Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (68 page)

So that was the true problem I realised, watching his back as he continued to pack things away. He wasn’t just burying Arthur’s past away, he was losing hope for his brother, too. He didn’t want Jason to remember anything about what happened to him, but anyone could tell he was missing the brother he’d grown close to lately.

I walked over slowly and placed my hand on David’s back. He stopped packing, his spine going straight and stiff, and just stood there, looking out at the night through the window.

“He’ll be okay, David,” I whispered, kissing his shoulder blade softly as I pressed myself up against him. “I promise you.”

“You can’t make that kind of promise, Ara.”

“But I am anyway.” I wrapped my arms around his waist and squeezed tight.

He laid his hands over mine and took a deep breath.

“Maybe we should try some of the fruit—from the Tree of Life,” I suggested. “It has healing properties. Maybe a drop of juice would be enough to heal his brain and—”

“I don’t want it to heal, Ara.” He lowered his head. “I don’t want him to remember what Hans did to him.”

“Aw, David,” I whispered to myself, pressing my cheek a little bit closer to his shirt. “Why won’t you tell me what else happened to him?”

As he opened his mouth, I thought for a second that he was finally going to tell me what the girls, who were in the cell with Jason and Arthur, had told him. They’d made a promise to their King that they would never tell a soul, and it didn’t matter what I bribed them with or how much I begged, they held their secrets tight. All I knew was that something awful had happened to both of them down there, and David hadn’t been the same since he found out.

He exhaled the breath he’d drawn to speak, and unclasped my hands from his waist. “I need to get back to work.”

I backed away, trying not to feel hurt by his dismissal. “Okay, well… I’ll be in the kitchen with Falcon if you need me.”

“Where’s Elora?” He looked up at me then, as if he’d only just remembered we had a baby.

“With Vicki.” I pointed behind me with my thumb.

“Okay.” He nodded, looking away, either not seeing it or plainly ignoring the hurt on my face. “I’ll see you in bed later then.”

He moved his attention to the job at hand, while I just stood there in the middle of the room, waiting for him to look at me. He didn’t, though. And I was sure it was deliberate.

“Are we really doing this?” I asked, the lump in my throat making my voice high. “Are we really shutting each other out?”

“No one is shutting anyone out, Ara. I’m just—”

“Just shutting me out,” I demanded, holding his gaze even though he tried to look away. “I’m not stupid, and neither are you. And you know damn well that you’re shutting me out, so stop denying it!”

“I
just
lost my uncle!” he yelled, motioning around the room. “Barely twelve weeks have passed. Just get off my back.”

When he turned away, clearly severing the conversation, I know he expected me to leave the room, storm out and go cry myself to sleep. But that was the old me, and that was the way things
used
to be. I would never let them get like that again.

“I lost my dad, David,” I said in a barely controlled tone. “We have all lost
someone
. You are not the only one grieving.”

He shook his head, busying himself with piles of books, as if I might just float away into the land of annoying things.

“This isn’t you,” I added. “This isn’t us. Don’t do this.”

“
I’m
not doing anything, Ara.” He held a book open in his hand, pretending to read it. “You’re the one dragging this out and making it into more than it needs to be.”

I ground my teeth, and my fists balled up for how badly I wanted to stomp my foot and then punch him in the arm. How could he be so dismissive! To his own wife! The mother of his child! His best friend!

He glanced back at me. “Are you
still
here?”

And that was it! The air left my throat in a mighty huff and I charged over to him, ripping the book from his hand and slamming it into the box. “You promised me! You said we would never end up like this again, that you would always talk to me.”

His mouth opened around an argument, but his face softened a little as he looked through my tears and into my eyes, his gaze travelling down my loose-fitted sweater and bed-shorts then to my bare feet. He smiled, then laughed.

“What?” I yelled. “What’s so funny?”

“You’re cute when you’re mad.”

“Don’t be so condescending!” I hit him in the chest with a rather pathetic fist.

He caught it and held it tight, still laughing at me. “And you hit like a girl.”

“And you grieve like a child!” I stepped back and jerked away from him. “You’re doing exactly what you always do, David. You’re running on auto and it’s tearing a rift between us.” My voice broke as I pointed to my chest. “I can’t lose you again. I—”

“You won’t lose me,” he sighed, walking over to hold me; I stepped away. “Ara, I’m sorry. Okay—”

“No, you’re not. You’re just trying to simmer things down so you don’t have to argue with me.”

One corner of his mouth angled up sharply as he laughed, looking away. He scratched that corner and then nodded to himself before bringing his eyes back to mine. “Shit.”

“What?”

“You’re right. I am doing that, aren’t I?”

I looked sideways and then down at my hands before looking back at him, not sure if he was trying to be funny or if he was taking this seriously now.

He drew a long breath through his nose and held it as he sat down on Arthur’s bed, exhaling into his hands. “I can’t grieve, Ara,” he confessed. “I don’t know how any more.”

My high shoulders dropped and I walked over to sit beside him, jumping a little to actually get up on the bed. “You cry,” I explained simply. “And you tell those you love how much it hurts. And they tell you it will all be okay, even though you don’t think it ever will be but then, after a while, it just is.”

He lifted his hand and put it back down on my knee, after some consideration. “And what if you’re afraid of weighing those you love down with a grief that just never seems to go away?” he said. “You’ll get sick of me, Ara. You’ll sigh or roll your eyes or—”

“David, I would
never
do that.” I put my hand on his. “I don’t know how you can even think that.”

