Break Away (Away, Book 1) (6 page)

Ian was staring at me, his usual loose
stance now stiff. A faint trace of regret sharpened the emerald in
his eyes.
So he did notice the hurt in my voice.
“Dafne,” he
uttered softly, using that voice people drew on whenever they
wanted to reach someone’s hand to soothe the pain away. “I didn’t…”
He never finished though. He trailed off when Buffy sat down
between his stretched leg and the one dangling off the couch.

She pressed a button on the remote control
she was holding, and then leaned over Ian, settling her head on his
chest.

He sighed, as if in resignation, and asked
while encircling her waist with his arm, “What are we
watching?”

“No way!” I protested once I aimed my eyes
on the screen and the symphonic song flew into the room. “We are
not
watching that thing. It’s like half a day long. Only
menopausal housewives can stand this.”

“How can you say that?” Buffy lifted up his
head as if offended. “
Titanic
is one of the greatest screen
romances of all time. Everybody loves it, even guys, right Ian?”
She turned and asked him for confirmation.

“A giant boat being ripped in half and Kate
Winslet naked? Sure,” he said with a shrug and looked at me, giving
his approval.

Ugh. Something told me I wasn’t going to get
any support from him. When did I get it anyway? He obviously didn’t
want to disagree with Buffy. He was playing the good-boyfriend
part. I stood up, left the plate on the coffee table, and reached
the small shelf stuffed with girly movies. There had to be
something not so cheesy. Buffy couldn’t be that brainless.

“What about
Mean Girls
?” Buffy
suggested when she noticed I wouldn’t let go of my hunt, which
turned out to be more and more difficult every second.

Okay, maybe she was brainless. “I will
pretend you didn’t mention that,” I said without looking at her,
crouched on the floor still looking for the impossible.

“
Never Been Kissed
? It’s a funny
movie.”

I scoffed. “Bring me a thermos of espresso
and an alarm clock.”

“What about
While You Were Sleeping
?”
Ian added to the parade of ideas. “A successful giant-eyebrowed
douchebag gets run over by a train and goes into a coma so his
older brother can get his hands under his girl’s pants. You would
like that.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Buffy said. “Too sweet
and romantic.”

Ignoring them, I finally raised from my hunt
with two DVD’s in hand. “This one doesn’t look that bad,” I said,
pushing in front of me a movie called “When Harry Met Sally,” an
oldie from what it looked like.

Ian seemed suddenly really interested. “The
movie that introduced men to spotting the signs of women faking the
Big O,” he said with a smile.

I nearly choked. “Okay…this one is out.” I
said putting it back hastily, as if my hand had unexpectedly been
burned. “What about
The Phantom of the Opera
?” I held up the
other case. I’d heard about the novel before, written by some
French guy a long time ago—apparently, it was a classic of French
literature—and the Broadway musical, but I’d never read or seen any
of those. It looked pretty interesting, dark.

Buffy frowned in interest. “I haven’t seen
that one yet. It’s a musical. Ian gave it to me last week.” She
turned around and placed a small kiss on his lips. They were
stretched all over the couch now, side to side, Buffy’s head
resting on the crook of Ian’s arm.

He pulled out a stunning smile, filled with
a perfect row of white as snow teeth, and said while looking down
at her, “Let’s see it.”

Maybe Linda was right and Ian was truly in
love with Buffy. The way he looked at her, as if she was his own
glowing sun on earth, said lots of poems.
An image is worth a
thousand words.
And it definitely did. They looked like two
lovers, prisoners of their own fascination for each other.

But instead of feeling relief, I felt the
increase of worry. There was still something I didn’t like about
all of this.

E
ven if all the
stupid snuggling and cuddling distracted me from the movie for the
first ten minutes, making me oblivious to a very important grainy
black-and-white scene, I caught up quickly with the events.
Suddenly I found myself immersed in the story unrolling in front of
my eyes—and not on the one sideways. I found myself fascinated by
the colorful flight into Paris’s Opera Populaire, with its pulsing
crowd of performers, chorus girls, set decorators, well-dressed
audiences and most of all, the mysterious Phantom haunting the
depths of the Opera, who molded the voice of an orphan chorus girl
into a pure-as-crystal soprano , transforming her into the next
Opera’s big star.

