Jackson Pearce - Cold Spell

I grab hold of his shoulders, bring my lips to his; he reaches up in response, tangles his fingers in my wet hair, pulls me closer. I finally pull away from his lips, but not his face, leaving my eyes on his, my cheeks close enough that I can feel him breathing.

“You know I love you, right?” he says hoarsely, and I nod against him.

“So that’s him?” Flannery asks. I turn my head, see her propped up on her good shoulder. “I dunno, Ginny,” she says, surveying Kai. “For all the trouble, I expected him to be taller.”

They assure me the water in the bathtub is barely warm, but it feels scalding for the first few moments after I get in, clothes and all. Kai sits beside me on the tile floor, staring at his hands, while the others sit in the main room, bundled up in blankets and towels, Ella cradled against Lucas’s chest. The Travellers refuse to go to the hospital, despite the fact that both Flannery and Callum probably need stitches.

“They’ll give me a number,” Callum says, folding his arms. “I don’t want to be a number.”

“That’s not how it works,” Lucas says. “You’ll just get checked out and stitched up. I’ll pay.”

“You think we need your charity?” Flannery says, her unblackened eye widening.

“That’s not what he said—” Ella argues.

“Who are they again?” Kai whispers to me, the question sincere. He’s sitting outside the bathtub, as close to me as he can get without being in the water. He’s barely met my eyes since returning to the hotel.

“It’s complicated. I’ll explain some other time,” I say, reaching forward to add the smallest bit of hot water. My lungs still ache, and as feeling returns to my limbs, I become more and more aware of just how many cuts and bruises I got. I wince, reach down, and tug my socks off, tossing them over the edge of the bathtub alongside my coat.

“I have a question,” I say slowly as I slide deeper into the water. Kai nods but still doesn’t look at me. “There was a boy in the back of Grandma Dalia’s cookbook. A boy that Mora took from her, the same way she took you. We shot him in Nashville—he died. Do you know what his name was?”

“Red hair?” Kai asks, voice grim but a little louder—he has to be, to overpower the sound of the Travellers and Lucas arguing over health care. I nod. “His name was Michael,” Kai says as he pulls one knee to his chest, half hugging it. “He was nice. We were… we were brothers. Sort of. When I changed for the first time I was so happy. I was finally perfect; I was one of her guards. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to be everything for her… I loved her,” he says, shaking his head as if he doesn’t understand. His eyes find mine and I see him freeze, as if he realizes what he’s said aloud.

I look at him for a moment, inhaling slowly. “It’s all right,” I say, and it surprises me to realize how all right it genuinely is. I want him to love me, always me, the way I’ll always love him… but having him back makes me aware of how all right I really was without him, in the end. I reach across the edge of the bathtub and open my palm; he puts his hand in mine.

“It’s not all right for me,” he says numbly, and I can’t think of a response. Perhaps because I know it’ll take more than kind words to stop that spinning feeling of wrongness, of hurt.

I watch him for a moment, then rise, creating waves in the bathtub. The others look over from the main room; Flannery reaches into her bag and pulls out a hotel robe I assume she was stealing, tossing it to me. I duck behind the shower curtain, drop my soaked clothes on the floor, and tie the robe tight.

“Can you feel everything?” Ella asks, looking at me doubtfully. I sit at the top of the bed, tuck my feet into the blankets.

“I’ll be fine,” I say, reaching over and squeezing her hand. “Thanks for coming.”

“Don’t think we aren’t going to fight about you sneaking out on the drive back,” she jokes.

“You’re going back with them?” Flannery asks, alarmed.

“What? I don’t… I don’t know. Can’t I figure that out when I don’t have hypothermia?”

“Yeah, sure, if that’s what you want,” Flannery says quickly. “It’s just, whatever you’re driving—and no offense to you, Ella—it isn’t as great as Wallace.”

“It’s a private plane,” Ella says, confused about what “Wallace” is.

“My point exactly,” Flannery answers. Callum laughs under his breath, though, and the sound seems to divert the scowl forming on Flannery’s face. She grins at him. “Anyway,” Flannery continues, looking to Kai, “you’re awfully quiet for the man of the hour.”

Kai has hardly moved. He’s sitting in the bathroom doorway, as if he doesn’t want to really be in the same room as the rest of us. “Sorry. I just don’t…” he begins, then stops, as if he planned to say more but can’t work out what. He exhales, rises, and walks out of the hotel room, head slung low. Flannery raises her eyebrows toward me; I hurry from the bed and go after him, letting the room door slam accidentally.

“Kai,” I call out softly, expecting him to be halfway down the hall. I’m surprised when I realize he’s just beside the door, sitting with his back against the wall. The wallpaper is covered in a pattern featuring elk and plants, and the hallway smells like old coffee. I sink down to the floor beside him.

“I don’t know what happened,” he says quietly, voice broken. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“Neither do I,” I say. “But we’ll be fine. All of us. Me, you, them…”

“You almost died,” he says. “More than once, because of me. Right? I mean, I’m guessing—I don’t even know what happened to you. But you’ve got these… people and stories and you… you’re different now, Ginny, and I missed it.” He sounds crushed—not guilty, but something closer to scared. His voice sounds the way I felt when I saw him in the garden with Mora, when the possibility of him ending our love, our life together, our future, our dreams, was painful and raw.

“First off, I didn’t die,” I say. “Secondly, I saved the stories. Every one, so I could tell them to you. Before all this, I didn’t know I could survive without you, Kai. And sure, I’ve changed. Now I know… I can make it on my own. But that doesn’t mean I want to. It doesn’t mean I ever stopped loving you.”

Kai exhales, something of a broken, relieved laugh on his lips, and leans his head back against the wall. He stares at the ceiling for a moment, then turns his head toward me. “Am I remembering right—I killed all the roses?”

“They might be fine,” I say, shrugging. “They’re tough.”

He nods, then drops his gaze to where our hands rest on the hotel floor, close to each other but not touching. Kai lifts his fingers, brings them down on mine delicately. “All of them?”

“I think so,” I say, nodding, and turn my palm over to meet his. We stare down at our hands for a moment, Kai running his thumb across the scar on my left hand, the one that matches his.

“I wasn’t strong enough for you,” he says, the words falling from his mouth as if they’re the ones he desperately needed to say.

I shake my head at him. “I didn’t need you to be.”

“When I said before that I loved her, Ginny, I didn’t mean that I stopped—”

“I know,” I say. I smile. “I mean, I might have doubted it for a minute there in Nashville. And when I got in a knife fight with you. But I know.”

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Remind me.”

“I love you,” he says, eyes hard on mine. In the end it’s always been us, together, but knowing it and hearing it, seeing it, feeling it, are different things. In a single, sweeping motion I pull Kai toward me and find his lips with mine. I kiss him the way I’ve wanted to for weeks, the way I want to forever, our arms around one another, breath hot, heads spinning. It’s hard to pull away, but when I do, I smile, because I know we’ll kiss like that again, and again, and again.