CHAPTER 14 - EAMES
The world came back to me all at once, a rush of sound and light, even though the ceiling was already familiar and there was nothing moving except the storm to generate any sound. It was if my eyes and ears opened and started working at the same time.
I was in bed, that much I knew. And I was wearing very little, that was clear from the way I could feel the blankets above me against my skin as I turned from my back onto my side, puling them tighter around me and thrusting my head into my pillow.
I didn’t know how I’d gotten here. My memory was all snow, the kind of snow you saw when a TV was turned onto a channel that didn’t exist. Only my version of it was actually cold.
My eyes focused and I saw that she was sitting there next to the bed in a chair, dozing. I narrowed my gaze and made it seem like I was still asleep, just for the chance to watch her for a moment.
As if on cue, she stirred, waking up from whatever dream she was in. Naomi wore one of those old dresses again, and I’d think about teasing her about it if I didn’t think she looked so pretty in them.
She sat up and looked me over, and I was sure she’d notice that I was awake, but instead, she stood up and rustled with my blankets, making sure they were covering me — one of my feet was exposed until she pulled the covers back over them, making me feel another rush of warmth.
Something about her was different now. Maybe it was the weird vibe I’d gotten when I’d opened up the locket back at the cliff and seen that she wasn’t telling me the whole story. Maybe she’d figured out that I’d probably looked in the locket, that I knew that the jig was up, that she was busted.
Whatever it was, even though I wanted answers, right now I was content to just wait a bit. I was actually kinda enjoying having her take care of me like this, even if I’d only just become aware that she was.
“How’s it going down there?” hearing her voice again was like hearing beautiful music for the first time, but I tried not to let it show. I think I did a pretty good job of it, all told. Maybe I could make it as an actor.
“Alex, I know you’re awake,” Naomi said, this time poking me with her hand. “I’m glad you’re awake.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, my voice muffled against the blankets. “I’m still asleep. Keep taking care of me.”
“Very funny,” she quipped before her voice dropped and she got all serious. “I’m really glad you’re OK,” she said, and then she was on top of me, hugging me, wrapping her arms around my neck.
“Hey!” I said, raising my own voice weakly. “Come on, recovering man over here!”
“Shhh,” she said, hugging me even closer, and I got a face full of her cleavage and suddenly had no more complaints on Earth.
“Ok that’s better,” I said, in between her breasts. She laughed and pulled away. “No, wait, come back. I’m feeling faint.”
Naomi laughed. “I had a hunch that might get you going, but that’s all you get.”
“Tease.”
“I resent that! That was for medical purposes only.”
I turned over. “Make sure and write down the name of the nursing school you attended; I want to make a large donation.”
She laughed again, that musical laugh that could set me on edge, make me mad, or turn me on like no other. “I don’t think they accept the kind of, uh, donation, you’re thinking about.”
That even got me laughing, even though it hurt all over to do so. “OK if they teach you bedside manner like that, I’ll even make a donation of a financial nature.”
She got in close to me, and I could feel her warm breath on my face. “I really am glad you’re OK, Alex.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“It was really touch and go there-“ she started.
“No, really, please don’t mention it,” I coughed. “I don’t really want to think about it anymore. I think I’ve learned my lesson — it’s the tropics for me.”
She punched me lightly on the shoulder. “And give up New England? You woudn’t dare.”
“After being buried under several mountains worth of snow? I absolutely would dare.”
She brushed her hand over my forehead and held it there. “Well, you’re not running a fever, but clearly you’re delirious. Maybe you need another bath.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” And I was happy to see the flash in her eyes as I said it; I could tell she was running through that over and over. “Wait a second…another bath? What’s this another?”
Naomi shrugged impishly. “You came here near frozen to death, Alex. It was the only way we could heat you back up.”
“We?”
“Marty wanted no part of it, but I couldn’t shoo Clara out of the room.” Naomi shrugged again. “She said you must spend a lot of time in the gym, by the way.”
“Tell her, uh, thanks.”
“Oh, from the eyeful we got, she and I should be thanking you.”
I paused and let it sink in that a little old lady elsewhere in the same building was now full of mental pictures of me naked. “You should have left me out there,” I groaned.
“Trust me, I wanted to,” She laughed. “Not really, though.”
“I know.”
The silence that followed started out uncomfortable and then got more so before it came around the bend and settled down into something that resembled peace for a few minutes.
And then Naomi started pacing around the room. “Listen,” she said, finally breaking the silence.
