Blue Aspen Page 11

  Uncle Jack would lose.

  The idea of being separated from Vincent made me want to die. I wondered if actually that might be a legitimate concern for me. Would I be able to survive without him? Would the changes he made inside me cause me to break if he wasn't there, fueling the fire?

  The morning that marked day fourteen for us, broke our routine. That day, I did not wake up before Vincent. When I opened my eyes I was alone, and I felt tired and anxious. I had been working up the courage to talk to Vincent about Uncle Jack’s homecoming. When I went downstairs, I found him sitting at the kitchen table with our breakfast set out in front of him.

  "You were restless last night," Vincent said, looking up at me. "What’s wrong?"

  I sighed and sat down. "My uncle will be coming home in three weeks. I have no idea what to tell him about us. In all the times he’s called, I’ve lied to him, afraid to tell him anything about you. I’m just so worried. How are we going to tell him?"

  I had hoped Vincent would laugh at me and tell me not to worry because he had the answer. Instead, he hung his head.

  "I have been thinking about this, too," he said slowly. "We can’t expect him to understand. No one will ever truly understand us, Dulcee. When he returns, the freedom we have been enjoying will vanish. I’m afraid we will have to go through a temporary oppression. We will have to continue to lie and we will have to hide…But I promise you, it will be temporary. It will be the first of many hardships we will have to endure to once again be free. It is the price."

  "I can endure whatever I have to, to be with you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how hard. I’m willing. I belong to you, Vincent. And you belong to me." I was convicted, but sad nonetheless.

  A single tear slid down his cheek and a sort of miserable pleasure swept across his face. The legs of his chair scraped across the floor as he pushed away from the table and came to me. He pulled me from my seat and into his arms. My heart began thumping loudly in my ears. I rested my head against his chest and I could hear and feel his heart as well. The fire in my chest rose to the surface and our hearts, so physically close to each other in our embrace, pushing to burst from our bodies and become one. But that kind of intimacy was only possible in my dreams. While I was awake, we were bound by the laws of nature, most of them.

  We spent the day quietly, doing nothing extravagant. Both of us were preoccupied in our thoughts and we tried to find peace inside ourselves. I didn’t know how Vincent was feeling, but I was afraid. I suspected we would be separated for a time. I cringed away from the thought. I continued to roll our problem over and over in my head. I was doing my best to come up with a solution, but I had nothing. Around noon, I decided to take a nap. I was spent mentally and emotionally. It was the first time in two weeks that I would sleep alone.

  "Do you want to come take a nap?" I had asked

  "No. I have something I need to work on, but you go ahead, Sweetheart."

  "What do you need to work on?"

  He smiled slyly at me. "It’s a surprise. You’ll see it later."

  "Okay. Whatever it is I’m sure I’ll love it."

  I fell asleep quickly. I didn’t dream. When I woke up, my room was pitch black. I had slept long into the evening. Groggy, I rubbed my eyes and sat up. Downstairs, the phone rang. My heart clenched, it was Uncle Jack. I bolted drunkenly for the door, not quite coherent. I took the stairs three at a time and ran for the phone when I hit the floor.

  "Hello," I huffed into the receiver.

  "Hey there," Uncle Jack exclaimed. "Uh…are you working out or something?"

  I was trying hard to control my breathing. "Yeah, working out," I said.

  Uncle Jack laughed. "Well don’t hurt yourself." He sounded in a much better mood than he had the whole time he’d been away.

  "How are things going?" I asked.

  "Great! It will take some time to wrap up, but it looks like things are swinging my way. And I have some very good news. I will be able to come home for about a week soon."

  A lump rose in my throat. "How soon?"

  "I’ll know tomorrow what day I will be able to fly. I’ll call you when I know. It will be so good to see you."

  "Yeah, you too," I said flatly. "I have to go, I…uh…need to finish my work out before I run out of steam."

  "Okay," he said brightly. "I’ll call you tomorrow."

  "Bye." Frustrated tears started spilling out of my eyes.

  Vincent came up behind me. "Dulcee?"

  "He will be here, soon," I said. "I’ll know tomorrow how many days we will have before he gets here. But we don’t have three more weeks to figure this out. If we’re lucky, we’ll have three days. He said he’ll be here for a week and then he will have to go back."

  "Well, that’s not so bad," he said casually.

  "Maybe not, but if we don’t try to tell him now, it might be worse later because he'll be angry about the deception."

  "Dulcee, this isn’t the right time to tell him. Besides, he can’t ever really know the whole truth anyway. When he comes back for the week, I'll just make myself scarce."

  I didn’t like the sound of that. "What do you mean by scarce?" I asked. I was disturbed he was so blasé about it. In fact, he didn’t seem to want to talk about it at all. It even seemed to annoy him.

