Timepiece: An Hourglass Novel (20 page)

Chapter 42

L

“I don’t think she understands that locks don’t keep someone like Jack out.” Still, she secured all three and leaned back against the door. Then she reached out to hook a finger into the collar of my shirt. “Why are you all the way over there?”

I let myself sink into her warmth and the taste of her lips. Her kiss told me I didn’t have to explain anything. That she already knew the question, and she had the answer.

“Let me help,” she whispered, with her mouth still on mine.

I pulled back slightly. “I can’t.”

“I told you once that you aren’t like Jack.”
Frustration.
“I was right, but I was also wrong.”

Now I stepped back a full foot. “How were you wrong?”

“Let me explain why I was right first.” Taking my hand, she led me to the couch. “You don’t take advantage of people and use what they have to benefit yourself.”

“You say that knowing I need your help to find Jack. Putting you in danger, going against your grandmother’s rules. That’s taking advantage.”

“Not to benefit you,” she said, disagreeing. “To benefit people that you love. I know that’s your desire, and that’s the thing that comes first. You don’t have to ask me, Kaleb. I’ll do whatever it takes to help you.”

“But your grandmother, and the men and the fact that they could be watching—”

“Focus,” she said. “I have a point to make.”

I kissed her on the forehead, breathing in the citrus scent of her hair. “I’m focusing.”

“On what I’m saying.” She pushed back and took my hands in hers. “As for how you were wrong … I think, in trying so hard to be different from him, you missed some really important similarities. In doing that, you’ve missed some answers.”

“Explain.”

“I’ve been thinking about this since the night we talked in Memphis. Jack takes memories hostage. You take terrible emotions and keep them away from the people they hurt. How tied are emotions and memories?”

I stared at her.

“You can’t separate the two. Jack keeps telling you killing him would be a mistake, that the two of you are alike. He’s telling you the truth. If you kill Jack, you kill your mother’s memories with him, and now your father’s. If he goes, so do they.”

“Are you saying he’s the key to restoring my parents?”

“No. I’m saying you are.”

“How?”

“The memories Jack took were the ones that were most important to your mother.” Lily spoke slowly. “Her love for your father and you, all the personal moments that tied you together. If those memories aren’t tied in emotion, I don’t know what is.”

“Finding their memories, their emotions, inside him? Taking them back, and then transferring them over?” I shook my head. “It’s impossible. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“That’s why you’re going to practice on me.”

I followed her to her bedroom. It was on the small side, with clean white walls and photographs everywhere. Built-in bookshelves lined one wall, crammed full of every kind of book and organized by color. It looked like a perfect rainbow. She sat down on the edge of her double bed, leaned back on the red duvet cover, and held out her foot. I stared at it, and then looked at her.

“Knee boots?” She grinned. “Can you help me out?”

“Oh yeah.” I pulled the right boot off while I was facing her, but for the left, I turned around to give her a view of my backside.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked, laughing.

“I enjoy yours all the time. I just figured I’d give you a chance to enjoy mine.” I gave a little wiggle before I faced her again. “What’s with the socks?”

They were lime green with pink stripes.

“I think what a girl wears under her clothes is just as important as the clothes themselves. And I like a little spice underneath.” She looked directly at me as she peeled off the socks in a striptease fashion, swung them around in a circle, and threw them over her shoulder. One landed on the bookcase, the other in a corner.

“You’re trying to kill me. No, correction, you are
going
to kill me. And how can you make me laugh like this in the middle of all hell breaking loose?”

“It’s a gift.” Lily scooted to the middle of the bed and sat cross-legged. “I’m ready when you are.”

“I told Abi I wouldn’t let you put yourself at risk, and I meant it. Don’t act like what your grandmother wants doesn’t matter when it does.” Still, I sat down across from her.

“Looking for memories isn’t a risk. It’s my memory,” Lily argued. “If we can do this, you can figure out exactly what to look for with your parents. It should be even easier with them, because the three of you shared most of those emotions and memories.”

I sighed, and then put my hands on her hips and slid her toward me. The movement threw her off balance. She gasped and grabbed my forearms to keep from toppling over. I stared down at her fingers on my skin for a second before meeting her eyes, and then leaned forward to touch my lips to hers.

Our combined heat gathered in my chest and radiated out through my skin. She put her arms around my neck and pulled me closer.

“This isn’t why we came in here,” I whispered.

“I know,” she whispered back. “But it’s a nice side benefit.”

“Are you procrastinating? Changing your mind about letting me inside your soul?”

“No.”

“It’s intense for me when I take emotion. I know it’s not going to be easy on you to give it.” I frowned. “And it’s going to be even more intense this time, because I’ll be concentrating on the memories that go with the emotion, too. What if I do something wrong? What if I hurt you?”

“You won’t.” She touched my cheek. “I’m not afraid of anything when I’m with you.”

This time, I put my hands on her knees instead of her hips.

“Before you do anything, I think the memory you look for needs to be significant.”

“You’ve thought about this.”

She nodded.

“What do you want me to take?”

“The day I left Cuba.”

