I pulled my phone off the charger and held it up, the light hurting my tired eyes as I looked at all the notifications that had slowly woken me up over the last half hour.
Fuckin’ Will.
Missed calls, texts, pictures… He was having the time of his life in Rio.
Or Cartagena. I forgot.
Him on the beach. Him with what’s-her-name. Him in the sun and sand, not freezing his ass off back here in Thunder Bay in January. Eating good food and laughing.
In the nearly three months since Devil’s Night, we’d gotten him clean but not dry, and as Kai, Michael, and I settled into the holidays, our homes, our women, and our work, he broke away and did some traveling. He said he needed a change of scenery, but he’d been gone a while, and although the pictures looked great, and he looked happy, I knew he was spinning and spinning until he eventually lost his balance and fell.
And, at twenty-four, his family would only tolerate the self-destruction for so much longer before they cut him off and made him come home.
Throwing the sheet off, I grabbed some sleep pants and pulled them on, dialing Will.
No answer, though. I sent a text, letting him know I was awake, and he could call.
Walking over to the floor-to-ceiling window, I peered out at the master bedroom balcony, taking in the blanket of fresh snow falling, making it look like cake frosting on the stone railing as the wind howled outside, making the trees creak.
Picking up the cigarettes on the table, I pulled one out and slid it under my nose, smelling the tobacco and cloves. My lips burned, and I stuck it in my mouth, rolling it and feeling the comfort of its feel already.
Winter was trying to get me to quit. It was a non-option for much of the argument. I wasn’t a non-smoker.
But then she mentioned kids and it being on my clothes and how secondhand smoke kills, and do I really want the baby to smell like shit?
Ah, fuck it.
I walked over to the French doors, picking up my lighter off the table, and sparking it up as I put on my shoes and opened the door to go out, but then I heard her sleepy voice from across the room.
“Hey,” she said from the bed. “Anything wrong?”
I growled silently, tearing the cigarette out of my mouth and crushing it in my fist.
Dammit. She would’ve smelled it on me when I came in, but at least I would’ve gotten a smoke in.
I tossed the lighter and broken cigarette on the bureau, kicking off my shoes and heading over to her.
“Everything’s fine,” I soothed, sitting on the bed and leaning down to kiss her.
“You were trying to smoke, weren’t you?” she said, sitting up.
I sighed, setting my phone back on the bedside table. “I’m dying here, babe.”
She snorted. “You don’t have to quit,” she told me. “I’m not going to leave you over it. It’s just healthier.”
Then she climbed up on me, straddling me as I sat on the side of the bed.
“I know.” I ran the backs of my knuckles under her V-neck, over her stomach, touching the soft skin that still wasn’t showing signs that there was a kid in there.
She was only about eight weeks along, and with all the dancing, she was working off a lot of what she ate, and I worried the baby wasn’t getting enough, so everyone was feeding her all the time now. Thankfully, her tour was short, and she only had a few more performances before a nice, long break.
We’d gone ’round about putting herself in danger and the kid in danger with the shows, but she was determined to assure me she could finish it and be safe.
Things had gone well for her the past couple of months, and she already had more projects lined up for after the baby was born.
I tried to be at every performance—no matter where—but after the work I did for Grady MacMiller, jobs started coming in, and I had to work. A couple families sent me to their summer houses down south to build things, and I was busy planning out more projects already booked for spring and summer.
I made sure either Rika, Banks, or Alex was with her if she had to go out of town overnight for a performance that I couldn’t attend.
And although I was paying the bills and building us a future, I did relent when Banks gave the house back to Winter, including ownership of everything in it. Banks advised Winter to keep it solely in her name, though, so she could kick me out whenever she wanted.
They laughed about that one.
And Banks also honored my father’s deal with Margot and Ari for a nice settlement, even though the marriage didn’t make it a year and was now annulled. They’d moved into the city, Ari refusing to ever be in the same room with me again.
Somehow I’d find the strength to go on living.
And we still hadn’t heard anything about her father. I hoped it stayed that way.
Winter planted her forehead on mine, gliding her fingers down my arms.
“It’s snowing,” she whispered.
“How’d you know that?”
We weren’t outside. She couldn’t feel it.
“I can hear it,” she said. “Listen.”
