yes, he’d heard me. I was positive.

He wasn’t ready to talk—loud and clear. I would just wait for him to cool down. I sat on the hallway floor with my knees tucked under my chin, but eleven became midnight, and still, he hadn’t returned. When one o’clock rolled around, I admitted that I might not see him until tomorrow morning, and returned to my hotel room, fraught with worry.

I wanted to burrow further into the blanket and hide my face in pillows. I wanted to drift away. Like bleached driftwood, I wanted to float to sea and not return. Because returning meant facing whatever monsters waited for me on that craggy shore.

But I sat up and pulled myself together.

With a trembling hand, I filled a glass with water and quenched the burning tightness in my throat. I grabbed a wad of tissues from the colossal bathroom and stumbled back to the living room, swiping tears and fears from my cheeks. My stomach growled. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything today save for banana bread and coffee, but I wasn’t about to show my messy cry-cry face to the hotel lobby. Resigned, I opened a five-dollar bag of mixed nuts from the snack drawer.

I took a shuddery breath and set my shoulders. Okay. So I had my fears and baggage. But there was still something going on with Samuel—it wasn’t my imagination.

A sudden slam made me jump. I pressed a hand to my fluttering heart and listened. Another slam, from the hallway.

Samuel?

Sure enough, he was outside his hotel room, fists digging into the solid door as if he were trying to push them through a wall of butter. He was a sweaty mess, hair plastered to his forehead, shirt clinging to his back. He favored his left foot and I assumed, given the telltale intensity of his run, he’d blistered it. Frustrated, he banged the door again.

I cleared my throat.

He whirled around. Cold sky eyes skittered over my face, then landed firmly on my neckline. “I locked myself out of my room,” he said flatly.

I tugged up the vee of my sleep shirt. “Do you want me to—”

“No. I’ll go to the front desk.”

I shuffled my feet, then decidedly took a step forward. He held up reddened hands, a silent request for me to stay where I was.

I tried again. “Samuel, about tonight. I think we should talk—”

He laughed, a dry, bitter sound. “Firecracker, the last thing I want to do tonight is
talk
. You’d better go back to your room.”

“But, Sam—”

“Go the
fuck
back to your room, Aspen Kaye!” He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed deeply. “Please. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

I nodded and backed into my room, my eyes not leaving his contorted face until I’d closed the door. I pressed my cheek against the cool wood and sighed, the feelings of New York flooding my veins.

At least he’d returned, thank God.

After some minutes, I noticed my chirping phone, telling me I’d missed two calls.

They were both from Hector. I stared wistfully at his name. An overwhelming urge to call him hit me and, even though it was after midnight in Lyons, my fingertip still hovered over the send button. It drifted to my contact list and found another name: Danita.

I texted her, asking her to call me when she woke. Two minutes later, my phone rang.

“Hey, Danita.”

A gruff male spoke, instead. “Sorry, just me.”

“Hi, Angel. Where’s Dani?”

The rustle of what I assumed was a potato chip bag answered my question. “Sorry, Kaye-bear. She and Molly are having a slumber party—can you believe it? Some Welcome Home thing for Molly’s step-SILF. Either Dani has a secret thing for chicks or she didn’t get enough girl love in high school. She accidentally left her phone behind.”

“SILF?”

“Yeah, Sister-I’d-Like-to—”

“Gotcha. Don’t ever say that around Danita. Or anyone, for that matter.”

“So what’s up,
manita?”

I sniffled into the receiver, feeling like a complete idiot. “I’m just a little homesick, I guess.”

“On your first night out there?”

“Yeah, no. I don’t know. Everything is just…off. These people, this place. Even Samuel.”

Angel’s jock-boy tone sobered. “What do you mean, Samuel’s ‘off’? Describe ‘off.’”

I paused, weighing what I could and couldn’t say. “He’s, well…ugh, this is embarrassing. I went frigid on him because he’s being a big-mouthed horn-dog. Kind of like how you were in high school, no offense. Which is totally normal for some guys, but, Angel—this is
Samuel
. Since when has Sofia’s well-mannered son ever said ‘fuck the paparazzi’ and grabbed someone’s tail in front of a hundred witnesses?” I waited on tenterhooks for Angel to speak.

“Uh, yeah. Wow, Kaye,” he hemmed and hawed. “Look, my advice is to forget blowing off steam with Dani and go to the man himself. He’s probably just all jacked up from getting you back.
Hombre
seriously loves you, you know? Tell him his gropey hands and naughty words are freaking you out, and you want to know why he’s acting that way. That’s what works for Dani and me. Then, if he’s still being a horn-dog, you come talk to me, little sister, and I’ll kick the piss out of him.
¿Comprendes?”

