Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(31)
What am I, like, in middle school?
That’s what it had felt like then, and it didn’t feel all that much different now. Sure, he believed in the cause Ela was fighting for on her native land and all. But dropping everything and coming home to Texas with her was all about Ela holding him by a string, making him dance on command.
“Sugaring the tea would spoil the effect.” She winked at him, the steam from her cup rising between them and seeming to stain the lantern light.
Dylan took a bigger sip this time, starting to detect a slightly acrid odor to go with a bitter undertaste that left his tongue feeling dry. They were seated in the long-abandoned root cellar beneath Ela’s family’s ancestral home, once used to store perishables for the long winter, and later appropriated by Ela as her personal hideaway. She’d spent lots of time shoring up and beautifying the fifteen-foot-square chamber as much as she could. Then college had brought new interests and demands on her time, her personal hideaway deteriorating back to its original damp and musty form. The furniture Ela brought down here from storage was rotting, and the planks she’d laid over the earthen walls had warped and puckered. The old-fashioned kerosene lantern they were using had once hung from the ceiling, but the hook that had held it there was gone.
“Peyote?” Dylan asked, the cup still touching his lips.
She flashed that smile again. “Uh-huh.”
Dylan wanted to stop drinking the tea, should have stopped, but didn’t let himself.
“You’re not scared, are you, boy?”
“Do I look scared … girl?”
He tried to chuckle, but his mouth was too dry. He managed a smile that seemed to freeze in place, to the point where he had to make his mind pry it free.
“If you only knew,” Dylan said, taking sip after sip now, feeling the liquid cool, or maybe not feeling it at all.
“Knew what?”
Dylan didn’t want to tell her, to risk spoiling the moment. “Let’s just say there’s lots of assholes in the world and I seem to have gone up against most of them.”
In the now quivering light, Ela’s eyes looked like molten lava. “You sound like a Comanche, like my Lost Boys.”
“Lost Boys?”
“What I call the young Comanche I practically grew up with. They’re all cousins of mine. Even more radical about our land and heritage than me; you can tell, because I don’t paint my face.”
“Or draw a red X on your chest.”
Ela smiled at him playfully. “You sure about that, boy?”
Dylan realized he’d finished his cup. “I didn’t know you could make tea out of it,” he said, his voice sounding like somebody else’s, like he was hearing it from outside his body.
“Only for a few thousand years. Especially in these parts, since the buttons harvested from the roots of West Texas cacti are unusually high in mescaline sulfate.”
“So now you’re a chemist, as well as an activist.”
“You can take the girl out of the school, but not the school out of the girl.”
Dylan felt her sliding close to him, nearly tipping the kerosene lantern over as she shifted on the blanket warming them atop the root cellar’s cold, flattened ground.
“The Native American Church believes peyote to be crucial to obtaining spiritual guidance, so long as it’s ingested in the proper environment.”
Dylan looked about dramatically. “A root cellar?”
Ela laughed. Their eyes met and locked, and Dylan could see a light sheen on her flesh, her face seeming to glow in the twinkling lantern light. The world before him was shifting and shaking slightly, though not in the way that left him dizzy. It was more like the effects of the IV anesthesia he’d gotten before a stomach test he’d needed, a few years back.
If anything, Dylan felt more alert, more aware, hyperfocused on his surroundings, with Ela shining as the only light amid the darkness. He couldn’t see the lantern anymore; there was only her. And then they were kissing, without Dylan realizing their faces and mouths had come together.
Even though the tea tasted sour, her breath was sweet, reminding him of sunflowers, for some reason. Then he seemed to be with her in a field of them, green and yellow and bright, their hands sweeping about each other. Dylan’s arms felt disconnected from his body, like snakes pulling free of his shoulders, acting independently of his own thoughts. It felt like a dream he could control, all of this happening according to his own direction as he stood outside himself and watched it all transpire. He heard a baby crying, and then his mother was somewhere else in the field, picking flowers with his younger brother. Then something was crawling into the jeans his dad hated because they were too skinny to suit his tastes and cost too much, and Dylan realized it hadn’t crawled in at all, just morphed into something altogether different, over which he had no more control than he had over his arms or his thoughts.
The lantern tipping over burned his eyes with a splash of light that brought Dylan back to where he was. Except his shirt was off and the wool of the blanket was scratching at him. Or maybe it was Ela scratching at him. Didn’t matter, because there was no way this was really happening, no way. It was just a dream or an illusion he’d lost hold of, and soon he’d wake up with his underwear soaked, the way it had happened when he was, like, twelve.
The raw newness of his feelings then was what he felt now, but it was a newness heightened by an awareness, in the recesses of his mind, that he had gone back to that time with all his knowledge and experience retained. Then Ela was wrestling him, pounding him, it seemed, until he realized it wasn’t her at all but his own heart, thudding up a storm, his naked rib cage seeming to expand more with each beat, threatening to explode.