We sat there, so still and quiet, and I closed my eyes, trying to see the world how she did. I inhaled, smelling the cold air, but the silence rang in my ears, and I couldn’t hear it at first.
But then I picked up a hint.
“On the glass,” I told her.
She nodded, smiling. “I love that sound. Like the world is asleep.”
It looked like it, too, remembering the blanket of white over everything outside. How water kind of had a habit of quieting the world around me my entire life, and in one form or another, I sought it out and reveled in hiding behind it.
Looking over her shoulder, out the window, the snow fell, charging the air with a little more beauty, the animation making the Earth look alive even when everything else was still. A little more pretty. A little more peaceful. A little more cover.
She always got that about me. She felt it, too.
Even when we were kids, she knew.
I sit in the fountain, the water spilling over the sides from the bowl above, down around me, and hiding me from her.
My finger stings, dripping with blood where I’d sliced myself on a thorn as I ran through the maze, but I don’t dare make a sound or even breathe.
She’s searching for me, and I just want to be left alone. My chin trembles. Just leave me alone.
Please.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she says, having bumped into a little girl. “Are you having fun?”
I close my eyes, imagining I’m far away. In a cave. Or out at sea. Anywhere away from here. I rub the little scratches on my wrist that I’d put there yesterday, trying to see if I had the balls to do it. Maybe I won’t do it. Maybe I will. If I did, I wouldn’t have to stay here with them. I wouldn’t have to live here. It would be over.
“Have you seen my son?” I hear her say, and I open my eyes, my hair and tears blurring my vision. “He loves parties, and I don’t want him to miss this.”
I don’t like parties. My knee shakes uncontrollably. I don’t like anything.
“No,” the little one says.
But I see her staring at me through the water, and I wait, terrified she’ll tell my mother I’m here.
Don’t, please.
My mother finally leaves, and the little girl moves toward the fountain, checking behind her to see if anyone is still there.
Approaching, she calls my name. “Damon?”
She can leave, too, for all I care. I want to be alone.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
Just fucking go. I don’t want to talk. I won’t say the right thing, and I don’t want to answer questions. Just leave.
“Why are you sitting in there?” She peers through the spills of water, and I shiver, the cold seeping through my clothes. “Can I come in, too?”
I notice she wears a tutu—everything white—and her hair is twisted into a tidy little bun. She’s younger than me, clearly one of the students from my mother’s school. Winter, I think? She’s been here before, and I was in the same grade as her sister.
“I see you at Cathedral sometimes,” she tells me. “You never take the bread, do you? When the whole row goes to receive communion, you stay sitting there. All by yourself.”
The nanny takes me every week—my parents making me attend but never bothering themselves. It’s the one thing that bitch lets me fight her on, too. It all felt so fake, like the makeup women put over their bruises to hide what’s happening to them. It’s an act.
“I have my first communion soon,” she says. “I’m supposed to have it, I mean. You have to go to confession first, and I don’t like that part.”
My lips twitch, my anger fading just a little.
I don’t like that part, either. It never stops me from making the same mistakes. It seems weird to receive forgiveness for repeatedly doing things I know are wrong but I’m not sorry for.
“Do you want me to go?” she finally asks when I don’t say anything. “I’ll go if you want.”
I sit there, not as frustrated as I was a moment ago. I’ve even forgotten about the pain in my hand and my parents for a minute.
“I just don’t like it out there very much,” she explains. “My stupid sister ruins everything.”
I feel like I understand. I don’t like it out there very much, either. We can hide.
Together.
If she wants.
“I’ll go,” she tells me and starts to turn.
But I reach my hand through the water, inviting her in instead.
She stops, seeing me, and turns back around. Her eyes light up, and there’s almost no waiting. She takes my hand and steps in.
The water splashes, and she sucks in a breath as the cold water hits her. She giggles as she comes to sit down next to me.
“Wow, this is cool,” she says, looking around at the space, the shade of the bowl over us and the water spilling around.
I notice her white ballet slippers in the water as she hugs her knees to her chest, and everything on her is so small.
“What happened to your hand?”
I look at it, turning it over and rinsing off the blood in the water and wiping it on my jacket.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
I still don’t speak. But yeah, it hurts a little.
“My dad taught me something cool. Wanna see?”
Her voice is so…relaxed. Like she doesn’t know how awful things can be.
“It’ll help get rid of the pain,” she informs me. “Let me show you.”
