For the next three weeks, Kira ignored Tristan. At school, she built her friendships with Luke, Miles, Dave, and Emma. At home, she played with her sister and practiced for culinary school. She was determined not to think of him and the drama he would bring into her life. Instead, Kira focused on all of the people and things she did have and let that little part in the back of her head that longed for him get quieter and quieter. But she couldn’t completely erase the nagging wish that he would be the one to break the silence and approach her.
On the first Saturday of October, Kira decided it was finally time to start working on her term paper about Charleston’s role in the War of Northern Aggression, more commonly referred to by the rest of the world as the American Civil War. Her history teacher had assigned the entire class a research paper due before Christmas about Charleston’s local history and involvement in the war. The open-ended question was to be interpreted in any form she wanted, and Kira thought it was more than annoying that most of the students had a lifetime of knowledge about the city compared to her meager month and summers spent mostly at the beach. Today would be her day to wander around and explore until something interesting caught her eye.
Battery Park was the first stop. Kira figured she would start from the southernmost tip of Charleston and move north. As she walked along the wharf that ran parallel to the park, Kira noticed that the Civil War monuments still stood but their meaning had been left behind. Statues had been erected to honor past heroes of the South and cannons were placed facing the open water as if still waiting for an attack to defend against. However, the mounds of cannon balls were now a play place for children pretending to be soldiers, and the statues were a challenge to little adventurers hoping to climb something more than a tree. The North had long since moved past the Civil War, but even in Charleston, a city engrossed in its own history, the past was beginning to be left behind.
Kira leaned against the metal fence, facing the sea. In the distance, almost like a mirage, stood Fort Sumter, the ultimate spot of Charleston’s Civil War history. It seemed hard to believe that such a small island fortress had been such a huge stronghold and spot of aggression. But she knew it was too easy of a pick for her paper and figured almost everyone in her class would be writing about it.
Kira turned back toward Battery Park just as a modern day horse and carriage rode past her. She tried to picture two women with hoop skirts and floppy hats riding around, probably pulled by a slave, and envisioned men wandering around in uniforms with muskets to patrol the streets against a potential Northern invasion. She imagined a way of life come crumbling down, imagined the mansions in front of her exploding with cannon fire, and all the beautiful trees around her lighting up in flames.
For a moment, she saw all of that, until someone's breath tickled her neck and a whisper made its way to her ear.
"Lost in thought?" Tristan’s deep voice sent a shiver down her spine, and a secret smile played upon her lips—he was officially the one who broke the silence. Since she had tested her own willpower and won, Kira decided it was perfectly fine to talk to him now.
"I was until you so rudely interrupted," she said playfully while turning her body to face his. Kira took note of his dark-washed jeans and how they completely opposed her own white tank top and flower-covered skirt.
Tristan shrugged and said, "Since I’ve already annoyed you, I guess there’s no real reason to stop." She couldn’t help but laugh, and he smiled in return. "What were you thinking about?" He leaned back against the rail, so his arm lightly brushed against hers.
"Hoop skirts and muskets," she blurted out.
"What?" He lifted one corner of his mouth and furrowed his eyebrows in a half-question, half-laugh.
"Oh, sorry, my Civil War paper." Kira frowned and looked beyond Tristan at Battery Park. "I see all of the history here, but I can’t seem to find a topic that really stands out to me."
"Come on." He put an arm around her shoulders and guided her toward a cannon across the street. "Who better to show you around than a Charleston native?"
After not speaking for three weeks, Kira had never expected to have Tristan as her own personal tour guide, but it was perfect. He seemed to know everything about the city, and spending the afternoon with him was exactly what she needed to get the paper done. It also happened to be exactly what she wanted in her heart.
