Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 79892 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79892 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
He smiled to himself, then slipped out of bed to change.
* * *
Fox did not like this newfound restless energy.
He preferred his thoughts calm. Quiet. Even if it came at the cost of a certain emotional deadness, at the very least it let him maintain his focus and a certain peace of mind.
Not this...this...
Constant agitation that had him feeling ready to snap at any moment, on a hair trigger, constantly needing to be moving and not even sure why save for that his body did not seem to want to hold still. He would find himself tapping pins, jittering his foot against his knee when he crossed his legs, restlessly drumming his fingers, standing from his chair and then sitting down again.
Or, as he was now, prowling the school grounds, hoping that a walk beneath the trees and the open moonlight would at least settle his thoughts.
And get them off Summer damned Hemlock.
That young man was starting to border on an intrusive thought.
With every moment Fox’s mind wasn’t on classwork, on keeping those unruly monsters in line, on planning the next week’s lessons and assignments...
It somehow drifted back to Summer.
And sometimes Fox found himself simply touching his lips, when they always seemed tender and sensitive lately with the pressure of daily kisses stolen between classes, against desks, against the wall in his office, in the secret crevice of a hallway with students passing by utterly oblivious beyond.
With staff meetings and so many other things to worry about, it always seemed every kiss was just a half-second’s stolen moment, over too soon when one thing or another always interrupted.
And it was rather quite annoying Fox that each time a student or a phone call or an authoritative rap on the office door cut them off...
Fox found himself left unsatisfied, and craving more.
He let his drifting steps take him through the overgrowth around Whitemist Lake, the little burrs growing among the grass and flowers catching on his slacks as if trying to drag him back from the edge, the scent of the night clear and damp and at least settling his agitation somewhat, even if it couldn’t calm his thoughts.
His reflection was a quiet murky thing in the depths, and he could only look at it for a moment before he had to turn away.
It made him think too much of drowning; of ghosts sinking away into the dark and the deep, like Isabella of the legend.
Like Michiko, dying alone and trapped in her vehicle, swallowed into the darkness of night, into the blackness of the river, deep down where the moon couldn’t even reach her to light her way.
He hadn’t even been there.
Not to save her, and not to die with her.
He’d failed her.
How, he couldn’t quantify. If he stepped out of himself objectively, he knew he wasn’t being even remotely rational.
But then feelings weren’t rational.
Grief wasn’t rational.
And neither was the struggling, floundering sense of drowning in his own attempts to find himself, when he realized he was ready to stop grieving but didn’t know how.
He tilted his head back, let the wind kiss his cheeks, looked up at the quiet sallow curve of a dim moon shrouded by clouds.
“Were you there with her, that night?” he whispered. “Can you tell me someone was with her, even when I wasn’t?”
The moon didn’t answer.
The moon would never answer, because it was only Fox projecting shallow, selfish needs to imagine that some quiet silver hand had reached down from the heavens and eased Michiko’s pain in those last silent, airless moments.
No matter how many times he told himself that, though...
It still comforted him in small, aching ways.
Maybe he hoped, one day, when he died a day or a thousand days or fifty years from now...
There would be someone to hold his hand, too.
Someone more tangible than fingers of pale moonlight.
“Is this really what I want?” he asked. “To pull myself so far out of reach that one day I’ll only know this empty coldness...where no one can take my hand at all?”
Just as the moon had not answered for Michiko...
It did not answer for him.
He’d known it wouldn’t.
But he smiled, nonetheless.
And bent to pluck a single little daisy from among the rioting wildflowers, before tossing it out onto the water and watching it sink.
Maybe he wasn’t quite ready to wish to Isabella for what he truly wanted, when he couldn’t define that just yet himself.
But one small offering, perhaps.
Just that he wouldn’t ruin whatever this strange bright feeling was, that he had every time Summer was near.
He turned away from the lake, heading up toward the main school building again—but paused as bright rectangles of light caught his attention, spilling across the grass from the swimming annex’s high, narrow rows of windows.
Fox frowned, knitting his brows together.
No one should be in there at this time of night.