HoneySweet, Part One (Cozy Omegaverse)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Elias

The red clip in Nana's hair kept catching the light.

Small and red, shaped like a poinsettia, old enamel worn at one petal's edge.

She'd found it that afternoon in the back of her jewelry box, her grandmother's, she said, and worn it to Pop's workplace Christmas party.

I watched it from the back seat, turning gold in each passing streetlamp and then going dark again.

She'd been quietly pleased about it all evening.

Nana was always quietly pleased about small beautiful things.

Pop had both hands on the wheel, steady pace, checking his mirrors. He'd had two glasses of wine at the party and would have had more, he told us, but he was driving. He took driving seriously. He took most things seriously, Pop.

"Jim Beecham had three," Nana murmured from the passenger seat. She had her hands folded neatly in her lap, her eyes on the streets going past, her voice carrying that dry precise quality she used when she had an opinion she was not going to make a big thing of. "At least."

"Jim Beecham is riding home with Sandra Kowalski," Pop replied. He did not take his eyes off the road when he said it, both hands easy on the wheel, the way he always drove. "Which is the right call."

Nana tilted her head slightly toward the window, the red clip catching a passing streetlight. "Sandra had two and a half." She said it with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had been keeping count.

Pop made a sound through his nose, dismissive, and I could see the corner of his mouth pull up just slightly in the rearview mirror. "Sandra is built like a draft horse. Two and a half is nothing to Sandra."

Nana laughed, warm and loud, and it made me smile.

I was in the back seat with my phone, not really paying attention to any of it.

The radio played soft Christmas music that none of us were listening to.

Outside, the streets of Maren moved past, the pharmacy, the bank, the church on the corner of Mill and Prospect with the nativity scene out front.

Joseph was facing the wrong direction again, same as every year.

Pop noticed every December without fail.

I saw it and thought I should say something, opened my mouth, and then looked back down at my phone and didn't.

December twenty-second. Ten forty-seven at night. Three minutes from the intersection.

I didn't see the truck.

I heard it, a sound that had no name. Not a crash.

Not a bang. Something larger and worse than either of those words, a sound that went past my brain entirely and into my body, the kind that only means one thing.

It came from the left and my body knew before I did.

I dropped my phone. I lurched forward in my seat.

And then the impact hit the driver's side front and the car stopped being a car.

The whole left side caved inward in less than a second, the door frame folding, the pillar collapsing, metal into metal with a force that rearranged everything.

The windshield exploded into a web of fractures.

My body slammed into the right door and my head cracked against the window and the world went white, brilliant and total, and then came back still and wrong and full of a sound that made no sense.

The radio was still playing. That was the first thing I registered. The same soft Christmas music, just continuing on. My stomach turned. How was it still playing. How was anything still anything.

Then the smell hit. Copper, thick and immediate. Beneath it the sharp chemical burn of the airbags, and underneath both, faint and almost impossible, the trace of Nana's pine perfume still in the air of the ruined car. I turned my head toward the front.

The driver's side was gone. The whole left side of the front had folded inward, the door frame driven into the space where the seat was, the column pushed back, the dashboard collapsed, the steering wheel at a wrong angle.

Metal torn and sharp where the steel had given way.

Glass and plastic covered everything. The December streetlight came through the fractured windshield in broken pieces.

Blood on the window. Blood on what was left of the door frame.

Blood in dark streaks across the collapsed metal.

Pop's hands were still on the wheel. Both of them, at a quarter to three, exactly where they always were.

My throat tightened looking at them. Those hands had built our kitchen table, had pressed flowers for Nana's frames, had held mine when I was small and frightened.

They were still gripping the wheel, still exactly right, and below them, where the column had been driven back, where the door had come in.

I looked at what had happened to him and I understood, completely and all at once, and I closed that away and did not go back to it.

He had been doing everything right. He had always been doing everything right.

I turned toward the passenger side. Nana was there, her profile through the gap between the seats, head at a wrong angle against the headrest, face tilted toward the window.

Her left hand was flat on the dashboard, fingers spread, her wedding ring catching the fractured light.

And the red clip was still in her hair. Still exactly where she'd placed it, still perfectly there, small and red and unchanged.

The world had broken open and the red clip was still there, and something in my chest throbbed and burned as I looked at it.

She was breathing. Wrongly, wetly, a thick struggling sound with each breath that no throat should make, drowning from the inside.

Something had gone through her in the impact, part of the dashboard or the collapsed frame.

She was alive and she was choking on her own blood and I could not reach her.

The copper smell was stronger now. I knew why.

I didn't let myself think about it. I pushed it down.

Something was wrong with my lower abdomen.

Not pain, just a deep fixed pressure, a spreading heat, the sense of something being there that had no right to be.

I looked down. A piece of the door frame, six or seven inches of twisted steel, jagged at both ends, had gone into my lower abdomen.

I could see it against my shirt, dark with blood, the metal bent where it had entered me.

I understood what I was looking at. I felt very far away from myself.

I didn't pull it out. Something in me knew not to.

I pressed my left hand flat around it and turned back toward Nana.

"Nana." My voice came out wrong, thin and shaking, barely mine. I reached through the gap between the seats with my free hand, straining forward, needing to close any distance between us. "Nana. Can you hear me? I'm right here, right behind you."

She tried to answer. It wasn't a word. It couldn't be, not with what was happening in her lungs.

But it was the attempt at one, wet and broken and reaching, pushing through everything her body had been put through with whatever she had left.

I knew her voice in it. I knew it the way you know the people you love in any form, in any condition.

She was trying to say my name. Even then, even in that, she was trying to reach me.

My eyes burned. "I'm here," I said, my voice breaking on the second word.

The tears were already running down my face, hot in the cold air flooding in through the wreckage.

"I hear you. I'm right behind you. I'm not going anywhere.

" She tried again, her chest working against her, that wet effortful sound reaching toward the back seat.

Her hand on the dashboard pressed flat and then released, fingers spreading and curling like she was trying to hold onto something.

Her wedding ring moved in the broken light.

I tried to get to her. Reached and the metal in my abdomen flared, not the distant pressure anymore but something sharp and urgent, and I stopped.

Tried a different angle and stopped again.

There was no room left. What had held all three of us so easily twenty minutes ago had become something that kept me from her. So I talked to her instead.

"I'm here," I said, pressing my forehead against the back of her seat.

The fabric smelled of the softener she used on everything, so ordinary, so entirely ours, and my chest ached with it.

"I hear you every time. I'm right here." I told her about Joseph, the nativity on the corner of Mill and Prospect, Joseph facing the wrong direction the same as every year, the thing I'd been about to tell Pop and hadn't.

"I was going to say something," I whispered.

"We passed the church and I thought, he needs to know he's not the only one who notices it.

And then I didn't say it. I don't know why. "

She made the sound again. Smaller now. Her hand pressed flat against the dashboard and released.

"It doesn't matter," I choked out, voice cracking as the tears came harder.

"None of it matters. I love you. I love you and Pop and I'm right here and I'm not going anywhere.

" I turned toward the driver's side, toward Pop's hands on the wheel, toward the stillness I hadn't put the right word to yet and wouldn't for a long time.

"I love you," I said, to both of them, to the red clip and the hands at a quarter to three and all of it, the warm car, the laughter, being seventeen in the back seat of their world. "I love you both. I love you so much."

Nana made one more sound. Softer than the others, less like reaching and more like something slowly coming to rest. Then there was only the radio.

I kept my forehead against the back of her seat and my hand flat around the piece of metal in my abdomen and I breathed carefully and I stayed. That was all I had.