The Reaping of Norah Bentley (27 page)

I squirmed and tried to roll back over anyway; but his strong arms were unrelenting, and his laughter quickly hypnotized me into surrender. I sighed and relaxed into the bed, lifted my arms above my head and stretched my fingertips to the headboard. Eli propped himself up on one elbow and leaned over me, reached over and lifted a few stray strands of hair away from my face.

“That wasn’t much of a fight,” he said.

I laughed. “Well I’m a lover, not a fighter.” I pointed to one of my favorite posters, hanging just to the right of my dresser: a print of a peace sign in the shape of a heart, above the words
Make Love, Not War.

“I should have known.” He put his head on the pillow next to me, close enough that the tip of his nose touched my cheek, and said, “So. What are we doing tonight?”

“We could just stay right here,” I said, frowning a little.

“And make love instead of war?”

I couldn’t help but laugh again, at how innocent he managed to look in suggesting that. It made it easy to tease him back, to not get caught up in the heat spreading from the base of my neck, up into my cheeks; heat that with anybody else would have been paralyzing, but with him somehow seemed natural, made my body feel light as air instead of rigid as stone.

“Maybe,” I said. “If that’s what I have to do to get you to forget about going to Wilmington.”

He picked up my hand and started absently stroking his thumb across my palm.

“Well that is incredibly tempting.” His voice was low; the words more like a thought he’d accidently uttered out loud.

“The choice is yours,” I said with a coy shrug. And suddenly I found myself watching him, hanging on to every noise he uttered; every slip of breath, every false start to his answer. I’d been joking when I’d suggested it, but now that he was thinking about it—thinking about who knows what, exactly—and he’d used that word…tempting. I was tempting. The word was intoxicating in its newness; not something I’d ever
meant
to be, but now that he’d said it....

But then he smiled and shook his head, turned his face to stare at the safety of the ceiling instead of me.

“Nice try,” he said. “But this isn’t my decision.”

“Well what do you think I should do?” I tried not to clench my teeth as I spoke, tried not to let any more of my frustration show.

“…You already know what I think. I think you should go out with your friends.” He laced his fingers together behind his head and rested back against them before adding, “You only live once.”

“You know, that’s not an especially convincing argument coming from somebody who died four years ago.”

“I’m not exactly living right now,” he reminded me.

“Close enough.”

“I’m still right,” he said. “You should go.”

“It’s not like I don’t want to,” I said, dragging my finger in circles on the bed sheets. “I just…” I trailed off in a shrug.

“You’re worried,” he finished.

“Shouldn’t I be?” I sat up, turned to look him straight in the eyes. “You and Luke—”

“I promised, didn’t I?”

“Well yeah, but…”

He sat up, too, reached up and cupped his hand against the side of my face. His eyes held mine for a few seconds, looking very serious, and then he pressed his lips against my forehead. They lingered there for a minute, soft and warm, parting every few seconds with a deep breath.

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” he said decidedly, pulling away. “I promise I won’t kill him.”

“Ahem. Yesterday you promised you wouldn’t hurt him.”

“Hurt him, kill him…” His gaze wandered, and a sly smile crossed his lips. I punched him lightly in the chest.

“And you expect me not to be worried?” I said. I went in for another punch, but he caught my fist and then forced it apart, brought my fingertips up to his lips and kissed them one-by-one.

“I was joking,” he said, my ring finger still resting against his lips.

“You better be.”

He kissed my hand again, muffling his words against my skin when he asked, “Was that a threat?”

“…Maybe.”

“Should I be frightened?”

“If you know what’s good for you.”

“I’m terrified, then.” He dropped my hand and reached for my necklace instead, lifting the glass away from the oval of heat it had blazed in my skin. He stared at it for a moment, at its colorful brilliance reflected in the sunlight slipping through the window, the prisms of purple light it threw out over his palm.

“And I should be terrified, shouldn’t I?” he said, his fingers tracing the smooth edges. “Terrified of the girl who conquered death, in every way imaginable.” His voice was barely a whisper, his smile slight.

“I had a little help,” I said.

“And you’ll have it tonight, too,” he said, letting go of the glass. It fell back to my neck with its surprisingly heavy weight.

“Tonight?”

“I’ll be there, too. And if we can conquer death, a double-date should be nothing, right?”

It was a perfectly reasonable argument, but I still rolled my eyes. “This again?” I said. “You’re impossible, you know that?”

“You have no idea.” His playful smirk was my undoing; the breech of my last defenses.

I turned around and planted my feet firmly on the plush carpet.

“Fine. But when this ends disastrously, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said, getting to my feet. I’d already made it halfway across the room when I thought of something else, and I turned back to see him already reclining in that same lazy position I’d found him in earlier, his head resting against his hand and that sleepy smile on his face. It might have been cute, and I might have smiled back. But the thought of what might happen tonight had already consumed me, and it forced my would-be smile into a frown.

“And we’re taking a separate car,” I said.

#

It had started to rain. A light, fine mist that drifted in sheets over my windshield, that didn’t seem to bother Eli but that had me reaching and turning the windshield wipers until they moved fast, faster, fastest.

“How can you even see?” I finally asked him.

“It’s not raining that hard.”

He’d agreed to take a separate car only if I let him drive. It was one of the things he missed most about being human, he’d told me. So I’d happily handed him the keys. It was probably safer, anyway, for his calm, steady hands to be gripping the steering wheel instead of mine.

I knew that, but I couldn’t ignore the potent need to force the worry inside of me onto something
outside
. It had nothing to do with his driving, but that was the closest target. So I’d been criticizing it pretty much since we left the house— asking him several times if he was sure he still remembered what he was doing, if he
really
had to follow that close to the person in front of us, if he was even looking at the speedometer… After about thirty minutes, his patient smile finally twitched a little, and he suggested I call Rachel and see where they were at.

