27. Orion
Orion
Itake one corner, then another, sinking into the feel of the bike and letting the roar of the engine block out the sound of the world around me.
The landscape is dark, the trees nothing more than shadows rising above the road, and I’m alone for the first time in way too long.
I spent the day with Arden in her room, trying to get her to tell me what’s wrong, and then with the doctor, trying to get him to do more than measure her heartbeat.
“It’s erratic, but that’s what I’d expect from a girl who’s just been attacked,” he said, his voice intentionally mellow. “I don’t think there’s anything to see here, Orion. You’ve got a girl who faints when there’s too much stress. That’s not that uncommon.”
He’s wrong, though, because she doesn’t just faint when there’s stress.
She puts her hand to her heart every time there’s too much emotion, as if she’s checking on it.
And she doesn’t just faint. She gets as pale as a sheet of paper and shaky.
Her eyes go wide with fright in a way that breaks my heart.
And when she wakes up, she pretends it’s nothing.
That she’s not at all concerned about it happening again.
And though the doctor insists she’s just fainting and that it could happen at any time, her behavior tells me that it’s not just some random thing. She knows what’s going on, I’m sure of it.
She just won’t tell me.
And that part...
That part hurts more than anything else.
If she’d tell us, we could fix it. Figure out how to handle it and make sure she’s okay. Instead, Mars and I are left guessing, and that’s going to lead directly to us sending her home to people who presumably do know what’s wrong with her.
Though I still don’t know whether they care. After all, they didn’t find the kidnappers who had her for months. They must have had the chance, and they certainly have the means. She’s said herself that her family has money.
If they were asked for ransom money, they should have given it.
I don’t like that they didn’t. And I don’t like the thought of sending her home to people who didn’t bother to bring her home themselves. It feels wrong, like we’re selling her out.
But if she’s sick...
I growl, turn the wheel to head further up the mountain, and try again to turn my brain off. I’ve been over all of this more times than I can count, and it doesn’t lead anywhere except back to the fact that Arden isn’t telling me the truth.
And for the first time, I actually need her to give up some of her secrets.
I kill the engine two blocks from the house and roll the bike into the driveway by hand, as I always do when I’ve been out for a night right.
Mars and Arden have to be asleep by this time, and I don’t want to wake them.
When I get in sight of the house, though, I see that there’s a light on.
Not the porch light, but a lamp on the table near the door.
And next to it, I see a small form that I recognize. She’s got a blanket wrapped around her against the chill of the April night, and a book in her lap. She must have come out here to read, unable to sleep, but she’s stopped reading at some point and started watching the night.
Right now she’s looking up at the sky like she’s searching for answers in the stars above her head. She may have come out to the porch to read, but now she’s lost in thought, communing with the stars and moon above.
The sight of her shoots right through my body to my heart, and I nearly stagger.
She looks at peace, but also fragile, like someone built her out of glass and then turned her over to a world that wasn’t going to be careful enough with her.
Not weak, exactly, but breakable, like someone who’s spend her whole life pretending she’s okay and is now too tired to go on.
Someone who’s protected herself from the outside world, but hasn’t been able to shelter herself as much as she needed to.
Someone who’s never been understood, and is tired of standing alone.
I feel all of those things in my soul.
She might be a broken bird, but she’s never let that stop her. She still here fighting, trying to make the people around her feel happy and safe and seen.
She’s still shining her light out into the world, even as her own battery drains down toward empty.
I park the bike and walk slowly up onto the porch, trying to keep my boots quiet.
She must know I’m here, but she doesn’t take her eyes from the stars above her, and up close, the image is even more breathtaking.
The moonlight has turned her skin ivory and put deep shadows under her eyes, and I feel like I can see her skull through her skin.
See a dark fate waiting for her.
I sit down, using the movement to distract myself from that thought, and wait for her to say something. She doesn’t have any chocolate tonight, nothing but the book, and we sit in silence for several moments.
“I was waiting for you,” she says finally.
It’s exactly what she said that first night, when she sat up even though she didn’t know me, and I can’t stop the warmth that spreads through my body.
“Why?”
She finally turns to me, though her expression doesn’t change. “I heard you go out, and I knew you were upset. I thought you might need a friend. Maybe even some chocolate. Or whiskey. Or just one of those.”
The girl sees right through me, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that.
Because I do need a friend. I’ve been needing a friend since the day I was fucking born.
The thought cuts me so deep that when I speak, I’ve forgotten to put my filter on first. “I really just need someone to talk to.”
