Chapter 11
?
Call her Cupid; I’m in love.
Viktor
Crisis lied to me. I don’t know why she lied to me or what was really making her cry, but I do know that Crisis is particular enough to not use the word text unless she means exactly text . As in a message sent on her phone.
And her phone?
It was laying dormant on her nightstand on the other side of the room when I came in to find her crying.
She could not have read a text from Crimson and returned her phone to the nightstand within a period of time that feels natural.
The woman…she…she boggles my mind and makes my head hurt. I don’t know what to do with her. I want so badly for her to trust me enough to confide in me, but I know we’ve not had anything close to that kind of relationship up to this point.
“Straight pull to the anchor point…” she murmurs, lifting her bow and drawing her arrow back to the line of her mouth. Completely relaxed, she exhales past her lips. “Release.”
For the fourth time in a row, her arrow flies, hitting the bullseye on a target positioned thirty feet away .
She reaches for the fifth and final arrow in her quiver, then nocks it.
I lift my hand to my mouth, feeling parched. “So…Crisis…” I begin.
“Hm?” Pull. Release. Bullseye.
A swear takes up space in my skull as my feeble heart trembles. “Have you shot an arrow before?”
“No. Why?” Lowering the bow, she turns to me, as though she’s oblivious to the surrounding audience. In the line of guests shooting, half have stopped to watch her.
Upon her agreeing to come with me for archery tonight, I deluded myself into thinking I might get to show her how it’s done pool cue style. Up behind her, gently guiding, whispering insipid little lower your shoulder, that’s it, good job comments in her ear.
Instead, the cosmos vetoed that idea. They boomed their heartless laughter and mocked, You want a chance to appear attractive to the girl you like? Hilarious! No, you must fall pathetically further under her spell at every juncture, no mercy.
Why is a woman effortlessly handling a weapon so hot ?
Finding it quite difficult to breathe, I say, “You’re just…very good at it.”
“I did a little research earlier. It’s not really that hard. The targets aren’t very far away.” She passes off the bow and quiver to me, then makes like she’s going to retrieve the arrows herself.
Instinct takes hold, and I grip her shoulder, stopping her before she can set a foot on the grass. “I’ll do that. I’d prefer you not go anywhere near the line of targets.”
Her arms fold, and she lifts an eyebrow. “Nothing we’re shooting could possibly be fatal.”
It is with great skill that I employ a flirtatious comment: “Losing an eye might not be fatal, but I’d still prefer it if you keep both of yours.”
Huffing, she lets a lip jut and does not at all seem swayed by my playful repartee implying I like her eyes. All the same, she lets me fetch the arrows. But she isn’t standing where I left her when I return.
She is in the lane over by the redhead I met this morning, gripping a young man’s ear, twisting it sharply down, and gritting between her teeth, “You wanna say that to her again, huh? Come on. I dare you .”
“Cri—” I attempt.
In practical tears, the early twenty-something says, “Y-you look good, getting nocked up…mind if I introduce you to a different definition of that word?”
Crisis digs her nail into his flesh. I think…I see blood. “Yeah. That’s what I thought I heard. Definition ,” she hisses. “N-o-c-k-e-d and k -n-o-c-k-e-d are completely different words, so of course they have different definitions. You were probably suffering to work homophone into your pathetic excuse of a pickup line. Didn’t your mother train you better? Like, I don’t know, by teaching you not to try and pick up strangers by making lewd suggestions?”
Be still my heart.
Crisis tosses him away, like he’s trash. The image replays in my mind while my breaths weaken. Planting her hands at her fabulous hips, she glares down her nose at the man, resulting in tilting her head back, because she is several inches shorter than him. “You’re done here today, and if I hear or see anything about a second offense, you’re done in Sunset.” She lifts one finger, whirling it. “All this land’s private property , and you will be escorted off it for harassment. Am I understood?”
He swallows. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Great. Go away. ”
He flees before I can manage a real inhale.
She’s just so…wow.
Yep. Real articulate for an author, I am.
“Thank you so much,” the redhead—whose name I never caught or bothered to remember—murmurs once Crisis turns to her. “I…I didn’t expect that here. I had no idea what to do. A-and he just kept getting closer.” She sniffles, scrubbing a hand beneath her glasses across her speckled face.
