Dream of Me

As I walked out of the apartment, I felt myself collapse inwardly. Tears sprang to my eyes and a hand pressed against my temple. My eyes were red, my boyfriend was a Spade, and we were going to be charged with some medieval form of Solitary Confinement. This was just the most perfect weekend I’ve ever had.

By the time I was a couple blocks past his building, the tears finally ceased to shed and I could finally clear my eyes into perfection. Of course, as I was clearing my eyes I had to stumble into someone on the sidewalk. “Excuse me.”

“Yeah, watch that step, would ’ya?” The man I bumped into squabbled in a light tone as he flicked his cigarette ashes to the ground.

I stopped walking and looked at him fully. He was tall, lanky, but muscle was under the skin if he needed it. He had black hair and grey eyes and a cigarette in between his index and middle finger. There was something about him that made me feel unsafe by the way that he stared at me with a smug little smile coating his lips as he blew smoke out slowly. “Right.”

Some sort of Noah instinct told me to walk on, keep your head forward and just walk home. It was only about a forty-five minute walk anyway. “Hey, do I know you from somewhere?”

I turned back to the sound of the man’s voice, and shook my head with a twinge of confusion. “Um, no. I don’t think so.”

“I’m Josh, by the way.” He called once more as I turned and walked away from him, putting another two feet of distance between us.

Turning my cheek slightly, I called over my shoulder, “Yeah, that’s nice. Not interested, dude, I’ve got a boyfriend.”

“Do you have a boyfriend or a soul mate?” Josh called further and I could feel a smirk to his words.

Twirling around quickly while my brows furrowed behind my sunglasses, I looked at this Josh person and crossed my arms over my chest. “What did you just say?”

Releasing a very intimidating laugh, Josh’s hand moved through his hair careful of his cigarette. He nodded as he walked slowly towards me, the cigarette positioned between his lips. “Mhm,” he sucked in the carcinogens, and then spoke while he blew the smoke out, “I know your sexy lil’ boy toy. Yeah, I was just about to pop over for a visit. That is where you’re going, right?”

I opened my mouth but I didn’t know if I should lie or tell the truth to this stranger. He raised an eyebrow toward me as he moved a couple feet forward. “You’re not going there, are you? Then where are you going, little Lidia?”

My brows furrowed even more together, if that was possible. I guess its worldly known to the Spade race of the story between the two “traitors”. I looked both ways while this smoking Spade came toward me. “How… how do you know about…?”

He chuckled as he flicked the butt into the street and stopped a couple feet short of being toe-to-toe. “Oh please, darling, who doesn’t know? Now, that’s the right question to ask. You’re the new Cristo and Lidia. The hottest scandal in our little realm. Congratz.”

Without any warning, Josh lunged forward and grabbed my arm in a vise grip, squeezing my arm between his fingers with a wicked little smile dominating his features. “I wonder if there’s a reward for turning them in.”

A certain slick of fear crept through my bones and into my veins. I looked down at his hand clenched around my arm and then back up to his face as it contorted in an unidentifiable emotion. “H-How do you know that Noah will follow after me?”

Josh blew a raspberry and rolled his eyes, laughter creeping through that twisted face and slipped into his eyes. “Yeah right, the noble, righteous, gallant Noah? What else would he be doing besides following you around?”

“You underestimate him.”

“Perhaps it is you who underestimates him! He is at your beck and call, he is your puppet, whether you believe me or not. Even then, you know I’m right.” Slowly his other hand lifted to the level of my eyes and snatched the sunglasses from my face.

Somehow, in the second he pulled the aviators from my face, my eyes snapped shut. I kept them closed as I waited for him to replace my sunglasses. He didn’t. “What are you trying to hide behind those lids, little Lidia?”

“Let go of her.” A growl sounded from in front of me.

Without thinking at this point, my eyes snapped open to the sound of a very livid Noah. Josh stared at my eyes and raised an eyebrow, with that smirk still against his lips. “Now, those can’t be natural, right,” Josh’s head turned to the side to catch glimpse of Noah’s pissed off glare, “Noah? Or, do you mind if I call you Cristo?”

Noah made a face at Josh, mocking him within that glare that still made my body freeze with fear. “How clever, are all of the townspeople chanting that, or is it just you and Anna?”

He raised an eyebrow and dragged me with him as he moved closer to Noah. I tried to fight against his grip, but that doesn’t work when you know you’re not strong. “What did you say? Anna? When was she here, you shark!”

