Chapter 5 #2
“Screw you.” Lexy pivots and heads into the party.
A dark laugh gurgles in my throat. “I remember thinking that Lexy was going to be a social pariah. That the bitch squad was totally going to abandon her, and it’s only the beginning of senior year.”
Chloe tosses her head back and barrels toward the party as the rest of her cheer peers follow along like a line of lost baby ducks. That was the bitch squad in a nutshell. If it walks like a slutty duck, and quacks like a slutty duck, it’s the bitch squad.
They follow the stream of bodies out onto the expansive backyard that Demetri lit up with orange and black lights, making everyone look as if they’ve already set one foot in the grave.
Gone are the gorgeous flower arrangements and rose trellises, replaced with every tacky accessory from the local party supply shop, complete with cardboard cutouts of witches and ghosts staked along the yard—all courtesy of my earthly mother, of course.
Demetri employed her to do just about everything for him, and judging by my sister Misty’s existence, my mother did just about everything.
A steady fog emits from the fountain, and bodies dangle lifeless from the weeping willows.
“Wow, my mom did a magnificent job of turning the Garden of Eden into a giant pile of gaudy crap,” younger me observes.
She was so right. Lizbeth Landon really did specialize in decorating as if she were personally at war with good taste. It still happens on occasion. Like every single holiday.
A slow song comes on over the speakers, and people migrate over to a makeshift dance floor under the canopy of bright orange twinkle lights.
“You mind?” Gage looks to Logan while taking younger me by the hand. “Just one dance, I promise.” His dimples wink in and out as he pulls her in.
“Just one.” Logan glares at him a moment before relenting.
We watch as this younger, doe-eyed version of me follows Gage’s hot-to-trot scent all the way down the stairs and into a thicket of swaying bodies at least fifty deep. Logan will never see them, and that’s the entire point.
“I’m not going to lie, Skyla”—Gage breathes the words into my ear as he holds this younger version of me close, his hips moving so hard over mine, I can feel that baseball bat he keeps in his pants— “I’m dying to talk to you.
I’m dying to spend time with you. I need you more than ever. This separation is killing me.”
“You have the visions, Gage. Hold on to those. I’ll be speaking with my mother soon, and everything is going to get straightened out.” I watch as I pull back enough to see him. The tangerine glow from above makes him look haunted, demonic, desperately broken.
I shoot my mother a look. We all know how easy communicating with her can be. But nevertheless, I lean into Logan.
“It was moments like that,” I sigh at the drama of it all, “that made us who we are. And oddly, I think I can add Gage into that equation.”
Logan shakes his head. “It’s always the Gage math getting in the way.” He shrugs. “But you’re right. I can practically see our growing families on the horizon from here. Even though the faction war was just around the corner.”
“I believe it’s my turn.” The younger version of Logan crops up, pulling Gage back by the shoulder.
The music switches gears to something way upbeat, and the past version of Logan looks as if he’d rather slit his neck than lose it to the funky groove.
“Oh, come on!” Younger me tries to pull him out onto the dance floor, but he doesn’t budge.
“Just my luck,” he laments. “I’ll catch the next slow dance.”
“Come on, Logan,” Gage teases. “Skyla here wants to see you bust a move.” He whips out his phone. “I’ll record it, and we can play it back for the team.”
“You wish.” Young Logan pulls her in and takes her hand. “You mind if I take a rain check? Maybe a private dance later, say in the butterfly room? The bowling alley needs me. Three more people just called in sick.”
“I’ll go with you,” younger me whispers. I don’t know why I felt the need to whisper since there’s only Gage in the vicinity, and this isn’t exactly a top-secret conversation.
“I get it.” Gage holds up his arms. “I’ll get lost.”
“No, wait—” Before the younger version of me can properly protest, he’s drifting through the crowd.
“You’d better find him.” Young Logan brushes his fingers over the top of her brow with a look of resolute sadness. “I should have closed the damn place tonight. It’s dead anyway.”
“I’ll remind you of that next year.” The past version of me pushes him in by the small of his back, and they sway together to a rhythm all their own.
Logan’s eyes widen before he frees a tiny smile. “I don’t want to think about next year. I’m enjoying this moment, right now.” That destitute sadness comes over him again. “I thought we held something big, Skyla. I thought we’d last forever.”
I can practically feel my stomach pinch at the use of the word forever. That’s sort of Gage’s self-proclaimed buzzword. I watch as I slip my hands down over the back of his jeans and into his pockets. I was pretty smooth back then.