Tristan led her around Battery Park first, pointing out a huge mansion that was a wedding gift from a father to a daughter after the war, and another beautiful town home that still had a piece of shrapnel lodged in the roof from a Northern attack. He explained that Battery Park had been Charleston’s first line of defense against any ships that made it past Fort Sumter and had not always been so picturesque. They kept walking as Tristan pointed out famous cemeteries where Confederate soldiers were buried and tons of buildings that had been preserved during the war that were truly from historic Charleston. They walked to the old slave market, which was now a flea market where local artisans could sell their goods. He showed her where the slaves had been kept, how they were sold, and where they were eventually set free. He painted the picture of a graceful city with an ugly undercurrent of racism that still needed to be weeded out.
"How do you know all of this?" She questioned him after two hours.
"You pick up a lot when you live here." He shrugged. "Charlestonians are very proud of their history."
"I guess, but you describe it like you lived there."
He breathed out a laugh, one that almost sounded like a sigh. "Do you actually believe that’s possible?" His squinted eyes caught hers at that moment and she knew there was more to this question, some deeper meaning. Her heart skipped a beat. Was it possible?
"Of course not,” Kira looked away, flustered, and focused on the old woman sitting on a blanket on the sidewalk weaving a straw basket. She could have been from a different era and almost seemed out of place near the busy intersection where cars zoomed by behind her.
Kira looked back at Tristan. Did he fit into the scene? His constant brood made it seem like he was years older than he looked. She knew he had more on his mind than the average seventeen-year-old, but was that enough to start believing impossible things?
"Come on." He nodded to the side making his hair slip to shield his eyes. When the piercing blue was hidden in shadow, Kira finally felt she could breathe and stopped her mind before it dreamed up even crazier theories. "I want to take you to my favorite place in the city."
They walked for a while, lightly chatting to avoid any serious topics, before Tristan stopped in front of a huge building. Four round columns shot upward into a huge triangular frieze that reminded Kira of a Roman temple, until she looked further up and saw the top of a steeple. The building was huge but rather plain with large wooden doors and sweeping windows, but no ornate decorations marred the beauty of the architecture. The yellow-tinted stone created a beautiful contrast against the blue sky, and Kira tried to take it all in before she looked to her left to read the sign that stated Saint Philips Episcopal Church. Kira was a little shocked. She had never figured Tristan as the religious type.
"I know what you’re thinking, but it’s because of the view." He started to enter and she had no real choice but to follow. When she walked inside, the sanctuary took her breath away. Huge white columns rose toward an arched ceiling that was also a polished white. The marble floor led her eye past the ivory pews toward a huge stained glass window behind the altar. With the sunlight beaming through, the window acted almost like a kaleidoscope, casting colors around the otherwise bare room. Kira looked up at the balconies that ran parallel down the sides of the church and were composed of carved mahogany, creating a striking contrast. And when she turned, an organ took up the majority of the back wall, and she could almost feel the music coming from the great instrument.
"Kira, come on." Tristan stood beneath the organ and waved her over. "This is nothing."
He walked over to the wall at the left corner of the church, and Kira watched him dubiously. Suddenly, what had seemed like solid plaster creaked open as Tristan found the secret latch he had been searching for. He pulled the thick door and moved his arm toward the opening as if to say, “After you, miss.”
"Is this allowed?" Kira asked while she peered into the darkness.
"Rules are made to be broken," Tristan said with a wry smile. She knew it was a challenge—could she drop her usually straight-laced mentality?
Kira smiled back and started walking. As she passed through the hidden entry, she found a wooden staircase that creaked when she put her weight on the first step. She saw the light disappear and heard the door shut as she continued to climb with Tristan following behind her.
When she reached the top, she could see the structure of the arched ceiling and knew they were above one of the balconies. Kira tried not to touch any of the dirt and dust, which she was sure held tons of nasty insects she would rather keep away from, and followed Tristan’s exact movements as he confidently strode toward a second door. Cobwebs draped from the handle, and Tristan swiped them away. They were definitely not supposed to be up here, but she was too intrigued to see what waited at the end of the climb and too scared to turn around and face the darkness alone.
Kira’s breath became labored as they walked farther and farther up the never-ending staircase that she could only assume belonged to the steeple. Finally, she saw light and as she turned around the circular steps, a window appeared. She peeked through the grimy glass to see that they were well above the city skyline.
