Page 13 of The Bleeding Woods

Sitting at the edge of the wooded ocean, our car looks like a forsaken puppy.

With only phone flashlights and a waning crescent to guide us, we transform it into a bed fit for four.

Grayson has already started piling blankets on the side promised to me, and I realize my shivering is all but concealed.

It is summertime, but the goose bumps gathered on my skin feel like barbed wire against the fabric that covers them.

He did something to me. The soldiers protective of my subconscious were cannon fodder, shot down too quickly to keep me rational.

It was effortless to accept the commands.

It was ecstasy. It was freedom. It was power I’m familiar with.

All my life, I’ve been different. With Jasper, my inherent otherness faded.

I was safe, I was warm, and I was unconditionally allowed to be what I am.

What I truly am. His directives were easy to obey because they felt as natural as my own neural patterns.

It’s the rest of the world that makes no sense. It never made any sense, but he . . .

He makes sense.

“Here you go.” Grayson pats the top of a fluffy sherpa blanket. “You’re shaking.” The fleece does nothing to stop it, but I don’t let him know that.

“No more hikes tonight.” Jade rattles the trunk as she enters beside me, causing the tires below to squeal.

Her expression suggests there will be no argument.

I nod and curl up against the outermost wall of the car.

Normally, Joey would insist he sleep by the window, but tonight, he claims the middle.

As he wedges himself between Grayson and Jade, his face is frozen in a terrified frown.

I’ve never seen his cheeks look so sunken.

“Are you okay, Joey?” I murmur, propping myself up to meet his gaze. His head shakes like a beaten pinata rustled by a breeze. My heart sinks for him. “Want a piece of chocolate? There’s still some left.”

“Don’t eat any more. If you do, you’ll give yourself diarrhea, and you’re not using my socks to wipe,” Jade tries a joke.

I give her arm a gentle smack and reach over with a square anyway. I even take one for myself, hoping it’ll make the offer more enticing. “You can use my socks.”

“I brought tissues.” Grayson puts an end to our dilemma with a grin, nudging his brother in an attempt to make him smile. “You can have your chocolate.”

“I don’t want it.” He oozes melancholia.

“Nothing bad is gonna happen to us,” I say without an ounce of certainty. If I could take back my pitiful attempt at reassurance, I would. Thankfully, Jade steps in to cushion the failure.

“Stuff like this happens all the time. Cars break down, people get stranded, and then they pay ridiculous amounts of money to the first towing company they find. Don’t worry. We’ll be lounging in your mom’s Jacuzzi before you know it.”

“And you’ll have a cool story to tell your friends when we get home. You can even tell that kid in algebra about it. I’m sure it’ll help him forget the hibachi incident,” Grayson adds.

Joey brightens. Reaching toward me, he plucks the chocolate from my hands and gnaws at it anxiously. It’s a start. “You really think so?”

“I know so.” Grayson nods. “You’re safe, Joey. Get some sleep. Jade’s right: We are going to need an overpriced towing company, which means we’ll be getting our steps in until we find service.” His barless phone screen blinks tauntingly to remind us of our isolation.

Joey shrinks into a fetal position beneath his thin blanket. I untangle myself from the pillowy sherpa and drape it over him.

“Thanks, guys,” he whispers.

“Good night, Joey,” we reply in choral synchronicity.

An exchange of good nights circles through the space.

Finally, we fall quiet, but it’s obvious our internal monologues are ripe with terror.

To look outside the windows would be to face fear incarnate.

The light of the moon effuses only a feeble stream of light, and that stream illuminates a minuscule fraction of our surroundings.

The rest is pure, inky darkness. Chthonic chaos. Shadows and silhouettes.

Eventually, Grayson’s and Jade’s breath patterns turn slow and cyclic.

They were able to drift off, even with something so caliginous watching from between the gaps in the trees.

Every hair on my body stands at attention, antennae detecting danger.

Still, the most unnerving aspect of this impromptu sleepover is the fact that I am not nearly as afraid as I should be.

I can’t stop replaying the way Jasper called to me.

It claws at every corner of my consciousness, creating a sensation similar to when one first allows alcohol past their lips.

Intoxication. Euphoria. A welcome loss of control.

I should be as scared as Joey. I should be masking my fear like Grayson and Jade are. I should be upset by the possibility that we may never see bars on our phones again. I should feel something, just like I should have felt something when my parents’ eyes stared lifelessly into mine.

“I saw it.” Joey’s voice shakes me from my thoughts, as tiny and timid as a mouse’s squeak. “The thing you were hearing. I saw it.”

“What did you see?” I whisper.

“It. I didn’t say anything because I—I didn’t want it to hear me.” His breathing turns ragged. I pause too long for any of my incoming reassurances to be reassuring.

“Nothing is going to happen, Joey.”

“You don’t know that,” he whimpers.

“I know not all scary things are bad. What if he’s just lost like us?”

He stays silent, and after fifteen or so minutes pass, I turn to face my window.

As though I’d given some sort of nonverbal consent, something squirms within the abyss.

Something consisting only of shadows dances across my line of sight.

