Page 57 of Dominion

Heavy wasthe weight of the world when you tried to carry it all on your shoulders. And looking at Ash as we drove away from the airport after we came back from New York, I knew that he blamed himself for everything bad that had happened. I also knew that he blamed himself for not seeing the truth earlier, but there was no use in thinking about the past and the things we couldn’t change.

I wished I could show him that it didn’t matter. None of our pasts mattered because all we had was now. We couldn’t change what happened to either one of us, but we could influence the future. The past was in the past, and no matter how many times I wished I was somebody else, born in some other city, I was grateful that it was me going through all these things and not some other poor girl that maybe wouldn’t have been as strong as I was.

We’d been driving for at least thirty minutes now and only then did I realize that we weren’t heading toward the safe house. The scenery changed from the flat terrain and it took me a moment to notice that we were climbing up the mountain, going in an unknown direction.

Fear seized my body, my palms becoming sweaty, as I looked at the driver who’d also taken us to the airport earlier in the day. “Where are we going?” I asked, my voice shaky, filled with uncertainty. “This isn’t the way home.”

“No, it isn’t,” Dylan answered. I felt his gaze on the side of my face, and I slowly turned my head, confused beyond measure.

“What do you mean?”

“I spoke with Casimir earlier,” he continued. “I think that it would be a good thing for the three of us to get out of that house for a couple of days and just, I don’t know, chill.”

“Chill?” Ash finally spoke. His first word since we left New York. “We have?—”

“Things to do.” Dylan huffed. “I know, Ash. I know we have things to do, and a battle to fight, and people to destroy—I know. But I also know that staying cooped up in that house won’t do us any good. I know that I’ve been going crazy only thinking about Judah and whatever the fuck he’s been doing.” He had a point there. “I also know that we haven’t had the chance to actually be just us.”

I fucking liked the sound of that.

The last couple of months were, for a lack of better words, fucking insane. It was as if the Universe decided to just throw everything bad at us and let us deal with it. We didn’t get a chance to sit down and talk about us, about the way any of us felt.

Between finding out about the Order and getting the hell out of Winworth, I had forgotten what it was like to just be static, and I missed it. I missed being a teenager. I missed the days when I didn’t have to worry about Judah or some faceless people who were haunting me.

I missed just living and dreaming of a better life.

“He does have a point.” I grinned, trying to lighten the mood. Ash’s face darkened, the storm in his eyes threatening toburst out, and I didn’t want them to argue about something this irrelevant.

“It’s only going to be three days, Ash,” Dylan said, leaning forward to have a better look at the man in question.

I was squished between the two of them, barely able to move, and sort of grateful that they weren’t sitting next to each other.

Ash was a ticking time bomb and Dylan was obviously trying.

Trying to fix things.

Trying to be present.

“Please,” Dylan murmured. “I just… I just want us to have a decent chance at making this work. If you want to, we can turn around and?—”

“No,” Ash breathed out, his entire body relaxing almost immediately. “I’m sorry. I’m just… I guess I’m forgetting that we can’t always just be tense. I forgot what it was like to relax.”

Because he never had it.

There were so many things the three of us had to learn about each other, but we had time. We had all the time in the world. Once this thing with Judah was over, I promised myself we would fucking disappear from this area.

I always wanted to live by the sea, to feel the sunshine on my face and not worry about the cold for at least a couple of years. I had no idea what Ash or Dylan had planned, or what was happening with Dylan’s studies, because none of us actually talked. Not one of us took the time to really get to know the other person.

I knew Dylan as my brother, as the person who calmed me whenever I needed it and the person who was there during the darkest nights. But there were things he’d been hiding. Things I wanted to know that couldn’t be discussed when he was pretending to be my brother.

The same went for Ash. I knew all the obvious facts, the things I needed to know in order to understand his reasoning,but he never told me his favorite color or his favorite song. As mundane as all of that sounded, especially given our current situation, I wanted to fucking know.

“Well, I mean, I could use a couple of days to just relax and not think about anything,” I mumbled.

You could cut the air with a knife from how tense it was inside the car, and as if he knew, the driver turned the volume of the radio up. The “Night We Met” by Lord Huron filled the air, enveloping me in its embrace. As I snuggled deeper between the two of them, my throat began to close and my eyes filled with tears.

Silence ensued and neither of them spoke a word as the soft voice of the singer started singing. I took one look at Ash, whose eyes were already plastered to me. His left hand snuck into my lap, taking my hand in his, enveloping his long fingers with mine and squeezing, speaking without words. Dylan followed suit, and I dropped my head to Dylan’s shoulder, closing my eyes just as the chorus began, swallowing the emotions that were threatening to burst out to the surface.

I didn’t want to break in front of them, but there were so many regrets I carried in my heart when it came to the way I’d behaved over the last couple of months. But I didn’t know better. I didn’t know that I could ask for help.

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