NOCTE (Nocte Trilogy #1)(7)

Dark hair tumbles into his face and a hand with long fingers impatiently brushes it back, all the while his eyes are still connected with mine. His jaw is strong and masculine, with the barest hint of stubble.

His gaze is still connected to mine, like a livewire, or a lightning bolt. I can feel the charge of it racing along my skin, like a million tiny fingers, flushing my cheeks. My lungs flutter and I swallow hard.

And then, he smiles at me.

At me.

Because I don’t know him and he doesn’t know better.

“Cal? You ready?”

Finn’s voice breaks my concentration, and with it, the moment. I glance up at my brother, almost in confusion, to find that he’s waiting for me. The hour has already passed and I didn’t even realize it. I scramble to get up, feeling for all the world like I’m rattled, but don’t know why.

Although I do know.

As I walk away with Finn, I glance over my shoulder.

The sexy stranger with the dark, dark gaze is gone.





3


TRIBUS



Finn



FuckYouYouCan’tDoAnything. HurtMeMotherf*cker. YouCan’tDoAnything. You’reSoFucked. HurtMe. HurtMe. HurtHer. Can’tDoAnything. KillMeNow.

Like always, I ignore them…the voices in my head that whisper and hiss. They’re always there in the background, inside my ear. There are several of them, mostly women’s voices, but there are a couple men’s voices, too. Those are the ones that are harder to ignore, because sometimes they feel like my own.

It’s really hard to ignore your own voice.

And even though I can push them to the back of my consciousness most of the time, I can never make them go away. The colorful pills I used to take every day couldn’t even silence them, not always.

Because of that, since they made me nauseous and didn’t work anyway, I added another chore to my to-do list the other day. It was an easy one to cross off.

Stop taking pills

Don’t tell Calla or dad.

I picture my mental list in my head, with perfect clarity, because that level of focus tends to muffle the voices for a second. My list is on white notebook paper, lined with blue, a pink line running vertically down the left side. After I complete a task, I draw a mental line through it, crossing it out. It makes me feel accomplished.

Without my list, I can’t get through the day. It’s too hard to think without it, too hard to concentrate. Without it, I can’t even appear normal. Its compulsory for me at this point, just one more thing that makes me bat-shit crazy.

No one except Calla and my dad know how crazy I am. And even they don’t know the extent of it.

Not all of it.

They don’t know how I wake up in the night, and have to force myself to stay in bed, because the voices tell me to throw myself from the cliffs. To stop myself, I always dive into bed with Calla, because for whatever reason, she quiets the voices. But she can’t be with me every minute.

She can’t be with me during the day when my fingers itch to scratch into my skin, to pull my fingernails out, to run down to the bottom of the mountain and scream as I hurl myself into traffic.

Why would I itch to do these things?

Because of the f*cking voices.

They won’t shut up.

It’s getting to the point where I don’t know what’s real and not real anymore, and that scares the piss out of me. It particularly scares the piss out of me because Calla and I will be separated soon. She thinks we’re going to the same school, that I’ve consenting to going to Berkeley with her. But I can’t. I can’t suck her down with me. I’d be the worst person in the world if I did.

So soon, I’ll be at MIT and she’ll be at Berkeley, and then what will happen?

She’ll be fine, because she’s sane. But what will happen to me?

As I come out of the therapy room, I bend and gulp a drink from the water fountain. A few drops of icy water trail down my neck and instantly the voices react.

Scratch it off.

My hand is already on my throat before I realize what I’m doing. Frustrated, I force my hand to my side.

I’m not going to hurt myself.

Jesus.

I have to stay sane.

Quickly, I find Calla curled up on her normal bench, staring into the distance. I cover the ground between us in twelve long strides.

“Cal? You ready?”

She stares at me like I’m a stranger, before realization filters across her face and she smiles.

“You ok?”

Calla’s voice wraps around me like a blanket.

She keeps me sane.

It’s always been that way, maybe even in the womb, for all I know.

Don’t let her know Don’t let her know Don’t let her know.

Don’t let her know.

I smile, a perfectly normal grin.

“Perfectus.” Perfect. “You ready?”

“Yep.”

We walk out of the hospital, into the afternoon sunlight and pile into the car. I start the engine and steer the car from the parking lot with shaking hands.

Act normal

Calla turns to me, her green eyes joined to mine. “You wanna talk about anything?”

I shake my head. “Do I ever?”

She smiles. “No. But know that you can. If you want to.”

“I know.” And I do.