  He pursed his lips together and inhaled loudly through his nose. "This is not what I want us to focus on right now. There's no need for you to be so worried. I know what to do when your Uncle comes back. All you have to do is pretend I don’t exist around him. You won’t be without me. I’ll be with you in your dreams and we can steal moments together when he’s distracted. Don’t look so sad, Baby. It’s only a week and then we will have all our time back again."

  I sighed, slowly letting go of my anxiety. "All right," I said heavily. "I trust you."

  He placed his hand on my cheek. "It will be all right. I promise." He traced his fingers down my cheek and looked at me in a way that made me blush. "You are so beautiful," he whispered.

  I snorted and blushed further.

  "What? Hasn’t anyone, other than me, ever told you that?"

  I thought for a second and then snickered. "Well, there was this one time. A boy I knew in high school told me that I made him howl at the moon. Does that count?"

  Vincent threw his head back and laughed heartily. "Wow. That’s a good line. Did it get him anywhere?"

  I wrinkled my nose in contempt at the memory.

  Vincent chuckled again. "I guess that’s a no."

  We were both quiet for a moment, the atmosphere turning serious again.

  "I want you to come with me now. I have something to show you."

  "Is it my surprise?"

  "Yep. Come on. I’ve been working really hard on it."

  Vincent grabbed my hand and pulled my along behind him. When we reached the lower floor he stopped and turned to face me. An excited, nervous gleam filled his eyes.

  "Take off your shoes and cover your eyes," he commanded.

  "Take off my shoes?"

  "Yes. Take off your shoes." he said again, beaming.

  I smiled, forgetting all my worries, and slipped off my shoes.

  "Now cover your eyes."

  I placed my hands over my eyes and Vincent towed me along down the hallway with one finger hooked in a belt loop of my jeans. We stopped shortly and I heard a door open to my right.

  "Keep your eyes covered."

  He stepped behind me, placing his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me forward. We passed through a doorway. The air had a fresh moist smell to it, and I could hear the sound of water splashing. I jumped as I stepped on something soft and cold, like thick, dew-covered velvet.

  "Now open your eyes."

  Removing my hands, I gasped with astonishment and delight. We were in the solarium. Vincent had filled it! It was everything I had imagined it could be. Every inch was covered in life. I was standing on Irish moss that grew all over the floor. The fountain was bubbling with water an
d long, flowering vines hung from the glass ceiling falling around our heads. It should have been dark, but the full moon was right above us and there was a light in the fountain, turning the water light green, and sparkling on the scales of the large koi. Little white lights twinkled through the flowering trees, and abnormally large glittering golden bumblebees hummed lazily around the room. It was like two worlds in one, an enchanted garden in the spring, under a snowfall that could not touch us. It was the most amazing experience of my waking life.

  Vincent stood quietly watching me taking it all in. "So what do you think?" he asked.

  "I am awake, aren’t I?"

  He chuckled and pinched my forearm.

  "Ow! A simple yes would have been fine." I grumbled, rubbing my arm. "Okay. I’m awake. So how did you do this? I thought you could only do things like this in my dreams."

  He didn’t answer right away. "You’ve been holding out on me." I accused.

  "It takes a bit more effort and concentration. But I had to do it. It’s the right place, and I couldn’t do this while you were asleep, it would be wrong."

  "What are you talking about?"

  Vincent took a deep breath and ran his fingers through the length of my hair. "You are too beautiful and too wonderful to worry about anything. There is nothing in the world that could separate us. There may well come a time that we are physically apart, but that doesn't mean we're separated."

  "What are you talking about?" I asked again, this time in a whisper. Something serious was going on, I just didn’t know what.

  He took one step back from me and knelt down on one knee. I could not breathe. My heart had stopped. Holding my left hand that was now shaking, he slid a ring onto my finger. I thought I was going to faint. Looking down at my hand, I saw this was no ordinary ring. It was comprised of tiny white flowers woven tightly into a band. It was the most beautiful ring I had ever seen, not made of diamonds and gold, but of something alive. Even though the flowers were picked, they still lived.

  "Marry me, Dulcee."

  "Anytime, anywhere."

  I fell to my knees, into his arms. I thought I would explode with joy. We lay down together in the moss, my head pillowed on his arm, our mouths never leaving each other’s company. I was convinced there had never been a better proposal in the history of the world. I lay there, breathing in his breath and my mind turned in a purely physical direction. He had given me so much. I wanted to give him something, make our bond complete. In all this time that we had shared the same bed, we had never made love. I thought now was the time. He belonged to me, My Betrothed.

  I pulled my mouth away from his. "Let’s go upstairs," I whispered.

  He was silent for a moment and perfectly still. His eyes erupted into flames and one of his hands ran up my arm to my collarbone, where he roughly grabbed the fabric of my shirt. I was sure he was going to tear it off me. I was holding my breath, so was he. His fist full of my shirt began to tremble as his eyes scanned my face, and he bit down on his bottom lip.

