Page 17 of Raise Up, Heart
“Good,” Damon says. “There’s no time for that.”
“Why?” Cole asks grabbing Damon’s arm. “Are you going somewhere? Are you leaving me again?”
Somehow Cole knows that’s not coherent, but it’s all that matters right now. Damon has come to him, he’s crouched beside him, touching his hair, and looking at him with that focused intensity that only Damon ever had, and if he leaves now…if he goes away again. No time for what? Cole runs hot and cold at once. “You can’t leave me. I just got you back.”
“Shhh,” Damon says. “Cole…” He sighs. “Come on, let’s get you up.”
Cole lets Damon help him stand, and he stares at him. It’s a moonless night, but the headlights are more than enough to illuminate Damon’s eyes, green and vibrant, so alive, and Cole remembers staring into them as Damon had died, as he’d sobbed uselessly and begged Damon not to leave him.
Cole feels like he’s going to fall again, and Damon’s grasps his arm, steadying him.
“It’s really you?”
Damon nods, swallows, but says nothing.
“Where have you been?” Cole asks, the words finding a way out of his mouth, like thought bubbles in a comic, unplanned and unreal.
“No place I’d recommend visiting,” Damon says.
Cole’s heart feels stalled in his chest, and the weight is crushing. “Take me with you.” Cole leans into Damon’s hand as it comes up to touch his cheek. “Wherever you’re going,” Cole says. “I don’t care. Just take me with you.”
CHAPTER 4
Cole is quietas you drive his car out of the parking lot and point it away from town, toward the woods and the cabin that you woke up in six months ago, naked as the day is bright. The only thing Cole says, as you turn up the long, winding, nearly invisible dirt road to the cabin, is, “You were so close? All this time?”
“Some days, I was even closer,” you say.
He makes a wounded sound, and you wish that you could take the words back.
It has been six long months of reading Alex’s journals, coming to terms with the reality that you exist in a body that you carved for yourself out of someone else’s flesh, trying to make scientific sense of the incomprehensible, and keeping your eye on Cole.
Six months of a half-life that you would shuck if you could, like shucking yet another skin, but for Cole, and the connection that has torn your death asunder and brought you back here as a kind of monster. That’s what you believe on those days when your scientific mind can accept that any of this is true.
“Tell me about it,” Cole says. His trembling hands are around the coffee mug, the steam curling up to his mouth as he sips. “I want to know everything. How did this happen? Where have you been? What does this mean? Why didn’t you come to me?”
The questions spill from Cole’s lips so fast that you can’t answer one before another pops out. He’s calmer, though, and while his eyes are over-bright, his cheeks flushed, and, yeah, he’s still shaking like a leaf, he doesn’t seem on the verge of losing consciousness anymore; it’s an improvement. You feel moderately encouraged.
You want to sit next to him on the not-entirely-ratty sofa that you picked up at the North Maryville Goodwill for twenty-six dollars, but you don’t want to get used to his scent, his touch, his presence, because this is all still incredibly fresh for him, and there is still a lot of doubt in your mind that he can handle the actuality of your physical form. There are days when you can’t handle the truth of your existence, either.
You pull up a chair and sit down across from him, elbows on your knees and your hands pressed together. “One thing at a time. There’s a lot of ground to cover here.”
“Start at the beginning,” Cole says. His voice is trembling, and he’s having a hard time with his mug, the coffee sloshing a little over the sides.
You want to reach out and take it from him, but you let the coffee run down the sides and drip on the wood floor.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. There are a lot of things that, in the end, don’t matter. That’s something you always suspected; people invest a lot of emotion in all kinds of idiocy, and you always knew that it was wasted energy, but now? Now there is no question.
Very little actually matters. You know that to be true, because while you’ve been fighting your way out of the claustrophobic hell of Alex’s body, you’ve been so focused on one pure thing—Cole—that everything else, every other want, desire, resentment, and dream, has dropped away.
You take a breath and say, “I can’t vouch for it, but I’ve been told on numerous occasions by several supposedly well-meaning old bastards that in the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was—”
“Damon,” Cole says, his tone irritated and accompanied with his patented eye-darts of annoyance.
You love that look. You’ve missed it so damn much. Something unclenches inside of you. This is right; this is better. He’s calling you by your name, and he’s responding appropriately to your jibes.
“I don’t remember the car accident,” you say. You’ve gone over this and over this in your mind trying to understand. “I remember Alex driving and his laughter. Then I remember him swerving to avoid a buck. He lost control and I remember knowing it was going to be a bad crash. I remember being afraid.” You trail off, trying to remember more details, but it always stops with that gut-wrenching terror, and then nothing.
“You were scared,” Cole says, and his voice sounds worn. “I’ve thought…I mean, Imademyself think about how you must have felt. How frightened you must have been.” He’s pale again, and his lips are losing color.
