Fearscape (14 page)

“
Quite. Chess pieces are rather territorial, but we won't be worrying about that for now,” he added, glimpsing her confusion. “The ones that look like stallions are called knights and they move, and capture, in an L-shaped pattern, three by one spaces in any direction you desire.

“
The pointed ones are bishops. They move, and capture, diagonally. The castles are called rooks and can move horizontally or vertically. They can also be used in a defensive move called castling in tandem with the king. We'll get to him in a moment after we discuss his lovely consort.”

“
Consort?” Val repeated blankly.

He picked up the black queen. “Yes. Consort. The queen is arguably the most powerful piece in the game. She can move like a rook and a bishop combined, carving out large sections of the board for herself and placing them under her power.”

Val watched him set the piece down. “What can the king do?”

Gavin's lip curled. “Not much, I'm afraid. Like the queen, he can move in any direction but his scope is limited to one space only. He's rather like a glorified pawn.”

“
Oh,” said Val.

“
Yes, well — “ he tapped the board, “ — shall we?”

Val played White. She didn't want to, but he insisted, and she immediately proceeded to fumble the game. Several times, she moved pieces the wrong way, and when she tried to castle she switched the rook with the queen instead. Each time, though, he corrected her mistakes with impassivity, and when she realized he wasn't going to laugh at her she began to enjoy herself.

In many ways, chess was similar to the video games she played on her various consoles at home. There were rules, and you could not bend them. Sometimes you could work them in conjunction with one another, though, and play the field to your advantage — but there were no cheat codes for extra chessmen or power-ups in chess.

Gavin might as well have been cheating, though. He was good. Very good. Incredibly good. Even as a beginner, she could tell. He spun complex traps, so many moves in advance that, in retrospect, the innocuous move of a pawn suddenly seemed like a harbinger of doom.

Before ten moves were up, she was already down as many pieces.

“
Running away from me?” he teased, when she was forced to retreat. “So soon?”

“
You're going to win,” she protested.

“
Oh, I think I've already won, my dear.” He'd infiltrated the ranks of her pieces and took one of her rooks, simultaneously making sure that she couldn't castle with the other. “I'm just playing with you now.” He studied the rook in his hand for a moment before placing it off to the side.

“
Why would you do that? It's not very nice.”

“
Don't make it so easy for me to take advantage of you, then.” He took another piece.

She glared at him.

Levelly, he returned her gaze, his lips curved like a cat's. “What would you say if I told you that I could have checkmated you and ended the game ten turns ago?”

“
I'd say you're messing with me.”

“
Perhaps. Perhaps not. How sure are you? Sure enough to make a bet?”

The intent look in his eyes made her falter. “What kind of bet?”

“
How confident do you feel?”

“
P-pretty confident.”

“
Really?”

“
Yes?”

“
Well, in that case … you would be wrong.”

“
What?” Her eyes scanned the board. “I don't see ho — ”

He moved his knight, which had been in the corner this whole time, forgotten and harmless. Or so she'd thought.

“
Checkmate.” He picked up his tea and sipped it as she stared at the board. “Good thing were weren't playing for keeps, isn't it?”

She must have looked startled, because he set down his cup and said, “Good game.”
When he clasped her hand in his it was warm, almost hot, from the mug of tea he'd been holding. “You put up a good fight,” and his grip tightened briefly before he pulled away, “trust me; I've played with some of the best — I know.”

“
What was that like?”

“
Exhilarating.” She watched his eyes go to the window. The sky had grown less menacing and Val could make out the faded twilight peering through the gaps in the denim-dark clouds. “You should call home, perhaps,” he added, as if as an afterthought.

Val glanced at her phone, did a double-take.
Oh my god, it's 7:13.
Her mother would be worried sick. She probably already was. How had so much time elapsed without her noticing? She hazarded a look at Gavin, now cleaning up the board, and answered her own question.

Her legs shook a little when she got up from the chair, after sitting still for so long. She dialed her home number. The phone picked up on the first ring. “Hello?” Her mother's voice was wary.

“
Um, Mom? It's me, Val — I'm done with track practice.”

“
Val? What happened? Are you all right? I was so worried. I tried to call you nearly half a dozen times but you didn't answer.”

Val glanced at her call history. “I never got any calls from you, and my phone was on the entire time.”

“
It must have been the storm,” Val's mother said, “it took out one of the telephone poles and caused a power surge several blocks over — you weren't outside, were you? Where are you now? Still at school?”

“
N-no! Don't worry. I stayed at an, um — ” Gavin was still setting up the pieces, not looking at her, but that didn't mean he wasn't listening. “At a friend's,” she finished, turning back around and perching herself on the arm of the leather chair, subsequently missing the satisfied smirk that marred his face at her words.

“
Lisa's?”

“
No.”

“
Someone from track?”

“
Mom, I have friends outside track.” She gave her mother the address, adding, “It's pretty to find. He lives in the big house with the white shutters at the end of the street.”

A pause. “He?”

Uh-oh
.

“
Is this the boy you were telling me about in the car? The senior?”

She made the word sound tantamount to 'senior citizen.' “It's not like that. He just — ”

“
This is neither the time nor the place to discuss it. You, your father, and I shall be talking about this later, young lady.”

“
But I didn't — ”

“
I'm on my way now. I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Be ready.”

The phone went dead. Val glared at it.

“
Is there a problem?”

