Mirror of My Soul by Joey Hill (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

159

Joey W. Hill

A moment later, they heard the wind bring a snippet of the conversation. Violet’s quick joyous laughter, tinged with a sob. Mac rose, taking her hands, leaning down to meet her mouth in a sweet, chaste kiss. A kiss that became less chaste very quickly.

“Yes,” Tyler said. “I think so.”

Marguerite rose, leaving the warmth of Tyler’s lap to watch the couple. They

resumed walking, only now they were like one person, Mac’s arm around her

shoulders, both of Violet’s arms around him as they moved through the night.

Together. Now not just a safeguard for each other, but for the life they’d created.

When Tyler’s arms slid around her from behind, she pushed away, but of course he caught her hand, pulled her back, this time holding her so she couldn’t get away. “Let me go,” she said.

“Do you always want to live with this death grip on the past? It doesn’t define who you are.”

“Hypocrite,” she said, bitterness burning her lungs. “When you see blood instead of wet earth between my toes, do you think it didn’t define who you are now?”

He threaded his hands through her hair, which he’d taken down with his fingers when they sat with the others having after-dinner drinks. Teasing, flirting, gentle romance that seemed diametrically opposite to this moment of pain.

“You can honor what your past has made you without enshrining it, worshipping

at its feet, dedicating yourself to it for life like a monastic taking vows to serve a cruel god. What do you want, Marguerite?”

He asked it in a voice that sounded to her as relentless as time and power. Not the power of man, but the power of the wind, the sun’s heat, the determination of flowers to push up through the earth every year and prove that beauty could rise from the rich earth of the grave. The power of water, cycling through tide after tide, like the power rising in her now. For dinner she’d changed into a strapless top that hugged her hips and a soft gauze skirt that floated around her calves. His hands moved to her shoulders, her neck, his warm strength touching her bare skin.

“What do you want?” She tossed it back at him. “Children, I’m sure. I can’t give you those. I can’t give you anything, be anything remotely close to normal for you.”

“What do you want, Marguerite?” He tipped her chin up.

“Don’t touch me. I don’t want to be touched right now.”

That was no more true than for a figurine of porcelain, too thin to be handled. She did want to be touched, she was just deeply terrified, deep in a part of her that knew only fear, that his touch would break her into pieces, an explosion of shards small and thin as confetti, lost to the wind as if she’d never been.

“Tell me what you want.” His mouth whispered it, those lips close to hers. Her own parted, letting out a breath that was a near sob.

160

Mirror of My Soul

“I want to be whole. Feel it just once more.” She raised her palms before her face. “I remember lying there with David beneath me, feeling his heart stop beating. I tried to cup his head in my hands and it was wet…so soft. Softer than a baby’s skull.

“And there were these people around. Staring at us. But I felt so alone, because David was gone. His heart was no longer my heart, his voice in my head was gone. And they didn’t know me, didn’t know us. And I wondered, ‘Will anyone ever share my soul again? Get inside me and know my thoughts?’ No. Surely not. And yet, I didn’t die. That’s the most intolerable cruelty, that you can realize that truth and not die. It seems a revelation like that should simply pluck your soul right out of you, cast it into the earth. And I think it did. I am a vampire. Sitting in the shadows, sucking in everyone else’s light and life to feed my own, but it’s false, because there’s only darkness within me.”

When Tyler took her hands from her face, he was alarmed to feel her cold skin had gotten even colder.

“I don’t believe that. Sshhh…” He soothed her, touching his lips to the juncture of her neck with her shoulder.

His hair brushed her jawline and she tilted her head despite the scream of

resistance in her head. Easing one arm around her back, he brought her a step closer.

Turned her to face him. “Let me in,” he said softly. “And I’ll light a candle.”

He didn’t threaten a roaring blaze, as if he knew a being that had lived in darkness as long as her soul would be agonized by bright light. She raised her hands to touch his back, closed her fingers into handfuls of his shirt.

Keeping his eyes on hers the whole time, Tyler leaned in and pressed his mouth over hers. Over her bottom lip only. A brush of that fullness, tasting the flavor of a moist lip gloss, finding the source of the scent of raspberry he’d occasionally caught when she spoke tonight at dinner.

He moved his kiss to the upper lip, nibbled there, nuzzled her cheek with his nose.

Sliding both arms around her shoulders, he wrapped them across her back so she was folded in toward him, her elbows bending to maintain her grip on his back. He took her into a deeper kiss, one where both of her soft lips were covered by his mouth.

Caressed her tongue with his own. When she made a curious noise, somewhere beyond a whimper into the realm of a sigh, he kept exploring her mouth with his own,

cognizant that her body was rigid against his, but he realized it wasn’t conscious resistance. She had a death grip on his shirt. She was simply, totally petrified, rendered to catatonia by something as simple as a kiss.

Following instincts that had been honed from nearly twenty years of enjoying,

mentoring and