Burn (Brothers of Ink and Steel #2) (14 page)

Soon, I remember myself and rest my forehead against hers. I’m so overwhelmed. I can’t open my eyes, can’t look at her or face her.

“Quinn …” I sigh. “I can’t keep kissing you like this.”

“Why not?” She’s out of breath, and I like the way it sounds.

“Because,” I say, my lips just hovering over hers, “I’ll want more. I’ll want you to be my girlfriend.”

Neither of us pulls away.

“I’ve never been a girlfriend.”

That makes me smile. “I’ve never had a girlfriend.”

“You’ve had plenty of girlfriends.”

“I’ve had plenty of girls,” I assure her, “but never a girlfriend.”

“Liam …”

“Quinn …” My eyes are still closed.

“Kiss me again.”

“I can’t.”

“Did I do it wrong?”

“No, you did it
too
right.”

“Then let’s do it again,” she insists.

“I told you, I’d have to make you my girlfriend.”

“Then make me your girlfriend.”

My eyes open fast. “You want to be my girlfriend?”

“Yes. Especially if it means you’ll keep kissing me.”

“Quinn, this is serious.”

“I
am
serious,” she says. “Remember that when this started I was the one who said I love you.”

I’ll never forget. It’s etched into my memory forever.

“Being girlfriend and boyfriend means commitment. It means we belong to each other—no other guys, no other girls—nothing and no one can come between us. It means we love and we fight and we love again. We fix it, whatever it takes.”

“I like that. And it sounds like what we’re already doing.”

“I guess it does … it also means we don’t leave each other, either. We can’t, ’cause we’re all we’ve got.”

“I promise I’ll never leave you, Liam,” Quinn vows, our eyes burning into each other’s. “I promise nothing … and no one … will ever come between us. I promise to love you forever. We’re two halves of one whole.”

I put my hands on either side of her perfect face. Her eyes reflect back at me everything I feel.

My emotions are everywhere at once, but as I close my eyes, lean into her body and press my lips against hers, everything I feel—everything I’ve
ever
felt
—culminates at this one point, releasing all of my energy, all of my darkness and all of my light into this moment—where Quinn and I become one perfect star as our souls fuse together.

Chapter Seven

2015

Quinn

I shouldn’t be here.

I shouldn’t be in this house.

I shouldn’t be here with Liam.

So what am I doing here?

What am I looking for?

I don’t know.
I thought maybe I’d feel it and know it when I touched it. Now that I’m here, the thing I was most afraid of—that dark endless abyss that threatens me every morning when I wake up and every night before I close my eyes to sleep—is all around me.

For a decade, I’ve tried to outrun it. I’ve done the psychotherapy to vanquish it, until it’s nothing but a memory. Truth is, it created who I am, who I was. It’s the chiseling force that has dug a crevice so deep inside my soul I can’t climb back out into the light.

The boys are behind me. They stand uncomfortably inside the doorway. I know they’d pull me up if they could—maybe, if they could find the rope, but there isn’t one. I cut my safety line ten years ago.

As I walk down the hall to the kitchen, I hold out my hand and let my fingers trail along the wall. The old paper feels tacky from age and cigarette smoke. The ceilings are stained yellow. But the real stains this place holds are only visible to me. Maybe they’re painted in my eyes.

Quinn, what are you doing here?

Trying to find the piece of me I lost.

You don’t restore those things by going back, only forward.

It’s a lie. It’s a lie I tell myself to comfort myself, so I don’t really have to face my pain or my demons … the monsters that swallow me during the darkest nights.

I can’t go forward until I … I don’t know.

It’s all the same inside this house. Exactly the same as the last night I was ever here … and the months before that.

I try to conjure a good memory, something happy, something I can take with me, but I can’t remember clearly, I can only feel. And what I feel is fear and hurt.

The dining room table still sits, stately, in the middle of the room. Six chairs of smooth dark wood and velvet cloth stare at each other, empty and wordless. The matching wood hutch with glass cabinets is still filled with my mother’s favorite displays—the things that made her feel wealthy and affluent. That’s all she ever really cared about—things. If she ever cared about a person, I never saw it.

She never loved me.

And isn’t that the hardest and heaviest memory you have, Quinn?

“Did she have a will?” Ryder asks.

“If she did, I wasn’t in it,” I reply.

