Erasing Faith(69)
I sighed when I felt someone hovering in the space behind me and reached up to remove the hot-pink shooting muffs Conor had given me when I’d first started. He’d meant them as an embarrassing joke, but I loved them.
Pulling them down to dangle around my neck, I turned away from the target with my gun still resting comfortably in my palm and frowned at the stranger who was waiting to speak with me.
When I first came to the range with Conor, I’d been a twitchy, trembling rookie so green it had almost — not quite, but almost — made him smile. The first time I’d shown up without him, the men who’d been practicing here for years looked at me like an unwanted interloper who was more likely to shoot one of them in the head with a rogue bullet than she was to hit the target.
No one laughed when I walked through the doors anymore. Now, they looked at me with respect. A few of them even looked at me with more than respect, going so far as to ask me out to dinner or a drink after I’d finished for the day. I tried my best to be gentle as I let them down easy.
I’m not dating right now.
The lie was comfortable on my lips after using it for so long, and far easier than the truth. If I’d looked at them and said, I’ve got trust issues and a broken heart, so I’m never dating again. I plan to die an old spinster with seven thousand cats and a dried up, celibate uterus they never would’ve believed me. What sane, twenty-four year old New Yorker didn’t date?
Eternal Singleville…. Population: me.
My eyes scanned the guy who’d approached in a detached, cursory survey. Mid-twenties with handsome features and prominent muscles that attested to his many hours at the gym, he probably turned heads wherever he went. Before Budapest, I’d have been so flustered he was even looking at me, I probably would’ve passed out cold. At the very least, I’d have talked his ear off with a cringeworthy stream of unstoppable babble. But I was no longer that girl.
I raised my eyebrows coolly and waited for him to speak.
“Nice shots,” he said, flashing a mega-watt smile. “You must spend a lot of time here.”
“Yep,” I agreed, shrugging as I flipped on the safety, stowed my gun back in its holster, and shoved it inside my black duffel.
“Maybe we can practice together sometime?” he asked, hope plain in his voice. I couldn’t help but notice that his expression was already a little crestfallen — I think he saw the rejection in my eyes before I even opened my mouth.
“Sorry.” I slid the strap over my shoulder and brushed past him on my way to the exit. “I shoot alone.”
***
I love history.
Ancient times. Faraway lands.
I’ve spent hours hunched over history textbooks, pouring over facts and figures. Examining the different eras and periods.
See, historians… we like order. We divide things into B.C. and A.D. designations. We draw lines on a piece of paper and segment the past into chunks that make our own historical consumption easier.
The Stone Age.
The Middle Ages.
The Dark Age.
We like to know exactly when things changed. The precise moment one era ended and a new epoch began. As if any amount of organization could make the brutal history of our world easier to swallow.
If you’d charted my existence on a time line, there would be a bold red divider bisecting my life, with everything leading up to Budapest on one side and everything that came after on the other. If you were to look a little closer, you’d find the catalyst of change separating the two periods of Faith Morrissey was an infinitesimal instant of time — a single, sunny morning in Heroes’ Square when I’d fallen into the arms of a charming, crooked-grinned stranger.
My lifespan had two distinct eras, now.
B.W. and A.W.
Before Wes. After Wes.
And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to erase that line or step back over it to my life before.
My family, my friends — hell, even my name — were all on the other side. Untouchable and unreachable.
As far as I was concerned, as far as the world was concerned…
Faith Morrissey was gone.
***
“Fae? Are you here?”
I broke eye contact with myself in the mirror and hastily grabbed my shirt off the bed as I listened to the slow, waddling footsteps that were making their way across my apartment. It should’ve surprised me that she was here this early on a Saturday morning, but my friend was anything but predictable these days.
“In my room!” I called through my closed bedroom door. “Give me a sec, I’m just throwing on some clothes.”
“Yeah… I’m not gonna make it that far. I’ll be on the couch.”
I smiled softly at her words.
Pulling the thin sweater down over my head, I hid the ugly scar that marred the upper left side of my stomach. Three years after surgery, it had faded from bumpy pink flesh into semi-smooth white skin, but it would never be entirely gone. I’d bear the mark of what had happened in Budapest for the rest of my life — a perfect physical manifestation of the invisible, intractable memories seared into my mind.
I set my shoulders, smoothed my dyed-dark hair into place, and swung open the door of my bedroom. As soon as my eyes caught sight of her, sitting on my couch with both hands on her very pregnant stomach and her swollen feet propped up on my coffee table, a giggle escaped my lips.