Chapter 88
Davian
Pumpkin
In My Veins
Andrew Belle
I stared at my cell phone for another ten minutes, then my frustration got the better of me, and I hurled the useless piece of crap against the wall.
“Where are you, Quill… Where the hell are you?!”
My heart was pounding, and if I didn’t get a sign of life from her soon, it would either burst out of my chest or suddenly stop beating altogether.
This wasn’t even torture anymore. It was as if I could feel myself bleeding out inside, without knowing how to stop the bleeding.
My ink batteries were running out.
No writing, no eating, no clear thinking. Nothing had gone right since she had disappeared. I wasn’t even sure how I had managed to get any sleep at all over the past 123 hours.
Frantically, I began pacing back and forth.
“Please, Quill. Just one sign of life and I’ll wait…”
Damn it, I didn’t want to wait. Never again. I had already been waiting too long.
I needed this woman in my life. Without her…
I clenched my teeth, balled my hands into fists until my nails dug into my flesh.
It was a wonder the floor wasn't worn down in this spot yet. Maybe it was because of the student papers scattered all over the floorboards. Countless sheets of paper bearing the prints from my shoes. Shoes I had been wearing for two or three days now. Just like the dull dark blue sweatshirt.
Without her, I turned into a walking corpse.
With throbbing temples, I rubbed my face, raked my fingers through my hair until it was tousled, ready to wait longer, not to sleep a wink, until I knew that my Blue was safe under my roof and wrapped in my blanket, where I would make it clear to her that I would never let her go again.
My gaze fell on the small black velvet box resting on my bookshelf, and I held my breath, listening to the longing beating in my chest.
What would the Davian from six months ago say to this one?
Crazy. Out of his mind.
He would be afraid of me.
Fuck that old stubborn fool, who I could only pity now. He hadn’t had a Quill. No reason to keep breathing. And the mere thought that I might be just a moment away from becoming that man again made me tear my gaze away from the box I had picked up from the jeweler this morning.
She’s alive, Davian. She’ll come back. She has a reason.
The problem was that those were my words, not hers.
Just before I could kick over the plant pot in the corner, I spun around and continued pacing back and forth.
It was the day before Christmas. The holiday break at Maplecrest had begun a few days ago, and all I had planned was to spend time with Quill and Lara, try to sort things out, talk, and plan what to do next.
Tony had rung the doorbell here three days ago, hysterically shouting, “I’ll kill you the moment you open that damn door!”
The funny thing? I understood him.
God, how much I regretted not having told him sooner how much his sister meant to me. I had thought I would regret it.
Part of me already missed the friendship I’d had with him. A friendship I feared I would never be able to repair.
As much as I had sometimes doubted it, Quill meant something to him.
I deserved every blow he wanted to give me for that betrayal. But the fact that he had brought Quill to that man and had never clearly and unequivocally taken her side made him deserve just as many blows.
Lara, who hadn’t exchanged a single word with me since the incident, hadn’t let him come to me, had driven off with him, and had talked to him about whatever.
She had also met with Monica, who urgently wanted to talk to me. But I would need time to process what she had kept from me all these decades.
I had told Lara to spend Christmas with Monica and Tony and leave me alone, but as far as I could tell from Monica’s voicemail message, Tony would be with his family and she would be alone.
Taking a deep breath, I came to a halt.
What she had done might be wrong and unbearable for me, but neither did I want to ruin the holidays for Lara, nor could I bear the thought of leaving that woman, who had made sure that Lara had the most wonderful Christmases a child could have for the past seventeen years, alone at Christmas.
Until she had come into our lives, I had hated Christmas because it was the time of year when, back in my days at the orphanage, I had longed most of all for a family. Thanks to Monica, I had been able to leave those days behind.
The fact that she was responsible for those days ever having existed in the first place was the icing on the cake of irony.
I knew that if Quill were here, she would help me find my inner peace, sort things out, and think clearly.
But she wasn’t here. She was gone, just gone.
The only reason I hadn’t put together a damn search party yet was the letter she had left on my desk.
My Inkbird,
I’m sorry.
I’m so, so sorry for turning your life upside down.
After that day when I met you on that bridge, I should have left town and never looked back.
Why I didn’t?
Normally, my answer would be, “Because I’m Quill, and I never do what’s right.”
