Chapter 17 BETH
BETH
The wind rustled and moaned as if mourning this moment.
‘I’m here’
We were trying so hard to decode what could be going through Mrs. Takahashi’s mind at the moment. According to Kenzo, his mother had never been like this before.
So yes, it was really past my bedtime and I was trying so hard to keep my eyes open. Of course I didn’t believe the message that was staring at me right now was from who it said it was from.
With Kenzo still on the call, the shuffle of his feet as he paced about in his room echoing in the background, my fingers clicked on the said message, leading me to my conversations with him, the unanswered messages, and well this one right now.
I stared at it for minutes long, like the sheer force of my eyes would bend reality, make it make sense, or vanish into a puff of smoke if this was just my mind playing tricks on me.
How do I reply to this? Days of silence–well, he did pick my call earlier today after school, though he didn’t say anything before he hung up. But still, what did he expect me to do right now? Was I supposed to jump in joy and go welcome him with a nicely packed hamper bag?
What I wanted was a stable ground, someone I knew would be right next to me the moment my eyes opened. Not someone that would be here this second and gone the next, someone who didn’t know if he wanted to stay or leave.
I was not sure if Callan Raskov was a stable ground.
Staring at his casual message that still managed to make my chest tight, something hot and visceral coiled behind my ribs. But despite the anger, I couldn’t curb the urge to reply because this right here was what I had wanted for days, checking my phone a million times a day.
A reply.
“She has gone to bed,” Kenzo said, breaking my chain of thoughts, so unassuming of my current misery.
“Has she?” I asked, hiding the crack in my voice, my hand trembling, a buzzing sound ringing in my ears.
“Yeah, I just heard her room’s door shut.” He dragged in a sharp, unsteady breath. “Damn. I’m cooked, aren’t I? She’s like so mad. That’s why she isn’t saying anything. Because she doesn’t want to say things she doesn’t mean out of rage, right?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, guilt overlapping my other emotions. “It’s all my fault.”
“It’s not your fault, Christ. Must you take credit for everything?” he dismissed, his tone lacking that teasing edge. “You didn’t ask me to hit him, did you? And to be honest, I don’t fucking regret it. I will do it again and again if given a chance. He’s a fucking dickhead.”
A beat of silence stretched between us. I chewed on my nail, my thoughts running wild. How do I fix what was happening between Kenzo and his mom? And for Callan; do I reply to him or leave his message unattended like he did mine for days?
Would replying make me desperate and cheap? What about Kenzo’s mom? How mad was she at Kenzo? Did she hate me now because I was the reason her son did something he wouldn’t usually do?
God, I was going insane.
“I don’t know why she’s being so difficult.” Kenzo’s frustration was evident in the strain in his voice. “Like, I know I did what she didn’t like. But why can’t she just scold me and let’s get this over with?”
I didn’t know what to say. Maybe I would know how to comfort my best friend if Callan’s text wasn’t staring at me, waiting for my reply.
‘I’m outside your house’
The next message dragged breath out of my lungs like a blade, my phone clattering to the floor right next to the bed.
What?
I sat down there, shock leaving me immobile.
What did he just send to me?
I kicked off the covers, hopping out of bed and dashing to my window. I pulled the curtains aside. But it was pitch black outside. The streetlights at Elowen’s Lane were old and long dead for months now. So there was barely any form of illumination.
I pressed my face to the glass, eyes squinting. And then I saw it, a black car that seemed to have blended perfectly well with the night sky, its windows tinted, as usual.
This neighbourhood was basically ancient, like a scene dragged right out of a centuries old film reel.
Every building, including ours whose face Mother, though, tried to lift every year, sagged under the weight of time.
Their walls were all crumbling like brittle parchment.
Yet right in the middle of this decay, the car sat, gleaming and modern, a jarring intrusion that didn’t belong here.
A low buzz echoed from my phone that was still on the floor, face up. Leaning off the window, I hurried for it, lifting it into my hand.
“Are you still there?” Kenzo’s voice echoed, weary and confused. I completely forgot I was still on a call.
“Um, y-yeah,” I clicked on the new message, my heart racing, hand trembling. “I’ll call you back in a moment.”
‘Can you come outside?’
I bit my lower lip, hard enough to hurt. My gaze went back to the window, and the realisation that he was just out there, the man whose presence I had yearned for for days, made my skin buzz with the hollow sense of want, desire…maybe need.