Truth is, I don’t even know if me being in her house is legal.

What do I have to lose? I’ve already lost everything.

I walk through to the living room. Two large, red leather sofas flank each wall; glamorous photographs of my mom line the mantle over the fireplace—her ice blue eyes stare back at me coldly—beside them are a cuckoo clock and crystal knickknacks. A hanging lamp with three women standing back-to-back in a garden is suspended in the doorway. There are thin cable lines that run down around it, and when it’s turned on, oil drips down the cables to mimic rain. It’s sort of pretty, really, but I hate it. I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I see one.

I wonder if other people do that—see some benign object from their haunted pasts and associate it with an unwell, malaise feeling that’s too hard to describe.

My eyes spy the bookshelf.

The old photo album is still there. I stare at it as if it were alive, like maybe it was being guarded by a demon that I’d have to battle and kill just so I could touch it.

“Fuck this,” I hear Liam curse. He says it softly, as if he doesn’t want me to hear.

A moment later he’s beside me.

“You want that book.” It’s not a question.

My throat constricts, and I fight the tears that rush to my eyes.

How well he knows me.

I nod.

Liam leans forward and grabs the album. He tucks it up under his arm.

I feel him watching me.

“Is this all you want downstairs?” he asks softly.

I nod again.

The tears spill over my face, but I’m not sure if they fall because of my mom or because of Liam.

“You want to go up to your old room?” Liam places his hand tenderly on the small of my back.

The hurt and loss bubble up through me and make me cry. I try to do it as silently as possible, swallowing each sob. 

“Come on, I’ll go with you.”

Why is he being so nice to me?

He’s become yet another person I’m a massive disappointment to.

I nod anyway, and together we silently walk towards the staircase. We begin climbing each stair slowly, following the blue carpet up to the landing. But I freeze. I’m only a few steps away from my room.

“I don’t think I can do it,” I whisper.

“You can do anything, Quinn.” His tone is infused with admiration.

He holds his hand out to me.

But I can’t move. I just stand there, looking at it, remembering the strength of it, the love that used to be attached to it, the incredible rush of feelings I’d get every time I touched it.

I think of how badly I really need it right now.

How badly I need
him
right now. But I might crumble if I take it. I might turn to dust and blow away. Or maybe a miracle will happen, and I’ll wake up and the past ten years will have all been a dream, a terrible nightmare. And I’ll be able to avoid the series of events that further destroyed me and sent me reeling so deep inside of myself I couldn’t even let Liam in.

I hold my breath and, like a child, wish beyond all probability that the latter might actually happen.

“You don’t have to do this alone.” He takes my hand, laces my fingers between his.

Oh, the feel of his hand, the firmness of his grip, the security.

I can’t stop the tears. He smiles down reassuringly at me before he leads the way up the stairs, promising to take on the waiting monsters.

I want to kiss each of his fingers then lay his palm over my cheek to catch every cold and bitter tear I’ve cried without him.

Before I know it, we’re standing at the threshold of my room. The one she told people she kept for me in case I ever came home. As long as she looked good for the people outside looking in, what really happened didn’t matter. She didn’t take any responsibility, hadn’t even worried about me, and never said she was sorry—she never thought she did anything wrong. She had no sin to atone for.

“You want to go in?” he asks.

I shrug. Not a thing is out of place from when I left here at fourteen years old. The antique-looking brown and white flowered lace bedspread still lays over the twin sized canopy bed, as if it had been freshly made this morning. The white desk and bookshelf still sit against the wall. A paint-by-numbers picture I did when I was ten is still displayed, exactly where I set it, next to my pink and white Hello Kitty pencil sharpener.

“They don’t seem real,” I say. “I thought maybe I’d remember one good thing, something—a bedtime story, a kiss goodnight—but I don’t. I thought coming and looking would make a difference.”

The sorrow is momentarily pushed to the side by a blistering anger. “I know what it was … what I was looking for … some shred of evidence that maybe, at the end, she loved me or that, at the very least, she was sorry.”

I walk over to my desk and open the drawer, rummaging through it. The contents have been untouched for years. I push aside erasers and cartoon covered pencils; I finger through pink paperclips and old magazine cuttings. I come to my own folded notes, the ones I had written to her. Letters from a little girl and, later, a teenager that declared how much I loved her and missed her when she was away at work. Me asking her to spend time with me and my ideas for things I thought we could do together.

