Chapter 52
Quill
Ink Bunny
The Distant Past
Past Day
“Can you drive?” Davian asked, tossing his keys to me at the same time.
I barely managed to catch them before he turned back to the trunk and started sorting the groceries into white plastic bags.
“Let’s just say I have a driver’s license.”
He looked up, confusion written all over his face, and I couldn’t help but grin.
“The friend who made my identity appear in the Maplecrest files also made me other documents.”
For a moment, Davian studied me, his expression unreadable. Then he raised both eyebrows, straightened up, and I tried to ignore how perfectly the dark blue sweater over the light blue Oxford shirt followed the lines of his torso.
“Please tell me that friend isn't a friend of Lara's.”
“So that no one else with criminal tendencies can have a bad influence on your daughter?”
He knew Thomas, and even though he pretended to distrust him, he secretly liked him.
The two had met at Oktoberfest, and Davian had thought Thomas was Lara's boyfriend all evening.
We both had had to explain to him that Lara would have had to be a man to even make it onto Thomas's list of interests.
I was sure he would put two and two together. I didn't have that many friends.
“No.” He squinted his eyes. “So I don’t have to worry so much about my daughter having problems of her own that she’s trying to deal with by making friends with people who have complicated lives.”
One couldn't blame him for this concern. Lara obviously seemed to be carrying things around with her without wanting to talk about them. She often said that her problems were nothing compared to what I had had to go through. And she knew how much such comparisons bothered me.
“Lara adopted me two years ago,” I replied, thinking back to the day when the ginger-haired girl with the white strand of hair and the hand-knitted pumpkin sweater had placed a box of cookies on the table in the cafeteria with a note saying, Let’s have lunch together next break and talk about The Bloody Chamber.
The other girls here don’t read. “I don't know where I'd be today without her.”
Avoiding his gaze, I looked down at the keychain. And as my fingers ran over the golden charm, I realized what exactly was dangling from the key ring.
Smiling, I looked up, only to find Davian's gaze fixed on the keychain in my hand.
“Nice charm.”
He slammed the trunk shut and looked across the parking lot with an amused smile, even though I thought there was something sad in his ink eyes.
“A sly author gave it to me.”
Live Forever
Oasis
Davian had returned the shopping cart before heading over to Ritz Camera to pick up some new film and Polaroid equipment for Lara.
In the meantime, I had made myself comfortable in the passenger seat, opened a bag of sour Blue Swedish Fish gummy candies, and was humming along to the tune of Live Forever by Oasis.
The driver's door opened and Davian got in, a small shopping bag in his hand, which he slid between his feet before leaning back.
I turned down the radio before popping another gummy fish into my mouth, feeling caught in the act.
I knew we would be cooking at home soon. And from the look on his face, he was about to point that out to me.
“Could it be that you go grocery shopping on an empty stomach?”
I had already taken off my shoes earlier, so I pulled my legs up onto the seat and leaned my left shoulder against the backrest so that I could look Davian straight in the eye.
“Whenever Mama and I went grocery shopping back then, she let me pick out a little snack. Ever since then, whenever I go grocery shopping, I get a new snack that I've never tried before.” I held the bag in front of his nose with my arm outstretched. “Wanna try?”
He stared at the blue and yellow plastic packaging with the red lettering, but finally took it and tried one.
When he grimaced at the sour taste, I grinned.
“Jesus, Quill... Are you trying to kill yourself?”
“Next week we'll try something spicy,” I laughed, glad that Lara hated weekend grocery shopping and had sent me to help Davian.
Something I could do for the rest of my life, because these grocery trips were one of the few moments when I could enjoy his company without questions about whether I was about to cross any boundaries haunting my mind.
“You miss her a lot.”
He took another gummy fish before handing the bag back to me.
I leaned my head against the window behind me and looked through the windshield at two parents with their three children.
The father was carrying a girl on his shoulders, while two little boys tugged at their mother's hands as if they couldn't get back to the car fast enough.
All three children were holding lollipops.
“It's tragic how we miss those who ruined our lives.”
The man took the little girl off his shoulders, threw her up in the air, and she laughed, just like him, before he held her in his arms and tried to unlock the car without dropping her.