Warmth for the man who’d been a big brother to me circled me like a long-distance hug. The tension in my neck and shoulders eased, and I began to feel like myself again.

“I’ll talk to him as soon as I can.”

“Hey, Kaye? Do me a favor and keep this conversation on the DL with Danita, okay? She’s already this close to flying down there, chopping off Samuel’s manly parts and feeding them to the sharks at Sea World. Dani means well, but sometimes she needs to chillax.”

“Chillax? Seriously, Angel?”

Before I switched off the bedside lamp, I tossed my old-school day planner on the nightstand. A folded piece of paper slipped from the back pages—the photocopy I’d hidden away and forgotten. It was that wretched good-bye note from Samuel.

My fingertip traced the letters, seeing the hard press of a pen, the mental stress in each slant. The word choice was a succinct arrow to the heart. Meant to injure, to distance.

Go home to Colorado. I don’t want to see you again. The roots between us are dead, we are dead…

Jaime had been right with her whole Occam’s razor spiel. Dang it, I hadn’t wanted to believe that Samuel had written the note, so I’d grasped at frayed strings, desperate to wrap the blame for his final good-bye around someone else’s shoulders. But instead of despair, I felt clarity. Peace, even, because now I saw the truth.

Go home to Colorado. I don’t want to see you again. The roots between us are dead, we are dead…

I considered not only what Samuel had written in the note, but how he’d written, when he’d written. The
how
was with a heavy, stressed pen. The
when
was sometime after going ballistic and then running up and down the streets of the East Village.

Go home to Colorado. I don’t want to see you again. The roots between us are dead, we are dead…

Samuel had a mental illness, and it wasn’t depression. Tonight I’d briefly considered that he was doing coke again, and I still wasn’t ruling it out. But according to the articles I’d read on cocaine use, highs only lasted roughly half an hour, usually shorter. Unless he was lying about being clean and snorted a line whenever I turned my back, drugs didn’t explain his prolonged agitated state and strange eyes. But I’d seen this before, hadn’t I? That night in New York…

“Go home to Colorado, and don’t you ever come back here again, Aspen Kaye. I fucking mean it. You think this is a joke?”

It was there in his bitter words. In the note. In the backpack.

It was there, that keep-out sign on the tree house, passed from his mother…to him…to me.

I’d forgiven him. But I couldn’t ignore him, not anymore, or I would lose him completely. And knowing what I now did about his mother’s own good-bye letter, tucked away in his kindergarten backpack just before she’d tumbled to her death, there was no room for a blind eye. This was too vital. I turned out the light, Samuel’s long-ago words resonating through my dreams.

“Go home to Colorado, and don’t you ever come back here again, Aspen Kaye. I fucking mean it. You think this is a joke?”

And when daylight came, I would rise to face the last Other.

Chapter 7

Freeflying

An expansion of skydiving,
freeflyers experiment with different dive positions
to increase speed and thrill factor.
Freeflyers will find themselves in mortal danger
if they do not transition back to a traditional
dive position before deploying their canopy.

Hydraulic Level Five [working title]
Draft 1.28
© Samuel Caulfield Cabral & Aspen Kaye Trilby
28. Skygods

W
E
T
RY
T
O
W
ATCH
F
OR
T
HE
S
LIP
.

It sidles up—a warship creeching unaware over planks—and bombards our sides, all hands and fire back plastic-coated pills till we sink that mother in murky silt graveyards of fishbones and rusted remnants of those other warships sunk by pills. Sometimes we don’t see the slip until it slips into us and we fall
down down down
to the sea floor where gravity squashes our sorry asses. There is no air. There is no lung. There is no word in the place where fishbones and warships lie. Sediment crusts for a thousand years over our limbs and encases us in a deep cave where only blind fish and gilled symbiotic creatures swim. So deep, so deep. Othertimes we slip and fall
up up up
to wide skies. Weightless, tumbling, pushing those words so high, so high. Cold virgin air burns off our gills and didn’t we soar? Didn’t we twine feathered limbs together like skygods? My God, Firecracker, didn’t we fly?

We found the ground when we heard sine waves crawl across Planet Bluegrass, twanged from the guitar strings of an ermine Festivarian court. They wrapped diamonds around your finger and chained you to me. You heard it again when you pressed your ear against my chest. Take me back to my room, you said, and make me yours. Lyons misted our faces as you stumbled behind me to our second-story haven, your hands on my waist.