Of course, there had to be romance involved,
or else Buffy wouldn’t have wanted to watch it, even if the music
was terrific. But instead of being usually cheesy and silly, it had
a heartbreaking depth I would’ve never expected. The phantom with
the teeny mask, who’s a man hiding more than a mild skin problem,
was in love with the rising star, but she didn’t return his
feelings. She loved another man, her handsome, perfect-skinned
childhood sweetheart. The despair and loneliness the phantom
exhibited because of it undid me, tearing some threads that
embroidered my heart, and leaving part of the sheer shell
vulnerable to emotion. But when the phantom put into play a
mechanical music box with a cymbal-clapping monkey, the only good
remembrance of his ill-treated and dark childhood, in the cold
loneliness of the cellars, I couldn’t stop the tears sliding down
my cheeks, thick with sadness and compassion. The way he was
looking at that music box, as if he’d never known happiness in his
life and the clapping monkey was the only thing that filled him
with a spark of joy, made me wish with all my heart that I could be
there next to him, to comfort him and shelter him.

And strangely enough, in that same
heartbeat, all my surroundings started to blur, to smudge, as if
everything was being rubbed in linear motions, distorting all the
angular and circular shapes in the living room to a baffling hazy
mixture. The only thing that remained unchanged was that
tear-jerking image of the phantom in my mind, clear and vivid as a
flesh and bone image. The reality of it was striking,
hypnotizing.

Like some bizarre dream, I felt a vaporous
tunnel forming in the back of my head, pulling me to its
unfathomable depth as if with a mysterious magnetic force. Though
my eyes weren’t closed, I was suddenly in the darkness behind them,
its intensity deepening every second. In some corner of my mind, I
knew this wasn’t normal, that my eyelids needed to be pressed
together to find this black veil. Even some ghosts of light
should’ve been dancing across this puzzling night. But I didn’t
have enough time to ponder it. Misty twines, filmy and soft as a
whisper, floated from behind and coiled around my arms and legs,
infusing their touch with a spellbinding melody through my pores,
singing to my heart a melancholic call. I realized it was the same
lullaby of the music box, only it had a gentle-as-a-breeze symphony
of voices echoing in the background.

If angels could sing, that would’ve been
their anthem.

Gradually, I let myself be drawn back in a
trance by those whispery twines. I was about to reach the gates of
the vaporous tunnel, the moisture in the air getting denser, when I
remembered the tears tickling and cooling my cheeks. Somehow, I
knew that my skin was far away, that it wasn’t part of me in that
moment—a wrapping that I couldn’t feel anymore, dwelling in another
existence. I felt
light
. And that’s when understanding fell
on me as heavy and thick as an elephant.

I'm literally in the back of my head,
I realized.

Suup.
A strange force suddenly sucked
me as if with a vacuum, back again into the living room. The same
image of the cymbal-clapping monkey and the phantom staring at it
showed on the TV. I blinked once. Twice. My eyelashes sticky with
tears. The image changed and the movie kept rolling. I felt a
pucker forming between my eyebrows. Hadn’t time kept going while I
was on that odd daze? It looked as if the movie had frozen—or was I
imagining everything? Maybe it was still part of this reverie I’d
seemed to fall into.

No. It wasn’t. I could feel my body, my
skin, the heaviness of my being in this shadowy room where random
bursts of light coming from the television touched our faces. I was
here
, not far away. Then, why? Had I experienced a short
trip to space, travelling to a parallel dimension where time ran a
lot slower than on Earth, say, an alien minute equaling a
terrestrial microsecond? That vaporous tunnel could’ve been a
wormhole leading to a remote galaxy.

Whoa, I frowned in disapproval, and I’d
criticized that Star Wars bookworm out in school when I was a
latent Star Trek freak.

I shook my head softly. It’d been only a
daydream, a vision, a hallucination—or whatever it was called. The
tunnel and the whispery twines had just…just, um…a reeling
sensation stroked my head. What was I talking about? The pucker on
the top of my nose deepened, as if trying to wriggle out the train
of thought that had escaped my grasp in a blast. Oh, yeah, the
tunnel and the…the…dammit, the reeling sensation worsened. What was
I trying to remember? The images were slipping away, leaving the
thread of my mind. If I could’ve only remembered what those sneaky
images were. The trace of them, though faint, still lingered in the
sea of my thoughts, but its outline was too weak, too badly
sketched to figure it out.