She takes my hand, and I try to pull it back for a second, but then I stop and let her have it.
She holds it up in front of her. “Ready?”
Ready for what?
She finds the cut on the inside of my index finger, toward the knuckle, but puts her teeth on the other side of the finger, pressing down enough to stretch the skin but not break it.
Her eyes meet mine, and that’s how she stays for several seconds, increasing the pressure just a little.
It doesn’t hurt, though. Not at all. It actually feels kind of good, because the annoying sting of the cut is suddenly gone. Just gone. Like a kill switch.
She stops biting, explaining it to me. “He told me if you’re hurt in more than one place, your brain only registers one pain at a time. Usually the stronger one. I had a hangnail one day, and it really hurt, so you know what he did? He bit my finger. It was so weird, but it worked. I didn’t feel the other pain anymore.”
One pain at a time. So if something hurts, you can make it hurt less by adding more pain?
The sting starts to return but not as strong, the feel of her bite still lingering.
She does it again, and again, the sting disappears.
“Is that okay?” she asks. “Better?”
I want to smile, and I think I do a little as I nod.
Amazing. I wonder if the cut were deeper, would I have to bite harder? And does it have to be biting? Can I do something else to make the pain go away?
She releases my hand and smiles up at me. “It doesn’t make me happy like Oreos in ice cream, but it’s relief.”
Oreos in ice cream, huh? Yeah, I like that, too.
We sit there for a while, enjoying the noise of the waterfalls, the maze falling quiet and the lightning bugs starting to spark up around the hedges. The music and party and nothing else exist except our little hideaway.
“I wish we didn’t have to leave the fountain,” she says.
We don’t. Not yet anyway. Let them come find us.
“Why do you wear the rosary?” she asks.
I follow her gaze, looking down and seeing the wooden beads peeking out from under my shirt where they’re caught on my collar.
“They get mad when kids wear it like a necklace, you know?” she points out.
A laugh escapes me, and I can’t help it. I swallow. “I know.”
That’s why I do it. They give the girls white ones and the boys wooden ones for first communions. Father Behr was really mad when some of us put them around our necks. When I found out how wrong it was, I started wearing it like that all the time.
There isn’t much I can do to fight back—at home anyway—so I pick dumb things I can get away with.
I pull it off over my head and hold it over hers, slipping it on.
“Now you’re bad, too,” I tell her.
She looks down at it, rubbing the cross between her fingers, the silver over the wood.
“You can have it,” I say.
She can remember me, then.
“Are you mad I’m here?” she asks all of a sudden.
Do I seem mad?
When I don’t answer, she looks up at me.
I shake my head.
“Can I come back again, then?” she presses hopefully.
And I nod.
“Let’s do this,” she says, taking off the rosary and then unclipping the silver jeweled barrette from her hair.
She takes both and sets them up on the little alcove under the upper bowl, hiding them in the niche there.
“Since it’s our secret hiding place,” she tells me with an excited look in her eyes. “It’s like part of us is always here. In our spot.”
I tip my head back against the fountain, looking up at the items that claim our nook, and I smile. She’s nice. I like how she talks to me.
And she likes it here, too.
Winter’s mouth hovered over mine, our lips teasing each other as I pulled the white V-neck over her head and dropped it to the bed.
Her chest rose against mine, and she all but begged my name, “Damon.”
I kissed her slow and soft, her hands torturing me with featherlight touches and her body so warm I was drunk on it.
“Damon,” she breathed, tipping her head back and letting me taunt and nibble her neck.
“Shhh,” I teased in a whisper. “Quiet as a mouse.”
The snow outside turned to water, and the sounds of it rushed my ears as the fountain fell around us again, lulling me and my body into the only girl who ever really knew me. The only woman who needed who I was and who was all I needed.
I didn’t deserve anything I had, but I was doing everything to make sure I’d deserve whatever came. We’d have the family we would make, our friends, and our home, and every fucking night, I’d have her right here, surrounding me and getting lost with me where the rest of the world didn’t exist, and it was just us.
Always just us.
I slid inside of her, and she started rolling her hips, taking me in and out as she tipped her head back, and I squeezed her breast and bit her neck.
The snowy, silent night raged outside, our entire world right here, right now.
I wish we never had to leave the fountain.
We never did.
