Endless (2 page)

“He was thinking just the most wonderful
things. He had missed me, and even though I could feel that hurt
and pain, I was amazed that he still loved me that much. And how
happy he was to be with me, and that we were whole again, and no
one was ever going to pull us apart.”

Aline sighed just a little, and I stifled a
grin. Having the most romantic boyfriend in the world could elicit
envy, I knew.

“I finally told him that I was so sorry for
what I had done to us. And Michael took my face in his hands, and
he looked into my eyes, and he said I didn’t ever have to be sorry.
He said that he knew I’d been under some pretty strong bad
influence, and I realized he meant Marica.”

The pang of mixed shame and regret struck
just as sharply as it had that day. Aline picked up my wince.

“So Michael believed that the fault for your
break up could be laid totally at the feet of Marica Lacusta?”

I nodded. “And in a way, I understood that.
It made it easier to blame someone else. Easier to forgive me,
easier for us to move on. We’d had some experience with people
around Marica and Nell doing strange things—like Amber. She thought
they were her friends, and she lied to her parents, took part in
coven activities. . .so it’s not as odd as it might seem for
Michael to believe that.”

“And what do you think about that? About
Michael blaming Marica?” The therapist was fully back in charge, I
thought wryly.

“I thought—I don’t know. Like I said, I
understand it. And it would be pretty easy for me agree to that.
But I think it might be letting me off the hook too easily.”

“Really? In what way?”

I shifted uncomfortably as I tried to put my
feelings into words. “Marica
was
influencing me. That’s
true. But she never tried to get me to break up with Michael. She
never said that if I didn’t end the relationship, she wouldn’t work
with me. I was aware of her feelings, but the decision to act—that
really falls squarely on me. I heard what Michael thought that day
last December, and I made the choice to walk away.”

Aline cocked her head, considering me. She
was quiet, as though she were listening to a voice I couldn’t quite
hear. According to her, the only gift she possessed from her
family—one of the extraordinary first families of King, Florida—was
that of empathy and insight. I recalled our very first session
together, a little over a month ago, when she had told me that she
considered herself an excavator more than anything else. “You
already have the answers,” she had told me. “I’m here to give you
the tools that will help you uncover those answers.”

Now she nodded at me. “Tell me something,
Tasmyn. And you don’t need to respond right away; you can think
about it until next time, if you want. But I’d like you to consider
this: what if you heard Michael think that same thing today? What
would you do?”

I didn’t need time to mull over my answer. I
had mulled it over more often than I liked, and sometimes, in my
nightmares, Michael had never really come back to me. There was
still so much I had to sort out about the mess that was my life
last spring. But this was one answer I already had.

“I would tell him that I had heard it. I
would ask him why he was thinking that. But I wouldn’t leave him. I
know I can’t handle that pain again. If any good came out of all
the misery. . .well, it’s that I know one thing for sure. Michael
and I--we’re meant to be together, forever. And that’s the most
certain thing in my life.”

Perriman College was still a little
old-fashioned when it came to freshmen. Our dormitories were co-ed
in theory; the boys occupied the first three floors, and the girls
lived on the upper three levels. My room was identical to every
other one in Rollins Court; two beds, two desks and two closets
housed within ecru-painted cinderblocks.

I liked my roommate, Sophie. She was quiet
and very focused, and it was fairly easy to block her thoughts. I
even kind of liked our room; we had decorated it with posters and
girly curtains, and it had a certain character in spite of the
institutional feel.

But I didn’t head back to Rollins after my
weekly appointment with Aline. It was Friday, and although I knew
that Michael wouldn’t be out of class yet, his dorm was closer and
much more appealing to me. I knew the path to Gilbert Hall with my
eyes closed.

I climbed the steps to the second floor and
knocked at the door. I didn’t expect an answer; Michael’s suite
mate, Charlie, was a soccer player, and he had practice or games
nearly every afternoon.

I pulled a key out of my pocket and opened
the door. It was definitely against the dorm rules for anyone
outside the occupants of a room to have a key to it, but Michael
had broken that rule right away. Charlie was pretty easy going and
didn’t mind me having access to their suite either.

Upperclassmen really had it good, I reflected
as I locked the door behind me and glanced around the small living
room. Michael and Charlie shared this common area, a tiny kitchen
and a bathroom, but they each had their own bedrooms on opposite
sides of the suite. Sometimes four boys shared a suite this size,
but because Charlie was a junior and an assistant resident advisor,
he and Michael had scored this living arrangement for just the two
of them.

I headed straight for Michael’s room and
dropped my backpack just inside the doorway. The room was pure
Michael, I thought with a smile as I sprawled out on his bed. The
dark blue comforter was pulled over the sheets and pillows. He had
a few posters on the wall, mostly old obscure bands that I never
would have heard of if I didn’t know Michael. A picture of the two
of us dominated the small bedside table.

I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent so
uniquely his. It was still very fragile, this love between us. We
hadn’t lost any of our history, but we had lost time. Michael tried
not to talk about anything that had happened during those months
apart, but sometimes I heard things cross his mind. He hadn’t done
anything wrong, of course, but the pain of our separation still
lingered in his thoughts.

I definitely kept my mouth closed as much as
possible about our time apart. I never mentioned Marica or Rafe
Brooks, the friend who had briefly become. . .something more.
Michael might not blame me for anything, but I certainly blamed
myself.

