Audition (North Security 4)

I’m walking through the rubble, pulling aside chunks of concrete, searching for someone. Bethany. The name is enough to bring me back to waking.

A dark room. Stillness.

I’m alone in bed. I know that before I open my eyes, before I swing my arm across the cool sheets on the other side. There’s no surprise, only a low throb of inevitability. Of course, of course. Of course she left me.

It’s an old wound, the way a broken bone aches in the winter months.

Being abandoned. Doing the abandoning.

Both of those have left their scars in my body. I’ll never fully escape them. The bone has healed, but the scar tissue will always be there.

Bethany won’t abandon me.

I know she won’t, because there’s something stronger than muscle and weapons—there’s love. I almost lost her a thousand times, but she’s with me anyway. She’s with me because she’s strong enough for the both of us.

Knowing that she won’t leave doesn’t stop the dread in my body every time she’s away. That’s the thing about childhood pain. It sets in deep.

It never really goes away.

She could be having a cup of warm tea in the kitchen.

She could be practicing her new routine in the gym upstairs.

Instead I find her on the floor in the living room, a fire blazing in the hearth despite the warmth around us. I’m already feeling the heat as I sit cross legged opposite her. She has a deck of tarot in front of her, her hands resting lightly on her knees, eyes closed.

“Thought you didn’t go in for that mumbo jumbo,” I murmur, and my voice comes out hushed because there’s a strange energy in the room. The same energy I feel in Mamere’s house.

“Smoke and mirrors,” she says, a smile playing at her lips.

“You’ve seen how the sausage gets made.”

Her eyes open, and I’m looking into brown eyes that are a thousand years old, an eternity of wisdom. “That’s the thing. I’ve seen people looking for comfort, for solace, for hope—and I’ve seen them finding it. There’s a kind of magic in that, don’t you think?”

There’s magic in you. It sounds too sappy to say out loud, even for a man head over heels for a woman. Instead I gesture toward the deck between us. “Are you looking for hope?”

She raps her knuckle on the deck, and I know from what she’s told me that she’s clearing out the evil spirits from the cards. A gentle push and the deck is closer to me. “Are you?”

I look askance at the cards. I don’t know if I believe in what they say, but I’m more concerned that Bethany believes it. What if the cards tell her to dump the bastard she’s with? What if they warn her that I’m going to walk away? That’s the crazy thing about abandonment. I can never be sure other people won’t leave. I can never be sure that I won’t leave, either. I don’t trust anyone. Especially not myself. Her eyes glisten with understanding. “Shuffle them.”

Love can make a man do crazy things. It can make him hope for a happily ever after. It can make him shuffle a worn deck of tarot cards. I do until she looks satisfied and set it back down on the floor between us. She asks me to cut the deck, and I do that, too. She could ask for anything. I’d follow this woman off a fucking cliff, so it’s easy enough to make three piles and put them back together.

Her slender hand falls to the deck, almost protective the way she pauses. There’s a shudder deep inside me, a fear that she’ll pull that same card—The Tower. That it will prove I’m meant to be alone. So much destruction. That’s all my life has ever been. I tried to destroy Bethany, too, with cruel words and cruel actions, but she was too strong to break.

The Chariot. A man in armor stands tall in a chariot, two lions ready to pull.

She taps the card with her forefinger. “This is a card for a warrior. It’s about determination and action and success. It’s almost the exact opposite of The Tower.”

“I’ll tell my brother,” I say, because he’s been hounding me about getting back to work. Of all people he knows what it’s like to find love, he knows the obsession that comes with it, but North Security has more business than it can handle. I’m staying with Bethany until she stops having nightmares about Connor. And then maybe I’ll stay longer. I’ll stay fucking forever.

“There are stars in the curtains. Moons on his crescent. This is not just a card of physicality. It’s about finding success inside you, not accidentally, but with pure willpower.”

“Willpower.” An interesting way to describe love. The right word for someone who was burned early and often in life. It took determination to decide to work for it again. To fight for it again. To risk everything on one little dancer who stole my heart the very first time I saw her spin and leap in a derelict warehouse.

Bethany

I try not to wake him up. In my dreams it’s not Josh standing behind Mamere’s house. It’s Connor, who never even visited there. It’s my brother, who’s in the city committing crime. It’s my father, who once read bedtime stories. Before he decided I looked too much like my mother. Before he drank too much to tell the difference between us. At six years

old I learned not to trust anyone.