Perigee - Chapter 11: Chapter 11

It had been so long since Jaylin dreamed about his snowy mountaintop and the fir trees that bristled his shoulders when he tried to part his way through their branches. He remembered Quentin telling him one time that they each had a place like this—a world dreamed up not by themselves but by the wolf in them. He said that he himself dreamed of the mountains in spring, when the rivers and streams that veined the earth had just begun to thaw and the sun shown down on the mountain caps in a blinding bright that often had him wishing for overcast when there was none. But Quentin loved his place too, loved it more than anything.
"Even Felix has one," he told Jaylin one time. It was New Years—they'd stayed up talking, long after the fireworks had stopped. Jaylin had a bit too much cider, and when it had gotten so late that neither of them could speak a proper sentence without drunken dribble or sleep dragging the edges of their words, Quentin offered to go. Jaylin had been daring enough to tell him, "I'm not tired yet, stay." So Quentin stayed, and he told Jaylin of Felix's place. A field of tall green grass, freckled with thousands and thousands of wildflowers. It was always night in Felix's world. So dark, he couldn't pick out the colors of the petals. The moon paled everything, but it lit the hills of grass around him in a dusty sage, and Felix had told him that it felt like he was walking on glacial-green pearls.
Jaylin asked him why they dreamed of these places and Quentin told him it was often believed that when the werewolves inherit their curse, what they receive is the soul of a wolf. One that lives within them, takes over on occasion. These places they dream of were the places those wolves had spent their lives. The places they lived and died.
Jaylin understood after that, why he loved his snowy world so much. Because the wolf—the lichund in him loved it. But those recurring dreams hadn't come to him in so long. He wished for them some nights—prayed for the escape and the isolation, but they never came. Not until now.
He was stolen away to a place where the wind kissed his face and the cold numbed his feet and he could run—run as far as he wanted to run without ever losing breath or slowing down. So Jaylin did. He ran and ran through his wintry haven.
But it was fleeting. And after what only felt like moments in this place, he was ripped away from it by the sound of wailing wind.
He woke on a blanket, in the back seat of a car—the stench of blood so strong he could gag on it.
But there was another smell contending it. Fresh grilled steak, in a takeout box on the seat beside him.
As hungry as he was, Jaylin put it out of his mind for a moment and edged himself closer to the window, where nothing but a boundless stretch of sand and the swell of ocean waves shown and shimmered in the dark shroud of night. And Quentin was standing there, wind tossing his hair in every which direction, his hands in his slack pockets. He was looking off toward the horizon, so Jaylin couldn't make out his face. But he knew by the slack in his shoulders, the relaxed posture. Quentin was in a different place.
His stomach groused, keen on the smell of beef beside him. And Jaylin didn't notice the blood in his fingernails and the creases of his knuckles until he'd gnawed down half of the steak in the box. By then, he was too set on the taste to stop.
He only partly remembered turning—but this time, things were more vivid than before. The sharp splintering pain, the adrenaline that burned in his stomach. The strength and the speed and the hunger. This time he hadn't been bathed—not even dressed, as he noted the hotel robe draped over him and the fleece blanket he'd been laid down on to keep the blood off of the car interior. He wrapped the robe around himself and shoved the door open. It clapped shut behind him, but Quentin didn't waver to the sound.
He waited until Jaylin reached his side. Then he said, still gazing at that streak of horizon, "I couldn't take you back to the hotel. Qamar can't know you turned in public."
Jaylin grazed a comber in the distance, watching the seagulls cut through white moonlight. "I'll wash off here."
"I didn't know about her." Quentin said it too suddenly; Jaylin wasn't sure he was ready to hear it yet. "I didn't know she was your friend."
Jaylin looked away now, straight ahead. He bit his lip, and when he spoke, it was in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. "Why didn't you come? After my mom died, you didn't show up. Not once."
"I was there," Quentin told him. "I flew in the same night. Your friends called and I was packing a bag before they even had to tell me what happened. I could feel it. Knew something was wrong."
"You weren't there."
"I was there," Quentin told him. "By the time I showed up at your place, you were asleep. I didn't want to wake you up. I know how hard it is to sleep after...."
"It's really hard." Jaylin felt his voice quiver. He didn't want that—he'd been trying so hard to keep it at bay. But Quentin... fucking Quentin. He clapped a hand over his mouth and let a sob out into his palm—it was a sudden, ugly sound and he hated that he'd made it, but it had come out of him so easily. Tears were burning his eyes. "It's so hard to sleep and that's all I want to do."
"I know."
Quentin didn't look at him—he gave Jaylin that, at least. The opportunity to catch his breath and bind his emotions back.
When he was ready, Jaylin asked, "You were there?"
"I was there," Quentin said. "The night it happened. The night after that and the night after that. To make sure you slept, I was there."
There was a stutter in Jaylin's chest. He didn't know quite what to say, so he looked to the blood on his fingers and once that silence had grown too loud, he asked, "You couldn't have stayed?"
"I thought you needed to be alone."
His tears were drying, but Jaylin rubbed at the raw, red feeling on his face. "I did."
This time Quentin looked to him. The moonlight slipped over every cut curve of his face. He looked like a painting. "Do you still need to be alone?" he asked.
