43. Forty-Three
Forty-Three
Presley
I underestimated my brother. That or he’d changed. Instead of being an annoying cry baby, he was actually cool. The Zach and Luke kind of cool. The kind of cool I let drag me out of bed into the snow in the middle of the day. We’d driven at least two hours to get here, and I didn’t know where here was, but it was beautiful. The mountains on either side almost distracted me from the fact that I was hiking in snow. I didn’t even like hiking, especially not when there was snow involved.
“Where are we going?”
“Almost there, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. My socks are just wet.”
Kimberly came up beside me and wrapped her arm around mine. She was absolutely beaming, and the sun had her natural red hair peeking through the dark brown. It wasn’t fair she looked so good in different hair colors. I smothered my brown hair with a beanie, and I guess I understood why Kim didn’t like her hair. We weren’t ready for the change.
Kimberly was back in her element. We didn’t have the clothes for hiking, but it was easy not to slip in sneakers when you were a vampire.
I needed a day without creeper Kilian breathing down my neck or The Family texting me. I’d given Kilian my phone and gotten a new one, then I felt a lot lighter without a cult stalking me. I’d forgotten what no responsibility or problems felt like.
We walked up a hill until there was a clearing in the trees. An enormous frozen lake glistened in hues of bluish-green marble. It expanded far into the mountain encased in snow and powdered trees.
“I thought we could use some fresh air,” Aaron said, taking off his gloves and wrapping his arms around Kimberly’s shoulder and mine.
Our little trio.
“It’s so beautiful!” Kimberly exclaimed.
It reminded me a little too much of our last hike together. The day everything changed and got terrible.
“It’s water. You know we have a pond by the house, right?” I was being an ass, and I hated it.
My brother only smiled and squeezed me. “It is water, but I wanted to bring you both here because I have something important to say. And I wanted to say it in a place where I could make you a promise and have that promise be measurable.”
He stood in front of the cliff, the hills and the entire mountain waiting to hear.
“The next time we come here in the spring, it won’t just be the three of us anymore. We’re going to come back to this exact spot and look out on the unfrozen lake. All five of us.”
Kimberly nodded with a soft smile.
“You brought us up here to say all that,” I said.
“I brought you up here to spend time with you and to initiate this.”
He presented a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil.
“Are we writing love letters?”
“No, we’re starting a list of things we want to do when this is over. I figure once we don’t have a cult on our backs anymore, then we’ll have a lot of time to spend together, so I started a list. A forever list.”
The vastness of the mountain swallowed me. I was ready for winter to end even more so if it meant Zach and Luke would be standing next to us. I missed normal. I missed Blackheart and all that stupid stuff we used to do. It was brief, but it was everything I’d ever wanted.
Suddenly, I wondered what spring would hold if my brothers came back. The image of them in the photo was carved into the back of my mind.
Would they be different? Would everything be different? Could it ever be as good as what already passed?
The thought made me feel sick to my stomach again. Like the nausea that had transferred in the bond from Aaron to me. Now I was the one making us both sick.
“I know it’s hard to see now, but it’s going to happen,” Aaron said to me, and I pushed down anything else snarky that came to mind. “I already started. Number one: go back to the lake. You guys pick something. Nothing is too far-fetched.”
“We could all go to Italy. Like the summer trip I never got to have.”
There were a couple things I hadn’t let myself daydream about since my brothers were taken, and any thought of vacations was one of them, but Aaron’s excitement had my mind turning with the thought of us all on the beach lying in the sun. Visiting the museums . . . riding in the gondolas . . .
“That’s good!” He placed the paper on his leg to loosely scribble it down.
Aaron’s excitement jolted me out of my previous gloom and into the present.
“What about you, Kim?” I nudged her.
“Sometimes . . . I imagine we’ll buy a piece of land and have our own cabins. We could build them and decorate them all and live close to each other, kinda like we do now, but it will be ours. Not sure if everyone else likes the idea.”
