The Heart's Ashes
Page 114

She rolled her cheek into his touch, closing her eyes as he swept her hair from her shoulder and kissed her alabaster skin. “Maybe I should sleep more often, so I can be with you,” she said.
“I’d like that.”
The girl rolled over then, looking up as she did, but when our eyes met, freezing me in place, she just smiled, like I was a ghost; a spectator who had no bearing on life. The boy didn’t notice me at all, or if he did, made no attempt to let me know.
“What should we do today, Jase?”
“How ‘bout that flight I promised you,” he said, cradling her head in the crook of his elbow, looking down so lovingly at her smile.
“Maybe. But, for now, I just want to lay here.”
“Your wish, Ara-Rose, is my command.”
With the deep breath she drew, her hands clasped on her belly, she exuded happiness; the joy of summer, the easiness of love, melting the world around her in soft, white light. “Jason?”
“Yes, sweet girl?”
“When are we going to tell him?”
“Soon.” He nodded to himself, contemplative. “I have everything planned for our departure.”
She smiled sweetly and rolled onto her belly again, winding her thin finger around a strand of grass. “It’s going to kill him, you know.”
“I know.” Jason rolled onto his belly, too, elbows propped under his chest. “And I know you love him.”
“I love you more,” she said, turning her head to smile at him; his face split into the biggest, cheesiest grin. “It’ll hurt though. I’ll miss him.”
“I could make you forget.” He traced a line over her cheek; she closed her eyes, revelling in his touch.
Inside, I felt the sun go down, felt the world around me change and shift, growing colder, but the day stayed bright, despite me usually being in control of this place. This scene didn’t belong to me, it had already happened, and I was just watching from a place neither time nor want could change a thing. The girl, me, bobbed her head. “Can you make it go away for forever?”
Jason’s voice softened to beyond caring, “If that’s what you want.”
“How? You can’t just erase a memory permanently. How do you do that?”
“Do you remember the dream you had, when I changed your hair colour? How, when you woke up—” He smoothed his fingers over her hair and a vibrant blonde trailed behind them. “Look in the mirror.”
The roof looked grey under the cloud of dawn. I pressed my palms beside my legs, listening to the restful breathing of David, sound asleep beside me, the warmth of my dream still tingling in my cheeks.
My hair!
Touching the ends, I ran to my mirror, my heart pounding as I looked at my face; pale and soft, my eyes sparkling a brighter blue against the golden, honey colour of my hair. “Blonde?”
“What’s blonde?” David sat up and looked at me.
“My hair.” I looked back at the mirror. “Does it look lighter to you?”
David’s sweet scent filled my breath before I felt his arms on my waist. “Still the same beautiful chocolate it’s always been.”
“I had a dream,” I said with wide eyes. “Golden hair.”
“Perhaps it’s your subconscious mind adjusting to the idea that you’ll stay the same forever,” he said, his cheeky grin warming the room.
“Very analytical, David.”
He reached around my shoulder and brushed his fingers through the length of my blonde hair, studying it carefully. “It’s pretty. You’re not thinking of changing the colour, are you?”
Looking at him in the mirror, standing behind me with a calm smile across his lips, it felt as though he was in a different world—somewhere beyond the looking glass, a place I couldn’t go. What he could see; the face, the hair, the frame of this girl he loved, was something so different to the gold-haired traitor I stared at.
“No,” I said, maybe a little too late. “I’m not thinking of changing it.”
“Come on.” David wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “Come back to bed.”
Through the dark room, I walked beside him, touching the ends of my blonde hair, willing it back to brown. “David?”
“Yeah,” he said, letting his head fall softly on the pillow beside me.
“I—” I wanted to say I dreamed of him. I dreamed I loved him, planned to leave you. But the words stuck down my throat. “Are you sure my hair’s not blonde?”
He swept his long fingertips across my scalp, his cool touch tingling throughout my entire body; my eyes fluttered and closed involuntarily. “I’m sure. Must’ve been some dream, huh?”
I nodded, keeping my eyes closed, my hand tucked under my cheek. A dream it was. That’s all it was.
My mind wanted to go down the path of memory, wondering if things happened and I couldn’t remember them, but my heart belongs to David. There’s no way I’d betray him that way. The very idea made me insanely mad, so mad that, when the sunlight touched David’s hair, lighting his ear, his cheek, then his sleeping smile, I was still awake, afraid to let myself drift away again.
An old man hobbled from my bedroom, closing the door behind him.
“David?” I rested my book on the coffee table.
“Yes, dear.” He smiled, his weathered, rubbery skin crinkling around his dimple.
“What? What happened?” Not sure whether to laugh or frown, I jumped up and ran a cautious hand over his leathery cheek.
“I’m going to close an account at the bank today—one I opened a long time ago.”
“Why do you have to be old?”
“Because, my love—” his youthful teeth showed with his smile, his sparkling emerald eyes unchanged by age, despite sagging eyelids and grey brows, “—when I placed my possessions in the safe deposit, I looked only twenty, and that was a good fifty or more years ago.”
“How do you look so real?”
“Well, when you’ve been changing your identity for a hundred years, you learn a few tricks.”
“But, I can’t see any joins—even the baldness looks real.” His cheek, as I tugged it, felt like a warm, deflated balloon.
David laughed softly, pulling my hand away. “Well, I wouldn’t be able to convince a bank manager that I’m an eighty-year-old man if I looked fake, would I?”