“Lily. No. What if I can’t give that back to you? And do you really want to relive it, twice more? Because if I take it and give it back, I’m pretty sure you will.”

“I
want
to relive it.” She bit her lip. “I’ve pushed the memory away for so long. But I think I could do with some remembering. What do I need to do?”

“I guess … focus on that day, the way you felt, anything you can remember about it. I know you were young, but even one specific detail would be good, what you were wearing, the weather, something like that.”

She took a deep breath. “It was sunny, after about a solid week of rain. My mom was always super protective of me, but this day … I was so happy to be outside, free. She was hanging clothes on the line. I stretched out on the grass for a minute, just to feel it against the backs of my legs. Everything after that gets kind of …”

“That’s enough.” I could see the day on her emotional time line. It was a big one. “Promise me you’re sure.”

“Yes.”

I leaned forward, took her face in my hands, and looked into her eyes.

Emotion flooded through my system almost the second I touched her. Visuals I didn’t understand made her feel trapped, and then there was pain. Happiness and a swing set. White clouds and flapping sheets.
Worry, anxiety.
Shiny black car, feet, the ground.
So much fear.

Hope.
Hope and a red crayon, a lined piece of paper. Crude drawings and …
pain.

A doll with black yarn for hair.

Then everything clicked into sharp focus, but it all moved in slow motion.

Brake lights.

A woman who looked like Lily, but rounder, with brown eyes instead of hazel. Whispers.
Love, forgiveness.

Words. I knew they were said in Spanish.

The pain of the memory was jagged around the edges, grief like broken glass, and I was dragging Lily through it, slicing open fresh wounds. I heard her sobbing, felt her cries in my chest, in my bones.

The sharp focus faded and everything began to move quickly again.

Then there was only emptiness.

I knew I was falling backward, but I couldn’t stop myself.

Blackness.

Silence.

Chapter 43

“P

“I’ll be right back,” she said, scooting to the edge of the bed. “I’m going to get help.”

“No. Stay.” I tried to wrap my arms around her, but I couldn’t lift them any higher than half an inch.

“Kaleb?” She threw her body across mine and curled around me like a cat. “One second, you were fine, the next, you went pale and fell back on the headboard. You have a huge knot on the back of your head. I should call someone.”

“No.” The pain in my body was way worse than my head, and different from any I’d ever experienced. My joints ached, and I thought I could feel my blood moving through my body. Too slow. “Just … stay.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Intense. It’ll pass.” My voice was ragged, like it had been run through a thresher.

I hoped it would pass.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Calm down. You’re freaking me out.” Her emotions were everywhere, and they were making the pain worse. “I think I got a triple whammy. Your emotions, my reaction to them. Your fear now. You don’t need to be afraid; I’m fine.”

I opened my eyes. The afternoon daylight was gone, and her room was almost dark. “You’re not calming down.”

Panic. Loss. Emptiness.

She took my hands in hers. They were freezing. “I can’t remember. I know what you took, but I remember even less now. I just know it came out of my mind going backward. It was hard to make sense of it all.”

I cursed. I hadn’t prepared her for the blackness. I struggled to sit but could only manage to prop myself up on my elbows. “I’ll fix it.”

“You don’t need to fix anything right now. You can’t even sit.”

“No.” I gave up and stayed on my back. “Part of you is missing. I didn’t even think about the way it would make you feel.”

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“I hurt you. When Jack takes things, he leaves empty space. Pain. That wasn’t my intention, but that’s what you feel, right?”

She nodded and rubbed her chest with her hand, as if her heart ached.

“I’m afraid if I don’t give it back now, it’ll … I don’t know, dilute or something. I didn’t see what I took that clearly, but when I give it back, you should. I think.” I hoped. I rolled over to my side, facing her, and put my hand on her waist. “Come here.”

She scooted closer. A lot closer. Toe to toe, hip to hip, chest to chest. I had almost half a foot on her heightwise, so I had to lean my head down to touch my forehead to hers, but otherwise we fit together perfectly.

“After I do this, there’s a really good chance I’ll pass out again.”

“I’ll stay with you.” She lifted her chin and pressed her lips to mine. “Until I know you’re okay. Right here.”

“Hold on to me.” I tightened my grip on her waist. “Focus on what you see, and I’ll try to go slowly. Lily, this isn’t going to be easy. I think you’re going to feel it … like it’s fresh. Like it just happened.”

“I’m ready.”

I focused on the emotion and the memories. When I pushed them through my mental space into hers, they went backward for me, like a movie on rewind. Giving them back made me feel as if someone were scraping the inside of my soul away, leaving an open wound.

When I finished, she was crying as if she’d never stop.

I held her as close as I could and concentrated on not passing out. She needed me, and I wanted to be there. “Tell me what to do.”

“What you’re doing right now.” She shuddered. “It didn’t go backward that time. It was like I was watching it happen, like I was right there. I haven’t seen my parents that clearly in … well, in nine years. I look like my mom.”

“You’re both beautiful.” I tucked her head under my chin.