"We’re almost at the top," Tristan looked back to tell her as if he had heard her stop.
Kira started climbing again, energized by the fact they had almost reached their destination. At last, the steps gave way to a wooden platform, and Kira was greeted by church bells and a long rope that hung through a hole in the floor. She followed Tristan through the maze of bells, until he finally sat down on a cushioned bench right next to a huge window. Using his sleeve, he cleaned the dust away. When Kira looked outside, she could see for miles.
"Wow," was all she could say.
Kira glanced toward the harbor and saw Fort Sumter and Battery Park for the second time that day, but now it was from above. The mansions seemed small, and even the trees looked like toys from so high up. She swore she could see all the way to the ocean, and she counted the sailboats in the harbor. From this vantage point, they looked more like white speckles than large ships.
"I know, it’s pretty amazing right? Best view in the city." Tristan motioned to the other side of the bench. She sat down while still soaking in the scene.
"How’d you find out about this place?" Kira looked at him and noticed he was just as caught up by the sight as she was.
"My mother showed me.” He paused, and Kira saw his eyes lose focus as he jumped back into his own memory. "It was a long time ago," he said after a few moments of silence.
"Do you miss her?" she asked, guessing she must have died when he was young. Tristan nodded and she saw him retreat again.
"You can talk to me." She reached out to grab his hand. He met her gaze when their fingers touched. Sadness laced his melancholic blue eyes, but Kira didn’t know what to do about it.
"I believe you," he said, grasping her hand tighter, and they remained quiet for a moment, just feeling comforted by one another’s presence. Kira looked at her palm resting on Tristan’s lap and wondered if she could have ever guessed that the day would lead her here.
In the corner of her eye, she noticed something peeking out of Tristan’s pocket—something she hadn’t seen when he had been standing.
"What’s that?" she asked, and he followed her gaze to see what she meant.
A second later, he pulled a small moleskin notebook from his pocket and handed it to her. "It’s just sketches, you can take a look if you want."
"You draw?" She opened the book.
"Just as a hobby."
Kira imagined more than saw his shrug because she quickly became engrossed by his small pencil drawings. There were pages of hands that were perfectly shaded and seemed to leap from the paper. There were outlined sketches of people playing in parks, dogs running, and children hanging on swings. She came upon a series of pages dedicated to different people sitting on benches—one an old woman whose laugh lines told the story of a beautiful life, another a homeless man who was draped in newspapers for warmth, a third a couple holding hands and staring out toward their future.
"Tristan, these are amazing," Kira told him without pausing to look up. She continued to flip through the small notebook, slowly taking in his work. "Seriously, this isn’t just a hobby."
"Thanks," he told her when she gave it back.
"Have you ever thought about art school?"
"Not for me." He shook his head while stuffing the notebook into his pocket.
"Why not? You should let people teach you. Those drawings have a real personality to them. I can tell exactly who the people you are picturing are just by the expressions you give them." Tristan shrugged in response, which just made Kira push the point even more. "I get the whole bad boy thing you do, but I know it’s just a front. You really care about people. I can tell from the drawings that you choose people you feel for in some way."
He sighed when she finished talking, as if he had known she would notice that but had hoped she wouldn't. Then his expression changed so his lip curved up and his eyes gleamed in a mischievous way. "A front, huh? I just broke you into a church."
"You broke me into a church to show me a beautiful view and a place that is sacred to you. Not exactly the same as breaking and entering," she challenged back.
"Ah, but we used the trap door, which most people don’t know about. I could have just taken you up the janitor's steps."
"Would those have been cobweb free?" He nodded and Kira slapped his arm. "Jerk."
"Come on, it was much more adventurous my way. Admit it, you were scared but secretly excited."
Kira smiled, whispering, "That’s generally how you make me feel."
The words popped out of her mouth before she had time to think. She cringed and silently cursed herself for basically admitting she liked him.
"Me too," he whispered, more to himself than to her.
She looked up, but Tristan gazed out the window. She knew his thoughts were churning, and she wished she could peek inside of his head for just a minute.
