The spell was broken though, as if the loud noise had pulled me out of a dream. I laughed shakily and pulled away from him, putting distance between us. I leaned against the window and faced him, my bent knees a barrier. “I hope so.”
Ash stared at me for a moment but thankfully let it go. I was grateful for this. “I’m sorry.”
I looked up at him surprised. My face immediately flushed. Sorry for what? For almost kissing me? “For what?” I asked.
“Your parents. It sounds rough,” he said, leaning back and closing his eyes for a moment.
“Oh,” I paused. “Thank you.”
It stayed silent for a moment before he spoke again. “If it’s any consolation, I think that you’re lucky. Your dad is an amazing guy. And your mom, despite her faults, probably loves you just as much.” He sighed. “The last few days that I saw my parents was the most time I had spent with them in years, and they were dying.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. In the confusion and chaos of escaping the city, I had to admit that I had forgotten all about Ash’s parents. There was no question about it now; they were dead, and I had not stopped at all to even give it a thought.
He smiled slightly, looking a little surprised at my interest. “I love my parents. They’re great, honestly. They give me anything and everything I could possibly want or need. But…” he sighed, almost angrily. “They’re never around. They’re so busy.”
“Doing what?” I asked, thinking of Madison’s parents and the society events they were always attending that kept them out often.
“My parents are…were lawyers,” Ash explained. “And they were insanely dedicated to their job, and they were really good at it too. But it kept them out all the time, and when they were home, they were always on laptops, typing away into all hours of the night.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. My dad was often out of the house, but when he was there, he was there 100%. We ate out, went to see movies and constantly went to the Natural History Museum. We had season tickets to the Mets. We saw and watched trashy cop shows (for my dad) and cheesy sci-fi movies (for me) all the time. I couldn’t imagine being in the brownstone by myself all the time.
“It’s fine. I just sometimes wish they would have made it to a football game, or watched me pitch.” I opened my mouth to say something, but he immediately spoke. “Hey, you should sleep. I’ll stay up and wait for your dad.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. He nodded, not meeting my eyes. I turned away from him and curled up in a ball against the door. I didn’t think I would be able to fall asleep, in a car, in the middle of a forest, with Awakened everywhere, capable of ripping me apart. But my eyes eventually got heavy as I slipped into a deep sleep, with my cheek pressed to the cold glass and my arms wrapped tightly around my knees.
It started off so normal. I was back in the quad at school, under the twinkling lights, in the same red dress I had worn only a few months before at the fall dance. Things were different though. It was colder, darker and the music was harsher than the kind of music that St. Joseph’s Prep usually played. It was the kind of music that I would listen to on my stereo and dance around my room, feeling the aggressive beats move through my body.
I wandered under the vines that had been draped around, my fingers gliding over the thick branches and across the tough red skin of the apples that hung from them. It didn’t make sense to me, and I vaguely had a memory of telling Madison that apples grew on trees and not vines.
I felt a sudden pang of hunger and wanted to rip all the apples off the vines and bite into their skin and rip them apart. I wanted to sink my teeth into them, and my hands grabbed at them, yanking them down, vines scattering around me, branches in my hair.
Everyone on the dance floor was standing still, facing partners, as if waiting for something. I made my way through the crowd, distracted for a moment at how graceful and silent my movements were. I stopped in the middle, spinning around, spinning and twirling, until I came to a halt and Ash was standing in front of me.
He looked beautiful, perfectly and achingly beautiful, and he was gaping at me, horrified. Despite his fear, he reached for my hands, pulled me closer and led me in a dance. It was formal, calculated, completely mismatching the violent music filling the air. His eyes never left mine, and I could almost see myself reflected in the empty pools of blue.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, his voice loud enough to hear over the music. “You’re so terrifying but so beautiful.” The world beautiful echoed off the walls, and went bouncing through the secluded area.
The unmoving people surrounding us started whispering “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful” over and over again, and I felt a shiver run up my spine.