The Touch (Healer Series) (27 page)

  
“What he did tonight is a good thing, Addie,”
she whispered, patting her granddaughter’s knee. “What he did was save Rose’s
life. He broke the rules to do it and he will suffer a punishment for it; for
doing it in front of you. Yet he did it regardless. I know your heart is heavy.
Carry that last thought with you, because that boy loves you enough to reap the
repercussions of broken laws to ensure your heart stays intact and your baby is
safe.”

  
Addie leaned back into the couch. The tears
were stinging her eyes as she fought to hold them back. She wanted to scream,
to cry. Rose was safe, and she would never be more thankful for anything in her
life. She had lost so much, including her belief that she was in control.

  
“Why the photo albums, Gram?” she asked,
wiping the tears from underneath her eyes. Her chest hurt from the crying and
she hadn’t felt this tired in years.

  
“I think it’s time we talk about something
else.”

  
“Oh dear God, what is it? I don’t know if I
can take anymore tonight, quite honestly. I went from a world of normalcy to a
world where wizards and warlocks might as well exist. I don’t understand all of
this.”

  
“You never will, so get used to that
feeling,” Gram replied, turning the cover of one of the dusty, old albums. “I
used to be a Healer and I still don’t understand the way the world works. It’s
not for you or me to understand, only to accept.”

  
She turned to look at Addie, her face growing
serious. “You can’t talk about it, or tell anyone what AJ can do because it
would put the order of the world at risk.”

  
She had no friends to share it with anyway, she
thought. The world would think she was crazy, and Addie knew it.

  
“I won’t,” she whispered back quietly.

  
Gram pointed to a picture of Addie when she
was a little girl, standing in front of her mother’s legs.
The
graceful, long fingers of the woman who gave birth to her Addie resting on her
shoulders in an ancient memory.
Both had grins as big as the sun, and
Addie wore a grin across her face. The pictures were nice snapshots, although
ones she didn’t remember. Her memories were of her mother in an asylum,
mumbling to herself and not wanting to be touched. Addie recalled that hurting
the worst – her mother not even wanting a hug from her.

  
“Your mother was a beautiful woman,” Gram
said, smiling at the faces in the picture.

  
“Was,” Addie replied, a hint of disdain in
her voice.

  
“Do you know why she was sick?”

  
Addie shook her head. She had never asked.
She didn’t want to know what type of crazy. She figured when it genetically hit
her, she didn’t want to know what was coming.

  
“She wasn’t crazy, Addie. When Healers like
me give up their gift, it doesn’t mean we lose our genetics. We can still pass
that on. Your mama got the gene. She had been a Healer, too. It was too much
for her. She was a nurse, a smart one too. Had her degree at nineteen and went
to work at the big hospital down the road. She didn’t discover she had the gift
until she was twenty-one, in the midst of working in the pediatric ward. Her
heart was so big and seeing children sick non-stop at work was hard enough. Add
to that the ability to heal – yet only some of them – and you have a recipe for
a broken woman. She was torn between healing one little sweetheart she
shouldn’t and losing her gift, rendering herself never being able to heal
anymore, or watching some suffer and die because she wasn’t allowed to touch
them. It broke her heart and dealing with depression, she quit her job. She met
your daddy and for awhile she was better. She gave it all up for him. When you
came along, she started to worry again that she couldn’t save you if anything
happened to you. As parents, we want to protect our children from anything
harmful that might come their way; when you throw extras into the equation, the
emotion becomes that much more powerful. We lost her for good, or at least her
mind. Your daddy couldn’t handle it and skipped town. She wanted you to be
normal, to have a better life, and so she turned herself into the asylum and
left you with me.”

  
Addie looked at the pictures. It was a lot to
take in. She had just spent most of her life hating her mother and it was all
in vain. Her mother had loved her and had been a good person. The years and
tears Addie had wasted on hate were disgusting to her now. She traced over the
pictures with her finger, wishing that somehow the memories they portrayed would
resurface in her mind so that she could hold onto them instead of push them
away as she had done for so many years.

  
Then another thought occurred to her.

  
“Do I have this?” She reached for the back of
her neck, feeling nothing at the base of her skull.