“Are you okay?” Kenzo asked softly.
I forgot to hang up.
“Yes,” I replied. “I need to quickly do something. Don’t sleep. I’ll give you a ring when I’m done, okay?”
“Alright.” He sounded skeptical. Because with me, something was always up.
Grabbing the woolen jacket that was somehow always hung on my study chair, I threw it over my shoulder, my feet slipping into my cotton loafers.
Mother was asleep. At least that was what I hoped when I pulled open my door and stepped quietly into the corridor like a thief in the night.
She should be asleep. It was over two hours ago when she turned off the lights and retired to her room.
My steps were soundless as I walked to the living room, opened the front door and slipped into the night.
Before I made it down the rickety, crumbling stairs by the porch, he was already out, leaning against the car, his armed soldiers on guard—one in the front, facing down the street, the other at the back, facing the other side of the street.
And Callan looked like he had been carved out of the night itself. The glowing moon that managed to supply light to the street glazed over his skin, giving him a faint, ghostly glow, like something unreal…something I shouldn’t want as much as I did.
At an arm’s length away from him, he lifted his head, a faint twitch across his lips.
“Hi,” he said quietly, almost nervously when I reached him.
“Hi,” I replied, walking closer and leaning on the car next to him.
I thought the days of silence would have drowned out every part of me that used to feel warm and alive around him.
But behold my hand brushing against just an inch of his crispy, white shirt, a whiff of his sandalwood and rose scent, and warmth spread from the crown of my head to the sole of my feet.
My heart raced, burning like an ember glow.
I wasn’t cold. But I wrapped my arms around my body, dragging in air that smelt like dust and late-night damp into my lungs.
“How have you been?” I asked awkwardly, my chest heavy with unanswered questions, closures I needed to get.
“I have.” He paused, thinking. “I’ve been good…I guess?”
I nodded. He had been good. He wasn’t sick. Wasn’t dying. He just didn’t feel like texting back.
“You?”
Drowning. “Good,” I replied instead.
Then silence fell between us again, just for a moment. But I didn’t want silence. I wanted us to talk. I needed answers.
“This place is creepy at night,” I uttered casually, as if this was really what I wanted to talk about. “You can hold me if you get scared.”
His head turned slightly, like he wasn’t sure if it was a joke or a test, and the sheer thought of his fiery eyes on me made my skin burn. “I’ll…keep that in mind, Elizabeth.”
My name on his lips made heat curl at the depth of my stomach. I missed it. I missed the sound of his voice so much.
I pointed towards an abandoned house down the street. It was the most badly-looking-in-shape house amongst the rest. One side of the wall had fallen completely and melted into the earth.
“They said that one is haunted,” I whispered.
He followed my gaze. “Haunted?” A hint of amusement touched his voice. “Is it?”
“I suppose.” I shrugged, getting a gentle shiver from the stories I had been told about the families who died there after having dinner.
Apparently, a wall gecko fell into their pot in the kitchen, releasing its poison into the soup. They didn’t know. And by the time they knew they were consuming not just soup, but vermin from a common wall gecko, it was too late.
I always hastened my steps whenever I was passing that house. I believed in the existence of the extraterrestrial. And ghosts scared me a lot.
“If anything comes crawling, hold me.”
Something like a laugh ghosted through his chest. But it faded quickly, swallowed by the silence that returned, heavier this time, pressing into the invisible space between us.
“I’m…sorry.”
The way he said it made something weak flutter in my chest. Not because it fixed anything. But because the words hurt to hear.
I stared at the cracked pavement, kicking at pebbles the night had buried. “But you remember what I said that day, right?”
My question made him stiffen beside me. “Yes,” he replied, softly.
“So what happened this time?” I lifted my gaze, but he wasn’t looking in my direction, rather, at my house across from us where a woman was standing by the kitchen window, staring.
Mother wasn’t sleeping.
He inhaled a slow and sharp breath. “Something came up.”
There he went again. Something came up. Was this how it would always be? Something coming up that would make him disappear for another decade?
“What came up?” I asked, the night hanging between us like a veil.
His gaze dropped, jaw tightening as his fist clenched and then released. “I can’t explain,” he said finally.
I nodded slowly, like I understood, but really, I didn’t. I didn’t understand what it was that simply couldn’t be explained. And that reply hurt more than the days of waiting.