AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I nodded, barely hearing her. Her shoes clunked slowly over the rough boards of the attic floor, the liturgy book gripped tightly in her arms like it was something precious to her.
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. She was leaving, and all the air and light and peace in the room were leaving with her.
“Decca,” I blurted out, not knowing what I even wanted to say.
She stopped and looked back.
“Would you like to pray with me?”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure what her response would be. Her face was always so expressive, it displayed all her conflicting emotions at once. I waited for them. Slowly, her lips parted. A smile broke out, expansive and sunny, like dawn over the mountains. She nodded, striding back toward me.
“Always.”
I took a slow breath, basking in the relief that flooded back into my system. Like an alarm had been blaring and someone had finally turned it off. Or smashed the mechanism with a sledgehammer.
I took her hand. It was so warm and soft. I resisted the urge to brush my thumb across her knuckles as I led her to the bed, where it was easy to lean and face the icons in the corner of the room. “I’m going to kneel. You don’t have to. The floor is… hard.”
She knelt.
I hid my smile and knelt next to her, pressing my thumb and first two fingertips together, making the sign of the cross. She’d been to my church with my sister enough times to know she didn’t needto follow my lead. “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Glory to you, O Lord, glory to You.”
Her head bent low in reflection as I recited the prayer of Saint Basil.
“You grant us sleep for rest from our infirmities, and repose from the burdens of our much toiling flesh. And though we were sunk in despair, you have raised us up to glorify your power. Open our mouths and fill it with your praise, that we may be able without distraction to sing and confess that you are God, the eternal Father, with your only begotten Son, and your all holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen.”
I crossed myself again three more times and rested back on my heels.
We were both quiet.
The party continued below. The voices created a low din, almost felt more than heard as they filtered through the walls and the cracks in the floors.
The sun had set, and we were now shrouded in darkness. I turned to her. There was just enough residual light to bring out the contrast in her features. Those dark-painted lips. Hollowed cheekbones. Large, round eyes rimmed in smoky black. In the dark, she looked vampiric and almost… Greek.
“Open our mouths and fill it with your praise.” She repeated quietly before going silent again. “I can feel how that would calm a tormented spirit. It’s not enough to ask that he take away our pain, leaving us with a gaping wound. But to give us something to fill it up with.”
Her eyes flickered around the room, growing wider and glossy.
I reached for her before thinking better of it, dropping my hand. “Dec, I’m sorry. If I’d known it would affect you, I would have chosen something different.”
“I think anything you prayed would have this effect on me.” She put an elbow on my bed and ran her fingers through her long black hair. I didn’t see her wear it down very often. “Gus, did you…? Never mind.”
“What is it? You can ask me anything.”
“Do you think, maybe,Iwas the reason you came here?”
To my room,she’d implied. Where she had already escaped.
I thought for a moment, remembering that inexplicable transparency we shared. I could keep nothing to myself. She’d know somehow.
But I couldn’t keep her. I had to break away.
Yes. You drew me up here. I will always be drawn to you.
“No. I think it was just good timing.”
Decca, New Moon in May
“I want to beGus’s wife.” I plunked my empty wineglass down a little too firmly on Bethany’s coffee table, but caught it before it tipped and the last few drops spilled out.