  
“No,” Gram smiled. “It skipped you. The
powers-that-be probably decided you had enough to deal with in your life
without having to add on another level of difficulty. Plus, you would have
figured it out already. If it doesn’t surface by your early twenties, it’s not
surfacing.”

  
Addie breathed a sigh of relief. While she
hadn’t expected it, she did not want to be one of them. The responsibility and
rules were a bit more than she imagined she could handle in life. She
considered herself more of a free spirit.

  
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked
quietly, hoping Gram had the words of wisdom to heal her heart, mind and soul
simultaneously.

  
“Live. And love. Be a friend, be a mother. Be
a good person. Do all those things and the rest will fall into place, exactly
as it
should.
”

  
She turned her body back towards Addie,
closing the album and placing it on the table.

  
“I meant it when I said you cannot speak of
this to anyone. Not even Rose,” Gram said sternly now. “You not only put
yourself at risk. You put AJ and the rest of the Healers at risk as well. Do
you understand?”

  
Addie nodded her head. She didn’t understand
and was still half-convinced she was trapped in a terrible dream she couldn’t
awake from. The intensity of Gram’s voice brought her back to reality.

  
“What do I do about AJ?” Addie whispered, her
gaze dropping to the floor.

  
“Just be his friend,” Gram replied. “He’ll
need one of those.
Especially you.
Especially
now.
He’s probably worried out of his mind that he’ll lose you and Rose
permanently; that you’ll be frightened by him and not want to see him.”

  
Addie didn’t feel that way; confused, yes,
although no longer scared. She stood up, stretching her body out, hearing her
bones creek and feeling the stiffness from the excitement of the evening. She
walked towards the window, peeling back the curtain enough to peer out.

15
Look But Don’t Touch

She
saw AJ from the window, sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch of the
B&B, obviously exhausted and lost. Max came back out from inside, a glass
in his hand. He handed it to his friend and crouched down next to him. It was
apparent AJ didn’t want to move, or was not able to. Max stood up and looked
around, hands on his hips. He placed a hand on AJ’s shoulder and Addie could
see his mouth moving. AJ looked up at him, and then Max proceeded back into the
house.

  
She closed the curtain and turned back to
Gram.

  
“What do I do?” Addie felt so insecure,
insignificant now in the grand scheme of how she was finding out life worked.

  
“Honey, there is a plan laid out for each one
of us. The joy is that in that plan, we still have free will. We can deviate
our own plans; the laws of the universe simply state that someone else can not
deviate them for us. I can’t tell you what to do. What I can tell you though,
from looking at that boy,” she said, pausing and peeking out the same curtain,
“is that he could probably use a friend.”

  
Addie looked at Gram and then back to the
window. She chewed nervously on her nail, the other hand wrapped around her own
waist as if she needed to feel support. It was her “tell,” what she did when
she was thinking.

  
She took a few steps towards the door, and
then took a few steps back. She tried again, shaking her hands as if to shake
all the nervousness out of her. With one hand on the door knob and a deep
breath, she opened the door and closed it softly behind her.

  
Her clothes were still covered in blood, the
night unfolding so quickly that she hadn’t even given thought to changing. She
took careful and methodical steps; slowly down the front stairs and across the
cool grass. She hesitated several times, taking a few steps towards the B&B
and then turning back. Her limbs were shaking from the veracity of what had
occurred such a short time ago still echoing in her mind. She felt terrified
and intrigued as much as she felt confused.

If
AJ saw her coming, there was no indication. She was no longer scared of him and
of his abilities. She didn’t understand them and wasn’t sure she wanted to. Her
heart and her mind both agreed on the simple fact that she couldn’t abandon him
now after all he had done for her.

  
The first step up onto the porch creaked and
AJ opened his eyes, his head resting on the rocking chair. She looked at him
and froze. He felt as though she were scared he would hurt her.

  
“I can’t zap you,” he said, with a smile.
Maybe lightening the mood would help. “I can’t set you on fire or anything
either.”

  
She smiled. “I know.” Sliding her hand up the
railing, she made her way slowly to the porch railing across from him. “Gram
told me.”