A grumble of anger left Noah’s throat as he shot forward, his hand out in a loose fist. “Don’t accuse me, Taylor! She showed up while I was resting with my Dreamer!”

Josh pushed me to the side and I stumbled furthermore into the brick of a different wall as he walked towards Noah, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt. “Don’t talk about her like that! She loves me, I love her, and Noah doesn’t play into our life!”

“How sure of that are you?” Noah’s voice thickened and came out rough and scratchy. That voice made my heart leap, but I had to contain it at this moment.

Instead of dreaming about your boyfriend’s voice like that, maybe you should focus on the fact that your boyfriend and some guy were arguing over another girl, another girl who wasn’t you. Not that it was supposed to sound, well, self-centered, but because they were talking about being cheating and things along those lines. I pressed my hand to my head as they shot back and forth, their faces getting closer to each other, rage overtaking their emotions and movements as Noah threw Josh’s hands off him and latched his own onto Josh’s shirt, reeling him in so fast that the movement blurred in my vision.

“She threw her arms around me, Josh. She tightened them up and held me cozy into her. What does that say about your little bride?” Noah screamed as his eyes contrasted against the new red filling his face, and the blood vessels in his eyes tightening and throbbing. “She’s confessed her feelings to me, and none of them involved you, Josh!”

“She’s going through a tough time, I just can’t help her!” Josh screamed as gripped Noah’s shirt and took one quick, strong step and bashed him into the wall.

Noah’s face changed in a way that made me cringe away from him, turn my eyes away from his actions. “And what the Hell are you doing laying a single look on my Dreamer?”

There was a slow chuckle coming from somewhere in Josh’s throat, a shrug pulling against his shoulders. “How was I supposed to know?”

“Oh, you knew damn well!”

A shrug pulled lazily at Josh’s shoulders, that same deceiving smirk sat comfortably against his lips. “Yeah, well, you did yourself good on that one, good lil’ Cristo.”

“Stop calling me that, you dirty shark!” Noah yelled a rough threat, his body twisting and jerking around until he had smashed Josh’s back into the rugged red brick.

I found myself looking away again while Josh laughed breathlessly. “Since you’re going away for a bit, you don’t mind me taking care of her, right?”

Something inside me cracked, and I knew it was the part of me that was tied to Noah that was searing and cracking with anger. His hand pulled back and flew into Josh’s nose. I found that I was connected to Noah again, just like I had been last night. Something was connecting me to his feelings. Something was allowing him to connect us in a two-way tie, making my wish come true. For the moments when he was completely overwhelmed with one certain emotion, I finally got to see through his eyes.

I regretted wishing for this. I didn’t want to feel his roaring anger, his chilling sadness, his blazing rage, none of it was good to me, good in my body. His sadness filled me with ice in the veins and made my stomach gravitate to the floor and his anger made my blood boil and my stomach churn.
Slowly, I sunk down to my knees and cautiously reached out for the aviators before slipping them on over my eyes. They were still twisting each other to slam into the wall and more grunts and growls and fists hitting points on the body sounded through the silent area. I couldn’t take this. I couldn’t watch him bash another person like I had last night. I didn’t have it in me to watch him get hit or listen for his grunt.

There was something in me that grew jealous, and I wasn’t really a jealous or envious person. Just the thought of this girl having her arms around Noah, the mere possibility that her skin touched against his, it had my blood bubbling and my stomach fluttering. I knew that worrying about some random girl that talked to Noah was at the very bottom of my list of worries. But I just couldn’t stop worrying about it, I couldn’t stop picturing female arms wound around his neck, the same way I do.

Closing my eyes, I thought about the front of my worries, and that was what I was about to face in less than ten minutes. Gabe. How could I face him? He jumps for the jugular whenever I do something slightly wrong, what’s to stop him from tearing me and the rest of our apartment apart when I walk in through the door? What am I supposed to say about my eyes, as well? What am I supposed to say when he asks me why I wasn’t at Jules’s apartment last night, where I was supposed to be? What was I going to say to Jules, and what was she going to think when we didn’t spend Spring Break together?

Finally, my apartment came into view, and it was somewhere very close to elven a.m. and I still didn’t know what to say to Gabe, nor did I even remotely have something clever to say to Jules. Even though I was much unprepared, I had to face my impending doom.

