Page 40 of Sky Song
“Shame on you! Let me teach you.” She jumped up, graceful like the performer she had trained to be, and grabbed Cricket’s hands, sending her into a twirl.
To hell with it. They jumped around and gyrated late into the night, the melody flowing around them in pulsing beats as strong as a young heart that wanted to live life to the fullest. Cricket did try to follow Paloma’s precise moves, and could’t, sending them both into one fit of laughter after the next. Their music got louder and faster. They bumped into a table and made empty lemonade cans scatter with a loud clunk.
Only when Paloma’s neighbor started pecking at the wall, yelling at them to sober the hell up, did they break up the party.
Cricket stumbled into her home, sweaty and disheveled, grinning stupidly for no reason other than her troubles were temporarily forgotten.
The lights were off, Hipper was howling, and her house felt full.
“Hello, my hearts. Did you have fun with your neighbor?” Lyle was sitting on her couch, legs drawn up, chin resting on his knees.
Her world crashed around her, and rebuilt.
“You’re back!” Her voice broke.
“I never left.”
Lightheaded, she put her face into her hands to compose herself before walking to the lamp to turn it on. “How did you get in?”
“Getting in is one of my specialties. Goes along with my missing fingers. One day I may tell you about it.”
He didn’t look good. His nostril slits were fluttering, and a scary grayish sheen covered his normally black eyes.
Slowly, she approached the couch, noting a strange energy swirling around Lyle. It was weak and disoriented, as if he wasn’t in full possession of his senses.
“Are you okay?”
“I need to rest,” he admitted quietly. “I’m sorry, but I can’t… out there. I need a shelter. I lost my ability to sense danger when in stasis, so I can’t rest unprotected. And I can’t go without stasis like I used to… It’s so messed up.” He listed to the side but caught himself with one hand. The desperate energy flared.
Cricket lowered down to kneel in front of the couch very, very slowly. Taking his hand in hers - the right hand, with a full set of six fingers tipped with sharp blue talon-nails, she squeezed it in both her hands.
“You know I won’t turn you in while you’re unaware, don’t you?”
“Do I?”
“Yes, you do. That’s why you’re here.” Their connection went both ways. She wanted to believe it so badly.
He said nothing. His eyes closed as he let his back rest against the cushions and went absolutely still.
Cricket listened for the sounds of breathing but couldn’t get anything. Trying not to panic, she recalled that on the previous occasion, she had also listened from her bedroom into the night for sounds of Lyle’s rest, and had heard nothing at all, and he’d been fine that next morning.
It made her only slightly less disconcerted, and she reached for his chest, snaking her hand inside the high scooped neck of his shirt, seeking heartbeat. A barely-there flutter, it was weak as a dying bird that slowly, oh so slowly, opened and closed its wings, right underneath Cricket’s fingers. There and not. There and not.
She closed her eyes, absorbing those tentative, even beats.
His life.
When Cricket awoke, it was from a kink in her neck.
The windows were still dark with the lingering night, and her hand was resting inside the neck of Lyle’s shirt. A look at his face revealed that his eyes were partially open, the bluish third lid covering a good portion of the inner corners, and an opaque film deadening his normally brilliant expression.
Slowly, Cricket lifted herself from a sprawl over him, and pulled her hand out of his shirt.
“I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat. “I was worried… You were so still, and your heartbeat was so weak that I was afraid that it would stop.”
“You held your hand over my heart to keep it beating?”
It was exactly what she was doing. Heat flooded Cricket’s face, and she put both her hands behind her back as if making sure they didn’t touch him again. “Like I said, I’m sorry. Do you always go so still when you sleep?”
