NOCTE (Nocte Trilogy #1) (15 page)

He smiles, a real one this time, and I
collect it, putting it in my jacket so I can hold it for later.
 

Then he walks inside, his shoulders
swaying and the sunshine fading into the backdrop because something about him
shines so bright.
 

I fall into a chair on the side porch,
thinking about Dare, about his complexity, his mystery, his endless
contradictions.
 
I pull his smile
out of my pocket and examine it, because it’s beautiful and real and I want to
hold it forever.
 

I don’t see Dare again all day, but when
I retire to my room for the night, there is a bouquet of calla lilies on my
bed.
 

The note is written in dark scrawling
handwriting, that
simply says,
Thanks again.
 

The mere idea that Dare had somehow
managed to get inside of my room and stand this close to my bed, sets the
butterflies free in my belly.
 
They
whirl and twirl and fly against my ribcage as I collapse into bed.
 

I fall asleep with the flowers in my
hand, and thoughts of Dare in my head.
 

His smile is the last thing I think of before
I drift away into oblivion, and it reappears, over and over, in my dreams.
  

DECEM
ET OCTO

Finn

I wake with a start, from the nightmares of broken glass and
burning metal.

It’sRealRealRealReal.
She’s deadddddddddd.
 
The whispers hiss and laugh.
 

I gasp for air, gripping the
bedclothes tight, as I fight the clouds of confusion and panic and fear.
 

Without a second thought, I pad
down the hall to Calla’s room and climb into the empty side of her bed.
 
Something stabs me in the back, and I
pull out a bouquet of flowers.
 
I
stare at them for a second, puzzled.
 
Then I realize… Dare must’ve given them to her.
 
Suddenly and overwhelmingly annoyed, I
get out of bed and crush them under my heel.
 

I want her to be happy, I
do.
 

I do.
 

But… Not yet.
 
I just can’t be without her yet.

Calla quiets the voices.

She’s the only thing that does.

I crawl back in beside her,
curling up next to her and then I fight for sleep,
ache for
it
,
pray for it
.
 
And finally, finally, finally, the
blackness comes, covering me up like a blanket, and hiding my crazy.

For now.
   

NOVEM

Calla

I
wake with a start.
 

My dreams were strange tonight.
 

Dare was in them, of course, but instead
of the sweet images I usually dream, this one was more of a nightmare.
 
He was telling me something terrible,
something that I couldn’t quite hear, but my heart could feel.
 
It was something dark.
 
I could see his lips move, but no sound
came out.
 
Until he told me that
he’d go away, if I wanted him to.
 

And that was it.
 

I’m awake now in a cold sweat because
dream or not, I don’t want him to go away.
 

I apparently have a very real fear of
loss now.

I toss and turn, trying to get back to
sleep, but since Finn is in my bed and my thoughts are troubled, I’m not
successful.
 

So I pad downstairs, and out the door to
the side porch.
 
I curl up in a
chair and stare down the mountainside, at the rustling trees and the black
skyline.
 

The air is fresh and clean, and
borderline chilly. I shiver in the breeze, and as I do, I glance at the
Carriage House.
 

A light shines in there, through the
window, warm and soft.
 

Dare’s up.
It’s the middle of the night, and he’s
up.
 

Without even thinking about it, I get up
and walk in that direction.
 
I find
myself standing next to his front windows, staring in, oblivious to the fact
that I’m only dressed in a nightgown.

He’s sitting at the desk in the living
room, staring in apt concentration at a paper in front of him.
 
He bends over it, working diligently,
and I’m left to wonder what he’s working so hard at.
 

The light inside is warm and beckoning,
but of course, I can’t knock.
 
It’s
three a.m.
 
So I watch from the
shadows for a bit longer, and just when I’m ready to turn around and head home,
Dare stands up and walks into the kitchen.
 

Curiosity is killing me, so I dart around
the edge of the house to the windows on the other side of his living room.
 
From this angle, I’ll have a good view
of his desk.
 
Peering in, I
gasp.
 

When I first saw Dare, I’d been
right.
 
He
is
something artistic.
 
He’s an artist.
 

And he’s working on an amazingly
beautiful drawing of me.
 

My breath is suspended as I peer closer, and
leaning my forehead against the glass, I study the picture.

His skill is amazing.
 
And the way he’s drawing me is
exhilarating.
 

In the picture, I’m walking away from
him, and I’m completely naked except for a pair of high heels.

