21 Elle To Dance #3
I can feel Douglas’s eyes on me. I’ve begun to consider him oddly safe, this past month.
I’ve told him too much, laid out every terrible part of me, every sinful impulse and monstrous deed, knowing I’d never care for him.
More importantly, that he’d never care for me.
Yet this vulnerability seems to have drawn us closer.
I stand beside the man who knows me truer than anyone. Who’s shown me this prized possession. And if it were anyone else, if we were anywhere else, this would mean something.
“James—”
He interrupts me. I’m thankful because I fear what I might’ve said.
“Would you dance with me?”
I open my eyes, and he’s before me. He holds one hand outstretched, forever calloused yet immaterial. My throat is dry. When did my hands get so sweaty?
“You don’t need to—” I begin to decline, because how could I agree? When we are who we are to each other? A murderer doesn’t get to dance with her victim.
“I want to, Elle. If you do.”
I take his hand. I don’t feel the pressure of it in my own, but there’s something there.
The whisper of resistance against my palm, a coolness that spreads from my hip to the middle of my back as his other hand wraps around me.
Have we ever been this close before, save for the moment of his demise?
I place my other hand on his shoulder, hovering above it.
We’re clumsy. I keep accidentally leading, pushing us closer when he doesn’t anticipate my advance. His hand passes in and out of mine. My stomach alights in butterflies every time his hand presses through my shirt to my skin. It spreads goosebumps across my back. Can he feel them?
If he were alive, I’d feel his breath against my cheek. Everything would be different. “Elle,” he whispers. I may never get used to my name from his lips.
“Don’t. Let this be good. Once.”
We dance about the room, my calves bumping against the chesterfield and his through the corner of the bed on every turn.
I never knew dancing could feel like this.
My partner was always Thomas. Dancing was a necessity, not a joyous thing.
It was too-often-stubbed toes, a hand gripping mine nearly to bruising, a harsh word under his breath to keep up and not embarrass him.
The music box slows into nothing. But we don’t break away from each other. We spin in smaller and smaller circles until we are pivoting around the same point. His scruff would be tickling my nose, were it real.
“Thank you,” we both say at the same time. He laughs, I duck my head, and the last rays of sun fall between us as a warm curtain. He doesn’t remove his hands. Neither do I.
“It’s snowing,” Douglas remarks, surprise in his voice.
I look up. Soft flakes fall lightly out the kitchen window. While to Douglas this heralds only a beautiful seascape, it brings me back to reality.
“They’ve been gone too long.” My senses return to me—sharp, matter-of-fact, frigid.
I dislodge from him. His right hand passes through me in a chill. I’m already halfway to the door when he speaks.
“They’re fine. Can’t they enjoy each other’s company, as we have?”
“It’s snowing,” I counter, shouldering on a sweater over my work shirt.
What if they took the boat to the mainland?
They’re not ready. Liney doesn’t know where to land, Bridget’s never stepped foot there, and neither knows how to stay concealed without me.
“She can’t be reckless. Especially not in her condition. ”
“Perhaps she’s stronger than you think.”
I step into my old boots. Liney took Douglas’s warmer ones.
Every catastrophic scenario I suppressed since she left plays: Liney lying dead and rotting like the fish in the dying sun’s last light.
Liney fallen from a tree she decided to climb after Bridget dared her, broken limbs at unnatural angles.
Liney gone, only bootprints left on the edge of the water and no rowboat in sight.
She wouldn’t leave me. Yet Bridget’s grinning face at the breakfast table, her loud stories after supper as I’m leaving for the night, and the adoration in Liney’s eyes at her words paint a different portrait.
“Perhaps she is,” I mutter.
I leave my ghost behind. The snow falls soft, sticking to my face. I scan the tree line, hand over my eyes to protect them from the dying sun. Only red maples greet me.
I pass the tiny pond, the edge of water that makes up the spiral’s entrance, even the dock. The rowboat’s still there, which fills me with both relief and new dread. Nothing out of place. Within the forest there are only gray trunks and crimson leaves still to fall.
“Caroline!” I yell, standing in the middle of the island.
I could kill her for scaring me like this. How could she care so little?
I call her name over and over, turning in place to shout in each cardinal direction. Fluffy snowflakes fall in my face. Nothing answers.
I don’t know which end of the island I face anymore, but I head out of the woods toward the beach.
I could call on the island’s power, but the very freedom it’s afforded me could spell my doom. Mr. Pratterman is sure to feel any connection. I can’t risk him forcing a reunion to deliver my failure. All these tools, yet I’m forced only to shout Liney’s name.
Is it already too late?
Has the Devil come to take my sister, unannounced, while I danced with my ghost?