I knew that it was time for more serious things, and I needed to take the fall on that first. “Wait, let me first,” I said quickly, and Naomi fell silent, looking like she really had something to say, but then she nodded.
“I have to,” I started. “Apologize for the way I acted before,” I managed to get it all out fast. “I’ve been a dick this whole time and there’s been no reason for that.”
I saw Naomi’s face light up as she wrapped her head around my words, and she nodded again, a smile on her face. “It’s OK,” she said from across the room as she stepped closer. “I think I gave you the cold shoulder at first too.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, which after a couple seconds of sharp pain in my stomach turned into wincing. “Terrible joke,” I whispered through gritted teeth as the pain slowly subsided.
“Oh, right, Hah, didn’t even realize I was making it.”
“Let’s pretend that you didn’t, for both our sakes, alright?”
“Deal,” she said, still smiling.
“Mainly for your sake, though. I wouldn’t want it to get out that you were in the habit of making jokes that bad.”
“How often have I told you that I hate you?” she said, swiping at me on the shoulder. “Clearly not enough.”
I looked down the bed at my feet, covered in heavy blankets. “Yeah, well, now that you, uh, kinda saved my life, you’ll have at least a little while longer to tell me that, so I don’t forget.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Let’s call it even on the life saving thing.”
I refocused on Naomi’s smiling face, drawing a deep breath in as her beauty overtook my senses once again and I basked for a moment in the quiet radiance that she gave off. Even in the middle of this storm, I knew without a doubt that I felt safe and warm with her around me.
And then I realized that for the first time I wasn’t afraid to admit that.
“Heyyyy,” I said, drawing it out. I reached up and grabbed the locket around her neck. “You’re wearing that. It was in your bag”
She clasped her hand around mine and we stayed there for a long pause, our eyes never leaving each other’s. “Yeah!” she said, brightly. “I haven’t taken it off since I found it in your pants.”
“Going through my pants, eh?”
“Shut up, you weren’t wearing them at the time.” Her face turned crimson even before she got the end of the sentence out, and she clapped her free hand over her mouth in response. “Don’t say a word,” she mumbled, muffled further by the hand covering her mouth.
I laughed, this time ignoring the pain that shot throughout my midsection because this was just too funny. “So you’d already gotten my pants off, is what you’re saying.”
“No, that’s just what you’re hearing.”
“I implied it from what you said.”
“Actually, you inferred it. Implied is something else.”
“Factually correct, I suppose.”
Naomi smiled. “Factually correct is the best kind of correct.”
“That the English lesson for the day? I’m a little tired here.”
“Oh, we’re just getting started.”
We both fell silent after that, our hands still together, her locket still in my hand.
Naomi leaned in. “I really can’t thank you enough,” she breathed over me. “I don’t know what I’d have done without the diary.” She looked down. “Or the necklace.”
“It’s no big deal,” I forced out. “I could tell it was really important to you.”
“Oh you have no idea.”
Silence again, and then Naomi sat down on the bed next to my waist.
“I have a little idea.” She’d gone that far for it, so it was definitely worth something.
“What happened to the bus?”
“Took a dive off the cliff.”
“Oh no! Really? You could have been hurt!”
I waved it off with my free hand. “Nah, I was out with plenty of time. I just didn’t expect it to be so cold getting back.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, in a snowstorm? Chance in a million.”
“You’re a sarcastic jerk, you know that?” But we were still holding hands, and she was still smiling that smile that could light a fire without a match.
“I hear that.”
She squeezed my hand around her necklace and I opened mine, letting it drop to the bed next to her. Naomi kept her fingers around it, and looked down, suddenly pensive.
“It was…” she faltered and stopped speaking, now unable to meet my eyes with hers.
“Hey, listen…”
“No, I want to tell you…you risked everything just to get it for me, and we barely know each other, so…” she trailed off again.
Then our eyes met. “It was my sister’s diary. She’s Naomi.”
I caught my breath. “Then…who…”
“Let me finish. She was my older sister, and about six years ago, she…passed away suddenly.”
That hit me like a lead balloon, and I watched the pain swim all over her face as she relived the moment. “What happened?”
“She fell in with the wrong crowd, and went to a party one night, and overdosed on some designer drug people were passing around. Everyone at the party was too stoned out of their minds to realize she was in trouble, and no one was able to help.”
“Oh wow, that’s terrible, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
She still cradled the necklace in her hands, but now she opened up the locket and stared at the picture inside. “Yeah. She was a few years older than me, old enough that we weren’t too close, but it definitely hit me hard at the time. My parents, on the other hand…”
I looked down. “I know how parents can be.”
