Page 6 of Feral Touch
“Have you met him before?”
I nodded without thinking about it. “We… we went to the same music school back home.”
“Oh my god, you lucky girl. Why didn’t you tell us?”
I couldn't speak. I just stood there in the crowd of fans, staring at the retreating van. Jen and Natalie lost a bit of their exuberance.
“What’s wrong? Ivy? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“I have.”
I opened and closed my mouth a few times, trying to explain but not knowing how. The looks on Jen and Nat’s faces were rapidly changing from excitement to worry with every second. I closed my eyes and took a steadying breath, finally forcing myself to speak.
“Ren disappeared five years ago.”
CHAPTER 2
WHYHADN’TI recognized him?
I lay on my back in bed, staring at the wall. The ceiling was cracked with holes in the plaster. One large hole had six long cracks emanating from the center, like a lop-sided spider. Our landlord had never seen fit to fix it.
Wehadbeen far away from the stage, and it had been five years. A person could change a lot in five years, especially in the transition from teenager to adult. His hair was longer now; he never wore it long. It had always been neatly trimmed on the sides, but now it fell over his shoulders, glossy and thick, the kind of hair that made girls jealous. Had he been growing it out for those five years?
I tried to do the math in my head. I'd been sixteen back then. Ren was two years older than me.
The day Ren turned eighteen, he stopped going to school. He stopped attending our after school music academy. None of his few friends had seen him in days. It wasn’t until his parents starting calling around that we realized Ren had been missing for two weeks.
It took his parents more than fourteen days to realize he was gone.
After a cursory investigation, the police concluded there were no signs of foul play.His closet was half empty. The money his parents kept in a secret rainy day stash had been cleaned out. Most telling, his violin and its case were missing. He had just taken off. At eighteen, Ren was an adult and old enough that the police couldn’t do anything when he disappeared. Adults can’t run away from home, after all.
I rolled over on my bed and hugged a pillow to my chest.
Losing Ren had been almost devastating. I’d cried for days, wondering where he was and if he was okay. I’d tried messaging him, but he never answered. It turned out he’d left his cell phone sim card on his bedside table. He’d paid for whatever transportation got him out of the city with cash. He hadn’t taken money out of an ATM, so there was no record of him on camera.
Ren had left without leaving a single trace. Not that the police had looked that hard. Once they decided he’d left without being coerced, the investigation stopped.
I thought it was odd how easily the search had been given up. Ren’s parents were more than wealthy enough to keep the search going, to hire private investigators, to track him down—they just…didn’t.
Everyone had been shocked when it happened. Ren seemed like such a good kid. He was a good student, on his school’s soccer team, Vice-President of the student council. No one suspected he would be the type to run away. Despite the shock of it, within a few weeks it seemed like everyone had forgotten about him.
Everyone but me.
There were rumors about why he might have left and where he was going, but it was only ever idle chatter. No one ever knew how upset I was. I tried to keep it to myself.
There had never been anything between me and Ren. Not officially. We’d met when we were children and had attended the same music school for years. I considered him a friend.
I started noticing things about him when I turned sixteen—his strong, muscled forearms, dark, beautiful eyes, and when he smiled…
I rolled over to my other side and buried my face into the pillow.
Back then, Ren had rarely smiled. He had friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, and would never have been called an outsider. He just seemed closed-off somehow, withdrawn, never letting people close.
Except for me.
In the last year before he disappeared, I thought he’d finally started to open up. We would chat before and after our music lessons, just small talk, but every once in a while I’d say something he found amusing and his face would light up. It would only happen for a split second, but he’d smile before his lips would fall back into their usual somber expression. Seeing it made my heart sing for days afterward.
Boys didn’t pay attention to me like that. I was just a friendless music nerd who spent all her time holed up in her room practicing. Ren seemed to like talking to me. Sometimes he would pause mid-sentence and just stare at me, and I wondered if maybe he liked me as more than a friend.
