Page 100 of Caution to the Wind

“Teacher in college?” I clarified.

“High school,” she admitted, then laughed again at my expression. It was rusty, still, a little broken like the clang of a cracked bell, but God, it was precious. “I know, it was quite the scandal. Cress was fired, or maybe she quit, but they’ve been together ever since. You should see them together, it’s like…” She sighed, eyes dreamy. “It’s like the most epic love story in real life.”

“And I take it Loulou is LoulouGarro, Zeus Garro’s wife?”

“Yep. Another scandal, another epic love story.” At my look, she expanded. “Zeus is like nineteen years older than her, and they got married when she was seventeen.”

Nineteen years.

Married at seventeen.

I ached to talk to Loulou suddenly. What had it been like loving Zeus at seventeen? Had it felt like being awoken from a lifetime of slumber? Like realizing suddenly who you were and why you’d been put on the earth?

And what had it felt like to be loved like that in return?

Zeus Garro had been brave enough, kind enough to her and himself to pursue love when society had told them not to. And look at the results? They were married, a living love story according to Cleo, and she’d mentioned kids as if they were her own.

She was living a dream I’d had since I was seventeen, too. Only my dream had gone from highly improbable to never fucking happening.

“You okay?” Cleo asked me.

I cleared my throat and fixed a smile between my cheeks. “Wow. Is there something in the water here?” I joked, but really, my heart was beating too hard against my breastbone.

Cleo’s gaunt face pinched tighter. “Yeah, I wondered that, too. Like I said before, it was hard feeling so alone when everyone I loved seemed to be finding their perfect match. It’s not their fault. I was just weak and stupid enough to fall for an awful allusion instead of the real thing.”

“Hey,myGlory doesn’t talk about herself like that, remember?” When she rolled her lips under her teeth as if to zip the bad words inside, I sighed and reached for her hand, tangling our fingers. “I don’t think that kind of love can be forced, no matter how much we long for it.”

“Have you ever been in love?” she asked, cocking her head with a frown as if the thought had never occurred to her.

A rabid, wild laugh rose in my throat, but I swallowed it, and my voice choked when I said, “I guess I’m still waiting for my white knight to come and sweep me off my feet.”

She didn’t have to know that I’d already met him, already loved him, and had no hope remaining that he’d ever want to sweep me away unless it was straight into the dustbin.

“Hey, what about the big bear of a man, Kodiak? He’s hot,” I suggested with a waggle of my eyebrows.

Cleo made a face like she’d swallowed a lemon. “No way, he’s way toobossyandrude.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard him speak more than ten words, and he’s always around you.”

“Yeah, well, I guess he saves them all up to boss me around,” she grumbled so mulishly I had to laugh.

“I think it’s cool he’s so ready to take care of you,” I confessed. “It makes me feel better, if a little bit jealous, to know you’ve got all these people to love and that love you.”

Lin’s gaze was heavy on me, as it had been the whole interaction, watching me as if to relearn me. Something about what I said seemed to resonate with her because while Cleo’s toes were drying, she got up and returned shortly after with a Tupperware filled with paper towel-wrapped mooncakes.

My mouth watered when she offered me the container. I lifted a golden brown, scalloped-edge round pastry and bit into it with relish, moaning as the flavour of salted egg yolk dissolved on my tongue. She usually only made them for the mid-autumn festival, and it warmed me straight through to my bones to know she’d gone out of her way to bring them today because she knew I loved them.

“You’re in public,” Lin reminded me, which made Cleo cough out a laugh.

I rolled my eyes in bliss and moaned even louder.

This time, when Cleo laughed, it was full enough for The Fallen women on the other side of the salon to hear. It was a little win, but it warmed the icy recess of my heart enough to make the rest of our trip bearable.

MEI

The nightsin Entrance were long. Back at home in Vancouver, I worked a lot at night because that was when my creativity seemed to surge, but the dingy pink walls of the motel were not conducive to making art, and the only thing I could manage to draw or write about was Axe-Man. Which was kinda the point normally, given that I’d made my living creating a fictionalized version of him. But these weren’t the kind of drawings I could submit to my editor. Pages filled with his big hands, the blunt-tipped fingers and that stub for a pinky he’d sacrificed to save me, the wide palm topped with rough calluses, and the pocked scars from shrapnel he’d got overseas. The tattoos over the back of his fingers on each hand in a cool, gothic script––loveandloss. They looked like working man’s hands, not an artist’s tools. Not dexterous, fluid fingers, but weapons. Those hands had killed people. I’d known because I’d seen it that night at Turner Farm, and I had no doubt they’d done damage since.

So why was I so obsessed with them?