He closed his eyes slowly, shaking his head. “You’re right. Again. I don’t know why I thought that either.”

I leaned in and put my head on his shoulder. “Maybe everyone else is getting in the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Vicki says I shouldn’t talk to you about how I’m feeling, because you’re not coping with your own emotions and that, if you try to fix me too, you might end up overwhelmed.”

“And you think she’s wrong?” he said. “Because she’s the expert.”

“Yes, but you and I aren’t like other people. We’re…
you’re
my therapist. You’re the only person that’s ever really been able to get through to me. Maybe we should be talking to each other.”

“Well, how
are
you feeling?” he asked with interest. “Because, to look at you, talk to you, it’s like you’ve moved on—like you’re coping better than I am.”

I laughed, tossing my head back a bit. “Don’t compare your insides to others’ outsides, David.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,
you
feel like shit inside—you’re suffering with grief so thick you can’t breathe. But when you look at me, I look like I’m okay, so you feel even worse, thinking that you’re not as strong as I am and then you wonder what’s
wrong
with you—why you haven’t moved on as easily as everyone else.” I laughed again. “I
haven’t
moved on, David. I miss my dad every day. I worry every day. I feel empty and sad sometimes, and I only just stopped crying myself to sleep—”

“You cry yourself to sleep?” He turned and his hand swept gently along my face, as if to wipe the tears away. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was trying not to burden you,” I explained. “You know what you’re like. If you’re trying to fix me, you won’t stop to think about your own needs, and then neither of us will heal.”

His hands squeezed my face a little bit too tight, then he leaned toward me very slowly and kissed my mouth, holding there until I moved back.

When he opened his eyes, the green had changed a little and there was a smile behind them. “We need to fix each other, Ara. I’ve been feeling incredibly inadequate these last few months—thinking I was weak, telling myself I need to get over it, like you have.”

“We’re both so silly.” I shook my head. “No good ever comes from us keeping things from each other. Not for any reason.”

“You’re right. And we forgot that, but let’s make a pact, right now, never to do it again.”

I offered him my pinkie.

He smiled at it and wrapped his over mine.

***

My heart felt light the entire way down to the kitchen. David could be so unwittingly hurtful sometimes and then he could turn it all around and be the sweetest, most loving guy in the world. After our little argument, I finally felt like we were on the same page again, and I knew neither of us would stray from it now. Learning to be married takes time, I knew that. Trusting each other does too, and we wouldn’t always get it right, but we were both clearly willing to fight it out until the problem was fixed. It gave me hope for us—for our human problems, that it seemed would never truly end. But I liked that.

As I turned the corner and took the narrow corridor toward the kitchen, filled with the bright fluorescent light, it surprised me to hear another voice in there with Falcon. And considering how much he hated her before she was murdered by David, it shocked me to hear that the other voice was Morgana.

She rocked back in her chair, her fingertips curled around a mug, laughing loudly along with Falcon. I almost turned around and left them to it, but she saw me and waved me into the room.

“We were just talking about Elora’s first smile,” she said.

“So… why were you laughing?” I asked, sitting down beside Falcon.

“Because she has a pretty smile,” he said softly. “And I said that she’s going to break some hearts.”

“To which I replied that, no,
David
would—if any guy ever even so much as looks at her.”

I laughed, but that whole notion gave me a sinking feeling. No one but me knew about her soulmate—who he was or the fact that she even had one—and when David one day found out who I Bound her to, he would definitely do some ripping.

“We didn’t mean to offend you, Ara,” Falcon said, clearly noticing the look on my face. “We were just—”

“It’s not that,” I assured him. “I was just thinking about other things.”

“I’ll take that as my cue to go,” Morg said, standing up.

“No, you don’t have to leave, Morg,” I insisted.

“You clearly came in here to talk to Falcon about something.” She looked knowingly at him. “I’ll leave you to it.”

“Night,” Falcon said.

She lingered on the threshold of the doorway and smiled softly back at him. “Night.”

A sudden flood of disbelief sunk through me and moved my eyes onto Falcon’s face. “So you two are friends now?”

“Something like that.” He stood up, grabbing Morg’s coffee cup and taking it to the sink.

“Have you talked to her about Hunky Doctor?”

“Not really.” He put the iron kettle on the stove and lit the burner. “You want cream?”

“Sure.” I sat back, watching him. “So what happened then—with the doc? Why do you look so sad lately?”

“I thought he’d leave me when I told him the truth about me, but you were right.” He spun around and leaned on his hands where they cupped the rim of the countertop. “That just made me a whole lot cooler in his eyes.”

“And?” I laughed. “How is that a bad thing?”

He turned away and used a scoop of coffee in a mug to hide what he was feeling. “I think, no, now I
know
, I wanted him to back away.”

“Oh?”

“Ever since I lost the one girl I’ve ever loved, I do that—I fall in love and then push people away. It’s… a habit, I guess.”

“And you pushed him away?”

“I tried, but he was a lot more interested than I ever counted on.”

“Isn’t that a good thing—that he’s willing to fight for you?”

“In ways.”

“But?”

“But…” The layer of hesitation was almost physically pinning him down. “You know I love you—” He faced me again, and exhaled deeply. “You have always been like this mix of a little sister and a really good friend, and…”

“Oh God.” I pinched my nose, lowering my face. “Please don’t tell me you got caught up in Lilith’s Curse—”

“No, nothing like that,” he said quickly, with a sense of urgency in his tone. “Seriously, I will never love you that way, but…” He deliberately and decisively left the ‘but’ hanging.