I’m living two lives.
I have always been living a life that isn’t mine. It was created by the company upstairs, by Helford. I was a girl who watched her parents die and was shipped off to an orphanage and lived there until I continued to get letters inviting me for a free scholarship to a school on the California coast. I would never forget the day that I stepped off of the plane and headed to a man holding a board with my name on it, and how I had slipped into the limo at the same time a bag had been shoved onto my head. They tied my hands and shoved a cloth in my mouth to keep me from screaming. But I didn’t scream. I doubted anyone would hear me anyway.
I was perfectly normal until that moment. I liked to listen to music and I read books in my free time because they took me to a place that wasn’t here. I was a girl who was living in the clouds.
Helford brought me back down. They taught me how to look someone in the eye and shoot them in the head. They taught me how to take down a man twice my size in less than thirty seconds. I ceased to be a person, and I became another one of their drones. I thought like them and I acted like them. And I have ever since.
But now I’ve gotten to thinking that something is wrong. Something is not right.
I was starting to think for myself. And I didn’t like who I had become.
I am living two lives, two real lives, two that I can’t pick between for so many different reasons. They are two separate forms of reality that I have forged for myself.
One of them was a happy life. I lived in my own little world where I got up and went to school every day, and when I walked through the door I was swept into the arms of someone that I loved. I lived that life with Jonathon holding onto my hand and guiding me on, guiding me away from the other life. He made me smile and made my heart skip a beat when he smiled at me. It was everything I had ever wanted, just shy of being a princess living with her prince in her castle. I was an ordinary girl in France with a boy who lived in a big house and would give me whatever I wanted, no questions asked, as long as it made me smile.
The other is less happy and more troubling. Conflicting. I lived in reality, knowing all about the monsters that went bump in the night—I lived as one of them. I had a flat in France but it wasn’t permanent, and my partner and roommate looked at me like he loved me, and if I wasn’t so shaken I would be able to look him in the eye and see if he was telling the truth about it or not. But I was terrified of him. I was terrified because this was too real, nothing like the life I had with Jonathon, where everything was sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. Life with Rian was raw, real.
I wanted to live in fantasy, but I was trained to understand reality, and how losing myself in a fantasy world was more dangerous than losing myself in reality.
I knew that, if I really cared about either of them, I wouldn’t share feelings for both. It didn’t feel like it, though—it felt like there was two of me, two of my world, two of my heart. It wasn’t me. It was Caitie Alastair and Caitie Foerst.
I didn’t know who I wanted to be anymore. Neither life seemed like I deserved to be there.
With Jonathon, it is easy. I can be innocent and I can laugh at his jokes without trying to be the person who lures him in. But I don’t know if I’m acting. I don’t know if I am playing the part because it is something I am so used to being. I could be lying through my teeth every time I was with him and I wouldn’t know. I don’t know how to talk to him sometimes without telling him too much, because he didn’t know the truth of who I am.
Rian, meanwhile, knows too damn much.
I didn’t like how much he knew. He noticed things I don’t want him to and he buried them in his mind, saving them for a chance to whip them out and catch me off guard. He cared too much, wanted to help me. But I didn’t know what I needed help with. He cared about me and he wanted me to let him, but I didn’t know if I could do that after taking care of myself for too long.
We had our moments. We knew what we went through, killing people because someone without a face told us to. He understood the personal strain it puts on your personality until you cease to have one, just the way that Helford wants you to.
I have been too rebellious lately. I’m afraid that, if I let him get closer, he’ll notice, and he’ll try to save me.
He’ll tell the wrong people, trust the wrong people, and I’ll be anything but saved.
And I’ll be damned if I get murdered because I took a chance and trusted Rian Blackwell.
I remembered back to a life where I didn’t have to think about acting and murders. I didn’t have to think about anything other than procrastinating cleaning my bathroom and turning in my homework in time. I controlled my life then. I had the freedom that I needed to choose my own life, so when I told the leader of the orphanage that I wanted to go out to California, they allowed me to make that choice for myself.
I know it would have turned out differently if my parents would have been there, knowing what that invitation meant. I knew they would have stopped me from going to Helford knowing the person I would come out of it as.
I controlled my life back then. It would be nice if I could control my life now.
I haven’t controlled my life since my first day at Helford. A day where I was taken into a gymnasium with a bag over my head, let Shawn rip it off, and did everything he asked me to do, even if I couldn’t do it.
I lost control of my life that day.
Now, though, I didn’t think Helford was controlling it anymore.
I hated to think that it was fate.
