Nash
Breath and fire all mingled, shuttered and sparked like electricity in my chest. I couldn’t get air into my lungs, I couldn’t fight hard enough, grip tight enough to make her stay. No, she had to stay. There was a baby. Our baby. There was a life to lead. Our life. We were together and then… apart.
“No. No!”
The scent of baby powder clogged in my sinuses and I still felt the soft, heavy weight of a baby in my arms. I came awake, cradling nothing to my chest, my face wet, my breath uneven, a gasp that rent through with a sob. Tears I cried for my woman. Tears that came for someone I didn’t know. Had I ever known her?
Eyes tight, I saw all those faces. They looked familiar, like an echo of memory, something I knew was mine, but couldn’t get a grip on. My room was dark, but the light outside was bright, cracked through the blackout curtains around my windows. It was morning and I was alone. The sheets draped around my hips were wet and my chest felt damp. It had been a dream and like the others, it had felt so real. It had felt like it belonged to me.
Isaac loved Riley. I knew that. Felt it deep inside me. He’d loved her when she cried in the library with her lips busted and bloody. He loved each tear as they came and it was only her mouth, her touch that had kept him from finding that Trent asshole and ripping him to pieces. It was only Riley’s sweet words and sweeter taste that kept him from risking his own neck to be with her. No matter that Lenny warned him. No matter that the world was set against them. Isaac had loved Riley with a fierceness that made him made it impossible to do more but keep on loving her. That scared him, that made him brave.
But she had given him a son. He’d had a link to the world, a name and place and moment that would keep her with him always. Riley had given him a reason to get out of bed each morning. She’d given him a family.
I sat up straighter, elbows on my legs, hands on the back of my head, trying to steady my heartbeat. It raged quick and desperate. The dream was dimming, but the emotions, the feelings Isaac felt, swam inside me like she had been mine, like I had lost her.
And when I remembered what Isaac felt, how it seemed to him that his heart had come right out of his chest, like someone had taken a light that lit his entire world and snuffed it out, I did something I hadn’t done since my mother’s funeral. I sat in the middle of my bed and cried.
Riley had not been mine. That boy, the baby Winston, had not been mine, but I wept like they were. I cried for the loss. For the memory. For the man I’d never known and the life that had been stolen from him.
“Damn.”
I fell onto my mattress, dragging the back of my hand over my face, pushing back the ache in my chest until it became duller. Until it was only a small thud that smarted like a bruise and not the gash that pulsed and bled Isaac dry.
Outside I heard voices, many of them, workers likely, a few crews had tackling potholes down on the street below. It was the noise—their voices, the thump from their radios and the squeak from their tires that I tried to focus on; anything to move the ache of my dream from feeling so real.
I wondered, idly, as I lay there, if I’d called out in my dreams. Had I spoken Riley’s name? Had I begged her not to die? Had Willow heard me? Despite myself, despite the argument we’d had two nights ago, I still couldn’t shake her from my thoughts. I couldn’t ignore the connection she seemed to hold between all the strange things that had been happening in my life. Had I had been wrong about everything? No one could make me dream impossible dreams. Not unless their juju was real and by the sweat drying on my forehead and the slowing pace of my heart, I began to believe that Willow’s was.
“You’re doing this,” I’d told her, face tight as I’d yelled at her. “You planned all of this, didn’t you?”
“How the hell could I do that?” She’d waved the picture at me, and I caught a glimpse of Sookie’s smile. “I’m not supernatural, Nash. I can’t make up pictures from ninety damn years ago and I can’t make it that you have the same dreams as I do!”
But it wasn’t logical, not any of it. It wasn’t possible. And I knew it, even before I’d accused her, I knew she hadn’t done anything. It was deep down, in the center of my brain, that reality. It told me Willow had only reacted. It told me she was feeling everything I had, reliving the same lives I had.
But how?