“
No.” Val buried her face in her hands. “Oh, maybe. I don't know.”

“
I hope it wasn't through any oversight of mine.”

Val wasn't entirely sure what 'oversight' meant. “My mom's — ”
stupid
“ — protective.”

“
Ah, I see. So she thought that you, and I— ” he was standing in front of her now, she hadn't even heard him move “ — were playing a different kind of game. Is that the gist of it?”

Val swallowed nervously. “That's, um … yeah. About the gist of it.”

“
Because I'll admit the thought has crossed my mind.” He took another step closer, so that he was standing between her dangling legs. “On occasion.” The caress of his still-warm hands at her waist and the intimacy of the skin-on-skin contact made her jump; despite their warmth, his fingers seemed to leave strings of rime in their wake. “Now.”

The desperate wanting in his eyes scared her. She felt like she was teetering on the edge of a yawning abyss, one misstep away from falling headlong into dark waters. And when she did, she wondered, would she float — or would she drown? She was certainly drowning now; she could barely breathe.

“
You're so beautiful, you know. I've always thought so. Wild and artless.”

Really? She didn't think those words described her — not at all.
He's going to kiss me
, Val thought, watching him watch her and quelling an irrational urge to flee.
I really think he is.

If this was love, it felt different than she'd imagined it would, walking a thin line between passion and terror. It was Romeo and Juliet. It was Wuthering Heights. And Val was left petrified from the boiling intensity of it. “I'm just ordinary me.” She wet her lips. “I'm nothing special. Not like that.”

His eyes dropped to her mouth. “Show me,” he said, and with a clash of teeth and lips, they were kissing, and the rain on her skin seemed to blaze. He placed her hands, which were pressed against his chest as if trying to push him away, around his neck, pulling her closer. His own hands returned to settle at her waist, tracing spirals, swirls: scratching runes of fire into her skin.

The lump of ice in her throat seemed to melt, trickling into her belly and simmering like hot honey, filling her lungs with dizzying steam that suffocated even as it intoxicated. His lips disappeared from hers and she felt the scrape of his stubbly cheek against her neck and the sandpaper roughness of his tongue as he kissed the place where her heart beat fastest.

Her breathing quickened and she felt faint, like a rabbit not sure whether to freeze or bolt. He bit her and she felt his tongue trail over her skin, tasting the marks he'd left, before returning to her mouth.

“
I like the way your hands feel on me.”

A shiver arced down her spine, white and electric with guilt. Her fingers were curled in his hair, which had the texture of fur. She dropped her hands from his head as if she'd been burned — and in a way, she had been. She couldn't remember laying her hands on him like that. It was too rough, too proprietary, too ….

Too him.

Yes. Proprietary. That was the word. He acted like he owned her. She didn't like that.

Did she?

His lips brushed the neckline of her shirt and he gave it an impatient tug with his teeth, she nearly lost her balance. If he hadn't been holding her she would have tumbled head-first over the arm of the chair, and that still seemed less dangerous than staying in his embrace a moment longer. “Stop,” she said, “please. My mother's coming, and I don't — ”

“
Want her seeing her little Red consorting with the wolf?”

Val was disturbed. “Don't say things like that. I don't like it when you say things like that.”

“
I wanted you to see, if only for a moment, what I see when I look at you.” She shivered when he took a step back, because for a moment she'd feared he wasn't going to, and a rush of cold air filled the space where his body heat had previously warmed her. He was still holding onto her, though at a distance now, and after a moment's pause, even this bit of vestigial contact ceased. “You might say that you bring out the animal in me,” he said, and chuckled.

The room seemed to be spinning slightly. “You're not a wolf.”

“
A wolf hunts on instinct, without compunction. So do I. For the very same reasons, I could ask you why you run. You're not a deer — and yet you use the same instincts as a creature under pursuit.”

Her skin prickled. “That's nowhere even close to being about the same thing.”

“
Oh, but it is. Because I bring out the animal in you, too, I think.” He ran his knuckles along her neck, ghosting the trail his mouth had blazed only minutes before. “Hmm. You're going to have a mark there. Redheads bruise so easily…”

She pulled her head back. “Do you ever watch me? I mean out on the track, when I run.”

“
Have you ever seen me watching you?”

“
That doesn't answer my question.” She grabbed her jacket, zipped it up to the throat. “I'm being serious.”

“
So was I.” The doorbell rang. “I'll get it,” he said, giving her a knowing smile. “My dear.”

My dear? Or 'my deer?'

She wondered how he could sound so composed when her knees were a step from giving out.

Chapter Nine

“
Arctic” would have been an apt word to describe the car ride home. Val sat in the back seat, the stiff heads of her parents as formidable as stone statues in the front seats of the car. She closed her eyes and leaned back against her headrest, trying to blot out the icy, awkward silence. Trying to make sense of her own inner chaos — that kiss — his confusing and frightening words —

Gavin had given her mother a reception worthy of the queen, introducing himself, offering her tea, coffee, even managing to drop a courtly bow that, while not mitigating Mrs. Kimble's anger in the slightest, elicited a raised eyebrow and twitching lip.

After a polite refusal she said, coldly, “Come, Val.”

Sulkily, she went, humiliated that her mother would do this in front of a boy. But not so humiliated that she couldn't look back. And when she did, she saw that he was watching her, too. And in that instant before the door closed behind him with a neat click, she thought he winked.