As I climbed the stairs to the apartment, I found myself frozen outside my door. I could just turn back and walk myself down and explain it all to Jules first, that would be so much easier, and she could help me come up with a lie to tell to Gabe.

“Angel!”

A voice of possession and love filled behind me. My eyes closed tightly and I turned toward the voice, allowing the tingles and overwhelming feeling of distress fill my body as peace tried to corrode it. I opened my eyes up to a conflicted, rutted browed Noah, who was gasping for breath as he stood at the foot of the staircase from where I was.

I walked toward the staircase to just look down into his perfect face. Why couldn’t things be simple? Why couldn’t we just shake off all the bad things, like shaking your hair of the water droplets after a cleansing shower? I opened my mouth as my eyes filled with tears from behind the sunglasses. I didn’t want to think about that stupid woman putting her arms around his neck, holding herself dear and near to what was mine. I didn’t want to think about how we were going to be strung to wooden posts and I didn’t want to feel his agony of watching me in mine. I pressed my hands to my cheeks and let my head fall forward. I didn’t want to face Gabe, I didn’t want to think about Nolan, or about Felix Hartley, or about school tomorrow. I just wanted to rewind everything back to when Noah had me wrapped in his arms back on the balcony, when he whispered three words for the first time to my skin breathlessly.

At the second the first tear splashed against the ground, Noah was tripping over his steps as he bound his arms around me in an unbreakable force, but it was a force I didn’t want to break – ever. As my face was buried into his neck, I wound my arms around his neck and clung to his scent.
Turning his head toward me, his lips tickled against my ear in a soft, breathy whisper. “You are what matters to me, Angel. Not her, not Anna. I want you to know that. I should have said something, I know, but...” His voice trailed off.

Something in the way he had desperation in his voice did I realize what was happening, what he was saying to me. He was apologizing for the fight that broke out today between him and Josh. I was angry about it, and I felt I had a right to be. So did that bubbling in my veins and that terrible floating feeling inflating my stomach.

It was a moment like right now that I wanted to whisper those three sacred words back to him. I wanted to finally whisper that I loved him and that he was all I could understand. I wanted to finally share this, because if I ever said that I loved him, I never really meant it until this moment, right now.

“Noah,” I whispered slowly, taking a deep, encouraging breath.

“Angel Esperenza Reed, where the Hell have you been?” Gabe ranted the moment he opened the door. He stopped mid-breath and took in the desperation of the embrace that we shared. He stared at the lack of spaces between our bodies, the way my head was tucked protectively into his neck, the way his head turned toward me to whisper in my ear. He took it all in, and the look of anger and maddening rage filled up every feature.

“Oh. Who’s this?”

I pulled away from Noah, who began to grip my shirt as a shock of protection shot through his veins, like a lethal injection. I turned my head toward those blue eyes and pleaded with my covered ones to not make this any harder for the both of us than it already was. He seemed to read into my hidden plea as his fingers unclenched themselves almost begrudgingly and fell in a strenuous movement back to his sides.

I cleared my throat and smiled as calmly and normally as the little sister would have just yesterday. The problem with playing the part of the little sister that I was yesterday, was the fact that I didn’t have a clue as to who that person was anymore. I’d been through an emotional rollercoaster and it had been a little over twelve hours since I last was that person. “Oops. Hi, Gabe, this is Noah. He’s a boy I met at the par – at my friend’s house last night.”

“At the what, Angel,” Gabe raised his eyebrows for a moment while his lips pulled back over his teeth. “At the – say it with me – par… tee. Party.”

I turned my head toward Noah for some sort of help, or moral support, or bodyguard, if need be. But, he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking past me. To Gabe. All I could manage to think in this moment was that he didn’t pick a fight because of the way Gabe talked to me. Gabe always talked to me like this, and for Noah to step in and tell him no, that our broken relationship was wrong and hurting me, well that wasn’t his place. I turned my head back to Gabe and smiled tightly.

“You caught me. It’s not like it’s a secret or anything, you knew that’s where I was going. And look, I even followed your instructions. I didn’t come home drunk.”

Gabe gritted his teeth and snatched his hand out to wrap around my upper arm, tugging me from beside Noah to the front of our door before Noah wrapped his hand around Gabe’s wrist in a vise grip. “Remove your hand, sir.”

My brother’s eyes rested on me for a moment and then narrowed in on Noah’s bright, deep blue eyes and used his other hand to grip around Noah’s wrist. “This is my sister. Don’t tell me how to manage her.”

