The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) (6 page)

“Try it then, if you’re so sure. What’s my story, Zack?”

Zack sat forward, putting his elbows on the table. “For one thing,” he said, “you’re not satisfied to live a normal, boring life. Am I right?”

“I feel like I’m having my horoscope read to me.”

“I’m serious! Tell me that I’m wrong. You’re someone who wants to do something special with your time on this earth.”

Jill wrapped her hands around her coffee mug. She looked pensive. There was something on her mind. How Zack longed to know what was going on in her mind!

“Of course I want to do something special with my life,” she said. “Don’t we all?”

*****

She still loved him. That was the hard part of all this.

No matter how she spun it in her mind, no matter what angle she took to approach the problem, the solution was always the same.

She shouldn’t be here. The right thing to do was get up and walk away. She was putting Zack in danger, just like she had before.

More than that, she was being downright cruel. Zack clearly had feelings for her. Bernadette had wiped away his conscious memories of Jill, but
something
remained.

Some desire, some memory of the body, or the deepest depths of his mind, some piece of truth that hung around inside him, waiting to be coaxed out—Jill knew all about this. The same vampire who messed with Zack’s mind also tinkered with Jill’s. Bernadette had tricked Jill into believing all sorts of fantasy about a make-believe person named Tarin who always said exactly what Jill wanted to hear. When Gordon deprogrammed Jill, he didn’t erase Tarin so much as bring forth the truth, which had always been in Jill’s mind, but had been inaccessible to her when she was under the vampire’s spell. Now reality and fantasy coexisted in her memory. She could still see Tarin, could still hear his voice, but she knew he was fiction. She knew it because she could see Bernadette in those memories too. She could see the truth Bernadette had made her forget.

The truth about us is still in there, Zack,
she thought.
If we wanted to, we could help you remember it.

“You’re rich,” Zack said.

“Excuse me?” said Jill.

“You wanted to hear me guess about your story. That’s where I’m starting. You’re not from the neighborhood. You live closer to the action. Your family is plugged in.”

“Plugged in?”

“Yeah, you know—you guys have access. That’s what DC is all about, isn’t it? Access. You’re plugged in.”

“You don’t know a thing about me,” Jill said with a smile. “What makes you so sure I’m
plugged in
.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Zack. “Maybe it’s something about the way you walk. Or your voice—you have the accent of those people in Potomac.”

“The accent? I didn’t know Potomac had its own accent.”

“Well it does and you’ve got it. And those boots you’re wearing--”

“What’s wrong with my boots?” Jill said, lifting her leg to make one boot visible.

Zack let out a laugh. “Nothing at all,” he said. “That’s just it. Those are the kind of boots you don’t buy in a strip mall. You probably didn’t even get those in DC, did you?”

Jill looked down at her brown leather boots, remembering well when she bought them. The summer before, when she was courting Annika and Mattie, trying to infiltrate their group. They had gone on a road trip to New York, and shopped along the way in half a dozen boutiques in Connecticut.

“Okay Smartie,” she said. “You’re right. I didn’t get these boots in DC.”

“And that scarf,” said Zack. “You bought that scarf to go with those boots, didn’t you?”

He was being playful with her, but there was something serious underneath the banter. Zack was showing her just how well he knew her. How thoroughly he understood who she was.

The poor guy was probably working it out in his own mind. Here was this girl he had just met tonight, and something was familiar to him. It had to be driving him nuts.

Jill wanted to set his mind at ease. She wanted to tell him this wasn’t crazy, that he really had seen her before, that his feelings weren’t some oddball bit of infatuation, but were rooted in something real.

Something she felt too.

For the second time that night, Zack’s phone began buzzing. For the second time, he looked perturbed at the interruption.

“Hang on a second,” he said. “I’m just gonna turn this thing off.”

“You don’t need to do that,” said Jill.

He had already pulled the phone out of his pocket.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re enjoying a conversation with somebody it’s nice to shut out the interruptions.”

He was moving so quickly, almost angrily, that he fumbled the phone in his fingertips, and it clattered to the table.

“Easy there,” said Jill.

“Sorry,” said Zack, shaking his head.

Jill noticed two things before Zack managed to scoop up his phone. The first was that his hands were shaking. Badly.

Why are you so shaky, Zack?

The second thing she noticed was the name and picture on the phone. The picture was of a beautiful girl with straight black hair, dark red lipstick, and a sassy look in her eyes. Above the picture was a single word.

Lana
.

No last name. That knockout in the picture, whose eyes just seemed to drip with sex, was recorded in Zack’s phone by a first name only.

Zack pressed and held the power button on his phone.

“There,” he said. “No more interruptions.”

He was flustered. His breathing was irregular. A bead of sweat had formed on his temple. His lower lip was quivering.

Who the hell
is Lana?

As Zack put the phone back in his pocket, Jill felt the weight of the past three months settle in on her shoulders.

Zack had walked out of her house without a single memory of Jill in his mind. He had driven home and gone to bed that night, unaware that his girlfriend was in trouble with a vampire, or that he even had a girlfriend.

He woke up the next morning and got on with the life he had been living before he and Jill ever met.
Then he lived that life for three months.

While Jill had been hacking into a vampire’s phone and frantically chasing Rose Ransom clues, Zack had been living three months of his own life without a single thought of Jill.

