Sweet Liar (Candy #2)
Debra Doxer
When I turned eighteen, I decided to make my own luck since the fates had so thoroughly abandoned me. I bought myself a bus ticket, walked out of my aunt’s house where I’d been living for the past six years, and walked back into my father’s home. My home. The one I hadn’t lived in since my mother died.
My expectations were realistic. I knew there’d be no embraces or gushing words of welcome when I arrived on the doorstep. My father was a quiet man, stoic and guarded, and I accepted that. I didn’t need those things to reassure me I was cared for, or so I thought until I met Jonah.
He showed me how much I could feel if I would only let myself. When we met, I was still hurting from the betrayal of my ex. I wanted no part of a relationship. But somehow I got one anyway because Jonah wasn’t like other boys. He didn’t employ the usual cheesiness, calling me beautiful and kissing up. That didn’t come until later.
In the beginning, we were like a couple of medieval warriors wearing suits of armor to protect our vulnerable fleshy parts from the swords of our enemies. Except I shed my armor before I knew Jonah was my enemy, and then it was too late because he was keeping a secret.
It was a whopper of a deception, one that changed everything. He wasn’t a high school boy; his name wasn’t even Jonah. He’d been lying, and he did it to get to my father.
What hurt most was that Jonah had made a fool of me. That suspicious voice inside my head telling me not to trust him, the one I ignored because I thought getting burned in the past had made me paranoid? Well, it turned out to be right.
It wasn’t only that internal voice that warned me. My father tried too, but I wouldn’t listen. I trusted the wrong person, and my life unraveled. But in a strange twist, it brought my father and me closer together. We formed a new understanding, and I learned the hard way that he was the only person I could trust. When he decided to flee and asked me to go with him, it took me all of one second to decide, even though running meant I’d never see Jonah again. But I didn’t want to see him again; it would hurt too much.
While my father and I slept that last night, with the intention of leaving the next morning and never returning, someone else had other plans for us. It started with the sound of the house alarm startling me awake. I sprang out of bed only to hear my father in the hallway, shouting at me to stay inside my room.
I was never good at following orders.
Now I stood with my fingers wrapped around cold, deadly metal. In front of me was the huge man who knocked me down as he ran away after breaking into our house weeks before, and he had his hands around my father’s throat. He was choking him, and the only means I had to stop him was gripped tightly in my hands.
When Jonah appeared in the doorway, I hardly registered his presence, out of place as it was. His showing up at my house in the middle of the night made no sense. But it did make terrible sense, and I should have put it together sooner.
My finger was already squeezing the trigger when he called to me over the blaring of the alarm, shouting that the man strangling my father was his father. Jonah’s father. But it was too late, and it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. I had to stop him no matter who he was.
The gun went off with a bone-jarring recoil, and seconds later Jonah plowed into me, sending us both crashing to the floor. His weight knocked the gun from my hands and the air from my lungs before my head smacked into the hardwood.
I struggled to draw in a breath and the room blurred, darkening at the edges. As I tried to push myself up, a shadow moved in my vision. Jonah rushed to his father, who knelt on the floor, bent over and grasping his side. Beyond him was my own father, coughing raggedly, slumped on the floor.
When I tried to sit up again, the room tilted and dimmed, and that was the last thing I remembered before everything went dark.
***
It started out as a beautiful dream. One I didn’t want to wake up from.
I was sitting in the grass, surrounded by tall green blades that stretched almost to my shoulders. Above me, the sky was clear, not a single cloud marring the endless expanse of blue. As a warm breeze whispered through my hair and tickled my skin, my gaze followed the uneven path of an orange butterfly fluttering over the field. It was a monarch butterfly, just like the one Jonah and I saw at The Butterfly Place.
It moved toward me, crisscrossing the distance, growing larger with each flutter of its black-tipped wings, but when it was within arm’s length from me, it halted, hovering in place before heading back the way it came.
It went on this way for a while, my anticipation building each time the butterfly came closer and waning with its retreat, almost as if it were teasing me. I was tempted to stand and coax the delicate creature onto my finger, but I didn’t want to scare it off. So I remained where I was, watching it flutter aimlessly, enjoying the beauty of my silent companion.
When the sun dipped lower, the butterfly’s wings flapped faster and it turned, headed toward the woods at the edge of the field. I continued to watch, although I knew I had somewhere to be, but couldn’t remember where and felt no urgency to get there.
The butterfly grew smaller as it moved away from me, and finally I stood to stretch out the tightness in my limbs. My gaze continued to follow the butterfly as it came to the end of the field where it stopped, fluttering in small circles as if indecisive about entering the dark woods.