  
“She told you?” AJ was a little shocked Gram
would have revealed everything to her. “About me, I mean?”

  
“About her, too.
She
said she used to be like you.”

  
AJ nodded lightly.

  
“She said you do good things for people. You
save lives.”

  
They only stared at each other, very little
movement taking place. Their voices were soft and quiet, as if being any louder
might hurt someone.

  
“Sometimes,” he replied.

  
“You saved Rose.”

  
“Yeah,” he
said,
his
voice weak. “I couldn’t let..." he whispered, stopping himself. His voice
was cracking. “I couldn’t let anything happen to her.
To
you.”

  
“Thank you AJ,” Addie whispered back,
kneeling down next to him and putting his hand in hers. “Thank you for giving
my baby back to me.”

  
AJ smiled and if for the rest of his life he
was never able to heal another person, he’d relish in the fact that he had
saved Rose.

  
He always found it interesting how in the
face of change or death, people became different. They transformed into these
altered versions of themselves, as if they saw everything a little more
clearly. Just as they were each like individual snowflakes, so different and
making a journey to a new place on their own amongst an entire group of others,
once they got to where they were supposed to be they bonded together to create
something bigger, something more beautiful. And when their time in that place
was up and they had to turn into something else to continue the circle of their
lives, they began the process of making new steps in the same journey to do it
all over again.

  
That was how he felt about his life; mostly
the same steps, just a little different each time. He and Addie had spent a lot
of time arguing about things in the past. Tonight began the peaceful and
relaxing part of their journey.

  
“You don’t ever have to thank me,” he said.
“I want to protect you.”

  
“I know,” she said, her thumb stroking the
back of his hand. He wasn’t holding hers back, though it wasn’t because he
didn’t want to. He didn’t have the energy to flex any of his muscles.

  
“Can I tell you something?” he asked. He had
decided
,
sprawled out on the floor in the barn, that
he wanted her to know how he felt about her and why he couldn’t be with her.
Even if they had to spend their entire lives apart, only as friends, he wanted
her to know it wasn’t because he didn’t want her or need her. He didn’t want
her to feel rejected. And after what she’d just seen, he figured he just didn’t
have that much to lose anymore. He was already facing the loss of his gift.

  
“Of course,” she replied, sitting back on her
heels as she watched him carefully. “Although I can’t believe there’s more. I’m
still reeling from finding out the world is…essentially round and not flat
might be a good comparison.”

  
His body twitched as he struggled to sit up
as much as he could. Using the strength he had left, he picked his head up so
he could really look at her. She was striking. She had been beautiful from the
moment he first set eyes on her on that country road on the outskirts of town.
She wasn’t afraid of the woman she was, and she wouldn’t apologize for it. She
was nearly fearless and had the notion to speak her mind given the opportunity.
All of that added to how amazing she had come to be in his eyes.

  
He lightly squeezed her hand, his body aching
as he did so. Max was walking past the screen door about to walk out, when he
saw them out there. He pulled back, watching for a moment. He had been in AJ’s
shoes once upon a time and knew exactly how the kid was feeling. He only hoped
AJ would make the right choice for himself so he didn’t have to live with
regret.

  
AJ looked at her, her eyes piercing and
questioning. With a deep breath, he managed to get out the words he had been
holding inside since the first week he’d been in town.

  
“I love you, Addie Jenko.”

  
She hadn’t expected that to escape from his
lips – ever – after what Gram had told her. Her lip quivered, the tears in her
eyes causing them to look glassy in the moonlight. She couldn’t speak; she
could only squeeze his hand a bit more. Was he going to give everything up for
her? Share his life with her?

  
“I don’t understand it. I only know that I
love you like I have never loved a woman before. You are strong and fierce. You
are smart and gorgeous and everything that someone could want in a woman. You
make my heart skip a beat just by smiling at me, and you make anything I’m
facing seem a little easier to overcome just by your touch. I know it sounds
like some cheesy line out of a love story, but this is how I feel.”

  
She was crying now, looking down for a moment
to try and hide it. He wasn’t done though.