Breathless, I study the drawing…
enchanted with the way he imagines me to be.
 
I’m slender and pale, but pale in a
beautiful way, an ethereal way. My hair is long and lush, my muscles curvy and
perfect.
 
Through his eyes, I’m
feminine and delicate and perfect.

I scan the entire drawing as my cheeks
grow hot with the sheer thought that he imagines me like this… that he imagines
me naked.
  

And then my heart stutters and pauses in
my chest as I see something.
 

A birthmark on my side.
 

The size of a quarter, it’s the color of
coffee with cream.
 

Startled, my fingers subconsciously
flutter to my side, to feel the place where the very real, very intimate
birthmark lingers on my skin.
 

How
did Dare know?
 

There’s no possible way he could’ve ever
seen that birthmark, unless he’s somehow seen me shower or changing
clothes.
 

He
must be watching me.
 

What the hell?

I’m churning this through my mind with
such intensity, that I forget to step away from the window, and Dare scares the
shit out of me when he appears directly in front of me, his surprised face in
front of my own.
 

I yank backward and so does he,
then
he narrows his eyes as he stares out into the
dark.
 

At
me.
 

I back away and then take off down the
path toward my house, because of a hundred things.
 
Because I’m embarrassed that he caught
me spying on him, because I’m nervous and confused about his picture, and
because in spite of everything, I’m flattered and excited that he was drawing
me at all.
 

I haven’t gotten twenty yards, though,
before Dare is tugging on my elbow.
 

“Calla, what are you doing out so late?”

His dark brow is furrowed as he stares
into my face.
 

I stop and stare upward, into his dark
eyes and without bidding, the image of the beautiful portrait he’d drawn with
his own hands pops into my head.
 
It
was so lovingly rendered, so perfectly drawn.
 

“You were drawing me,” I say simply, my
hands dropping to my sides.
 
I don’t
know how I feel, other than confused.
 

He actually seems flustered.
 

“Yeah.
 
I…it’s a hobby.”

“You’re really good,” I tell him.
 
“So good that you were able to draw a birthmark
you’ve never seen before.”

Long pause.
 

Finally, Dare sighs.
 
“What do you mean by that?”

I sigh back.
 
“The birthmark on my side.
 
You’ve never seen it, so how did you
draw it?
 
Have you been watching
me?
 
If so, why?”

Another long pause.
 

“Uh, I’m not stalking around spying on
you, if that’s what you’re implying,” Dare finally answers.
 
“I sit outside sometimes, and you go
outside a lot.
 
When
you came back from sailing the other day, you weren’t wearing a cover up.
I noticed it then.”

Oh.
 
Obviously.
 

“I’m an idiot,” I breathe. “I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head.
 
“No worries.
 
I can see where you might jump to that
conclusion.”

Yeah, because I’m wacko.
 

He glances at me again. “I should be
apologizing to you.
 
For drawing you in such an… intimate way.
I’m sorry.
 
I hope I haven’t made you feel uncomfortable.”

If by uncomfortable, he means incredibly
flattered, then yes.
He has.

“It’s okay,” I tell him quickly. “You
made me look beautiful. Who could be mad about that?”

“You
are
beautiful,” he says evenly, his eyes flickering with a million different things.
 
The air is charged, thick with something
exciting, and I long to reach up on my tiptoes and kiss him.
  

“You never said what you’re doing out so
late,” Dare reminds me, interrupting my tempting thoughts.
 

I look around, hunting for a feasible
answer, but the quiet forest doesn’t give me a thing.
 
“I just couldn’t sleep.
 
I saw your light….”

“I couldn’t sleep either,” Dare
confides.
 
“I draw when that
happens.”

“You draw
me
,” I say slowly.
 
“Why
me?”

Of
all people in the world, why me?

He grins, a slow, sultry grin that
seriously curls my toes.
 

“I don’t only draw you, Calla-Lily.
 
I draw everything that I find
interesting.”

He finds me interesting.
  
My heart hammers, and I forget
that a few minutes ago, I thought he might be a stalker.
 

“You do?”

He nods.
 
“I do.”

I’m shivering now from the night breeze
and
 
Dare
notices.
 

“You should run up to bed, Calla,” he
suggests. “It’s cold out here.”

I nod wordlessly.
 
“Ok.
 
Good night,
Dare
.”

“Good night.”

I scamper up the walk, and the entire
way, Dare watches me go.
 
I feel
it.
 
