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Aiden! She remembered the way he'd cringed from her. "Sweet Moon," she moaned.
But what next?
She had leaped from his window, she knew - it was a stupid, crazy thing to do - but the Moon looks after her own and she'd hit the ground running. And that was all she remembered - running, running, running.
Or was it? She thought she saw Rafe's face in there somewhere. Or was that a dream she'd had?
The room was filthy hot. She would love to turn on the air conditioner, but every nerve end cried out to her, "Don't move!" Ignoring the caution, she shifted slightly, and her stomach heaved. Okay, okay, I'll just lie here, she told herself. The heat's not that bad. Maybe if she was lucky she'd fall asleep again and wouldn't have to think or feel.
She wasn't lucky. She lay bitterly awake on the cusp of nausea as the events in Aiden's room replayed over and over within her head.
I'm so stupid, she thought. So stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
She tried to move past that moment and on to events beyond, but the night opened up like a black pit of nothing with no landmarks and looped her back to the scene in Aiden's room. Time had passed, that was all she knew, and a chunk of her life had been torn away while she'd been mobile and mindless and in despair. It was as if she hadn't existed for that time. Was that nothingness like the nothingness of death? She tried to imagine a forever of non-being with no conscious moments ever again. She shuddered despite the heat.
She had heard of this happening - a change coming on so violently that it wiped away the human side and the animal reigned supreme. That was in stories, though, and triggered by great passions like jealousy or rage. She'd never known it to happen to a real person. And - the nausea rose again unbidden by movement - usually something terrible happened during the blackout.
Stop being an asshole, she told herself. Obviously the stories were based on reality, but the terrible parts were there because they were stories.
She was sticky and gritty and dehydrated. I need a shower, she thought. She imagined floating in a bathtub full of water and ice. The image was so comforting she held on to it and almost lulled herself back to sleep, but it also woke a tortured thirst.
She opened her eyes again, slowly this time and only halfway, and peered through the slits. Her head still hurt, but if she moved carefully maybe she could stand the pain. Right now water from the bathroom tap promised to be sweeter than ambrosia. She smiled slightly at the thought, and something cracked and crumbled around her mouth. She raised her hand to her lips and found a rough crust there. She inspected her fingers and saw rust-colored flakes. A hollow thud increased its tempo within her.
I must have bitten my lip in the jump, she thought. That's it. Or maybe I caught a rabbit. Yes. And underneath, in the back of her mind, another voice cried, Let it not be human.
She sat up, ignoring the screaming pain that went with the action, and the cold sweat that ran down her back. She looked down and found she was streaked with the remnants of blood. The sheets were blotched with it, dry and brown amid the evidence of vomit. She could smell the blood clearly now amid the sweat, puke, and tears. It was unmistakable. It was human.
She heaved over the side of the bed and weakly grabbed a handful of sheet to wipe her mouth. "Oh, sweet Moon. What have I done?" she moaned. Then a colder fear grabbed her. Not Aiden?
She scrambled off the bed, becoming entangled with the sheet, and barely missed treading in the pool of her vomit. At the door she realized - I can't go to the phone like this. What if Esmé sees me?
She grabbed her robe from the back of the door and fled to the bathroom, reaching the toilet bowl in time to throw up again.
Her shower wasn't the peaceful bath of her fantasy. She scrubbed her skin raw as she tried to erase even the ghost of a stain, and washed her hair till the roots hurt with the wringing. All the while tears streamed down her cheeks. I couldn't have, she told herself. I wouldn't have hurt him, no matter how much he hurt me. But she wasn't sure.
She approached the phone in the upstairs hallway swathed in towels.
"Is that you, hon?" Esmé called from her room.
"Yeah, Mom," Vivian answered reluctantly. The words came out as a croak.
"Are you sick?" Esmé asked.
In a big way, Vivian thought. "Yeah, Mom."
"Then go back to bed," Esmé answered, and ended the order with an inappropriate giggle.
Great Moon, she's got someone in there with her. For once this didn't annoy Vivian. At least that would keep Esmé out of the way.
Vivian picked up the phone, then panicked. What do I say if his father answers? "Hi, this is Vivian, is Aiden dead?" She swallowed a hysterical laugh and punched out his number. The receiver trembled in her hand, and the ringing shrieked through the soft tissues of her brain. It went on and on and on. They're at the police station, she thought. Or the hospital. His father's identifying the body right now.
Then someone answered. "Hello?" It was Aiden.
Vivian slammed down the phone. "Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you," she whispered to the Moon.
But if it wasn't Aiden's blood, whose was it?
She found a fresh pair of shorts and a clean T-shirt and got dressed, listening to a news station on the radio, but all she heard were endless baseball scores. After she'd mopped the floor with her towel, she bundled it up with her sheets and dragged the lot downstairs and threw everything in the washer. She switched on the local cable TV news and sat through reports of another shooting downtown, sexual harassment in the federal government, and some stupid boat show at the conference center.