  "No," he whispered, letting go of my shirt and closing his eyes.

  There was a moment of absolutely nothing, a rip in the fabric of the universe. Then I blinked and sat up. Did he really say it? Hadn’t he just asked me to marry him? Why would he say no? I was staring away from him, my eyes unfocused, slowly filling with tears. He sat up too and put his hands on my shoulders, trying to look into my blank eyes.

  "Dulcee?"

  "No?"

  He could see the pain and rejection in my face.

  "I am not rejecting you!" he said emphatically. "Quite the reverse. Don’t let yourself for even one second think I don’t desire you."

  I remained silent, tears streaming down my face. I was shaking slightly in confusion and uncertainty. Vincent wiped one of my tears gently with his thumb.

  "Oh, Dulcee…" he whispered. "I love you. I love you so much…You're just so young. I told you the night we met that I knew what you needed even more than you did. Remember? This is not what you need."

  I was about to raise my voice in protest when he cut me off.

  "This is what your body wants. It’s not what your heart or soul needs. Needs are greater than wants. And believe me, I want you. But I care more for your heart than I do for my carnal longings. You have suffered so much abandonment and rejection in your life. You need a solid commitment from me before I possess you physically. I swear I shall not touch you that way until you are mine, completely. Only then will you truly know I am in no way using you. Our love will be pure and unashamed, with no fear."

  I sat blinking at him in disbelief. How could someone be so selfless? And for my sake! Protecting me even from myself. He abruptly stood up, and literally fled the solarium as if his resolve might fail him if he did not.

  I sat there, stupidly, in the Irish moss a long time, perplexed. I felt somewhat embarrassed. I wished all this time our relationship had not been so much about me. He gave and I took. I wanted to love him with the depth that he loved me. I didn’t know if I was capable, he was so special after all. I couldn’t travel into his dreams the way he could mine. I couldn’t read his heart, knowing what it was that he wanted or needed. He had power I did not.

  Feeling sheepish, I left the solarium. I was afraid he would be unhappy with me for spoiling his proposal. I didn’t think it spoiled though; the things he told me opened my eyes to him. He loved me in a perfect way. It was self-sacrificing. It was mercy to me, grace even. I didn't deserve it.

  He wasn't in our room when I came upstairs, though it was clear he had been there. He'd left a note and there was another wrapped box laying on the bed. I almost burst into tears at the sight of it. Why did he have to keep giving me things? I wasn’t worth it.

  I plopped down on the bed and stared at the gift for a minute without touching it. I was feeling totally wretched and considered putting the box in the closet, unopened. But I knew I couldn’t do that. I was too curious. I sighed and reached for the note.

  I’m sorry…I’ll be back later, after you’re asleep. Now you know how much I love you. Just accept it. Accept me. -V

  I put the note in the little wooden box where I kept all of his notes, and went back for the gift. I pulled the lid gently off the glossy black box.

  "Oh my," I said to myself. Hooking my fingers through the spaghetti straps, I pulled the midnight blue satin nightgown from the tissue it was folded in. It was the same, exactly the same as the one I wore in my dreams. Only… now it was tangible, clear, and defined. Sometimes, in my sleep, it was hazy and vague, like everything else. But this real nightgown was also different in one other way. In a dream, a garment like this might not mean anything, but in real life…well.

  This was something a woman wore to achieve a certain response in a man. I thought Vincent’s timing for this gift was a little odd, considering what just happened in the solarium. I laid the gown on the bed and saw that in the bottom of the box was another little note. Just a scrap of parchment with a single word scrawled across it: Soon.

  I folded the gown and put it back in the box. Sliding the box under the bed, I felt as though I might collapse with weariness. The emotional roller coaster I had been on that night was most taxing.

  I didn’t know where Vincent was, but I could feel him moving further away from me. My skin prickled and my internal candle flickered and worst of all, I had a sharp pain, like a knife thrust into the base of my skull. It was withdrawal. It took me a long time to go to sleep without Vincent, and when I did, Theta was exceptionally unkind.

  I was lying on my back, flickering neon lights in my eyes. I lifted my head to see around me. My arms and legs were strapped down to a hospital bed. My heart began racing in panic. I looked around for some kind of help. Just a small empty room. A figure in a white coat, stood against the wall, looking at me. There was nothing offensive about this man’s appearance, he was totally ordinary, but the way he made me feel…he could have had red eyes and a forked tongue. He moved toward me.

  "Let me
go!" I screamed at him.

  He merely smiled, his eyes glinting evilly, and pulled a huge syringe out of his coat. The needle was so long, it looked designed for an elephant. He tapped it, squirting a thick black liquid into the air. I screamed. The sound of my terror echoed around the room. I strained against my bonds, they didn't budge an inch.