And, as usual, she doesn’t call me on the momentary mistake. Or the vulnerability.
“Well, I’m a person. I can listen. Some people say I’m pretty good at it.”
She pauses only a moment before she herself starts talking.
“I think everyone needs people to see them. Listen. One time when I was little, I went somewhere with my friends and they ended up leaving me there. I don’t think they meant to, but they couldn’t find me when it was time to go home, and they didn’t try for very long.
Just drove away. I had to find my own way home.
Made me realize you can never really depend on anyone else because the only person who really has you as their job is you. ”
I try to parse through that story, garbled as it is, and when I finally catch the meaning in my hands, I realize that she’s speaking right to my soul.
Again.
“When I was twelve, I realized that my parents weren’t in it for me.
They never wanted kids and had me by accident, and they never let me forget it.
My mom loved me, but my dad... He was a hard man to grow up with.
Nothing was every good enough for him, and he never got tired of showing me what a disappointment I was.
One day, I got home, packed my things, and left.
Figured that as long as I wasn’t going to be seen at home, I might as well go out into the world and find a place where I’d hold more substance. More color.”
“Did you find it?”
No, I think. I found a bunch of men who used me for a bunch of other things, beat me up for other reasons, and still told me I wasn’t worth anything.
And then I found Mars.
“Not for a long time,” I murmur.
“What did you do first, when you left?”
I have to think about that for a long time, because there are a lot of answers.
I ran to a friend’s house and asked if I could sleep there for the night.
And then I kept running, moving from house to house until I ran out of friends to stay with.
Then I tried living on my own. I can still remember my first night on the streets by myself.
It was raining and I couldn’t find anything more than a doorway to crouch down in. I was cold and wet and very frightened. Rats chewed my shoes in the middle of the night, and I didn’t think I’d ever eat again.
I was thirteen years old.
But those aren’t things I did. Those were survival instincts. The first thing I did was...
“I changed my name.” It’s a whisper. Barely a memory. But I’d been dreaming of doing it since I could start dreaming.
Her response is also a whisper. “You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to.”
I’m shocked when I realize that I do want to tell her. For the first time since that first night, I want the feel of someone else knowing who I really am.
“Caedyn,” I say. “My real name is Caedyn. It never fit me, though, and I don’t think it’s even a real name. Something my mother made up, maybe. A joke of some sort.”
The name fees strange on my tongue. Foreign, like it doesn’t belong to me.
“No on in this town has ever heard it, not even Mars, and there are good reasons for that. It’s not that I don’t trust Mars.
I trust the man with my life. But saying the name out loud brings the old life back, and no one is allowed to know about that.
I’ve never wanted anyone knowing who I actually am.
I don’t want to be Caedyn ever again. I want to be Orion.
But Caedyn has a bad habit of popping up when I least expect it and punching me right in the face. ”
It takes a moment before she responds, and I suddenly feel like I’ve said too much. I’ve told her that I’m not the person I’m pretending to be, and that no one knows who I really am. And gods, for a girl like her, that’s got to be a huge red flag. A sign that I can’t be trusted.
That I really am as dangerous as she originally thought.
Fuck, I’m stupid. This is why I don’t tell people anything about my past. This is why I work so hard to keep everyone at a distance from me. Letting them get close is just asking for trouble.
I’m about to get to my feet and get as far away as I can when she finally answers.
“Caedyn.” The word is a soft breath, a gentle exhalation. When she looks at me, she’s smiling. “I like Orion better. It feels more like you. You just need to give Caedyn a bit more time to disappear. But he will.”
God, this girl.
One word, one line, and she’s erasing years of tension from my shoulders, decades of fear from my mind.
Caedyn isn’t someone to be afraid of. He’s just the boy I’ve outgrown. But he’s still in there because he’s still me.
Of course he is.
I put my hand out and trace her jaw with my fingertips, amazed at how easy it is for her to look at me and see who I actually am.
See, instead of the monster so many people construct, the human man with all the emotions.
I trusted her with the one thing I’ve held for myself all these years, and the world didn’t fall down around me.
I didn’t explode. She didn’t get up and run away, screaming.
She just smiled and told me that I’m not that lost kid anymore.
And somehow... Somehow, that was exactly what I needed to hear.
How the fuck did I ever survive without her in my life?
“Where have you been all my life?” I ask softly.
She leans into my touch, her eyes soft in the moonlight. “Learning enough to be able to see you, I guess.”
Fuck. Me.
I’ve known this girl less than a week and she already knows me better than anyone ever has. And I don’t know if that’s terrifying... or perfect.