The sheets rustled as I turned, arms stretched out over my head and I stared off at nothing, reliving the dream of that day at the hospital. Most likely the worst day of Isaac’s life. He’d watched her blink twice, her gaze on him, then shifting to their son. There was softness in her expression, the peace that comes when you know you don’t have to fight anymore. It relaxed the tension in her facial muscles and made the whites of her eyes seem brighter. Isaac had watched Riley do all that while she kept her attention on their boy. He’d placed the baby next to her and she closed her eyes, her lips moving like a twitch, her face leaning toward the soft, sweet scent of newborn skin, like she knew, even as she faded, that her baby was there, sleeping next to her.
“My sweet’,” he’d whispered so low that only she’d hear him. “My sweet girl. I love you, Riley. Always will.” Then Isaac kissed her. Her skin was warm, but pale and one final rattle of breath went out of her. “What do I do now?” he asked, but she was gone, soft like a first kiss, bitter like a rainstorm. She left him and he could not keep hold of her. He could not stop her from going.
My eyelids felt heavy as the flood of pain came on me again. It was worse, this feeling, than anything. Worse than watching Willow walk out of my room. Worse than hearing the click of my front door when she left. Worse that seeing her standing too close to another man in the lobby, no matter that she swore he’d only hired her to make two dozen cupcakes for his niece’s birthday. Worse than the jasmine of her scent fading more and more each day I kept away from her. Worse than the look on her face when I took off, leaving her on the roof deck, a catch in her voice as she called after me.
I banged my knee against the bedside table when I sat up, but I didn’t feel it. Couldn’t. My mind was full of Isaac and Riley, of that baby. Of Sookie and Dempsey and the horror of it all. Of Willow. Of how heavy and thick it all felt as every one of those faces crowded inside my head.
Willow had tears on her cheeks when I walked away from her two nights ago.
I hadn’t believed her when she swore she’d done nothing to me. No, I didn't know if I believed her or not, but accepting what she said would have meant everything I have believed before had been a lie.
I left her alone out there. Because I was afraid and confused, I’d just left her…
Isaac would have given anything to keep Riley with him. Sookie would have done anything not to let the smoke and fire take her, to have her chance with Dempsey.
But I wasn’t willing to stop and even consider that I might have been wrong, to keep Willow with me? To be with her and never want her to go away from me? What in hell was wrong with me?
The sheets fell to the floor when I left the bed and I started then to rehearse what I’d say to her. “I’m sorry” didn’t seem good enough, neither did “I can explain…” because nothing would make up for the way I’d left her.
“Please forgive me” sounded a little better, but even as I spoke it aloud, tugging on my shirt and slipping my feet into my Chucks, it still seemed off, not nearly good enough. I’d crawl on my knees if that’s what she needed. I might not understand what was happening, and despite everything, I still couldn’t wrap my head around past lives or anything like that. But, I wanted her. No, it was more than that—I needed her. Apologies might not be enough, I thought, jogging out of my apartment and into the stairwell, taking steps two at a time as I went, but they were all I had. I’d thrown away everything else.
How long had I spent acting like she was an irritation? Months? Like I was too fucking important to waste my precious time on her, and then, when I’d finally gotten my head out of my ass, I ended up walking away.
I was a fuck up, something solidified and certain, I decided, as I got to her floor, skirting around two guys in gray overalls as they carried boxes toward the elevator. An epic fuck up who would die alone, apparently.
The door to Willow’s apartment was open and I slipped inside, bypassing another coverall-wearing guy with no neck as he held a lamp in each hand. A knot formed in my chest and the further I came into that apartment, the larger that knot got.
The crowded space that normally looked like a Technicolor wet dream was sparse. I only just noticed with all the furniture missing and windows, free of curtains or tapestries, that the walls were a soft gray and the floor, usually covered by blankets and rugs, was dark oak. Without Willow to decorate this small chunk of the world, it seemed lifeless and boring. I could relate.
“Hey!” I called, stopping the mover before he could punch the down button. He paused, moving his chin toward me in answer to my call. Standing in front of him, I’d guess he might have been 5’6 but no taller than that and had small, glassy blue eyes. “The woman who booked this gig, where is she?”
He shrugged, ignoring me as he elbowed the button on the wall. “I just move the boxes and furniture, man.” The bell chimed and he walked inside the elevator, adjusting the lamps. “There was a car outside next to our van, but it’s full. Pretty sure she’s gone already.”