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A soft, warm pressure beneath the point of my chin brought my face back up to look at him. His thumb stroked along my jawbone and the smile stretched wider across his face, lighting him up. “Smile?” he whispered.
I let my eyes fall to his hand cupping my face shyly, but after a long moment I allowed myself to feel the warmth of his touch and to look back up at his eyes of molten ice. And I smiled. It wasn’t anything big or grand, my teeth didn’t show, but it was real and that was more than I could say for ninety-nine percent of the smiles I had dealt in my life. He seemed to know it was real because he laughed so quietly and whispered, “You’re beautiful.”
I allowed the smile to remain, but felt my eyebrows lower slightly in confusion. I wanted to ask why, if it was the red sweater that made me so self-conscious, or if my worries about the make-up were in vain. But he kissed me on the top of my head and answered the unasked question quietly, “You look healed. The smile completed it.”
----
I had never had coffee before. I had worked at Starbucks for a long time, but I never drank it. It usually smelled great and that was enough to keep me satisfied and my paycheck intact. I knew it was expensive and not worth getting hooked on for that reason.
Frost had paid without hesitation, causing me to shuffle my feet and wring my hands awkwardly. I was not used to being given things, but I knew that if I complained or made any kind of comment, he would just tell me I was being foolish and buy me scones on top of it, because he was that sort of individual, the sort that I had yet to understand.
We sat across from each other drinking coffee, his black and mine some kind of mocha, and talked for over two hours. At first, I was unsure and kept checking the clock on the far wall, but before long, the minutes were slipping away and we had entirely forgotten the clock was there. He talked about his family a lot, though never mentioned his father and mostly focused on Trina. She had a ballet recital rapidly approaching on Wednesday and was nervous. He’d picked her up after school on Friday and found her fingernails chewed raw. He had tried a thousand times to tell her how incredible a dancer she was and that she would be nothing short of perfect, but she refused to listen.
“How long has she been a dancer?” I asked, easily picturing Trina in a pink tutu and ballet slippers. It seemed all too fitting.
“My mom starting taking her to mother-daughter classes when she was…what? Two? Three?” He chuckled and smiled warmly. He seemed to glow whenever he talked about his baby sister. “She was a natural. Even that young, the instructor could tell she’d be great if my mother kept bringing her. She’s…a dance prodigy, if you will.”
My eyebrows rose and I smiled, marveling not just at the words, but at his tone when he spoke them. It was like he was talking about his God. “You adore her, don’t you?”
Frost grinned and looked down into his coffee, ice blue eyes shining. “I do. ‘If all else perished, and she remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and she were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.’”
I grinned as much in shock as in pleasure at hearing the memorable quote. “Wuthering Heights. You read Emily Bronte?”
He met my gaze intensely. “It was Heathcliff. It sounds bad, but I always sympathized and identified with him.”
I tipped my head slightly in interest, the smile waning. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing, Frost.”
“He’s cruel and destructive. Many people would say inhuman.”
I nodded. “Pain does strange things to people.”
Frost stared deeply into my eyes for a long time, then looked away as if to hide his thoughts from me. “You’re right,” he said hollowly.
There was no way to easily recover the conversation after that and we shortly thereafter left for the movie theater. Frost’s rental car reeked of overpowering new car smell and I winced as soon as he opened my door, the stench wafting out into the street. “I can’t believe you still haven’t found the air freshener,” I said.
He didn’t answer, but smiled and took my hand. I froze and looked up at him, holding his gaze as he helped me down into the car, not releasing my hand until he had to close the door. As he walked around to the driver’s side, I stared down at my hand in confusion, wondering why it felt so warm when he held it, so comfortable and easy, so normal.
----
Raindrops pounded against the windows hidden behind the midnight-black curtains like tiny hammers and thunder roared through the apartment like an earthquake. A few candles provided the only light to my tiny living room area, giving off a faint warm glow that was just enough to read by. As I perused myComplete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, a leatherbound tome and the only book worth more than five dollars that I owned, I found my mind continually wandering over the night’s events, over the week’s revelations, and over memories I’d really rather not have to see again. It seemed, in a distorted way, that the dark thoughts were interrupting or interrupted byThe Pit and the Pendulum, the main root of my worries.
