Reckless

Chapter 14 Part 3

Present Day

Character POV: Roxanne

Each step to the front door feels like a mile. Each step forward, I want to take three back and run away. Right before I reach the front door, it swings open to reveal Zebulun standing there wearing an all black suit complete with a black tie. So formal. He holds out an umbrella to me, and for a moment I am puzzled, but right on cue, at that precise moment in time I feel the splattering of light rain on my head. I reach out and take the umbrella from him with a nod of gratitude and mumble, "Thank you."

I press the button and it flares open just as the one in his hand does. Still, he makes no move to stand out of the way. He gives me a long examining stare as he looks me up and down. Slowly, he drags his dark gaze back to me. He says in a smooth way, "You are looking better than you did when I last saw you. You look less burdened."

Part of me wonders if what he means by "less burdened" is that I look sober for once, but I don't press it. I don't have the time to, because at that precise moment, Hallucination Ariadne flares to life beside me, leaning heavily into me, her elbow resting on my shoulder as she chuckles, "It's amazing how losing some dead weight, about 180 pounds of it if my estimate is correct, can lift your spirits."

I hiss under my breath to the fake Ariadne as I move my shoulder out from under her elbow and throw her off balance, "He wasn't dead weight." I'm not sure what he was to me, but he wasn't that. At least, I don't think he was.

Ariadne laughs heartily in my ear as she says smoothly, "Funny-- you knew exactly who I was talking about. You must have equated him to that in some way for that to be what immediately sprang to mind." I almost snap at her that what she said was hardly vague enough for it to be a verbal ink blot test, but she's gone before I can say anything more.

When I drag my gaze back to Zebulun, I see how his left eyebrow has raised as he looks between me and the empty air, and then I see something click into place as he mouths, "Ah" to himself. My cheeks burn with shame as I push past this awkward moment where someone has caught me having fight with myself. I stand a little taller, willing myself to look commanding like I deserve some respect, and say to him,"I am here to see Ariadne."

"Are you certain you're not already seeing her?" Zebulun quips, pointedly looking at the thin air to my left and then back to my face. I look away from him, unable to face up to him in this moment. My stomach feels queezy like I might vomit, and not for the first time today, I think that I am not strong enough to deal with what comes next, whatever that is. Perhaps that's part of the problem: I have no idea what's coming next. If I did, I could brace myself, prepare for it. Now, I'm just swimming in circles in the dark, desperately hoping my feet will touch the bottom before I stop being able to keep my head above water.

Zebulun speaks again, his voice quieter, "I apologize. I did not say that to be cruel. You've had a hard past few days. So, before I say anything else that could upset you and I'm staked through the heart by my superior, I'm going to just let you inside." He reaches back and pulls the door open, gesturing with a broad sweep of his arm for me to go first.

I stand there for a second, but then I hear music spilling out from the club. "The Way You Look Tonight" by Frank Sinatra, my brain says as it recognizes the words. Ariadne's tastes in music, I see, have progressed only so far. A small smile surprises me as it appears on my face at the thought, grateful that Ariadne hasn't modernized so much that she's into mumble rap or something. There's something beautiful in her relishing in her favorite decades.

Something inside of me shifts at the next lyrics, latching onto the words "love you" and not being able to shake them like a crocodile in a death roll. I step inside the door, walking the few feet through the entry way and pausing before the doorway to the main dance floor.

At that moment, Ariadne steps out from the shadows, the real Ariadne. While I'm wearing a black V-neck long sleeved shirt with black skinny jeans, Ariadne is wearing a red dress, one that looks custom made but almost looks identical to one that I wore when we were together and wore while I had a portrait painted of me as a birthday gift for Ariadne. Her violet eyes connect with mine as we just stand there and stare at each for a long moment, Frank Sinatra continuing to sing in the background.

The song plays its last chords, and then the track abruptly ends, leaving Ariadne and I standing there, staring at each other in the silence of a dimly lit club dance floor. The silence is heavy, full of all of the things that we want to say to each other, the distance that has built up over centuries and has been exacerbated by the poor choices of both of us. Ariande reaches up and I freeze in place as she slowly brushes away a few stray strands of my blonde hair from my face. The touch is brief, but so familiar that it makes a tremor run through my body. For a moment I'm back in Elizabethan England, sitting before a mirror as I put make-up on and Ariadne does my hair for me, brushing it away from my face.

But we're so far removed from the people that we used to be. I broke Ariadne's heart and stopped her from winning the war that was her main goal. Ariadne broke my heart and killed my boyfriend and put in a position where I staked him through the heart. We're not the same people we were then, and my heart aches at the thought of being so close to her after so long, but being separated by so many invisible, intangible things that we're no closer than if we were on opposite sides of the globe from each other.

Still, I clear my throat and jolt myself into motion as I say to Ariadne, "You look astonishing in that dress." She smirks, her violet eyes dancing with slyness which prompts me to sigh through my nose and admit more generously, "You always look amazing. It doesn't matter what century it is or the current fashion trends. Somehow, you always manage to make it work."

She smiles brightly at me and says, "That's because I don't follow the fashion trends, beautiful. Like how washing your body was not a thing. I always bathed. I'm not down for that sensory nightmare," she gripes, visibly shaking it off and gagging at the thought. The action is so harmless, so at odds with the image Ariadne has carefully crafted with all of her actions these past few years. I smirk at the sight, and it warms some dark corners of my heart, making me want to hold onto this moment in time, this non-threatening line of conversation. I know I won't be able to do that, and it has the smile dying from off of my face.

Ariadne senses the change in the mood and nods to herself once, a decisive action as she shifts gears and moves onto what we came here to discuss. She looks me up and down then like Zebulun did and takes a deep inhilation of breath like a bassett hound on the trail of a criminal. After a moment, she asks me roughly, her eyes going more red than violet, "Do you still wake up screaming, hit a line, and throw up more than you're putting into your body? Because you looked pretty ragged the last time I saw you." When David was killed.

Her words hit home whether she meant for them to or not. I feel my walls going up internally as the desire to hide from the truth she laid bare rises inside of me like a tidal wave. My shoulders bunch, so tightly as I tense up that I feel a sharp pain in my shoulder blades. My mind goes back to last night, spent shivering on Zahra's couch, and I tell Ariadne with a conviction that I am not sure I feel entirely, "I'm better now."