~*~
“You know I love you in the friendliest way possible, Caitie,” Parker sighed, folding his hands on the tabletop and looking at them instead of my eyes. “I’ve been talking to Jonathon lately and . . . I don’t know. I’ve been starting to think some things. If I’m wrong and I offend you, you can pull a blonde Parisian girl and try to claw my eyes out.”
I wanted to smile at the mental picture of the girl telling her off, her face red and smoke nearly pouring out of her ears, but my stomach was sinking at the slow, cautious tone he was using. He was sitting across from me in the small café with a cup of hot chocolate and a frown, looking away every time I tried to meet his eyes. He was worrying me, and I didn’t like being worried.
“What’s on your mind, Parker?” I asked, teasing. “If there is ever anything on your mind.”
“Caitie,” he said.
I bit my lip. “Sorry,” I apologized. “You’re making me antsy. Just get to the point.”
“Jonathon really cares about you,” he said slowly, finally looking up at me. He paused for a moment and breathed out, looking like he was in pain. “I just can’t help but to think that you don’t like him as much as he likes you.”
This is the thing that I love and hate about Parker—he is observant. He can act as ditzy and foolish as he wants to but I can tell by the way he looks at things that he sees everything. And he knows it. The thought is unnerving. I never know what he is going to see, and what he is going to miss.
This, he did not miss.
He didn’t miss how sometimes I hesitated when Jonathon pulled me close. He didn’t miss the way I tended to think to myself while looking at Jonathon, thinking about all of my choices and trying to remind myself that nothing good might come out of what I have with him. Parker hasn’t failed to notice a thing, and he was looking at me now, knowing that I knew. I breathed out a slow exhale of surprise, trying to relax my shoulders, but they were too tense. I reached out and picked up my coffee mug, bringing it to my lips. I set it back down on the table without taking a sip, cursing myself because he had just seen my hand shaking.
He didn’t wait for me to say anything, but he didn’t advert his eyes as he said, “He’s been talking about you all of the time to me, telling me everything. He really cares about you, I can tell by the way he talks about you. It’s nothing personal, Caitie, but I’m worried that my best friend is burying himself deep into something that you don’t take nearly as seriously. Sometimes he looks at you . . .”
And I’m not looking back. My thoughts are a million miles away, the two of us standing in a blurry place that doesn’t exist, and I am crying as I am raising a gun to his head, watching him fall.
I felt my eyes go hard.
“Parker,” I said, “I understand that you are concerned, but you don’t have to be.”
“I don’t know what is going on with you guys romantically,” Parker said, holding up his hands. “And, frankly, I would rather not hear it. But I don’t think you understand how unfair it would be if you’re just jerking him around, because he is not the guy with the past that deserves to have a pretty girl playing with his heart. And if that’s what you intend to do, you better be damn sure that I’m going to stop you, because he doesn’t deserve it.”
I would give Parker a lot of my respect for being such a good friend, but even so, he was still a fool.
I looked him right in the eye when I told him, “I love him.”
He looked back at me. Reading me. I didn’t know what he saw in my eyes but his hands tightened into fists for a moment, and his face went expressionless. And then he let go, but I still couldn’t make out what he was thinking.
He didn’t look pleased or willing to accept that answer, the way I thought he would. His face was very stoic, unreadable. He didn’t look startled like he wasn’t expecting my answer. Parker didn’t look like much of anything.
He slowly nodded, accepting my answer, and leaned back.
“That’s good,” he told me slowly, distantly. “I would hate to see Jonathon get his heart broken.”
“I love him,” I said again, and I wasn’t lying.
“I hope you do, because damn does he love you.” Parker stood up. “So much so that he’s a fool for it. I trust you, Caitie. I trust you not to hurt him. But I think we’ve all trusted someone that we shouldn’t have. We all know that one person that we trusted with everything we have in ourselves, and they ended up stabbing us in the back anyway.”
I felt sick.
“I’m glad you’re not that person,” he said, and then picked up his school bag. He sent me a tired smile. “Goodbye, Caitie. Get home safe.”
I nodded slowly, and watched his reflection in a mirror as he walked away. I pushed my cup of coffee away from me once he was gone, reaching up to put my hand over my mouth like I was about to start screaming. I felt sick. Like the world was tilting on its side and we were on an ocean and there was no sight of land.
Night fell. I got up from my seat and took my bag, slinging it over my shoulder. I nodded in acknowledgement to the woman behind the counter but she didn’t pay me a mind as I walked out the front door and into the night.
I took a deep breath and looked up at the dark sky.
I wondered if anyone had missed me today.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
x Riley