That was part of the reason for my weekly
visits to Aline. My parents had insisted that I needed some kind of
therapy, and Rafe’s grandmother, Caroline Brooks, had suggested
Aline. With her family history, she was perfectly qualified to
counsel someone like me; she was familiar with all of the old King
families and their various powers or skills. Even though I wasn’t
from one of the original families, the gifts I possessed made me
unique. Thanks to Aline’s help, I was learning to control the
additional power that I’d uncovered during my time with Marica. I
tried not to think of myself as a freak of nature anymore, but it
was tough sometimes, when even a little bit of temper or upset made
all the pictures tremble on the walls.

Aline had asked me to tell her the whole
story, and I had spent the last six weeks doing just that. Some of
it was so painful that I ached for hours after our sessions. It
made me feel better to curl up in Michael’s arms and remind myself
that it was all over, that I was safe and
me
again.

Actually, we had both gone a little overboard
with the togetherness in our initial weeks at Perriman. It was the
first time that we’d had total freedom to be with each other away
from my parents and our homes. We spent every waking,
non-class-attending moment together. About a week after classes
began, Michael steered me toward an empty table at dinner.

“We need to talk,” he began, and my heart
thudded painfully. It only took a moment, though, for me to hear
what he was thinking. I sank into my chair in relief, my hands
shaking.

“Are you okay?” Michael reached over to rub
my arm lightly. “You went real pale on me there.”

“I wasn’t sure what you were going to say.
You scared me.” I tried to smile a little, to sound less serious,
but it didn’t work.

“I’m sorry!” Michael groaned. “I didn’t mean
to do that. I just wanted--”

“No, I heard you.” I managed a better smile
this time and covered his hand with my own. “And you’re right.
Neither of us are doing justice to our schoolwork. We’ve got to be
a little more disciplined or we’re both going to flunk out of
college.”

We worked out a compromise: we still ate all
of our meals together, but after dinner on weeknights, we parted at
the dining hall and returned to our own rooms. The payoff was that
we rewarded ourselves for good behavior by spending every weekend
together, from breakfast until Michael dropped me off at my room,
usually around midnight. So far, it was a good plan, and I knew we
both felt more virtuous.

Now, as I gazed at the photo of us on his
nightstand, my inner ear pricked: Michael was close. I could hear
his thoughts, weeding them out of the miasma of other students in
the hallway and the rooms around us. I smiled and lay waiting for
him.

He was whistling as he let himself into the
suite. I heard the refrigerator door open, and he thought,
Dang,
Charlie drank all that soda I bought. I wonder if he left me any
chips.
Eavesdropping in his mind, I saw him choose a bottle of
water and take a chug of it. He was heading toward the bedroom,
without a notion that I was waiting for him. I didn’t move as the
door opened, and then I felt his surprise, followed shortly by the
touch of his lips on my cheek.

“Are you asleep?”

I sighed happily and opened my eyes. “No.
Just lying here waiting for you.”

The bed dipped as he sat down next to me. “A
nice surprise. I didn’t expect you to be finished with Aline so
soon. Did. . .everything go okay?” Michael’s voice was cautious,
but his mind was worried.

I turned onto my side and curled my body
around him, smiling as he ran a finger lightly down my cheek.

“Yes. I finished telling her the story
today.”

Michael raised one eyebrow. “The story, huh?
Which one?”

I traced the side seam of his jeans with the
edge of my fingernail. “You know. Last year. This spring.” I
attempted a smile. “The dark ages.”

Michael’s tension level went up a notch, and
he shifted uneasily. “Oh.”

That familiar terror and anxiety gripped me.
On the surface, the deep rift that I had torn between Michael and
me last winter had healed, but I knew that some cuts were still raw
and bleeding. I bit my lip and hid my face in the pillow.

“Hey.” He touched my chin gently until I
turned my head again. “Come on. Don’t shut me out. I want to know
all about it.”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure,” I said quietly.
“I think it’s easier to pretend it never happened.”

“No,” Michael said, finality in both his tone
and his mind. “We know that we’ve got to be completely open with
each other—or things go wrong. I didn’t mean to react that
way.”

I flipped onto my back, heaving a deep sigh.
“I can’t do this. I don’t want you to apologize for letting me see
how you really feel. Yes, it hurts me to see you remember. But I
need you to be honest with me—like you said, completely open.
Okay?”

Michael leaned over me, one hand on either
side of my body. “Promise.” He dropped his lips to touch mine
lightly at first, and then he sunk deeper, pressing his chest
against me. My arms moved around his neck automatically, pulling
him closer. With a soft groan, he rolled over me, laying on the bed
and never breaking the kiss. The heat between us built, and I ran
my hands over Michael’s back, feeling the muscles that came from
years of working at his family’s nursery.

When Michael fell back onto the bed, we were
both breathing heavily. In the wake of our separation, the physical
relationship between us was still a little tentative. It was no
less intense, but neither of us was ready to push the boundaries we
had set from our earliest days together.

I knew that most of Michael’s friends as well
as the few people I’d gotten to know at the college assumed that
Michael and I were more intimate than we actually were. It never
occurred to them that a couple as committed and close as we seemed
to be would not be sleeping together. And truthfully, it was
sometimes hard for me to explain to myself. We had decided to take
things slowly at the beginning of our relationship; neither of us
had ever had a serious boyfriend or girlfriend before each other,
and it was all new territory.

Plus we were both what I thought of as good
kids. We really wanted to please our parents, and we followed the
rules. That began to change for me when I made the conscious
decision not to tell my mom and dad that Michael knew about my mind
hearing ability, and again when I didn’t share with them what I had
heard in Nell’s thoughts. Since keeping that secret hadn’t turned
out terribly well—and nearly cost me my life—it seemed like a good
idea to try to follow my parents’ other rules. And no sex for
teenagers was definitely one of those rules.