  
“I can’t promise to be with you. There is a
promise I can make, though. Every day, for the rest of your life, I will
protect you and Rose and Gram to the best of my ability.”

  
He struggled a little more to sit up, to not
look so weak in front of her.

  
“AJ,” she whispered, her fingers moving up to
her mouth as if to keep his name from escaping her lips.

  
“Let me finish,” he whispered, slowly moving
his other hand over onto hers. “I love you so much, yet it’s not enough. It’s
not enough to give you the life you deserve. I can’t give up what I have the
ability to do.”

  
He wanted to. He knew if he did, he wouldn’t
be able to protect them from Devin. He knew Max could, or one of the others,
yet he felt a responsibility. He needed to do it himself.

  
“I don’t know if I’ll even get to keep my
gift. If I do, I won’t choose to let it go. I’m so, so sorry Addie. I have jobs
left to do and if I give up this part of my life, I can’t protect you. I
couldn’t live with that.”

  
She was heartbroken. It was the ending she
had been truly anticipating since her conversation with Gram, despite the hope
her heart had that he might choose her. He was too good of a man to let go of
his gift and risk not being able to help others. She knew his obligation to the
cause would be greater than his love for her. Whether or not either of them
liked it, it meant they couldn’t be together.

  
She nodded her head yes to indicate she
understood. He heard her crying and sniffles as she tried to fight back the
tears. She placed her other hand on top of his.

  
“Gram explained it,” she whispered sullenly.
“She told me what you do. About the people whose lives you save. The changes
you make for the world. I couldn’t ask you to give that up.”

  
As she looked up, it tugged at his heart. The
only thing holding him together was a voice inside repeatedly reminding him
that the tears she shed today might keep her from the tears she would shed in
the future.

  
“I wish I could change the path, to give it
all up. I know your Gram did and that must make me seem like an awful person
because I won’t.”

  
“Not any more than it would make Gram seem
like an awful person for giving up helping others,” Addie whispered back.
“You’re a good man.”

  
AJ sat there for a moment thinking carefully
of how to say what he needed to say next.

  
“If I could give you the world, Addie, I
would. If I could promise you a lifetime of happiness with no bumps in the road
and no fear about the future, I would. But when I look at this town, when I
look at what happened to Rose, if I wasn’t who I was, Rose might not have
survived.”

  
He knew Max had been there and could have
saved her. He also knew Max probably wouldn’t have, because exposing himself
would have broken their laws. If Max was anything, he was a rule-follower
because he believed in all that he had been taught.

  
“I want you to take the knowledge of how I
feel about you Addie – about how beautiful I think you are, and how strong –
and I want you to keep that in mind every time a guy talks to you. I want you
to use it to remind yourself that when the Joseph’s of the world ask you out,
you know you’re worth more than what they have to offer. You deserve better.”

  
“You’ll be here to remind me if a guy’s a
jerk, won’t you?” she asked, a slight smile on her lips.

  
“As long as I can, I will be. Even if I have
to leave, I can promise you that I will always be back to protect you.”

  
Max stepped further into the house to avoid
being seen if Addie stood up. He was reminded of his lost love. He saw AJ
sitting out there, a broken man. A man never choosing to love someone over the
obligation he felt he carried to the world. He wished for the first time that
he had told AJ what to do, that he had enabled AJ to feel free to choose Addie.
They needed each other.

  
Addie stood up, her hands slipping from his
and easing into her back pockets.
 
She
hadn’t told him how she felt. She was debating it back and forth in her mind,
knowing that either way wouldn’t make a difference. Yet she couldn’t contain
the words. “I love you too, AJ.”

  
He smiled. He liked the sound of the words as
they slipped past her lips.

  
“You’re the first man to make me feel alive
since Robert. You’re the first one to take my breath away. The first one I
actually like fighting with because you don’t let me win. You make me earn it.
I love that you stand up for yourself and the people you care about. And I love
that, even when offered something so many people in this world are searching
for, you are a strong enough man to turn it down because you know you can do
more. I know the decision isn’t easy, and I know that if you felt you were able
to, you’d give it up. I won’t push anymore. Just knowing that you are built
into my heart for the rest of my life is enough for now.”