He had a girlfriend now. Of course he had a girlfriend – it had been three months! She couldn’t just expect him to sit around and wait for her. He wouldn’t even know what he was waiting for!

“Okay, where were we?” Zack said. “Your boots and scarf. You bought them together didn’t you? You bought that scarf, fully intending to wear them with those boots.”

“Zack…I…”

“You can’t help but be fashionable,” Zack said. “It’s the world you live in. That’s your story, Jill. I’m sorry, I mean, part of your story. You live in a world where people look like a million bucks every day and everywhere they go, and you are at ease blending into that world, even though it’s not who you really are.”

She felt out of place. The phone calls from Zack’s girlfriend had dragged her back into an ugly reality.
I shouldn’t have come here. I need to let him go

She felt like an intruder. Zack had his own life now. Jill, by her mere presence, was threatening to rip him out of that life, and put him in danger again.

The waitress refilled Zack’s mug. By Jill’s count, he was now on his fourth cup of coffee.

“Who was trying to call you this late at night?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s no one,” Zack said.

“No one?”

“It’s someone who can wait.”

“But maybe it’s important,” said Jill. “I mean, I wouldn’t call someone at two in the morning unless it was important.”

“It’s not important,” Zack said. “This. Sitting here with you. This is important.”

He was waving his hands to emphasize his words. His fingertips were shaking. His eyes were twitching. His face was going pale. She had never seen him like this before.

My Zack. My beautiful, confident, always-together Zack,
she thought.
I’m breaking him.

Bernadette had programmed Zack to forget about Jill. But now she was sitting right in front of him. How easy is it to forget about someone who is sitting right in front of you?

“We were talking about you,” Zack said. “Who you are. How you got here.”

He was breathing heavily as he spoke. His shoulders were swaying back and forth. He looked like he was cold, even though he was wearing a jacket and they were sitting underneath a heating vent.

He reminded Jill of her own mother, who lost herself to a temper tantrum when Jill made her go see the hypnotist.

The internal conflict tears them apart.
That’s how Gordon described what was happening to her mother when Jill forced her away from her work. In violation of her own programming, Jill’s mother became irritable and irrational.

Was the same thing happening to Zack? Was he going through some sort of internal struggle because he was programmed to forget about Jill, but couldn’t do so because she was right here in front of him?

“Zack, it’s late. I--”

“Why were you at the club tonight?” he said with urgency.

“I don’t know. I was just…there.”

She had to get out of here. She shouldn’t have come. It was a selfish decision to drive out to Columbia Heights to see him.

“But you’re so far from home,” Zack said. “There’s something about you. God, I feel like I’ve met you before. Why do I feel that?”

Jill looked down at the table
. I just wanted to see you one last time,
she thought.
I’m leaving tomorrow and I wanted to look at your face, to know you were okay.

You weren’t supposed to see me.
We weren’t supposed to talk.

“Maybe I look like someone else you know,” Jill said, meekly.

“No, I don’t think so. I’d remember if--”

The sound of squealing tires in the street outside interrupted him. They both turned to look out the window and saw a yellow hatchback skidding to a stop.

“What the…that guy just slammed to a stop in the middle of the street,” Zack said.

I have to go
, Jill thought.
Find a way to make your exit, Jill.

Find a way to say goodbye.

“Weird,” Zack said. “Anyway, we were talking about what brought you to the Red Rocket tonight.”

“It’s late, Zack.”

A look of panic came over his face. It broke her heart. “You’re not leaving, are you?” he said. “We’ve barely started talking.”

It will be so much better for him when you’re gone
, Jill told herself.
Won’t it?

Yes. Of course it would be better. Since meeting Jill, Zack had already found himself on death’s door more than once. Zack never asked for any of this. He wasn’t in the Network. He had his own life to live.
If you truly care for him, Jill Wentworth, you wouldn’t be anywhere near him.

“I’ve really had a nice time talking with you,” she said. Tears were welling in her eyes.

“What is this?” said Zack. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No. You’ve done nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”

“Jill, something’s upset you. Talk to me about it. I want to…I…”

Something behind Jill caught Zack’s attention. “Oh no,” he whispered.

“What is it?” said Jill.

She turned her head to see what he was looking at. At first everything looked normal. But then she saw it.
Jet black hair, deep-set eyes, a piercing on her lower lip—the girl from Zack’s phone. Lana. She was in the diner. And she looked angry.

“Jill, please, can you do one thing for me?”

“I don’t know that--”

“Can you just stay here while I go talk to someone? Please. I’m begging you. Don’t go yet.”

“Zack, I--”

He was already up. As he left the table to go confront Lana, he held out his hand at Jill and said, “Stay there. I’ll be right back.”

She watched him stride across the diner, meeting Lana in the aisle, using his body to prevent her from coming any closer.

“Who is that?” Lana snapped. “Who is that you’re sitting with? Please tell me it’s your sister.”

“Come outside with me,” Zack said, sweeping Lana out of the aisle and into the lobby.

“I want to meet her,” Lana said. “She looks like some fucking princess from Potomac. What’s she doing here?”

“Lana, if you want to speak with me, we will do it outside.”

Those were the last words Jill heard him say. As soon as Zack and Lana were safely out of view, Jill threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table and bolted out the back door, crying as she ran to the parking lot of the Red Rocket where, mercifully, her car was no longer blocked in.