Then two red eyes shine toward the top of their face.

His face. Instead of wearing his otherworldly exterior, Jasper has reverted to the form he claimed when we first met.

The only thing odd about him now is his statuesque beauty.

He tilts his head to the side observantly, a sharply arched brow cocking above his glowing orbs.

I maintain eye contact, just as I had in the gas station.

To make matters more confusing, I wave. It seems to take him by storm.

Surprise blossoms across his features, so much so that his disguise falters.

A glimpse of his real smile pokes through, and his scleras briefly drain of their milky hue. They turn as black as the void above.

He waves back.

He did say he wasn’t the best at flirting. Perhaps the flirting has just begun, and what he did before was a show. Joey’s adenoidal voice interrupts my train of thought. He is still awake, and he is still terror-stricken. “Clara, what are you doing?”

“Nothing.” My answer is automatic, and my mind skids to a halt as it is overwhelmed with siren songs from the trees beyond the car.

Everything goes hazy, the details of my world suddenly less fine.

It’s so easy to let it happen, to release my grip.

The temptation has a spirituous quality, like sipping from the rim of an enchanted apple martini. “I just have to use the bathroom.”

Lying comes so easily when Jasper is holding my hand. His influence is my true north. I rise to sitting and crawl toward the trunk’s latch.

“Clara, no. Wait.” Joey’s small hand grabs mine, and his expression reeks of desperation. In fact, the corners of his eyes have already become lined with silver on the verge of spilling over. “Can’t you hold it?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be right outside.”

He sees through me. “I’m coming with you.”

“Joey—”

“You shouldn’t go alone. Not with that thing out there.”

There’s no arguing with him, so I don’t. With a defeated smile, I settle into silence and nod. We exit the vehicle on tiptoes, careful not to wake the others. Jade’s thunderous snores drown out the sound of our movement, and Grayson’s been trained by sleepovers aplenty to endure it.

Once outside, I can breathe again.

“I’ll turn around,” Joey reassures me, facing the car and using it to anchor himself.

“Thanks.”

Hoping I’ll be able to escape before he wakes the others, my eyes scan the forest for Jasper’s bloody bioluminescence.

Our gazes meet in the middle, his red and mine begging to be.

With much less resistance than I’d exhibited prior, I step off the paved path and allow the darkness to embrace me.

Jasper’s hands clasp mine, and he whisks me into his underworld like Hades did Persephone.

Our first meeting was breathtaking, our second was nightmarish, but our third is a forbidden fruit.

Toxic and intoxicating. Prohibited but perfect.

“We didn’t finish our conversation before,” I rasp, following him as we are engulfed in smoke spirals, energy in tangible motion.

“You looked frightened.”

“I wasn’t.”

He pauses, whirling around to bring us face-to-face. There’s something incredulous hiding behind those pupils. For someone so well spoken, words seem to be failing him right now.

“You weren’t?” When he does speak, his tone plummets down the octave scale. It becomes a rumble like a shock wave swimming within the earth. “Be honest, Clara.”

A smirk crawls across his features, once again climbing toward his temples. His eyes glow more vibrantly, emitting patterns that numb my mind like morphine. Honesty slips beyond my lips before I can stop it. “I was, but I still wanted to see you again.”

“Don’t lie to me.” His pointer finger positions itself just beneath my chin. “You don’t . . . ever have to lie to me.”

I suck in a breath, preparing to speak despite having nothing to say. It’s so easy to let him speak, to soak up every syllable. I’m certain he read my mind, because he holds a finger to my lips to halt them before any words fumble their way out.

“You’re safe here.”

His fingers, naturally graceful but icy to the touch, lace through mine.

Guided deeper into the forest, I see it in an entirely different way.

The moonlight creates an iridescent glow that bends like the patterns of a kaleidoscope as it filters through translucent leaves.

The air is warm and welcoming, and red fireflies buzz around my body.

They dance, their rhythmic flickers reminiscent of balmy summer nights.

Even the branches look less threatening, their arms outstretched to embrace instead of entrap.

All eeriness has faded. This isn’t an eldritch realm filled with ever-watching spectral eyes.

It’s Jasper’s home, and it possesses the same wonderful beauty that lives inside his eyes.

I don’t even remember what my apartment looks like, what my city looks like.

Everything beyond this moment is something out of a rapidly fleeting dream.

Life in the world I knew could have been a precursor to this, the pain and ire and exasperation all preparative of it.

Jade will be better off without me. Grayson and Joey will go on to do amazing things, to live up to the Warner name with all the valor expected of them.

I can disappear.

Jasper is smiling wide again, but this time, it doesn’t spook me. He said I could trust him. Oddly enough, I do. “You can stay, you know.”

“Stay?”

Stay.

It’s like a bucket of ice-cold water has been dumped over my head.

Then the fireflies’ mesmeric dance speeds up, drilling his offer in deeper.

It makes me want to dance too. I could stay.

I could leave it all behind. I could leave myself behind and become something new here.

The word yes tingles on my tongue like melting cotton candy, sweet and sugary and delightfully artificial.