Bright Star (2 page)

“There was an accident about two months ago. I… I had to stay for awhile.” She shrugged and Jacob thought of the emaciated cat that had taken up residence in his room when he was twelve. It had come to die, just as she had. “Doesn’t matter, though. The guy who runs the gallery owns the condo, too. He wants me out.”

His eyes darted into hers, sharply. Hers, that intense blue, his own, a watery, wild brown. Wet hair irritated her face as her head hung down. She was feeling ridiculous again. The scars on her arms and inner thighs ached. This body. She would get rid of it. Jacob reached out to touch her elbow as he guided her down a side street. She forgot, for a moment, how much she had come to despise herself.

Then, suddenly, he averted his gaze. Again, eagle’s eyes, bright and dark darting. “Come in.” He motioned toward the door in front of them and pushed it open. It was dark inside.

Elizabeth cleared her throat. “I don’t usually go into strange men’s houses. It’s not very safe.” With a sideways smile, he turned and moved into the building. She followed him, lips slightly parted. She entered and closed the door behind her. A cloud of darkness drifted down like exploded gunpowder over her head.

She made a move to open the door. She could not. She felt him beside her and knew that he was using his weight to keep the door closed. She felt his quick breathing on her cheek and neck. Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut and it only served to add to the darkness, to make her more isolated, to make her more aware of the length of Jacob next to her. She opened them again. It made no difference.

Jacob could feel fear lashing out of her, scratching at him. How long would it take for panic to overwhelm, to peel back the façade she didn’t know she wore?

“You aren’t afraid of the dark, Elizabeth.” A large, gentle hand stroked a lock of hair behind her ear.

She opened her own mouth to speak but instead found herself inhaling warmth. It snaked through her nostrils, touched the back of her chilled throat, then filled her lungs and stomach with heat. Like steam, it did not stifle her.

The light came in the form of a loud crackling blaze from somewhere low on the ground. It was a fireplace. Jacob stood, losing his eyes in the flames that reached for him, licking and destroying as they strove up and out at him. He stepped closer, still out of reach. His toasted skin glowed capricious gold and orange. He stepped closer still and the flames shrank back into their cave, leaving the stone mouth still warm.

He stood up and asked, “Would you like some hot cocoa?” Elizabeth nodded. “You’ll find some clothes down that hall in the last room to your right. By the time you change, it’ll be ready. He watched her as she walked down the hall to his brother’s room.

*

Elizabeth stepped into the room. It was a world completely removed from that of the rest of the apartment. Even the comforting scent from outside did not penetrate this room. It was cold, lonely and sterile. The sun from outside pierced the windows and seared past the blue and white striped curtains. Wasn’t it evening? In Jacob Rush’s living room without the light of the flame, there had been complete and utter darkness. Here, her eyes hurt and she felt so exposed she was nearly overwhelmed by an illogical impulse to hide.

Ultimately, her eyes adjusted to the light and she inspected the surroundings. Her pinprick pupils missed nothing. The bed was made up as meticulously as if some Marine had been ordered to make it a hundred times to ensure he got it right. It was blue. The carpet was dark gray. The mirror mounted above caught the sunlight and bounced the white light off the stark white walls at Elizabeth. Everything was blinding white, and she could not see herself in the mirror; she couldn’t see anything. It was getting hot.

The heat pressed on her shoulders and massaged her back. She wanted to sleep. Wasn’t it nighttime? The bed beckoned and the light followed her as she neared it. She ran a hand over the soft downy cover, and lowered her lids with a slow smile, softening the hard and hungry angles of her face. Her limbs seemed trapped in slow motion. Her breathing was slow in her ears, but irregular to he who was listening. Yes, somehow, she knew he was there. Jacob. Rush. Listening.

The vision was starting again. Only this time, there was no beginning, middle, or end. There was only fire. She was enveloped in flames so hot they couldn’t be distinguished from freezing even as they burned the flesh away from her bones. She opened her mouth to scream but only a plume of black smoke puffed out then tunneled back down her throat, turning to flame and burning her from the inside.

“Are you OK?” His voice slashed in a cool arc through her dream. Her eyes fluttered. She was still burning. Her remaining flesh was bubbling, blistering. Her eyes were tearing, and as the water streaked down her cheeks, steam arose. Her whole body was on fire. She was burning, and she couldn’t understand why she was conscious through the pain. Her eyes opened, but blue light only seemed to reflect back at her. She realized she was in front of the mirror.

“I’m fine,” she called, willing the after effects of the vision to end. Her eyes were open but she could not trust them anymore. She reached out. She remembered a closet. She stumbled blindly until she reached it. She felt for the door, which partly opened for her. It was dark within. She could only make out the outline of clothing inside, but it looked cool in there, safe in there.

Safe. Inside, the vision ceased abruptly. She was cooling. Still hot, but cooling. Quickly, she passed her hands over the rest of her body until the blistered skin fell away and evaporated as it was replaced with pale pink flesh. Mouse-brown hair grew back. She couldn’t let Jacob see the vision on her, smell it on her.

The closet wasn’t dark. It was cast in a soft blue light. Inside, there were indeed men’s clothes. They hung neatly in the closet. Slacks, t-shirts, button downs. They were mostly very big and she only imagined how they would have looked on her thin, wiry body. The clothes were well-worn, well-cared for. She reached out a hand and touched a faded blue and green plaid shirt. It was so cool to the touch, cool to her heated touch. She moved further into the closet that tempted her, inviting her with a cool and fresh scent. The shirt fell around her thighs and she marveled at the size, so different from her own. She moved around in the cooling womb that had expanded for her, encasing her maternally in its obscurity.