But when I turn around at the
top of my porch steps, he’s gone.

I feel buoyed and amazing and wonderful,
until I get back to my bed and remember that Finn’s in it.
 
Next to the bed,
my
flowers have been smashed, by Finn
, presumably.
 

All of my amazing feelings plummet as I
realize that I can’t feel wonderful about
Dare
.
 
I can’t feel wonderful about anything,
as long as there is something so seriously wrong with my brother.
 

I fall asleep with dark clouds hanging
around me, consuming my joy.
 

VIGINTI

The
ocean crashes against the shore, the mist spraying against me as I lounge
against one of the rocks in the inlet.
 
It’s low tide, so I can linger here for hours before high tides comes
back in to cover all of the exposed pools.

All I want to do is daydream about
Dare.
 
To fixate on the fact that he
fantasizes about me naked.
 

But I can’t. Not right now.
 
Because in my jacket
pocket, my fingers rest on the tattered leather cover of Finn’s journal.
 
After realizing last night that Finn is
even more troubled than I realized, I know I’ve got to figure it out.
 

So when he and my dad went out to work on
the fence, I took his journal.
 
It’s
something I had to do because he’s obviously not going to tell me himself.
 
He’ll think it’s lost… and I’ll have to
go along with that.
 
It makes me
feel dirty, and awful for lying to him, because I know how much his writing
means to him.
 

But he’s just going to have to write in
something else.
 

I’ve got to do whatever it takes to
protect him from himself.
 

My breath hitches in my chest as I pull
the book out.
 
Because the last time
I read it, it scared me for weeks.
 

His hidden thoughts terrified me then,
and they’ll terrify me now.
 

Regardless, I open the cover with shaking
fingers.
 

And then I’m still.

Absolutely, completely still.
 

A folded paper is inside the front cover,
but I can already see what it is.
 

Dare’s drawing of me.
 

When
did Finn get it?
In the middle of the night?

Unable to breathe, unable to feel, I
unfold the paper carefully and then my heart spasms.
 

MINE is scrawled across the beautiful
sketch. Everywhere.
 
Big letters, small letters, in-between letters.
 
Scrawling bold writing.
 

MINE
MINE
MINE
MINE
MINE
MINE.

I can’t breathe.
 

I can’t think.
 

All I know is that my fingers are
trembling and my heart is spasming and what the hell is going on?

Finn crept out of my bed, down to Dare’s
house, and stole this picture in the middle of the night.
 
Hell, he might’ve even been watching me
the whole time and that’s how he knew it even existed.
 

Chills run down my back, causing me to
shiver and shiver and shiver.
 

Why?
 

What
is wrong with my brother?

Forcing myself to focus, I flip through
the pages of his journal because this is where I’ll find answers.
 
There’s a tarot card hidden in the
pages, which is odd, but I tuck it back in and fly through the pages until I
get to where I’d left off the last time I’d read it.
 
The writing is bold and heavy, which is
odd since Finn’s fingers and arms are light as a feather, scrawny and thin.
 

My chest constricts as I read his
words.
 
They’re written in all different
sizes, in scratches and scrawls, the scribbles of the insane.
 

Nocte liber
sum
 
Nocte
liber sum

By night I
am free.

Alea iacta
est
 
The
die has
been cast.
 
The die has been cast.

The die has
been fucking cast.

Serva me,
servabo
te
.
 
Save me and I will save you.

Save me.

Save me.

Save me.

The entire page is more of the same,
desperate Latin phrases and random words.
 
 
And of course the weird
symbol.
 
I don’t even bother trying
to interpret that.
 
My brother loves
cryptic symbols and scribbles them all over the place. I don’t even blink until
I come to the bottom of the page, where there are stick figures with their faces
scratched out.
 
Two
of them, a man and a woman.
 
The woman has flaming red hair.
 

Me.
 

I swallow hard and slam the book shut, staring
out to sea, willing my mind to forget what I just read.
 

What does he need saved from?

Insanity?

Save
me and I will save you.
 
From what?
 

Do I need saved, too?
 
Is that why he scratched my eyes out?

A lump forms in my throat, heavy and hot
and acrid.
 

I can’t do this.
 
I knew it would be insane in his
journal, I just didn’t know how much.
 
And I just…can’t do it today.
 
I need a break from the crazy.
 

Because my brother is crawling into my
bed and scribbling MINE across an intimate, nude sketch of me.
 
If anyone else were to see it, they’d think he was truly sick, maybe
even sexually depraved.
 