Distractions were the next best thing to calm me down, so I grabbed my phone, found her number and hit
call.
She answered within two rings, her cheery voice an almost surreal interruption to the gloomy dusk outside the rain-slicked windows.

“Freaky,” she said. “I was just about to call you—literally just about to hit the button.”

I put a hand over my other ear, to try and block out the sound of the raindrops pinging against the roof of my car. It was still hard to make out every word she was saying, but I caught enough of it; apparently, another band had joined the line-up at the last minute, and some shuffling had to be done—so now Jordan’s band wasn’t playing until eight at the earliest. The band that had taken over their time slot wasn’t, in Luke and Rachel’s opinion, worth hearing, so now they were suggesting a Plan ‘B’: a rendezvous at the beach house.

She told me all of this very fast, her voice breaking in and out and garbled with static, so that even if I’d wanted to I probably wouldn’t have been able to focus on coming up with any objections. I hung up a few minutes later, and while still staring at the dashboard I said,

“Change of plans. Looks like we’re going to Kure.”

Eli glanced over at me. “They’re meeting us at the beach house?” he guessed.

I nodded. “She said they’d be there after they stopped by a few places in Wilmington,” I said. “Getting food or something, I guess. I could only understand half of what she was saying.”

We rode mostly in silence after that; I didn’t even have to tell him the way. Every time we reached a turn I started to, but before I could get the words out he’d already flicked on the turn signal—always in the right direction. About thirty minutes later, we pulled into the driveway, and he put it in neutral and pulled up the emergency brake but didn’t turn the car off yet.

“I’m getting a strange sense of déjà vu,” he said, unhooking his seatbelt.

“Yeah.” I rose quickly from my seat and reached for the door handle, eager to get out of the stuffy car. It wasn’t much better outside, though; the rain had stopped, and without the raindrops to break it up, the air had become thick and heavy. It draped over me like a wet blanket, soaking my clothes and making my hair fall limply against the sides of my face.

I walked over to the bench by the back door and sat down, and a minute later the fog lights of my car blinked off and Eli stepped out. He stared back down the road for a minute, spinning my key ring around on his finger, and then came over and sat down beside me. He didn’t speak. The muscles in his arm were flexed tight, and they stayed that way when I laid my hand over them a minute later.

“You’re tense,” I said.

“…I’m trying.”

“This was your idea.”

“I know.” His arm relaxed a little, and he cupped his hand over mine. Then he tilted his head back, took a deep breath through his nose. “And I’ll be fine by the time they get here.”

“You better behave,” I said, unconvinced.

He turned his face toward mine, his blue eyes shining. “There you go making threats again.”

“…Sorry,” I said, dropping my gaze and focusing on smoothing out the folds in the sleeve of his jacket. “Apparently I’m just feeling sort of violent today. So much for my poster.”

He put his arm around me and pulled me close. “That’s okay,” he said. “I kind of like feisty Norah.” His lips hovered just over cheek as he spoke; not quite kissing, but close enough that they brushed against my skin whenever they moved. I started to get that airy, lightheaded feeling that always came with his closeness. But before it could overwhelm me completely, the sound of Luke’s Jeep pulling into the driveway interrupted us.

Luke’s eyes were on the radio, and Rachel was waving enthusiastically from the passenger seat, like it had been weeks since we’d seen each other instead of just a couple hours.

“That was quick,” Eli said, sounding disappointed as he slowly pulled away from me.

“They left before we did,” I reminded him. “And Luke drives like a maniac, so…”

We both stood up, and I put more distance between me and Eli than I wanted to; there was no way Luke hadn’t seen how close we were when he drove up. There was no reason to rub it in.

If he had noticed it, though, it didn’t really seem to bother him. He was smiling as he walked up—not the fake, plastered smile of an actor, but the real smile I knew and loved. The differences were subtle, but I saw them; the way the real smile brought out the faint dimples in his cheeks and lent a softness to his eyes, turned them a richer shade of brown.

I let a deep, cleansing breath sink through me. Maybe I’d been overreacting. Maybe tonight wouldn’t be so bad.

Luke’s embrace was familiar; swift and strong enough to almost knock my off my feet, a playfully rough contradiction to Eli’s gentle touch on my arm a second later, to the silent steps that brought him to my side.

It was obvious that Eli didn’t seem to think we needed any space between us—that he wasn’t even willing to give it to me, maybe. But even that didn’t seem to bother Luke; he just regarded him with the same smile he’d given me, held out his hand and clapped it against Eli’s with the enthusiasm that he would have given any of his closest friends.

It was relieving and unsettling at the same time. I wanted to forget about the unsettling part, though, to just accept the relief and be glad to have Luke back to normal. But I couldn’t ignore Eli’s uneasiness, the way his fingers curled and uncurled against the small of my back, like he was stretching them, keeping his hand alert and ready to snatch me out of harm’s way if Luke just happened to have another mood swing.

Rachel followed behind Luke a minute later, her eyes narrowed in his direction, her arms filled with brown grocery bags. “Make yourself useful and go get the rest of the bags out of the back,” she said.

“Yes Ma’am.” He gave her a mock salute, turned and jogged back to the Jeep.

“He seems like he’s in a good mood,” I said quietly.

“We talked,” Rachel said. Her eyes met mine with a look that clearly said
details later.
Then she shrugged, even the subtle motion of which was enough to send stuff toppling out of the overfilled bags in her arms. She cursed as a bag of what looked like shredded cheese hit the sandy ground.