Sublime Messages

Fifteen, A

Ruby regained consciousness to an intense burning all across her abdomen, as if a ring of fire tightened around it, but the sensation waned as she pushed up from the ground to sit. Only then did she realize she was no longer in the school, that she was back where she'd wanted to stay—home, in the Hills. Yesterday, she'd encountered her mother, ripped her father's book to pieces, wept the entire drive to Palm Valley (temple Josh had not known what to do or say, so he'd at least remained silent the whole way). She had met with her father's people at the high school in the middle of the night, and then . . . that strange woman had let them in. They'd had their own plans for how to get into the building, but her being there had been convenient. Whoever she was, she'd known—

Damien!

The cosmic array overhead offered some light by which to see, dusted the desert in an almost prismatic sheen; it'd always been something she loved about this otherwise forlorn place, the show of the universe beyond her microscopic piece of it. Perhaps those stars had been her hope against the walls of her insignificance, her Damien in the absence of promise. She'd found him again, her love, after all this time, in the halls of the very place she'd feared would be too far from him, and even now as she tried to comprehend the fact that he sat right next to her on a protruding boulder, watching her wake, she couldn't believe it was actually him.

Not until he spoke. "Hey, you stupid girl," he lightheartedly addressed her.

The words seemed somehow frayed around the edges, though Ruby would have found the old epithet endearing a day or so earlier.

She sat up, fully, painfully aware of her posture and her attire, her bare feet and her matted hair. She must look quite different from the time they'd last seen one another, and yet, he was as beautiful as ever, same solid yet slender form, same deep-set eyes, sculpted jaw and nose. His hair—it wasn't long anymore, and that was a shame, she thought, but she couldn't fault him for it. She couldn't fault him for anything at all, ever. And though she'd practiced a thousand times all the ways she could speak to him when they did finally meet again, Ruby was struck mute by the presence of him, the fact that here they were, after all that time. Why, when they'd last seen one another, he'd tried to strangle her. His long fingers had wrapped themselves around her throat, and oh! the feeling of them there, against her skin . . . she could only think of it fondly.

But this was too much, too quickly. The timid creature within startled, and Ruby hopped up to her feet. Damien followed suit, rising to meet her, but rather than draw near or speak, Ruby turned and, lifting her skirts up her calves, began to run. Or, she at least tried to run. Her feet were bare after all, and the ground was full of gravel and prickly things nearly invisible at night, so she made it only about ten yards before Damien took hold of her and forced her to stop.

"What are you doing?" he cried, a definite scold in his voice.

Ruby held back her emotion. "I'm not a little kid any more. Don't you dare talk to me like I am, you hear me?"

Damien lifted his hands defensively. "All right, all right. You're grown; I get it."

Looking at him, really at him, even in the umbrous, wide-open dark, Ruby was overcome by internal quivering, some combination of butterflies and jitters. To really be here, with him, at last!

"What now?" he asked.

Her chest ached, as if she'd swallowed a rock and it'd lodged itself in there somewhere near her heart. If only she hadn't talked to Mama. Everything would be different. She'd not be so confused, seeing him now. She thought of all the time she'd spent consuming fabrications of him like some snake ingesting prey, how she'd felt as if her body were expanding to take him into her more and more, like she'd had to unhinge some part of herself to bring him inside her small frame. Because she'd made him so huge, so blindingly enormous, that he'd become everything to her, he was all she thought about all she cared about all she wanted—she didn't know what to be or do or hope for without him. He was her. Ruby was merely the temple for the fiction she'd written about Damien, the temple where she'd worshipped every day for years. She'd heard his messages across time and space; she'd been sure he was waiting for her. The small things, the twinkling wishes she'd made on the moon, the petals she'd pulled from flowers in the backyard with their "yes's" and "no's," the secret symbols she'd drawn with her moist fingers across his portrait, the kisses she'd traced along the writings in his book . . . but they'd not been his, she recalled. They'd been her brother's . . .