Then suddenly, she was afraid to go out. She couldn’t move again into the room with light that exposed her so much she could not see. It was a room that made her tired and told her she needed to close her eyes, to sleep a lifetime, to burn and to die.

Then she heard his voice. “Are you all right in there, Elizabeth?”

“Uhh...uhh, I’m fine.” She wanted to cry out to him that she wasn’t. To make him save her, but she could not. She expected his voice to move away again to leave her. It would be better than the humiliation of being stuck in a closet because she was afraid of the light.

Silence played for a moment. Then the outer door was opened, and she could barely hear the footsteps coming towards her.

He stopped outside the closet door. “Come out, Bright Star.”

Slowly the door began to creep open and a small hand slipped around it. The hand was snatched, engulfed in his and she was pulled out and up. Cradled in his arms, she could see the room had dimmed with his presence. Then the darkness followed them out like a great cape that hung from Rush’s shoulders.

*

“Your brother,” Bright Star asked as she curled up in a soft chair and sipped her cocoa. “Where is he now?”

Rush looked back at her. He was sitting in front of the fire with an arm resting on a raised knee. “Bright Star?”

“Yeah?” She forgot her own question as she felt her skin prickle under his scrutiny.

Rush remained silent for a long moment, but his face with its soft curves and hard lines was turned towards Bright Star. His gaze roamed over her features then fell to the floor and then the fire again. He was still and yet, not still. “My brother’s up north for the moment.”

“Vacation?”

He shook his head, closed his dark brown eyes and leaned back with his arms braced behind him, stretching out his, long, lean body. So strong and exotic. Bright Star noticed how his dark, curling hair caught autumn streaks in the firelight and how his previously dark, dark gold skin glowed hot bronze. She shifted her gaze to the flames that seemed to be dying. Again, she had a fleeting thought that they were shrinking away from him. She continued her scrutiny. With his dark eyes closed, and his head tilted back she found that his ebony lashes were long, curling, and that he had a scar above his left eye. He suddenly seemed so exhausted.

She remembered the way he carried her from that room at the end of the hall. He had pulled her into his arms and lifted her with impossible ease. He had borne her away as if he knew she hadn’t the strength to move through the room to the door. She remembered that he didn’t even look at her until the door had been closed safely behind them. She remembered thinking of him as her hero, her champion. And yet somehow, something was wrong. She could see it when he looked at her.

“Jacob,” she called. Slowly he gave his gaze to her, though he didn’t respond. “Rush? In your brother’s room…”

“Don’t ask me,” he warned in a menacing whisper. Bright Star drew her legs up closer to her chest and studied her chocolate for a long moment. Her guess had been on the money: Jacob thought she was weak. When she glanced up at him, his features had softened as if he hadn’t been able to sustain the frightening visage. He shook his head. “Just put it all out of your head for now. Just bury it.”

The fear within her manifested itself in a trembling of slender fingers, a deep swallow of nothing, and a heart that felt too big for its chest. She usually talked too much when she was nervous, but now she found she could say nothing. In her own defense, she tried to retreat into herself as she had so many times in the ceaseless disquiet of the fair. Setting her mug down beside the chair, she slowly let her eyes roll back as her lids lowered. She breathed in the deep aromatic smokiness of the room. She leaned her head back expecting to feel the plush padding of the chair softly greet her head. Instead, her body continued falling back and back, and her lids became too heavy to lift. She was falling, her whole body feverish and damp with sweat as she descended. She was falling, and then, she was burning again.

“Bright Star!” The sound was loud in her ears, pulling her back. And his arms were around her, pressing her head into his chest and he was soothing her in barely more than a whisper, “Bright Star.”

Abruptly, her blue, blue eyes opened, and she began to shiver. She didn’t understand anything. She drew back and looked into Jacob’s face. She saw something angelic there but she also saw a darkness—a shadow that was so protective and honest in the way it shielded her from the hot light of the fireplace. And she saw it when she looked at Jacob Rush. She didn’t speak but held onto his arms as he anchored her. She found her voice. “Jacob? Jacob, what’s happening to me? I don’t know what’s happening to me.” He stretched long fingers over her face then, and held her with his gaze for moments. Bright Star felt his touch not only on her skin but also in her mind. She had wondered for so many years, what it was like to have someone journey through her mind the way she had with strangers for longer than she could remember. She noticed a blue glow on his nose and cheeks.

He was close enough for her to feel his breath on her face, and, all of a sudden, the light was gone from the fireplace and the house was as dark as it had been the first moment she’d come inside, save for the blue light.

“So you perform? That’s what the flyers said,” Jacob inquired softly. He stroked her hair.

“Psychic readings,” she offered with agitation.

“Psychic readings,” he repeated.

“Don’t you watch TV, you know, like the hotlines? I tell you stuff about your life: past, present, future—all that crap. Except I had lights and music.”

“Is that all?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Were you always right?”

“Of course, I was always right,” she answered impulsively. Then with eyes cast down, she added, “It’s all rigged anyway.”

“Bright Star,” he whispered. Had his face not remained so emotionless, she would have thought he said the name in horror.