She nodded. “They took it way harder. Naomi was kinda the, uh, pride of the family, you could say.”
“I can guess how they must have reacted.”
“Yup. Full lockdown mode for the daughter they had left. High school was not exactly the most fun for me. I didn’t really get the opportunity to do much of anything — none of that standard teenager figuring-yourself-out stuff. They went way over protective.”
“That sucks. At the same time, I can kinda see their point, you know? Natural reaction to try the opposite when things ended up so tragically the first time.”
She nodded. “You’re right, and every so often I have to remind myself of that.”
“I’m kinda surprised they didn’t move up to New Hampshire with you for college.”
She blanched, a look of horror coming across her face. “Believe me, if they’d been able to, they’d have moved in across the street from campus. No, going to college outside of Meridian, or even at all, was a huge deal in my house.”
“Yeah? They wanted you to stay home?”
“And work, and find someone to marry and settle down really quick. Start having babies, the whole nine yards.”
“Whoa, that’s heavy. How’d you get away from all that?”
She sighed. “A lot of arguing, and a lot of promises that I know in the future are going to come back to haunt me.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’ll move back home right after school, and settle down as quickly as I can. They just want me to be safe, they say. But I think it’s kinda more than that. I think they want to be able to tell themselves and their friends that they got something right, even if Naomi fell in with the wrong crowd.”
“That’s…kinda messed up.”
“Tell me about it.”
“And what do you want to do?”
She looked up and out the window behind me, and I watched her eyes dilate as she worked through all the ideas that bloomed in her mind. “Travel,” she said. “Grad school. Do something that helps the world, makes peoples’ lives better.”
“Anywhere in particular you want to go?”
“Not really, just somewhere away from New England. I love it here and when I stop moving I’d like to be back here, but for now there’s just so much out there to see, so much to experience. And I haven’t gotten more than a little taste of it, so it’s…almost too difficult to pick one to start.”
I coughed. “And the settling down part?”
“Not even on my radar. I’m too young to think about that.”
I let that hang for a moment without realizing that I had, before agreeing. “Yeah, good point.”
More silence, which I finally broke. “I take it you two didn’t have the same first name.”
She laughed a laugh that didn’t have much weight behind it. “No, she’s Naomi, or, rather, was Naomi.” She gave me a smile that was more than a little worried and questioning. “My name is Avery.”
“Avery,” I said, sounding it out, running it through my mouth. “Aaaaavery.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry to have led you on like that before, Alex.”
My own fake name started sounding more wrong by the moment. “How come you did that?”
Avery shrugged. “We didn’t know each other, and you kinda came out of nowhere. I didn’t realize we’d spend any time together, and I was, uh, I guess a little worried to be talking to a stranger like that.”
I thought that over for a few seconds while Avery kept looking at me wondering how I’d respond. “That’s…fair,” I said, seeing her face light up as she took me in. “I might have done the same thing.”
She laughed again, this time for real. “Oh yeah? Hiding something behind those eyes?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
I held my gaze steady and her smile dropped. “Really?”
I nodded. “In the interest of more disclosure…”
“Oh man.” Avery slumped over a bit before looking at me again. “OK, let me have it.”
“My name’s not Alex.”
“What is it?”
“Eames. Eames Beckett.”
“Eames. Eaaaaaaames,” she said, sounding out my real name just like I’d sounded hers out a few minutes ago. “I like it!” She squinted at me. “So why the fake name, then?”
“I, uh, don’t like to give my real name out to strangers.”
“How come, eh?” Avery said, ribbing me again. “On the run from the cops?”
I laughed. “Not in this country.”
Avery gave me a queer look before I kept going. “It’s just that my, uh, family is kinda well known in Meridian. My father built Beckett Mercantile.”
“I’ve heard of that.”
“Yeah. Most people have. I don’t really have anything to do with the company, so I, uh, like to lay low.”
“Makes sense.”
All of a sudden I was hit with a wave of fatigue that washed over me like I’d been thrown into a full bathtub. My eyes fluttered, and Naomi-I mean, Avery, looked at me with concern. “You need to rest,” she said, getting up off the bed. “Get some sleep, I’ll check on you in a couple hours, OK?”
“Yeah,” I said weakly. “I’ll do that. You do that.”
She smiled at me. “And, uh, Eames? I’ll make you a deal.”
“What’s that?”
“No more secrets between us, OK?”
“Yeah. That sounds good.”
And then she was gone and I was all alone in my warm bed.
The last thought that came to mind before blissful sleep came over me was that there was way more to this girl than I’d thought.