"Tristan?" she asked to see if he was listening.
"Yeah," he said distantly.
"Why did you save my life? You know I heard what you said to your friends, but for some reason I can’t believe it."
He turned to look at her now, and Kira was certain he could read the confusion on her face. His chest expanded slowly in a prolonged breath and his eyes remained closed for an instant too long. He was thinking about how to tell her something. Kira could almost see the secrets floating in his head and could feel him struggle with how much to say. "I saved you because I wanted to protect you, and I still do. Some small part of me won’t stop believing you are precious to me, even if I’m not supposed to feel that way."
She inched closer, trying to read his mind with her proximity. "Who says you can’t? Your friends?"
He laughed bitterly. "No, my so-called friends are the only ones making sense. We just can’t ever be, Kira."
"Why?"
"Someday, you’ll understand." He leaned back against the wall, away from her presence.
"God, I am so sick of everyone telling me I’ll eventually understand all of this stuff. Luke keeps telling me that, like some patronizing father who knows everything about my life, but won’t give me any insight. And now you! I never expected this from you. What happened to ‘Mr. Breaking the Rules’?"
Kira started pacing around their little corner, trying to make sense of everything. She was sure Luke and Tristan and his crowd all knew something she didn’t. They were all keeping the same secret from her. When would she realize it? When would she finally connect the dots and stop feeling like the baby that everyone had to coddle?
"I just can’t be the one to tell you, to see you look at me with hatred, because you will hate me." Pain passed over Tristan’s face and he winced.
"Look, Tristan, I get the whole self-loathing thing you have going on. I can see that you’re troubled somehow by the way you retreat into your thoughts and lose track of the world. But don’t presume to know my mind. You have no idea how I will react to anything. Everyone has some sort of past to hide. The fact that yours may be darker than most doesn’t scare me. It makes me want to help you, not hate you." She practically spat those last few words, frustration at an all time high.
He stood, and she knew his anger had mounted with her little speech. "Kira, you just don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not my past that you will hate me for, but today. Today, I let myself believe we lived in a different time, and when I saw you standing at the park, I couldn’t help but be glad we could finally be alone together. But today, I let you feel for me and let my walls come down for an instant, and that is what you will hate me for, for the moments of intimacy that I will cherish but you will look back on and loathe."
Kira hadn’t realized the fight had brought them face to face and mere inches apart. Like people say, anger is just one small step from passion, so when she spoke, she hardly realized what she would say until she said it. "Well, if it’s intimacy with you that I’ll come to hate, I might as well enjoy it while it lasts."
Kira took one small step forward and their bodies melted into one another’s. Quickly, his hands cupped her cheeks and his lips were on hers. She reached her hands around Tristan’s back to pull him closer. Heat rushed through her body and she moved with Tristan as he pushed her back against the wall, encasing her body within his, pulling his arms around her waist. Her hands found their way to his head and she grasped his thick black hair, running her fingers through it. His lips moved from her lips, down past her ear to the base of her neck.
"Kira," Tristan sighed. But then his body stiffened and he pulled away. "I have to go," he said with a firmer voice.
Tristan turned away from her and left, disappearing before Kira even had time to react to what had just happened. Instead, she sank down the wall she had just been pressed against, gazed at the empty spot Tristan had filled moments ago, and began to cry.
Kira needed to understand whatever was going on. The frustration of not knowing was driving her crazy. Luke didn’t want her spending time with Tristan, and even Tristan didn’t want her spending time with Tristan, so she decided there was only one thing to do—spend more time around Tristan. He was the key to finding out her role in everything, and she knew he wanted to be close to her even if another part of him fought that feeling. Watching him run away had just made Kira even more determined to solve this mystery revolving around her, even if she would come to regret losing this ignorance.
Kira stood up and wiped her face free of tears. She looked out at the sun setting over Charleston and knew it was time to leave the church and what had happened there behind for a little while.
She grabbed her bag, which she had set down on the bench, and noticed that Tristan had dropped his notebook on the way out. She leaned down under the bench and slid the notebook from its hiding place in the dark. In place of a novel, she knew what she would be looking at before bed tonight.
