Аманда Хокинг - Flutter

He was getting more nervous, which made me nervous, so I decided to wait to see how this turned out before I hopped in the shower.

“Yeah?” Peter answered his bedroom door sounding crabby, but that was Peter.

“I went to the video store and I, uh, rented Brideshead Revisted. I know you really like it, and I thought you might want to watch it with us. Me and Alice, I mean,” Jack stammered.

“Um… sure.” Peter sounded taken back, and honestly, so was I.

“Alice’s taking a shower, so it’ll be a little bit,” Jack said, feeling more relieved now that Peter said yes.

“Okay.”

“Okay.” There was kind of an awkward silence, and then Jack must’ve finally excused himself because Peter shut his door, and then I heard Jack running back down the stairs.

In the shower, I have tendency to sing very loudly (today it was the theme to Golden Girls), but even over the sound of my voice and the water running, I could still hear Mae screaming. This would later prove to be a godsend, when Peter explained to me that Brideshead Revisited is an eleven-hour long period piece that originally aired on the BBC in the 1980’s. At the time, however, Mae’s desperate pleas were enough to scare the hell out of me.

Somewhere, I knew that we had bathrobes, but Jack and I were in charge of keeping in our bathroom clean, so it was a total disarray. Maybe buried underneath piles of damp towels, there might be a robe, but I didn’t want to dig around for one. Once I got out of the shower, I could hear well enough to ascertain that Mae wasn’t in immediate danger, and Ezra was trying to calm her and reason with her. Still, something was the matter and I didn’t like it. Hastily, I threw on a pair of my sweats and one of Jack’s oversized tee shirts, and hurried out the door.

“I wouldn’t go down there if I were you.” That was Bobby’s word of advice. He was standing just outside of Milo’s door with a hoodie wrapped tightly around him. “It doesn’t sound pretty.”

“You aren’t bloody listening to me, Ezra! You never listen to me!” Mae shouted, sounding exasperated and angry.

“What’s going on?” I asked quietly, hoping to gain some insight on the situation before diving into it.

“I don’t really know. Milo and Jack left on a blood run about fifteen minutes ago, and then they just started fighting a few minutes after that,” Bobby shrugged. A blood run meant that we were getting low on bag blood at the house, and they had gone to get some from a blood bank. My stomach grumbled at just the thought of blood, but Mae was yelling so much, I easily ignored it.

“Don’t tell me to calm down! I am not going to calm down!” Mae continued after Ezra mistakenly suggested she relax a bit. “I don’t need to be reasonable! This isn’t something that we should be reasonable about! This is life and death, Ezra!”

“I know that, Mae! That’s exactly why we need to think about this!” Ezra raised his voice, but there was nothing angry about it. He was just trying to be heard over her. “But everyone else in the house doesn’t need to hear us yelling about this.”

“I don’t care how who hears anything!” Mae retorted, followed quickly the sound of something glass smashing, like a vase or a glass. Matilda barked in response and Mae snapped at her to shut up.

“See?” Bobby whispered meekly, but the things that made him cower were exactly the reasons I felt like I had to intervene. Peter was still in his room, trying to sleep from the slow sound of his heart beat, so that left me as the only one here that could help out.

I walked carefully down the stairs, not entirely sure what I might walk into. Matilda stood at the edge of the living room, looking as worried as a dog can look. Mae was standing to one side of the living room, and she was even worse than she was yesterday. Her hair was a frizzy mess, and her skin was blotchy from yelling and crying so much. She hadn’t changed her pajamas in days, and I’m not sure the last time she had eaten, but she looked even paler than normal. On the floor front of her, glass was shattered all over floor. There had been a heavy glass statue of a swan on the mantle, and she would’ve had to thrown it very hard to make it shatter like that. Luckily, nobody was hurt by the flying chunks of thick glass.

“You’ve woken Alice,” Ezra told Mae, almost tiredly. He was standing on the far side of the room across from her, wearing silk pajama pants and a tee shirt. Apparently, they had started fighting immediately after waking up. It was still fairly early, so they had actually probably just woken up.

“No, I was awake. I just got of the shower.” I tugged at my hair to demonstrate. It was dripping wet down my back since I hadn’t had a chance to dry it after lunging out of the shower to see what all the fuss was about.

“I don’t care if I wake her! I don’t care if I wake anybody!” Mae shrieked, raising her head to the ceiling so she could wake anybody else that might be sleeping. I had never seen Mae have any kind of disregard for anybody before, and I couldn’t imagine what we had all done to upset her so much.

“Will you knock it off? This isn’t about them. This isn’t their fault,” Ezra told her firmly.

“How is not about them?” Mae looked completely appalled and pointed at me, but she refused to look at me. I was starting to think that maybe Bobby had been right, and I should’ve stayed hidden upstairs. “This is completely about them! They’re why you won’t do this!”

“No, that’s not true. They have no bearing on this,” Ezra shook his head.

“Bloody hell they don’t! They have everything to do with it! You wouldn’t even turn Alice because her brother had just turned, and I know you wanted her to turn!” Mae gave him a knowing look that I didn’t understand, and he shook his head. “Don’t be so damn condescending with me, Ezra! I know you! And I know that you turned her brother for her! So why won’t you do this for me?”

“This is entirely different situation, and I won’t do this. I won’t let you do it. Absolutely not.” He was quiet, but his voice was so firm and finite. I would never be brave enough to challenge Ezra when he spoke like that.

“Dammit, Ezra!” Mae wailed, tears streaming down her cheeks. “You can’t deny me this!

You have no right! No right!”

“I cannot allow this, Mae, and I am sorry.” He pursed his lips tightly, but didn’t budge. Mae looked like she was about ready to collapse, but he made no move towards her. I wanted to help her, but I was afraid of how she might react to me, and if wasn’t going to tend to her, then I didn’t think that I should either.

“You are not sorry! You are cold and you are cruel, and I cannot spend my life with you!”

She was sobbing so hard she had to grip onto the back of the chair to keep from falling over. “I will not let you make this decision for me! You can’t!”

“You’re right. I cannot make this choice for you, but I will not tolerate it, either. You can do whatever you like, but you will not be allowed in my house with that abomination,” Ezra said coolly.

“Abomination?” Mae was incredulous and her voice cracked. “We are the abomination! She is merely a child, and I want to save her!”

“You cannot save her, Mae! You can only turn her into a monster!” Ezra insisted.

“Like we are monsters?” Mae brushed a strand of her hair from her eyes and looked down at the floor. “Maybe we are, and maybe she would be too, but she would have a life. And it wouldn’t be a bad life.

She could have everything that we have to offer.”

“We have nothing to offer her,” Ezra replied.

“How can you say that?” Mae gaped at him, then she looked over at me, looking at me with hate for the first time. It caught me off guard, and I nearly flinched. “Is it because of her? Because of Alice? She gets everything you have to offer? You let Jack turn her and gave him no repercussions, even though you had just turned her brother. For her. She is not the only thing in this life that needs you, Ezra! In fact, I don’t think she even needs you! You aren’t that indispensable to her!” Her lips quivered and she glared at him. “You aren’t that indispensable to me either!”