“Who is that?” I asked, raising my arm toward the man.
She brushed her chestnut hair from her face and peered behind me with her inhumanly sharp eyes. “Who? I don’t see anyone.”
I turned back to him. He was gone.
“I thought…” What the hell? Did he flash? Was it him? Or a protector? Or just my imagination?
“Probably one of the landscaping guys,” Mom finally said. “They have a different crew out today.”
“No Amadis?”
“Not until Owen comes later.”
“Oh. He just kind of…disappeared. And he was staring at me.”
Mom raised her eyebrows. “There would be many reasons for that, my dear.”
I looked at her for meaning. She just shrugged.
I tried to see the stranger’s face in my mind, but he’d been too far away. His build, though…his height, the way he stood…so familiar….
I slumped back into my chair and stared at my hands in my lap, fighting back tears. It’s not him. It’s not him. It’s not him. I tried to convince myself. I’d had other instances of mistaken identities, but because this was in my own backyard, it felt different. Worse. Especially because the stranger had simply disappeared, as if he hadn’t existed in the first place. As if I’d been seeing things. It doesn’t hurt. Just losing my mind, is all.
I shoved my plate away and stood up. I had to get out of here. Because it did hurt. It hurt like hell, actually. For some stupid reason, something inside me had soared high with the tiniest glint of hope, then dive-bombed into the pavement of reality. All the pieces inside shattered into even smaller ones, if that were even possible, cutting open old wounds and making them throb and bleed again. I clutched at the pendant—my gift for our one and only Christmas together—as if it could soothe the pain.
“You didn’t eat anything.” Mom pointed to my plate, then gestured at me. “You eat all that junk food and look what it’s done to you. I give you something healthy and delicious and you don’t even touch it.”
The last tick of the bomb sounded. Psycho Alexis could be suppressed no longer and a switch didn’t just flip this time. The whole bomb exploded.
“I’m not hungry, okay?” I roared. “Why can’t you just leave me the hell alone?”
The pained shock on her face stabbed me in the gut. I fled to my bedroom.
Who is he? Why did he stare at me? And what did Mom mean?
I went straight into my bathroom and, for the first time in…what?… probably months, I looked in the full- length mirror and really studied myself. My mouth dropped.
“How’d I get so old?” I demanded of my reflection, moving closer in, staring at a face that appeared to be fifty-five years old.
Dark puffy circles surrounded my bloodshot eyes that were once a deep mahogany, just like Mom’s, but were now a flat brown. Deep lines permanently etched my forehead, between my eyebrows and around the corners of my mouth, which drew down into a perma-frown. My skin was pale and sickly looking, blotchy and aged. My hair, a dull reddish-brown, hung lifeless down my back in strings. Holy shit! Grays! I looked closer at my head and stopped counting at ten. I’m not even thirty!
I stepped back to see if my body looked just as bad. It was worse.
“How’d I get so fat?”
A round pooch protruded in front. Where did these huge hips come from? And my ass? No wonder I preferred sweat pants and elastic-waist shorts. My breasts were the only part that looked smaller…and saggier.
I crumpled to the floor, wailing a mix of sobs and screams. What’s happened to me? What did I do to myself? I’m fat and ugly and old. And alone. All alone.
I literally looked twice my age and I never noticed I was getting older. For me, life stopped at nineteen. I knew time had passed. Dorian’s birthdays were the biggest marker another year went by. Plenty had happened, but I hadn’t lived it. I’d just been going through the motions, barely existing in the fog. Over seven years gone that I’ll never have again. And I looked like twenty-seven years had gone by. I’d let all that stress take a toll on me and my body while never realizing that I—the essence of me—was aging.
Images of the last seven years flashed through my mind like a slideshow while I lay on the bathroom floor with my eyes closed, tears still seeping. Pictures of Dorian—his first smile, his first steps, his birthdays, his first days of school—were bright. Others were dim—book launches, signing tours, buying my first house with my own money. Those experiences should have been remarkable, but I’d let them slip by barely noticed, like water through a sieve, as I wallowed in my pain and loss and loneliness instead.
How could I be so stupid? So wasteful? So fucking miserable?
I cried for some time. Then I grew mad. Mad at myself. Then mad at Tristan. The anger boiled up and exploded again.
“How could you do this to me?” My voice came raw and scratchy as I screamed at the top of my lungs to ensure the one who left me behind heard me, wherever he was. I pounded my fists on the floor, breaking the tiles. “How could you leave me? Why haven’t you come back? It hurts so much. I am so alone.”
I broke down in hard sobs again.
Where are you? Come back to me! Save me from this emptiness!
I cried until my chest and stomach hurt. Then I curled into a ball on the bathroom floor, closed my eyes and pulled out every single memory I could possibly grasp, forcing their clarity, no matter how much they felt like daggers piercing my soul.
That first night of class, when we met. The first time he smiled that angelic grin at me. Looking into those hazel, sparkly eyes, full of love. The first time he touched me and the unusual spark. Our first kiss as the sun set that fall evening. Cooking together. Motorcycle rides. Christmas, when he gave me the pendant, explaining it was a piece of his heart. His warm laugh. The night he proposed. His strong hands and powerful arms holding me close against his hard body, feeling so safe and so loved. And our wedding on the beach. Our wedding night….
Darkness overcame me.
Mom knocked once and I told her to go away. She didn’t come back until much later. I didn’t move from my fetal position on the bathroom floor. I no longer cried; I physically hurt from the sobs and didn’t think I had anymore in me. I barely acknowledged her as she helped me up and to my bed. But I hugged her fiercely as she tucked me in, as if I were six again.
“It’s okay, honey,” she murmured in my hair as I held her tightly. “It will get better. I can feel it.”
“Mom?” Dorian squeaked from the doorway, his stuffed shark tucked under one arm. “Are you okay?”
I propped up on an elbow and held my other arm out to him. He crawled onto my bed, squirmed under the covers and snuggled against me.
“I’m okay now,” I said as I wrapped my arms around him. Mom left, turning off the light and shutting the door behind her.
“Please don’t be mad at Dad,” Dorian whispered in the darkness. “Don’t yell at him for leaving. You said it’s not his fault. And he can’t even hear you anyway.”
I sighed sadly. I hated that he’d heard my bursts of anger.
“I love your father very much, Dorian. Don’t ever think I don’t. I just get mad sometimes and say things out of anger, but only because I miss him so much. Understand?”
“Yeah. I miss him, too.”
I squeezed him tighter. “But we have each other right now. I love you, little man. Very much.”
“I love you, too, Mom.” Within minutes, his breathing settled into a quiet snore.
I fell to sleep shortly after, welcoming unconsciousness, waiting for the memory-dream to start.
But it never came.
After more than seven years of the same thing every night, my dreams were finally different. I found myself in a world where everything was a shade of what I could only call steel-blue-gray. I sat on the top of a mountain, at the apex of the arced range with several peaks pointing to the steel-blue sky in each direction. Far below, at the base of the mountains, looked to be a meadow and a lake but they seemed small and vague from this perspective. A multitude of images hung in the air, as if projected on unseen screens. The images changed, like the slideshow of my waking memories while lying on the bathroom floor. Dorian, the beach, vampires, writing, college classes, Mom’s old bookstore, werewolves, my mom, motorcycle rides, me on the bathroom floor and the figure in the