“It’s great. I’m adding it.”
“You’d really want me close to you guys, asking you for things like milk and sugar?” I joked.
“Yes. Always.” She squeezed my shoulder.
“Will you help me decorate?”
“I’ll try my best.”
I loved the idea more than I wanted to admit. All of it sounded exciting.
After a few minutes of admiring the view and adding random things to the list—I added skydiving, and Kimberly looked at me like I hit her—she added us making our Halloween costumes, and Aaron mentioned we should head back before we got caught in the dark.
Just as I went to start back on the trail, Aaron stopped. He stood in front of Kimberly and kneeled on one knee.
“Holy shit.” The words rushed out of me.
“First . . .” He gazed up at Kimberly with a few hairs in his face. Admittedly, he looked too cool to be my older brother.
Kimberly’s cheeks flushed. “W-what are you doing?”
The scene behind them was storybook worthy. I waited with my breath in my throat for him to say it. To ask her those four little words—
“I’m just . . . checking my shoe.”
His soft, expectant expression deteriorated into that annoying grin.
“Dude. I hate you.” I rolled my eyes.
“You’re such a tease.” Kimberly hit him in the arm.
“Not cool. Come on, Kim.” I placed my arm around her and steered her away from my brother. “Seriously, if he does that again, you have to say no when he really asks you as punishment.”
Kim’s laughter soothed all the weird sad feelings I had earlier. “Deal.”
“Better yet, marry me instead. I’m more fun than Aaron.”
“Hey! Wait,” Aaron called to us as we descended the mountain.
“Got this one for you.”
I handed Aaron a little blue rock I’d found as we continued down the trail. It wasn’t bright blue, more like a gray, but it stood out among the brown and white pebble rocks around our feet.
“Wow.” My brother grabbed it from me. “I love it. I’ll add it to the growing collection.” He pulled a few other rocks from his pocket. All various shapes and sizes. “Kimberly gave me this one.”
Between his fingers was a heart-shaped stone, almost completely smooth.
“She really loves you, dude.”
Kimberly was out of earshot, far ahead on the trail. She was soaking it in, I think. Like hiking was a drug straight into the vein.
“I am going to propose, you know,” Aaron said, eyeing the back of Kimberly’s head.
“Soon?”
“Yeah, soon. Thoughts?”
He said it like he really wanted my opinion. Like it mattered. It was something Luke would’ve done—ask me about something to make me feel included.
“I think you better get her a good ring. She deserves it.”
“I know. I will.”
“I still want to be the officiant. And you better give me a heads-up for the actual proposal because I want to bring the camera.”
“Done.”
The silence stretched between us, with only the sounds of our feet crunching in the snow and a few birds.
“They’ll be here too, Pres. I’ll make sure of it.” He rubbed my back as my chest ached.
I hated that I believed him. Aaron wasn’t someone I counted on growing up. He didn’t commit to anything and never took charge. He panicked in a crisis, and I didn’t blame him because I also panicked in a crisis. We were largely in the same hopeless panic boat.
Something had changed, like he’d leveled up way quicker than me. He defeated a major boss and gained all the XP. Only, it was invisible. I never saw the mega boss monster. I never grabbed my sword to fight it. Or I didn’t own one.
If I’d known about a monster, I’d have hidden instead. Old Aaron would have hidden with me, but he was turning into one of those badass heroes in video games. The ones with the armor and the cool catch phrases. Kimberly too.
I was still the same. Just sad Presley trying to make it through another day. At one point, we were all sad and purposeless together, like an unspoken agreement, then it was just me. Alone.
“You okay?” Aaron asked, watching me. He had to feel the new pain rolling in my chest.
“Yeah. Thank you . . . for this whole day. It’s nice. Sorry if I was an ass.”
“Not more than usual. Either way, I can handle it.”
I know. I let my brother’s laughter comfort me and looked up at the trail ahead with only the power of his hope to keep me moving forward.