I used to leave them all around the house for her. But she never answered them, or even moved them, so I’d fold them back up and bury them in my drawer—like the bones of skeletons I couldn’t let go of.

I fish them out now. They’re all folded into tight squares and have
MOM
scrawled in my very neatest handwriting.

I gather them into my open hands, which I’ve shaped like a bowl, and offer them to Liam. He gives me a sympathetic look and takes them from me.

They’re paper that weighs a ton.

All of a sudden, I’ve had enough of this room that’s frozen in time.

I stalk out of my room and into
her
room.

I
hate
being inside this house, but I
loathe
being in her bedroom.

Chills run down my spine, and it takes every bit of courage I have not to run out.

I won’t leave here until I’m satisfied, either way.

When I received the call from her co-worker Louise, whom I had never met, telling me that my mom had died, my first response was,
How did you find me?

Not exactly proper etiquette.

Behind me, Liam clears his throat. He’s not rushing me; it looks like he’s dealing with his own emotions.

“She died of Leukemia,” I say out loud. “I found out after the fact. She was buried in Grove Cemetery, you know, the one closest to the city’s mansions. That old woman she worked for left her a nice inheritance when she passed away.”

I dig through her desk drawers, her chest of drawers, her jewelry box, under her bed, between the mattresses, everyplace intimate I can think of, but see nothing with my name on it, no personal notes, no diary or journal, nothing that said she loved me.

That she ever loved me.

I’m sure I’m missing it. I’m not going deep enough.

“It has to be here,” I say stubbornly.

“What are you looking for, Quinn? I can help you look,” Liam offers.

“Something … something important.” I’m starting to paw through her clothes. To make sure I’m thorough, I start pulling clothes and shit by the fistfuls from her drawers and drop them onto the floor. “You know, a letter. Something that she would have written when she knew she was dying …”
To make amends, to say she was sorry. To say she loved me.

I chance a quick glimpse over at Liam, who wears a worried expression.

“Fuck it. You know, you can wait downstairs if you want. I’m sure this is a real inconvenience, standing around watching me.” I swing open the double doors to her walk-in closet. “Sorry Cade forced you into babysitting duty.”

Her closet is smashed full of gorgeous, designer and name-brand clothing and shoes. The things she took care of meticulously for years, so now, not a thread is left out of place.

I sink my hands into the deep pockets of the full length mink coat she loved more than me.

“Nothing here.” I rip it from the hanger so it falls, crumpled, to the floor.

“I wonder if these silk blouses have pockets?” Violently, I wring each shirt, dress and pair of pants, feeling the pockets and then ripping the piece of clothing from its hanger and throwing it onto the floor.

“Quinn …”

“She had to have written something. She had to have left a note or a fucking code, a signal,
something
!”

When I’m done with the clothing, I move to the hat boxes and other boxes that line the upper shelf. I yank one down, knock off the lid, look through it and then drop it and move on.

“Her friend, or co-worker, whatever, when she called me, I asked her how she found me,” I explain like a lunatic, throwing anything in arm’s reach to the floor. “I asked her if maybe my mom had talked about me, or expressed a desire to make contact … especially while she was so sick.” I laugh and it sounds frightening to me. “She got real quiet. You know, that uncomfortable silence that happens when you don’t know what to say? She finally told me that their mutual employer had called her and told her she remembered me being claimed on my mom’s old income tax forms and health insurance at one time. They found the files with my name and hired a private investigator to find me.”

I’ve finished in her closet, so I start again by her bed.

I pull the paintings from the wall, letting them fall to the floor. “They found … my name … on some decade old tax file! They didn’t even realize she
had
a daughter.” I rip the bedsheets away from the mattress then shove it off, away from the box spring.

“She
NEVER
mentioned me—at all! She effectively made me
DISAPPEAR
from her very existence! How very convenient for her!”

I’m screaming and sobbing and trashing everything.

“Quinn …” I feel Liam’s hands grip my shoulders.

“DON’T TOUCH ME!” I pull away. “It’s here!”

“It’s not here, Quinn.” It sounds like he’s crying, or maybe I’m just hearing myself. “Please, let me take you out of here.”

“I CAN’T GO UNTIL I FIND IT!”