“We get happily ever after, remember?” The younger version of me bumps her forehead to his and pulls back. But it’s almost as if Logan doesn’t remember a thing, and it scares her to death.
“Yeah.” He looks down and fills his lungs to capacity. “I gotta go.” His lips twitch as if he’s fighting a smile. “Do you think I could steal a quick kiss?”
“You bet. I hear if you kiss someone on Halloween night, it means something spectacular is about to happen.”
“Really?” He ticks his head back a notch, slightly amused.
“No, not really. I totally just made that up, but wouldn’t it be great if it were true?” She gives a soft laugh, raking her fingernails lightly over his back.
“Oh, I think it’s true.” Logan twirls her until they land farther from the party, and the fog acts as a privacy screen just for the two of us.
Something in Logan wakes up, and he’s brimming with that sexy grin again.
“We’re on our way to something spectacular, Skyla.
I can feel it. I just have no damn idea how we’ll get there. ”
She puts her finger to his lips. Logan is getting ready to veer off the cliffside again, and she doesn’t want him to.
“This is real. Right here,” she picks up his hand and kisses it, “right now.”
“I want you to kiss me, Skyla.”
She leans in and lands a peck on his lips. Her biggest fear is that she’ll end up in a marathon make-out session with each one of them tonight. Logan, Gage, and Marshall.
“Kiss me like you mean it.” Logan’s longitudinal dimple inverts.
It’s the earmark of all of the suffering they’ve been through, the aching lust that had to be denied, the deception, the outright public denial they exhibited just so they could survive.
Logan and I were rising like a kite, the long tail of the past glittering behind us like an indelible trail of where we once were and how we came to survive.
“I’ll kiss you like I mean it.” She crashes her lips over his, and every blissful emotion detonates. The stars, the sun, and moon, they outshine their glory—the banner over the two of them is eternal love. They have happily ever after in their grasp, they just need to reach out and clasp onto it—
He pulls back abruptly. “I’d better go.” He dots her forehead with a kiss. “Thank you for that. I know you don’t want to have a ‘marathon make-out session’ with each one of us tonight.” He gives a playful wink. “And if you do”—he holds up his hands like it’s a stickup— “turnabout’s fair play.”
“Logan.” She swats him on the stomach.
“I’m going to ditch out the back gate. Why don’t you head inside and find that morose nephew of mine. Tell him to stop moping around like he’s got a communicable disease.”
“Got it.” She pinches his hand as their fingers lose their grasp and watches as he melts into the dismal fog. “I’ll always be your zombie girlfriend!” she shouts after him.
“And I’ll,” he holds out his hands, considering it for a moment, “always be your dead boyfriend.”
A bubbling laugh rides through her as she heads inside to find Gage.
Marathon kissing session. She huffs a laugh at the idea.
Although she did kiss Marshall earlier, and God knows, she just kissed Logan.
Two down—one to go.
“Now that was hot,” I say to Logan—this older, hotter version—wrapping my arms around him with a laugh. “And we were in l-o-v-e.”
“No, no, heavens no,” Candace protests suddenly, her voice sharp with what sounds suspiciously like panic.
“This night won’t do. It’s too—too close to the war.
We need to step back just a bit.” She waves her hands as if trying to erase the scene before us.
“Here, why don’t I find something that I’m sure you’ll both approve of? ”
Logan furrows his brows as he checks his watch, a gesture I know is more out of habit, considering time is something that doesn’t quite matter when we’re light driving. “Look, it’s getting late.”
“Oh, dear, sweet Logan,” my mother’s voice drips with danger, “is it past your bedtime?” she teases, landing a kiss to his cheek that feels more calculated than affectionate.
And just like that, my internal alarm bells ring louder with each passing moment.
Why is she so insistent that we move away from this period of time?
What doesn’t she want us to see—or worse, what doesn’t she want us to remember about this haunted, happy night?
More importantly, why the hell is she kissing Logan?
“By all means,” Candace says as she puts her hands on our shoulders, her fingers gripping just a bit too tightly as if she were afraid that we might escape. “Let’s find somewhere more suitable.”
Once again, the ground bounces below our feet, and we’re wrapped in a cloud of stars, being pulled through the fabric of Paragon’s past like threads through some cosmic needle.
The last thing I see before Demetri’s Halloween party dissolves completely is my mother’s face—not triumphant as she was before, but tense with something that looks a lot like fear.
Whatever game she’s playing, the rules are changing. And I have a sinking feeling we’re not the players we thought we were—we’re the pieces being sacrificed.