Perigee [bxb] | Bad Moon Book II

52;{Felix}: roses

Scarcely had Felix Cummins seen a sky so pristine as the day he drove Tisperella's top-down convertible along the white-picket-fence suburbia of her childhood home. The sun was fierce, even beyond the sanctity of his shades, but the breeze was fine and the roads were smoothly paved beneath them.

He'd enjoyed the lengthy drive so far. The vehicle was responsive and her chariot thrust forward at the lightest touch of the gas, the engine moaning, the radio playing faintly beneath the sound of whipping wind—and in the passenger seat, the princess pouted.

Through all of her transparent ways, Tisper made two things very clear: One, she'd never remove the eye patches in front of so much as a mirror. And two, she hated the way anyone else drove her car.

"You can slow down, now!" she called to him over the wind and the roar of the engine. "We're in a residential area and you're going forty-five!"

Felix allowed the car to coast after that, grinning at that sullen look on her face. He reached to her, one eye on the road, and gave the divot on her chin a little tap. "Ye'll get frown lines," he said, and to no one's surprise, Tisper perked up in a panic.

She took a look at the visor mirror, massaging at the skin on her face until Felix had to reach over himself and slap the visor back up. "Enough, don't mind the way ye' look. Aren't here to impress them." But the thought brought on another. "But why today of all days did ye' wanna reconcile with your family?"

Tisper didn't respond, but to point to a house at her right. "There it is," she said. "Pull over."

So he did, just in front of a three-story home with vibrant rose bushes in the front yard and luxury vehicles parked in the dual-driveways on either side. Tisper popped open the passenger door and reached behind the seats. And as she produced a large set of sharp gardening sheers from the back, she told him, "Keep the car running."

He tipped his glasses down to eye her from over the lenses. "And how, dare I ask, is that productive toward reconciliation?"

"Right," Tisper said in a deep breath, testing the sheers with a snip at the air. "I changed my mind about that."

And it was in the way she looked at him—one fine, dark brow lifted, a sliver of smiling teeth breaking through the wine-red paint on her lips—that made Felix put the gear in park and recline back against the leather seat, curious as he'd ever been to watch her tramp the newly-groomed front lawn.

Inside the window left of the veranda, a television beat its light against thin, lace curtains. In the one to the right, shadows shifted, the silhouette of a man, pacing from here to there. There were people within these walls. Just hours ago, she'd expressed her interest in making peace with her family, so what exactly did she have planned now?

Is that why she'd brought him here? To be her getaway driver?

The first violin notes of Come On Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners whispered through the radio, and Felix turned the dial until he felt the music in his fingers. And with his arm slung around the headrest of his seat, he watched as Tisper flattened the prim grass with those bare legs—so long, they could reach from Seattle to Tokyo in a single lunge. When she heard the music, she looked over to her shoulder at him—sunglasses too big for her face, and a smile that put those lovely knives in his chest.

Sunlight splashed along the bobbing curls of her hair as she turns her sights back toward the home and approached to the rose bush at the left of the veranda. She traced the soft petals with her fingers for just a breath before cracking those large sheers open and snapping the first rose from its stem. And by god, if he wasn't grinning before, it swallowed him nearly whole now.

He realized it as quickly as it took her to snap the next rose from its stem. Her mother's precious rose bushes—the ones she'd nurtured for decades. She was using him for a quick escape.

Moving to the tune, she snapped with those vicious shears, and one by one, the roses fell. And when the music grew, Tisper danced. She danced and cut away at the flowers, pausing only to pluck up a rose—to bring it to Felix with that charming little grin on her face. He took it between his fingers and watched as she retrieved a cigarette from her glove box. Then Tisperella went to work on the second bush. And as he admired the way she wiggled to the music while she beheaded every new rose, Felix brought her offering to his lips—felt the sharp thorns against his skin, the soft petals, the smell of it. They were unpleasant little flowers, roses. She was right to hate them.

But when he saw the way she'd tucked one behind her ear, he couldn't bring himself to deny their beauty—especially as the sun rained down on her black hair and dewy cheeks. As the petals matched the red of her lips, and the cherry of the cigarette that she held between them. And away she snapped, cutting them carelessly in whichever way she felt, until there was nothing but ugly, vacant stems.

Once all of the roses cluttered the lawn, Tisper squatted and gathered their corpses in her arms, and Felix watched with great interest as she carried them to the doorstep, dropped them to her feet, and gave the wood a hard knock.

When a woman—who Felix could only assume was her mother—opened the front door, it was without recognition. She studied Tisper's face—the cigarette in her mouth and the sheers at her hip—and then the woman saw the roses, piled on the ground at her feet. She wailed and dropped to the floor, and as she did, a lad stepped out from the shadows behind her to see the commotion. A boy who struck a deep resemblance to Tisperella. A girl joined him with a child in her arms, and the both of them watched the old woman mourn for her butchered flowers.

"My roses," she sobbed. "My roses."

The boy knelt to sooth his crying mother, and the woman bounced the wailing child on her hip—and Tisperella Tatem, in her shredded, pocket-shown cut-off shorts, took that cigarette between her fingers. She about-faced, roses crushed beneath her leather boots as she meandered off of the veranda, hefty sheers slung over her shoulder and smoke ribboning through the faint crack in her red lips.

Every step she made was executed with the brunt force of a woman who'd just sucked poison from her wound.

In all the years since he'd woken as the man he was, Felix had never loved a sight so much as the way that one-eyed girl held her chin to the sun and basked in the screams of her mother. The way she smirked around the filter of her cigarette as her brother shouted a name at her back that she seemed to no longer know.

The heavy sheers bounced on her shoulder, her earrings glinted in the sunlight, and with every step Tisper took, she grew free. He half expected her to grow wings and fly away from him, but his princess returned, tossed her sheers into the back, and swung her body over the passenger door.

"What are you doing?" she asked him, strapping her seatbelt over her chest. "Go already!"

So he shoved the gear into drive, and the car reared like a stallion, leaving that terrible place only a speck in the distant horizon. Tisper squealed from the acceleration and shoved her hair from her face, that smile a driving hazard if there ever was one.

"Where to now, Princess?"

"I don't care," she said, wiping that wild hair from her face. "Just take me away."

So he did, down the empty suburban roads, toward the promise of a golden sunset.