That’s not
the case.
 
I know that because we’re
two halves of a whole.
 
We’re
connected and because of that, he feels like he owns me. Like I’m his. Like
he’s mine.
 

My thoughts are swirling together and
nothing makes sense and I don’t know what to do.
 

I can’t think about it right now.

It’s
too much.
 

It’s
too much.
 

I pull out the little bag with the lighter,
and then I light the drawing on fire, because no one can ever see it.
 
If they do, they’ll lock Finn away
because they won’t understand.
 

I can’t let that happen.
 

I watch it burn, I watch the corners curl
and turn black,
then
I let it go up in flames, the
ashes blowing away into the ocean.
 

And then I tuck the journal in my pocket
and walk through the rain (
when did it
start raining?
) to the house.
 
The stones on the trail are wet and I slip a few times, scraping my
hands, but I still don’t hurry.
 

The rain is cleansing.
 

Maybe it’ll wash away the crazy.

Because I don’t know what to do about it
anymore.
 

Maybe Finn has gotten to a place where I
can’t fix him anymore.

The thought terrifies me, paralyzes me,
and I find that I’m rooted to the ground outside of the Carriage House, my feet
enmeshed in the ground, unable to move, unable to carry me one step further.
  

The rain soaks me and my hair is
dripping.
 
My teeth start to
chatter, but still I can’t move.
 
The panic, the desire to run far from my home, cements my feet to the
ground.
 
It’s insane, but I still
can’t move.
 
My feet are stones, too
heavy to lift.
 

The front door of the Carriage House is
suddenly thrown open, and
Dare
darts out, jogging down
the cobblestone path.
 
  

Without a word, he covers my head with a
jacket as he pulls me into his home.
 
His t-shirt is black, his shorts are black,
his
eyes are black as he rubs my arm with a towel, pushing me into a living room
chair.
 
 

“What are you doing out in the rain,
Calla?” he asks, his hands massaging my arms through the terry cloth.
 
I lean into him, my forehead pressing
against his muscle, against his solidity.
 

I love his solidity.
 

He’s strong and real, unmovable.
 

“I don’t know,” I murmur.
 
“I just… I didn’t want to go home, I
guess.”

Dare pauses, gazing down at me, a hundred
things wavering in his eyes.
 
“Any
reason why not?”

I shrug.
 
“I don’t know.
 
Just a feeling.”

A sudden overwhelming feeling.
 
The funeral home felt ominous and huge and I couldn’t go there, not with
Finn’s issues hanging over my head, not with my mother gone forever.
   

“We’ve been looking for you,” he
continues, eyeing me, rubbing the cold off my skin.
 

“You have?” I ask, confused.
 
“But I haven’t been gone very long.”

He pauses, and I think I see concern in
his eyes, but he quickly conceals it.
 

“You’ve been gone since this morning,” he
says calmly.
 

Isn’t
it still morning?

I look at the clock on his wall.
 

Six
p.m.
 

My heart pounds, loud and heavy, as I
look again.

It’s still six p.m.

How can that be possible?
 
I was so immersed in worrying about Finn
that I lost hours of time?

“I think I might be going crazy like my
brother,” I blurt out, my cold hands grabbing
at
 
Dare’s
warm ones.
 
His eyes soften and he stops, his hands
so warm and dry and strong.
 

“You’re not,” he assures me.
 
“You’ve just had a lot to deal
with.
 
Anyone would struggle.
 
Trust me.”

Anyone
would lose several hours out of their day and not even realize it?

“Did you?” I demand.
 
“When your parents died, did
you
struggle?”

“Of course,” Dare assures me, cupping my
hands now, enveloping them in his own. “Everyone does.
 
And you have more to deal with than the
average person.
 
Calla, you’re
surrounded by death here.
 
The
funeral home, your mom… it’s hard. Let’s just put it that way.”

He sits next to me, and I inhale him,
breathing in the scent of man and rain and security and want.
 

I want him.
 

That’s what I know.
 

The more I’m around him, the more I want
him.
 
I want his assuredness, his
sexiness, his shoulders,
his
hips.
 
I want his comfort, I want his voice,
I
want all of him.

More than anything I’ve ever wanted.
  

I reach a cold hand up, tracing his
jawline once again, the way I did the other night. This time, though, he
doesn’t stop my hand.
 
He doesn’t
stop my fingers from running across his lips, feeling the softness that lingers
there.