My head hurt, throbbing at the temples from
the exertion. I pinched the bridge of my nose. What was happening
to me? Was I becoming mad, imagining things and words that hadn’t
touched my lips? I bet Freud would’ve loved psychoanalyzing me, and
I would’ve loved to see its result because until now everything
pointed out to one thing: nutcase. Huge nutcase with Star Trek
paranoia, though why Star Trek, I didn’t know. I couldn’t
remember.

I brushed my cheek with the back of my hand
to wipe away the soggy trails of my tears and turned my head aside.
Buffy was flying in Dreamland, deep into its unfathomable,
beautiful territory. By the way she was smiling in her sleep,
however, beautiful wasn’t the right way to put it. Her uptilted
lips made it seem as if a halo of bliss surrounded her, and it made
me wonder if it was because of the pristine fantasy her mind seemed
to be indulging in, or if it was because of the strong arms that
cuddled her sleeping body. Maybe it was a brew of both.

I pulled my eyes up and found Ian’s deep
eyes. He was watching me, not the artistic images running one after
another on the flat screen, or at Buffy’s peaceful damsel-face
resting on his chest. His eyes were fixed on mine, and they had
that studious air he always had whenever those emerald irises found
me—usually while I wasn’t looking his way. But I was far from being
unaware of his thoughtful stare. Every time he aimed it on me, even
if I wasn’t watching him, it fell down on my body with
bone-cracking strength, its weight as heavy and resonant as a grand
piano. I hadn’t felt it this time because of the rainstorm of
confusion that had been thundering inside my head before, but I was
certainly seeing it and feeling it now. It was because of this
sparkle of awareness shining in me that the sudden wave of
kindness, thin as a single strand of hair, stroking his face didn’t
escape my notice. I knew that tender feeling wasn’t supposed to be
obvious, that it was meant to be buried deep down, but my eyes were
hawk-sharp and didn’t lose anything in that moment.

Why tenderness, though? It looked as if he
wanted to leave Buffy’s side and pull me into his arms, to stroke
my hair like he’d been doing to her, only with more gentleness and
care, as if being afraid of breaking me. But much more than a wish,
it was a
need
. Suddenly it wasn’t as thin as before. It had
thickened. Why? I wondered once more. He’d never shown anything
more than contempt, indifference, or boredom when he’d been around
me. Yes, there was the occasional banter and taunt spiking between
us, which sometimes brought more lightness to the atmosphere and
sometimes more tension (fully packed with hatred). Not to mention
those studious looks of his were just a way of trying to decipher
my psyche for his peace of mind—and ego. Once he could look through
the walls enclosing my inner-self, affecting me would be easier,
and that was his main goal with me. It was all about power and
self-confidence.

Yet, that look of deep kindness seemed
genuine. His will to hide it under that stiff analytical face told
me so. And I couldn’t stop comparing it to that warm look Dad had
given me when he’d found my eight-year-old self crying in the
stairs after being grounded for eating a whole bucket of chocolate
ice cream, or when Mom had eased herself next to me in our old
porch swing after I’d broken up with my first boyfriend. Ian’s look
had that same warmth. The only difference was that I wasn’t
mourning or crying.
Crying
. The horror of the realization
pounded in my head as with a hammer. He’d seen me crying!

As if someone had pulled a switch on inside
of me, I turned and shoved back the leg rest with a loud snap,
ending Buffy’s serene sleep. “What…” She jerked up her head in a
daze as I stood up. “Where are you going?” she asked with a
sleep-slurred voice, her eyes still at half-mast.

“Open your eyes sleeping princess, the movie
ended.” I pointed my hand to the credits sliding up in the black
background. “I'm free to go now.”

She looked confused at the screen. “Oh,
well, I guess—no, wait! Why are you in such a hurry?” she asked
before I would storm away. She eased herself up, stumbled a little
when she crossed the room, and flipped the light on. “Is there
something you’re not…” She trailed off and frowned.