“She is my D –” Noah stopped short as he clenched his teeth in unnerving anger. All he could process was the hand that wrapped around my arm, tugging me against my will away from him. All he could see was my protest in the way that Gabe pulled me from the scene. All he wanted was to stop the way my brother was treating me in front of him.

“She’s your what?” Gabe’s shuddering yell flew throughout the open hallways, filling up every space that every crevice produced, bouncing from wall to flooring, and providing shudders down the spine of my back.

“My girlfriend,” Noah amended as he looked straight into my eyes and sent a silent apology for the way he was acting. Even with that, he still didn’t make any attempt to remove his hand from around Gabe’s wrist, not until he let me go. Which was highly unlikely, even though he wasn’t abusive, he was hostile.

“Gabe, stop it!” I quickly butted between them. Using my voice to cut the tension in half, pull my brother’s attention back onto me, my eyes flicked to Noah for the entirety. “Look, we’ve been seeing each other for a couple of y – weeks now and I wanted to wait until I was serious about him before I brought him home.”

“Angel, you didn’t come home with Jules! You stayed at this boy’s house, doing God-knows-what with him all night! How am I supposed to take this? I am responsible for you!” I could see the glare fill in over Noah’s face at the last sentence as he bit his tongue to keep from saying something foul. “What am I supposed to do with you? You say you’re going to go out, you go get drunk. You say you’re going to spend your night at Jules. You spend a most romantic evening with your boyfriend! You’re… you’re grounded.”

“Grounded?” I shrieked back into his face, my eyebrows shooting up high on my forehead as I ripped my arm from his livid grip. Oh, he didn’t know livid like the kind I was feeling. “Grounded from what, exactly?”

Gabe turned his eyes toward Noah, and that was explanation enough. I waited until my brother’s eyes met mine once more before I shook my head and grabbed Noah’s hand. “You can’t ground me. I can’t be grounded. Spring Break is in two days, Gabe. You can’t actually ground me!”

The push-over inside him won as he rubbed the back of his neck slowly and his eyes closed for a short moment. “Then you’re grounded until Friday. Okay? I didn’t take away your whole break.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Noah squeezed my hand tightly for a moment, an indication to just purse my lip, pull on my best pout, and nod in tortured agreement. I did as I was told.

Gabe made a movement with his hand to tell me to go and have my last moment with my boyfriend, and get whatever kind of junk out of our systems to last us five days. Noah took my hand and pulled me down the stairs slowly, taking each step into consideration before we finally heard the door close overhead. Noah led me to the space under the stairs, just across from the custodian’s closet – it was confined, quiet, and ours for the moment.

He pulled me in for a kiss and I gladly opened up for him, my eyes closing as I twined my fingers through his hair to grip him closer. I had never felt so greedy before in my life, and something told me that the change of my eyes was a much bigger change than I thought it actually was. His deepened as he released a shallow grunt from my hand tugging him closer. Spinning me around, he slammed my back into the wall as gently as he could in the moment and pressed his hand to the back of my head as his lips bruised into mine. I craved for more. My fingers gripped his shirt front as I reeled him in closer. His other free hand pressed to my cheek as he angled my face up to apply that much more pressure to my lips, deepening the kiss to new levels.

Noah’s body covered mine and buried it into the wall as he closed his lips from their open embrace and pressed his lips over mine once more gently before breaking into a giddy smile. “Don’t you just love the new enhanced feelings that come along with bonding?”

I nodded helplessly as I turned my eyes from their warm embrace inside of his to staring at his newly plumped lips with a stretched crave to the way they looked slick and wet, waiting for mine to jump back in intensely. My eyes pulled back up to his eyes as he gently rubbed his lips against mine for half a moment, whispering in a barely audible voice. “I love you, Angel.”

A trembled breath left my lips after hearing his voice whisper those beautiful words for my ears to recognize and fantasize about hearing them again after they were said. I opened my mouth to say them back, finally, for him to hear and understand, and know the kind of joy and bliss I felt from hearing him say them to me.

“Angel, babe, where have you been?” Jules’s high-pitched voice filled the stagnant air in a gust of annoyance. When was I finally going to be able to speak these words? I didn’t want to say them in a dream, because that’s where I felt they were meaningless, but I felt like it was being bottled up deep in my chest and the ache of wanting to say them was almost too painful to understand. “Who’s that? What happened to Zak?”