“And my dad …” Her voice caught. She turned her face into my chest. Sobs shook her body, but she didn’t make a sound. Tears soaked the front of my shirt.

After a few minutes, she stopped. “The emotions are so much clearer … the things I saw, I remember so many more details.”

“Like what?”

She lifted her head. “Feet. Shiny black shoes. Three men, and their faces. And my mom. She was trying to protect me.”

I nodded and waited for her to absorb the next memory in the chain, the one I didn’t understand.

“They came for me that day, Kaleb.”

I stayed silent.

Confusion, shame, sorrow.

“That’s why we left Cuba when we did, and so quickly. Because the men had already come to take me away.”

Chapter 44

I

“What are you going to tell your grandmother?” I asked, stroking her hair.

“Nothing.” Lily stared at the ceiling. “How do I explain what you showed me?”

“Tell her the truth.”

“I don’t think I can. I don’t know how she’d react, or if she’d be angry.” She rolled over to face me and I brushed her hair away from her face. “I’d like to keep you on her good side.”

“I thought she’d already made up her mind about boys like me. I’m a bad influence. A temptation,” I teased. “The apple, I believe you said?”

“You know … I never did get a bite.” She put her hands on my cheeks and gently grazed my bottom lip with her teeth.

I kissed her without thought or hesitation, tasting her without caution. Slipping my hand under the hem of her sweater, brushing the skin of her stomach with the back of my hand. Her breath caught.

“Too much?” I asked, watching her.

“Not enough.”

I missed her lips, so I went after them, sliding my hands around to her back, the curve of her waist, the flare of her hips.

I wanted to be skin to skin with her, so much more than I’d ever wanted it with anyone else.

I wanted all of her.

Lily touched me greedily, as if she were afraid one of us might disappear. Her palms found their way under my shirt, and she pulled it over my head. Her lips were everywhere—my neck, my chest, the fading bruise on my ribs from the night of the masquerade. The night I’d met her.

“You’re beautiful.” I brushed her hair over her shoulder, away from her face, watching her kiss her way back to my mouth. “Every single bit of you.”

I stopped breathing when she tugged her sweater over her head to reveal an ivory lace camisole. “You haven’t seen every single bit of me.”

I was a hell of a lot closer than I’d been five seconds ago.

Reaching out, I drew a line with my index finger from her bottom lip to the button on her jeans. “Taking your memories of that day feels so personal. Taking something that important to you away, and then giving it back, it was even more intense than I expected. It reminded me of …”

“Kaleb.”
A skip of desire
.

“You know,
making love
has always sounded so lame to me. Maybe because I’ve never done anything like that, either. But I think I understand now.”

She tilted her head to the side. “I didn’t think … you’re not a—”

“Um … no.” I kissed her again to soften the words. I couldn’t tell exactly how much that mattered to her. “But everything is different with you. I’m closer to you than I’ve ever been to anyone.”

She leaned over and put her lips right next to my ear.

“Get closer.”

I opened my ability as wide as I could, staring into her eyes.

She wanted this as much as I did.

When I didn’t respond immediately, she turned away. “I’m sorry. The timing is …
so
wrong. I shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t.” I put my hands on her hips, sliding her close, flipping our positions. I eased her back onto the pillows and traced the line of her cheekbones with my thumbs. “I only hesitated because I wanted to feel what you felt. Know you were sure about me. Us.”

“I am.” She slid her hands into my hair and arched her back, pressing into me. Tightened her legs, pulling me closer.

“I know.”

I directed every ounce of focus I had to Lily. I knew exactly how to kiss her, to touch her. Not because of her sighs, or the way her muscles tensed and relaxed in response to me, but because I was wrapped in her emotions. Everything I gave, she returned.

Pleasing her pleased me. I stopped the second she was unsure.

“Tiger,” I said, pulling away, “I’m not in a hurry.”

Her cheeks were flushed, her hair dark and tangled against the pillowcase. Exhaling shakily, she said, “I know.”

“Do you?”

She nodded.

“People underestimate the benefits of taking their time. Slow is just as good as fast.” I grinned, running my fingertips across the exposed skin between her jeans and the bottom of the camisole. “Usually, it’s better.”

I saw the sadness in her eyes as much as I felt it.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Taking our time.” She traced the outer edge of the tattoo on my bicep. Her touch was warm. “I wonder how much we have.”

I didn’t want to think about that.

Leaning over, I kissed her forehead. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Trusting me enough to let me in. With Cuba, your parents. With this.” I gently placed my hand just above her heart. “I know how many risks you’ve taken, how hard it is for you to trust me. Why do you?”

“I’ve watched you go from stumbling to sure, and you’re getting even stronger. You consistently take risks for people you care about.” She covered my hand with hers. “Also, maybe I’m in love with you a little. But that doesn’t mean I like you.”

This girl was a miracle. A miracle in love with me.

“I don’t like you, either. But I’m a little in love myself.”

“We’ll find Jack. You’ll take your parents’ memories back, and then we’ll turn him in to Teague. We just have to—” Light flickered across her face, and she sat up quickly, pointing out the window.

Shock.

Ivy Springs was going up in flames.