Crisis winces, turning on her heel to head back toward our lane. “Don’t mention it. Some men act like children. Just take them by the ear and show them you’re better suited to being their mother than their lover, then send them to their rooms without dinner.”
Yes, Mommy.
Frick.
I cough and bleach that thought out of my brain, clamping a hand to my mouth.
No. Very much no . Just all around absolutely not. That wasn’t even a funny joke, and I’m sure I have mommy issues, so just all around completely no, no, no .
Crisis finds me mid breakdown, scans me, and lifts a brow. “You good, Viktor?”
That’s the third time she’s said my name. I wonder if I’ll ever stop counting, or if I’d sooner ask Zakery to tattoo tally marks on my skin.
Hoarse, I croak, “Yep.”
She straightens, alert, and her hand flies to my forehead. “Are you coming down with something? I bet it’s because you haven’t been having your smoothies. The nutrients here are not balanced, and to make matters worse, you chose white bread over whole grain to have with your oatmeal this morning. Those kinds of carbs hit your system like pure sugar. And you know what pure sugar does? Deletes your immune system.”
“I’m not sick,” I grumble, carefully—shakingly—guiding her hand away from my flesh with two fingers. “I just had something in my throat.”
Faux worry creases her brows as she eases. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay…” She doesn’t smile. She hasn’t been smiling. Not since I saw her crying.
She’s always a little… intense …for lack of a better word right now, but she normally smiles quite a bit, especially when she’s tormenting me “for my own good.” Today, however, she just seems sad. Like she’s going through the motions. Trying to survive.
I wish I knew how to cheer her up. I wish I knew why I’m the last person she’d want encouragement from.
Turning toward the targets, I nock an arrow and try to remember the advice Crisis was whispering to herself before. It’s hard when my thoughts are spiraling.
Should I call Crimson, spill my guts, and hope that whatever I did to deserve Crisis’s wrath wasn’t so heinous Crimson would turn around and tell Crisis everything, causing her to leave me forever?
Crimson’s always been kind, refined, and a decent confidant concerning the struggles of living in our social class. She knows the injustices that mark the hallowed grounds of our bloodlines. Money comes with corruption, after all. And the power hungry abuse whatever they feel like, including their children.
It’s been a while since Crimson and I have been stuck at an event together, discussing troubles over flutes of wine, though. And if there’s one thing Crimson is, it’s loyal. More so to Crisis than to me, by a somewhat significant margin, so maybe taking a chance on showing my feelings to her isn’t a good idea.
I don’t like the idea of letting whatever’s wrong sit, either.
Yet I’m almost positive calling her out on her lie is a bad idea, too.
I’m cornered on all sides by poor options. I don’t know how to make progress here without risking everything.
I wish things with Crisis were as simple as things with business. Business is always cold, calculated, clear. Even writing isn’t this hard, and especially not when I’m scrawling delusions about Crisis into a book that no one will ever read.
Writing, for me, has always been a way to cope. Structuring plots to sell and putting myself before the public eye was the price I paid in order to maintain my place in our messed up family. The real stuff isn’t anything I ever saved before my book about “Catastrophe,” because my real feelings couldn’t belong in places my parents watched. And they watched everything. I used to get the feelings out, then delete anything that wouldn’t meet some portion of their approval.
Because they didn’t want humans with feelings for children.
They wanted performers.
And they got four out of the five of us to do their bidding.
Since I’m naturally a private person, writing suited me best. I didn’t get Lukas’s flamboyant interest in parading in front of people, and I can barely stomach my virtual interviews, so I don’t think Kyran’s career choice of streaming games would have worked, either. I’m not interested in making appearances at cons like Zakery, and I didn’t have the option to run away.
I like hiding behind make believe. Keeping up a professional front. Putting distance between myself and my fans who will never know me . Because I don’t want to let them.
I need the control my parents didn’t care to let us have.
I need the ability to separate selling my products—and selling myself .
The words I put on paper are either too clinical or too personal, and there’s no in between. I’m either following an outline perfectly because I know it’ll sell, or I’m pouring something so raw into the pages the ink might as well be blood.
Writing to cope with my feelings and then holding on to those words is new. But maybe I can use it? Maybe it can give Crisis and me a place to start getting some things out in the open? Things about why she hates me—and why I love her anyway.
Do I dare?
Or…I let an arrow fly, hitting the top left of the target…do I continue to suffer, hoping that something, somehow, will change?