We were so similar. I had thought I’d been exercising humility and rationality in refusing to entertain the possibility. But, as I had come too late to realize, humility and rationality had been nothing but vain foolishness. I wondered if this would be more manageable, if still a problem at all, if I had known my lineage sooner. I wondered if any of the crueler experiences I’d endured in my life were a result of the curse, if they could have been averted. But the central thought I kept returning to was how similar Edgar and I really were, along with the pervasive imagery ofThe Pit and the Pendulum.
He had been orphaned at the age of two, left to a foster family that his mother had trusted with her child’s and her own life. He had lived under a distorted roof with a foster-father who was prone to cheating on the substitute mother Edgar adored, as well as cruelty and alcoholism. He struggled with money all his life and faced one disappointment after another when it came to employment and his writing. He was plagued by vicious nightmares and malicious circumstance in reality, his foster-mother and beloved wife and cousin taken from him by tuberculosis, the same demon that stole his mother. I had not lost my foster-mother and had not acquired a spouse to lose yet, but looking at the other impossible coincidences, I felt as though I was looking down a timeline at my life to come, a long and narrow tunnel with no light at the end. On the other hand, as far as I knew, Edgar hadn’t been tortured in his youth quite as mercilessly as I. He had actually been known as a profound athlete and a great sense of humor to add to a party. His siblings had also survived and though they were not terribly close, all having been sent to different families, he retained contact with them.
Perhaps I would die before I could lose a beloved spouse, or would refuse to ever take one. Perhaps I had been dealt such a tragic childhood to even the scales.
----
The nightmares that stalked me that evening added my screams to those of the volatile wind. Evan and Emma stared at me with cold, dark eyes as blood streamed from between their white lips. A raven perched above a bathroom mirror, surveying a bloodied razor abandoned in the stark white sink, and croaked as if to offer a suggestion. Frost bled out in my arms, his ice-blue eyes molten, silently screaming agony and accusation. By four in the morning, I sat at the foot of my rickety bed, my legs curled up to my chest, my chin resting on one knee as I stared at my alarm clock, the early hour announced by the glow of the face so brightly in the gloom that it seemed like a cruel mockery.
Finally, I stood shakily and made my way to the kitchen, filling a mug with water and heating it in the microwave as I fingered a freshly unwrapped teabag. Unlike soda and coffee, tea could be amazingly cheap if you were not too picky. Dr. Grey had gotten me addicted to it two years ago when he took drastic measures to combat my weight troubles in force-feeding me cookies and hot beverages at each appointment. The tea quickly became addictive and for some time was the main reason I made my scheduled appointments until I discovered just how cheap I could get it.
The tea had a marginal flavor, certainly nothing by comparison to Dr. Grey’s brand, but it was comforting. The heat calmed my nerves and the caffeine gently chased off the fear of falling asleep again. I sat for twenty minutes or so in the living area sipping the tea until it was gone, along with my anxiety. Then I returned to the kitchen and started a second cup brewing. As I waited, I opened one of the lower kitchen cupboards. I didn’t have the money to stock my kitchen well, so I had one cupboard left over in which I stashed a large cardboard box filled to the top with ratty spiral notebooks. The covers were decorated in Sharpie drawings that bordered titles of various stories. I rifled through the notebooks until I found a purple-covered one titled ‘Lay Me to Rest’ with tiny falling angels and floating feathers around the words.
With my mug of tea in one hand and the spiral notebook in the other, I returned to my spot on the couch and flipped through the story. I had begun it years ago when I was still in high school. Back before my life had really gone to hell again. It was told by an angel who had fallen and was cursed to feel the pain of everyone she touched. Having fallen in love with a man whose past was as tormented as hers, she begged the angels to release her and let her die. She could not endure his memories burning inside her, thinking of him feeling such agony, but could not endure a life without his touch either.
It was not exactly the same, but the story bore such a striking parallel to my situation with Frost that I was caught up in it quickly. Of course I was terrified of a relationship with him for more than one reason, but one of those reasons was that I knew a relationship with him meant that he rose to the top of the ‘cursed’ list that consumed my mind. I knew I could not bear to see him in pain and pain was what awaited him if I let whatever it was we had progress.