After finding her way through the bells and back down the steps, Kira searched for that janitor’s staircase Tristan had mentioned. She walked in the dark around the circular steps three times before finally finding a small knob beautifully free of cobwebs and dirt, and slowly opened the door. This path led right down to the front lobby of the church, and Kira silently cursed Tristan as she placed her foot on each superbly polished step. She quickly walked through the lobby and out the door, thankful no one was there to see her sneaking out. After a bit more walking, Kira finally managed to find her car. When she got home, her parents were not pleased.
"Where have you been all day? I was worried sick." Her mother barraged her as soon as she opened the front door. Her father stood in the background nodding his head and giving her a stern look. "I expected you to come home hours ago. Isn’t this why we bought you a phone, so you could call us if you were running late? You don’t understand what can happen to a young girl out alone at night."
Kira rolled her eyes and appeased her mother by listening to the lecture that began. She’d lived in New York, Kira thought, she understood the dangers of being alone in an unfamiliar place. She didn’t bother to mention she had been abandoned by her tour guide after he ditched her in the church steeple they had broken into, which was why she had trouble finding her car.
Eventually, her mother cooled down and started breathing again. After which, Kira quickly said goodnight, made her exit, and snuck into her sister's room to kiss her sleeping forehead. When she made it to her own room, Kira breathed a sigh of relief that her father had remained silent because he usually asked all the questions she didn’t want to give answers to. He was very good at reading people and almost always knew when she was hiding something.
After a shower and some chocolates from her secret candy stash, Kira settled into bed and turned on her reading lamp. She gently eased Tristan’s notebook open, and looked over the drawings she had gazed at earlier that day.
Again, Kira noticed the expressions he was able to convey, and she tried to think on why he chose those people on the benches in those three drawings that truly caught her eye. A homeless man? Had Tristan been homeless, or did he just sympathize with a man who had lost everything? An older woman? He could have a grandmother he missed, or old women could remind him of the age his mother should be. Kira thought back to his question. Did she believe he could have been alive during the war? Could he sympathize with the old because he would never be there? And what of the young couple in love? Was that why he pulled away? He was jealous of those in love because he believed he was not deserving of it?
Kira sighed. All she had were questions. Ever since she moved back to Charleston, everything about her life had become questions with no answers. She flipped past the bench drawings, past some blank pages, and tried to see if he drew anything else in that book she hadn’t seen.
After skipping through fifty blank pages, Kira was about ready to give up and go to bed when she turned one more page, and her own face was staring back at her. Her hair took up most of the small piece of paper, and within the mass of curls was the most perfect drawing of herself she had ever seen. The fire in her eyes sparkled. She was smiling in a laugh, and even her freckles were in the right location. Kira looked alive in the picture—and happy. Beyond all the minute details he drew to perfection, her emotion ran off the page. She looked like the sun radiating warmth to the viewer. Was this a drawing of how he pictured her? Kira never thought she had looked so happy or pretty in her life, but maybe Tristan had thought so.
Kira turned to the next page and saw a close-up of her eyes, turned again and it was her lips. One more turn and she saw herself standing by the wharf staring out at Fort Sumter with a breeze in her hair and her skirt flowing in the wind. Kira realized that he must have been observing her for a little while today before he finally snuck up on her to say hello. Why was he so afraid to talk to her? Everyone in school was intimidated by his good looks and standoffish attitude, by his dark slacks and typical black T-shirt, and by his friends. He was a bonafide bad boy. Every girl secretly loved it and every boy was secretly jealous of it, but Kira was starting to realize that it wasn’t who he was at all. What bad boy secretly draws pictures of old ladies and young couples? Tristan was more of a tortured artist than anything else.
She sighed and turned the page again, but the blank paper returned. There were only four secret pages devoted to her, and Kira tore each one out before dropping the small notebook back into her bag to give to Tristan at school. She wanted him to know she had discovered his secret and that she wasn’t going down without a fight.