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Ice’s heart had done a little jump as that rhyme popped back into his head. And now as he paced the room and waited for Indy the rhyme came back like one of those jingles you couldn’t shake from your brain.
No such thing as a lucky break.
No such thing as a meaningless mistake.
No such thing as misfortune or luck.
So just follow your heart and you’ll never be stuck.
Ice stopped by the living room window, pulling the curtains open and letting in the morning sun. The rhyme danced its way through his head again, and he found himself grinning, felt his heart do that little jump once more, twice more, three times now, skipping and jumping inside his chest, widening that grin as the sun warmed his face.
Ice wasn’t sure why the rhyme he’d always hated didn’t annoy the fuck out of him this time around. Maybe it was because of how everything ended with Mom and Dad, those awful last years. Maybe that little rhyme took Ice back to a time when Mom and Dad were happy, healthy, still years away from the downward spiral that had begun when . . . when Ice had turned his back on them after that fucked-up Thanksgiving.
“Stop it,” Ice blurted out loud like he’d lost control of his voice, couldn’t stop his thoughts from forcing their way out as words. He gulped, clutching the curtains so hard he almost ripped them off the railing as more words exploded from his lips which felt odd and rubbery, like they’d been molded out of clay. “That had nothing to do with it. You had nothing to do with it. Cancer is a physical disease, not an emotional illness. Cancer doesn’t originate in the fuckingmind.”
“What doesn’t originate in the where?” came Indy’s voice from behind him now. Ice whipped around to see her all dressed up and standing in the bedroom doorway brushing her long raven-dark hair. “And why are you talking to yourself? Is that what happens with you Delta guys because you spend so much time alone?”
Ice blinked back the burn from his cheeks. She hadn’t heard all of that, he told himself with a surge of embarrassment. He tried to force a smile, then realized he was still grinning through those rubbery make-believe lips.
But suddenly the grin faded when he caught his gaze moving down Indy’s curves highlighted in the open bedroom door. Now the warmth in his heart turned to a raw heat, and Ice wasn’t sure what was going on with him, figured it was because he hadn’t slept since his plane landed almost thirty hours ago.
Yeah, that was it, he reasoned. Jet lag plus adrenaline-fallout from the wet-team action plus dehydration from the food poisoning plus the rubbing-post incident plus a whole lot of unfinished business about which his brain and body seemed to be in violent disagreement. Yeah, he was just surging with adrenaline and testosterone and a whole lot of other neurotransmitters and hormones, all of which were combining to make him feel . . . weird.
But weird in a way he’d felt before.
Felt once before, many years ago.
The day things changed between him and his parents.
That very same Thanksgiving Day when he’d walked out on them, turned his back in anger, never saw them again until they were dying.
Dying because of him, whispered that darkness which he’d successfully stifled for years but was bubbling up now.
Bubbling up alongside that sickeningly familiar buzzing in his brain, like he was on something, something he recognized from that traumatic Thanksgiving.
That’s impossible, he told himself while blinking his gaze away from that mesmerizing V between Indy’s hips and forcing a smile, trying hard to look nonchalant as streaks of electric energy sparked his body, now his mind, now his vision, making him blink again and summon every last ounce of willpower to regain his composure and pretend like he hadn’t just licked the crotch of her panties like a deranged sex-demon and wanted to do it again, lick what was now pressed tight against the inside of those panties, taste that wetness on his rubbery lips like her nectar would bring him to his senses, put him back in control of whatever the fuck was happening to him.
It was only when Ice managed to focus his vision enough to see Indy’s face that he noticed she was still brushing her hair but doing it with a strangely repetitive motion, grinning big and wide as she ran the brush through her long black tresses, grinning almost like she couldn’t help it, perhaps didn’t even know it.
“Your mood seems to have improved,” Ice said stiffly, a frown suddenly dragging on his face when he remembered what he’d blurted out about cancer and causation before he knew Indy was listening. Shit. Shit. Shit. Don’t think about that, Ice. Not when your mind is spinning to someplace that feels way too familiar.
Indy shrugged, her smile instantly fading like she could see the dark emotion in his eyes, see right into him like there was no barrier, no curtain, no veil. “And your mood seems to have worsened. You said something about cancer. Were you thinking about your parents?”
Ice’s already stiff body tightened to stone. “No,” he blurted out far too quickly, kicking himself mentally for even opening the door to a conversation about something that did not need to be talked about—not now, not ever, because there was nothing there, because it was all just self-directed blame for not being able to convince his own parents to getrealmedical help, to getlegaldrugs to ease their pain, to stop kidding themselves about how the universe really worked, to face the facts instead of filling their heads with fiction.
Indy kept brushing her hair with those strange, almost manic, long repetitive strokes. She smiled quizzically at him. “No? That’s your answer? One word? And that too alie?”
Ice gaped like a guppy, tried to refute her accusation but couldn’t do it, like he saw clearly that she’d seen clearly, that she knew without a doubt that he’d been lying, like suddenly there was absolutely no way they could hide a damn thing from each other.
He kept staring, a sense of frenzied motion spinning his head around even though he was strangely stuck in place, frozen in the moment as that rhyme kept playing itself back and forth in his head, speeding up as if that broken record was spinning out of control, faster and faster . . .
. . . and as he watched Indy she kept brushing her hair in long strokes, again and again, now moving faster and faster like she couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop looking at him, looking at him with those big dark eyes, with pupils dilated to the size of saucers, irises pulsing with light that seemed to come out in beams of kaleidoscope color, spinning round and round like that rhyme, like that time, like that slime, like that mime, like that—
“Motherfucker!” Ice roared when he chanced a glance at his liquidy reflection in the window-glass, looked into his own kaleidoscope eyes and saw that his own pupils were dilated to the size of Jupiter’s moons. He shook himself like a flea-ridden dog, blinked about a hundred times as he watched Indy keep brushing her hair while grinning like a madwoman, like a stuck moment endlessly repeating itself. “Indy, I think . . . I think . . . shit, I think we’ve . . . we’ve been dosed.”
Indy suddenly stopped brushing her hair and held up the brush and stared at it like it was alive, a slug-like creature moving in her hand, a slime-mold with long sharp teeth that was about to leap for her throat. She gasped and tossed it towards the couch, her gaze following its trajectory like she was tracing its path perfectly through the air. It landed on the couch cushion and bounced off it onto the carpet. Indy stared at it as if to make sure it was dead. Then she cocked her head at Ice, raising an eyebrow like she’d only just processed what he’d said.
“Dosed? With what?” She looked down at her hands, then held them up and examined them curiously like they were alien flippers. “I swear I can see all the veins and arteries in my hands, Ice. They’re pumping and pulsing, throbbing and twitching, seething inside me, trying to slither out.” She looked up again. “Dosed with what?”