But that wouldn't be the truth.
Hope. Hope that I've become so attached to that it's like an addiction from which escaping would fill my life with emptiness.
Don't look for me. I'll be back. I promise.
But not before Christmas. There is no holiday that reminds me more of how broken I am and that I don’t deserve to have a family that cares about me.
Your ink burns on my skin.
With longing,
Quill
Searching for clues, I had read the letter so many times that it had eventually burned itself into my memory.
Last night I had dreamed that my memory read it to me in her voice.
I was losing my mind.
The door to my study opened and my head snapped around immediately.
Quill…
But it wasn’t my bittersweet hope that entered the room with a pitying look. It was my Pumpkin.
That was the first time in days that she had even looked me in the eye.
The hope that had just been on the verge of suffocating sprouted anew, even if the source was a different one.
“She’s fine.”
She was talking to me.
Why did it sound as if Quill had contacted her?
No… She would contact me first.
“How do you know that?”
Lara stared at me, her expression unreadable. Unlike that day when Tony had stared at me as if I had done something utterly abominable.
But this look here was a new addition to the list of things that would tear me apart from the inside like a wrecking ball if I didn’t soon find a way to clean up the chaos that my life had become since Quill.
Beautiful chaos. That was the only chaos she left behind. The rest was my own.
“She often disappears for weeks.”
An incredulous, if sad, smile – as if she were mocking my lack of knowledge – formed on her lips.
“That’s Quill.”
Her words were meant to calm me down. But all I felt amid all that stubborn despair was relief that my daughter had a reason to walk into this study.
This was my chance. My first. And I wasn’t going to waste it.
Lara was just about to turn and leave.
“Pumpkin?”
She paused, her hand on the doorknob, and I waited until she looked at me with a confused expression.
“Let’s talk, please.”
Meghan’s Theme
David Buckley; Luke Richards
Until I met Quill, I had been convinced that the most difficult topics of conversation with Dilara were those about safety, curfews, boys, and birth control.
How wrong I had been.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, could top the fact that I had slept with my daughter’s best friend, which made me feel – on this sidewalk in our peaceful neighborhood – like a felon.
After three awkward minutes of silence, during which the half-grown puppy had peed on every other tree, I finally managed to open my mouth and even form actual words.
“How long have you known?”
God, that question was awkward. Should I have asked her first how she was doing?
How is she supposed to be doing, Davian? Her father betrayed her trust and is in the process of destroying her picture-perfect life.
“Ever since you gave her that stuffed animal.”
She didn’t look at me, just kept walking. Her voice was flat.
Fuck.
That had already been a month ago.
A whole damn month.
And yet she hadn’t confronted me, hadn’t told Tony, hadn’t done anything about it. She had even acted as if she knew nothing.
“Why don’t you hate me?”
Of all the people in this town, she had every reason in the world to.
Lara took a deep breath, and with every second she didn’t speak, something tightened in my chest.
What if she did?
“Because we don’t choose who we love.”
All the tension melted away from my chest.
What had she just said?
She was so young, and yet she sounded so thoughtful. Quill was just a year older than her, yet my little girl had grown up sheltered, unlike Quill, and hadn’t had to learn so quickly how to deal with the harsh realities of life.
“I wanted to hate you.”
Swallowing, I looked back down at the path, shoving my hands deeper into my pants pockets beneath my open coat.
“When I realized how you look at her, I wanted to confront you with the fact that nothing about it is normal.”
My nervousness returned.
She tried to understand me, but she didn’t. And that was okay.
Maybe I was sick. Maybe she was right. But nothing about that would change the fact that I would bring this world to a standstill for Quill.
“But then I watched you two for a while, saw how she snaps you out of your thought spirals, that both of you laugh more together than you do with others, that you write…”
Hope returned. With it, a slight smile.
I miss you, Quill. Please come home.
“I’ve always known that Quill carries things around with her, and that she can’t bring herself to open up completely to me.”
Lara slowed down, her voice filled with exhaustion.
“I hated that she slept with older men, tried to convince myself that she was using you too, because she doesn’t realize she needs professional help.”
The thought hit me unexpectedly hard, even though I knew I wasn’t like those other men who had preyed on Quill’s emotional wounds to satisfy their sexual desires.
If I ever found out their names, I would make sure they never laid a hand on a minor again.