Jaylin shrugged. Then after a moment, he shook his head. "Where are we?" he asked, digging his toes down into the sand. Guilt and realization pricked him both at once. He'd surely ruined those rental clothes.
"The only place I can think lately," Quentin told him. A dreary mist clouded the horizon like it was something from a sad poem. It was the kind of night that felt black-and-white, life in monochromatic. And still, from here, the world looked as if it was nothing but water.
"When I first came to the US, this was the place," Quentin told him. "My place. The only place in the world that I didn't have to be a wolf. I didn't have to be an alpha."
"You lived in LA?" Jaylin asked. "When did you move here?"
"I think I was ten," Quentin told him. "My father was in trouble with the law. My mother had relatives and couldn't support me. She shipped me off here, to live with them. Barely ever spoke my mother's Italian or my father's Russian, so I already knew English fluently. Stayed until college, then I flew back to Europe."
"Were you a wolf then?"
"No," Quentin told him. "Turned when I was sixteen. But that's a story for another time." He reached into his suit pocket and took something into his palm. And when he turned it over, it glittered like raw magic in the moonlight. A diamond ring—its scintillating silver shimmering with the same luster as the ocean waves. "It was Anna's," he explained—a bit too quickly, like Jaylin might get the wrong idea. "Her engagement ring. She always loved the ocean."
Then Quentin stepped back, his feet sinking into the sand. With the pitcher's arm of his, he chucked the ring into the air. There was only one faint glimmer of its spangle in the moonlight, like a star falling to Earth. Then it was gone into the ocean waves.
Jaylin gaped to him, and the look on his face must of been something else, because Quentin laughed out into the night air.
"Jaylin, relax," he said with a grin. "That was why I brought it."
"You could have sold it!" Jaylin reprimanded him. "You need the money, don't you?"
"It was Anna's. I couldn't have sold it; that ring belongs to her."
"I think it belongs to whoever finds it in their next can of tuna."
He hadn't realized the change in his voice, not until Quentin was looking to him with that grin and a warm familiarity wreathed him. He clutched to the normalcy, because for a moment in time, he'd forgotten about everything else.
"Let me romanticize the thought for a bit longer," Quentin said.
Jaylin couldn't agree more. "My mom loved the beach too." The ocean waves burned into his ears. He gave the sand a kick, but his toes only dipped into the muddy grain. "The kind back home are too rocky. She always complained because she couldn't feel the sand."
Quentin crouched, produced a hefty seashell from the mound of damp sand beneath him and rose again, wiping the dirt from its grooves. "Do you have something of hers?" he asked.
"What?"
"Something to throw in."
"I didn't take anything with me. Not really."
"What sort of things did she like?"
Jaylin made a soft little scoff beneath his breath. "Television," he said.
"Television," Quentin replied. "That limits our options."
"Take me back here," Jaylin said to him. "When I have something of hers to throw in, can you take me back here?"
"Whenever you want," Quentin assured him. "For now, just throw." And he urged the seashell into his hands.
Jaylin paced the shore after that for a long time, chucking seashells and sand dollars as far as he could on the horizon. He drank. He drank so much to kill this feeling, and when that didn't help, Jaylin tried sex. It wasn't hard to find at college—the girls were pretty and friendly and he had no problem at all making an impression. Sex was an easy thing after that. They were so casual about it; sex was a you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours transaction. But when that didn't help, Jaylin had nothing else. Nothing else took the pressure from his chest like this did.
It was a simple thing, but he thought of every shell like a piece of that sick in his heart. The stress of school and the loss of his mother, and the guilt— both of killing Olivia and of leaving his friends behind. And the terrible yearning for something he couldn't place.
He paced and paced, threw his shells and paced some more, looking every bit like he wanted to jump into the water. To swim away somewhere new, where none of these horrible feelings existed. And when he gathered the courage to do it, Jaylin did. He shed his robe and jumped in.
It was cold at first—a bitter cold. But his body had a way of burning up in seconds, deflecting the chill with a heat of his own, so he swam out and let the waves pull and push him until he couldn't feel his fingers. Until his ears burned red and knots of storm clouds matted the sky above him. And when he'd cleaned the blood from his body and carried himself back to shore, Quentin was there with a towel in his arms like he'd planned this all along. Maybe he had. Maybe he was just always this prepared.
When they'd made their way back to the car and Quentin pulled a fresh bag of clothes from the trunk, Jaylin decided he'd definitely planned it.
By the time they returned to the hotel, a cluster of people had gathered out by the front. Alex, Matt, Sadie, Tisper and Izzy, spread out on the ledge of the fountain, looking restless and worried. Even Felix lounged beside them—maybe just to know Quentin had returned safely. That the lichund hadn't swallowed him whole.
As soon as they'd found a place to park, Jaylin tossed the door and ran to them with heavy legs and the light scent of blood still on his skin. He carried himself up those steps, two at a time, and threw his arms around Matt so hard, he nearly knocked him back into the fountain water. And though Matt didn't know what to do with himself at first, eventually he hugged Jaylin to his shoulder. Let him cry there. For a long, long time he cried.
They all hugged him, and standing there, wrapped tight in their arms, Jaylin realized what it was he'd been yearning for. It was this.
He would always need this.