Page 62 of The Whisper Place
I turned as much as I dared, feeling my stomach clench, and then forgot about my stomach completely.
Eve stood a cautious distance behind me, completely naked, holding a glass of water in one hand and a blanket in the other. I was naked, too. The previous night rushed back, water bursting over a dam, the sudden memory of Eve in my bed, the smell of her, the feel of her, her shimmering pleasure reflecting in me, building exponentially until we were both gasping and spent.
And now this.
Another flash, this time of me trying to escape the nightmare prison and shoving a weight aside before I fell out of bed. Fuck. It had been Eve.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She stopped chanting the names and lifted both the water and the blanket. “What do you need?”
I needed to rewind this morning, to go back to last night when we were falling asleep and pull myself away from her. Leave the bedroom and sleep in the tub, like I had when the dreams were bad with Celina. I rarely dreamed when I was that uncomfortable. Better that Eve would find me passed out in the bathroom than this. God, I’d woken her with an actual assault, fell off the bed, and ran out of the house buck naked like a maniac.
It was exactly the thing I didn’t want to happen.
She shivered and I took the blanket out of her hand and wrapped it around her. “I’m sorry.”
“For being who you are? I wasn’t expecting breakfast in bed, Kendrick.”
She put the water down on the deck railing and leaned next to me, looking over the water. Mascara was smeared under her eyes and her hair stood on end at strange angles. One delicate shoulder poked out of the blanket as she surveyed the morning sky. “Low stratus layer today. Stratus nebulosus at zero altitude.” She nodded to the patches of fog on the river. “They rarely last long.”
After another minute, the cold had seeped into my skin enough that I could breathe again. I slipped under the blanket and pulled Eve’s back against my chest, notching her against me. We passed the water back and forth and watched the sun burn the fog away.
“What do you remember?”
I closed my eyes, resting my forehead on the back of Eve’s. I could bring it back now. I’d redrawn the boundaries, anchoring myself in this cocoon.
“She was trapped in a small space. It was completely black. Bugs crawled on her. Biting. Bleeding. Then he came and blinded her with a light. She doesn’t know what he’s going to do with her. He says she deserves this for what she did.”
Eve’s energy reflected the horror still churning inside me. “It’s Kate? The missing jogger?”
I nodded.
“So she’s alive. That’s encouraging. And what about the man?”
I could hear his voice, the gloating sneer of it.No matter how many questions they ask, no one’s gonna find you.
“We’ve talked to him already.”
Kate
My favorite time of day was after Blake and I stumbled down to the bakery and turned the ovens on, and before she unlocked the front door and plugged in the neon pinkopensign. Neither of us were fully awake, scooping and rolling and kneading side by side as our playlists dovetailed into each other. Flour coated our arms, sugar bloomed in the air, and the sky through the bay window turned from black to gray to lavender to pink. We barely talked, silently exchanging tools and pans and fresh mugs of steaming coffee, moving through each other’s spaces with the practice of an old married couple. I could almost feel my mom behind me, nodding her approval at the glossy egg-white finishes and pools of icing melting into a piping hot pan of rolls.
My hair was scooped up in a paisley handkerchief. I wore a tight Fanta T-shirt under baggy overalls with the dough cutter in my back pocket like a talisman. My shoes were glorified slippers, tapping out the Eurythmics under the table. I’d thrifted the entire outfit and, like everything else in Darcy’s life, it fit me like a glove. My boyfriend was upstairs snoring in bed while my best friend and I baked for a still-sleeping world.
I picked mint sprigs from the greenhouse by the window and arranged them on a platter of brownies. “If you could be anyone, who would you be?”
Blake drained her coffee, staring at nearly done trays of giant cookies filling the top oven. “Just lead roles or are we talking supporting characters, too?”
“Not in a movie.” I finished the platter and slid it into the display case in the front of the store. When I got back, she was still staring at the oven. “I mean you. If you could go anywhere and have any kind of life, what would you want it be?”
We pulled out the cookies and transferred them to cooling racks, working in silence. I didn’t need to ask again. She was thinking, treating the question as seriously as a quantum physics thought experiment. No one understood the lure of alternate realities, the importance of all our possible lives, like Blake did.
“We can’t time travel?”
“We can’t.”
She sighed, dumping the last empty pan in the sink.