As the hungry void in my chest seemed to grow larger, I looked away, further into the distance of the busy parking lot.
“Do you miss...”
Davian didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.
“Sometimes I think back to the moments when he actually made me feel like he was a father for a split second. My father.” Saying those words felt strange. “But then I remember that I don't miss him, but only the man I would have needed as a child.”
Admitting to yourself that a person you had desperately wanted to exist somewhere in a loved one had never existed and never would was one of the hardest and at the same time most liberating things you could do. It left scars that would remain forever. Scars of hope.
“Could it be that you dream of your parents?” Now I couldn't help but look at him. “You...” He ran his fingers through his hair and looked down between his feet. “...sleep restlessly.”
Get You The Moon (feat. Sn?w)
Kina, Sn?w
He... had been watching me?
So I hadn't just imagined the creaking after all.
Something about this thought should have been unsettling, but the tingling warmth growing in my stomach seemed to disagree. Because it knew Davian.
“I...” he continued, visibly out of his usual composure. Added to that was the blush on his forehead. “...always hear it.”
There was something apologetic in his bashful gaze.
The heat literally rushed to my face. A storm of moths raged in my stomach.
He watched me sleep.
I wasn't alone.
Davian pulled something out of the bag. Something ink blue.
“This is Ink.”
Completely bewildered, I stared at the stuffed animal.
“A... blue bunny?”
Davian's uneasiness seemed to vanish, replaced by a gentle smile.
“He stumbled over my quill.”
Perplexed, I looked from the stuffed animal to him and back again.
His quill.
“He doesn’t want you to have bad dreams anymore.”
Slowly, I realized what Davian was holding out to me. A stuffed animal. For me. From him.
Carefully, I let my fingers slide into the soft fabric and took the bunny.
It was as big as an A4 sheet of paper and softer than anything I had ever touched before… except for Davian’s hair.
I swallowed, trying to pull myself together.
“How kind of him.”
I gave him a grateful smile and he returned it, but leaned back again and looked through the windshield into the distance.
“He wants you to tell him all the things you cannot talk about with others. You can hold him tight whenever you feel like it...” He hesitated, his chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly as his hand stiffened on his thigh. “So you don't have to be alone at night anymore. Never again.”
My smile faded.
All those things he couldn't do and be for me because our treacherous fate forbade it.
This stuffed bunny... was the closest I would ever get to him.
The lump in my chest tightened. So painful that I pressed the bunny to my chest and clawed at its fur.
Never had I allowed myself to become attached to a stuffed animal again.
The first one I had owned had been a little gray elephant.
Ella. Papa had torn her apart in a fit of rage.
That had been the day I had cried relentlessly in Mama's lap.
The day he had learned that I became emotionally attached to material possessions.
The only thing I had consistently received from him, besides all the outbursts of rage. At least for a while.
The second one, a smiling flower. Sunshine. I would probably never forget the only time our fireplace had been lit.
The third, my little brown bear. Theo. I had hidden him under a wooden floorboard, only taking him out at night and bringing him to bed with me, apologizing to him for leaving him alone for so long.
But only when Father hadn't been there. It had been my mistake not to expect Father home on a Tuesday afternoon and to have left the bear on my bed.
He had been lying in a puddle on my bedroom floor, reeking of beer. Because of another bad grade.
The fourth had been that black horse that had had to pay for my display window incident.
The fifth? I couldn't remember anymore. Because it had never been important. It had only survived three weeks.
I looked down at the bunny in my arms. It would never meet my father. I would make sure of that.
“Davian?”
He broke out of his trance, looked at me, and I smiled genuinely.
“Thank you.”
He looked down before the corners of his mouth cautiously turned upward.
“Not for that.”
Didn't he see what he was doing? What his mere existence triggered in me? That he multiplied this feeling when he gave me even a spark of his attention? That he blew up any space for emotion in me when he did something like that for me?
What did I do for him, except bring chaos into his life, while he filled me with the most intoxicating kind of inner peace?
A drug I shouldn't have found and was now most likely addicted to. The first one whose destructive process I enjoyed.
There was only one way to thank him without dragging him down with me.
The music switched to Radiohead.
Fake Plastic Trees
Radiohead