Bedful of Moonlight by Raven Held (best ereader for pc TXT) 📖

appeared in Wroughton.
Caleb had his face bent down to meet mine. For some reason, I was on the ground.
“It’s what I have to do,” he was saying, placing a hand behind my head. “Try to understand, Kristen.”
Except, what was I supposed to understand?
It was only when he dropped his hand and straightened up that I realised what it was he meant to do. It was happening all over again.
Caleb gave me a sad smile and turned resolutely away.
“Well done, son,” Gareth said, and clapped him once on the back.
And finally, I saw Blake. He was holding onto my feet as I thrashed about, watching Caleb leave. The pair of mugs we drank from every night on the porch smashed to pieces at my feet and I realised I had kicked them.
“Kristen,” Blake said, his open face closed tightly with hurt. He pushed the hair out of my face.
I was sobbing. I was hurting him. I had killed him, and now I was killing us both.
He took my hand. A jolt of panic ran through me when I felt how cold it was, and I gripped it tight.
Where was I supposed to go? Where did I want to?
Before I could give an answer to either of the questions, I felt the pressure on my feet ease off. Blake was gone, as sure as Caleb was too.
“Didn’t you promise?” someone – it sounded like mom – asked. “Didn’t you promise you’d start over?”
I had. And I had fallen into the same trap again. Blake had left. Mom would leave again. And then Caleb.
I woke up to find my pillow wet. The dream made no sense. Caleb was not going anywhere. And even if he did, what did it matter to me? How could I be this terrified of having people leaving me?
There was no point in dwelling over this. Too much had happened ever since I came to Wroughton. Of course my dreams were so disjointed and absurd.
Tomorrow, I’d ask Dr Oliveiro for more sleeping pills during therapy session. No more sleeping. I gave it up for a reason, didn’t I?
I plodded down the stairs. Shadows were flung boldly across the walls, so I knew the moon was still bright tonight.
He was not there.
The empty porch was lit dimly by the light of the moon. I wrapped my arms around myself and stared out into the quiet lane. The mugs sat where we would have sat, and I involuntarily thought of the ones I had smashed in my dream.
There wasn’t any smoke rising from our tea anymore, so I knew where he had gone, long before I came out to look for him. But I waited, even though the cold hours before daybreak stretched long and thin.


Twenty


“Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.”
~ George Eliot (English writer, 1819 – 1880)


“You’re hiding something from me.”
“I’m not.”
He narrowed his eyes and stared for a long while. I tried to blink a few times.
“There’s something that kid isn’t telling me, I’m sure of it. And you’re in on it, aren’t you?”
“You’re just being paranoid, Hyde,” I said, rolling my eyes. I tried disappearing into the storeroom to get a box for the bamboo handbags.
Caleb did not return until after his run, by which time I had already headed back into the house. I didn’t know why he left me there the entire night – I didn’t even know if I had the right to demand an explanation – and I didn’t ask. When he offered to explain, I told him we had run out of cereal.
Now, I was trying to stay away from him, as well as dodge Hyde’s persistent probing.
“Kristen,” Hyde was saying. I turned around and he seemed to be considering something. “He didn’t get into trouble, did he?”
Not yet, maybe. “No, Hyde. Relax, would you?” And I realised how I sounded like Gareth when I said that, so I hurried to add something else. “I’m sure if he’s in any sort of trouble, he’ll tell you.”
Aunt Belle pushed impatiently through the door, and the bell chimed noisily. She was hauling another box of her crafts, looking excited but slightly frazzled like she usually did. Behind her trailed two other women around her age, in jeans and tank tops.
“You know, Hyde. Much as I love this idea, I’m not sure it’ll work,” Belle said as Hyde took over the boxes from them.
Hyde said introduced me to the women, Marilyn and Jess, who were Belle’s university friends. “Don’t worry about it, Belle. It’ll be a hit. I mean, look at all this stuff you guys have made!” He flung his arm in a dangerously wide arc. “We’ll have this place restored in no time. Let us handle this. Now, aren’t you a bit late for your shift at the ticketing booth?”
“Shoot,” Belle muttered and, thanking me with a tight hug and Hyde with a rather awkward one, she left with Marilyn and Jess.
“There’s no more space in the storeroom,” Caleb said, coming out of it. I turned back to the bamboo handbags and rearranged them in the box. “How can anyone make so much of those?”
“Well, technically, she didn’t make all of them. Marilyn and Jess did too,” Hyde said.
“Hey, Kristen.”
I had no choice but to look at him.
He was staring at me with a puzzled look. “Do you want to have lunch together? We could go for some –”
“No,” I said, a fraction of a second too soon. Hyde raised his brows, and Caleb withdrew slightly. “I mean, thanks, but I have to go for my therapy session soon.” Backing out of the counter and pushing open the door, I said, “I’ll be back later.”
And then I left without waiting for a response.
“Don’t be too late,” Hyde called out behind me. “We need you to help give out those flyers!” As the door swung shut and the bell chimed merrily, I heard him say, “What did you do to her? She couldn’t wait to get away from you.”

*

This was possibly the most annoying therapy session I had ever been to. I was already regretting writing in that stupid journal last night. It had seemed like a good idea while waiting for Caleb. Took up some time, at least.
Dr Oliveiro was so pleased to find a three-page entry that she immediately crossed her legs like a little girl and started reading. I stared at the photographs on her coffee table while waiting. There were at least four of her and her daughter, and I wondered what kind of mother she was, how she brought up her daughter, and what her daughter thought of her.
“Tell me more about this Caleb character,” she said once she was done reading, her head perched on her hands. “I’ve never heard you mention him before.”
That was because I never saw the need to tell her about him before. Or anything else, for that matter. Catharsis just felt too good last night to stop.
“My dad and I moved into his house. His parents’ house, I mean. I mean, his mom and stepfather’s house. And now my mother’s back, so it’s not just me and my dad.”
Okay, Kristen, shut up now.
“You certainly spend a lot of time with him,” Dr Oliveiro remarked. “You must know a lot about him.”
“Actually,” I said, realising this was true, “I don’t. Not at all.”
“Does he know what you’re going through?”
“I’m not … I’m not going through anything.”
Dr Oliveiro threw her head up. “Oh, here we go again. The classic denial.”
I was about to tell her to shut up – what did she know about denial? Nothing was classic about anything, especially when she didn’t know Blake or Caleb or my parents – but she went on, “I’m curious about this Caleb character. You seem to avoid sharing anything about him. Any idea why that might be so, Kristen?”
“Because I was expecting you to sink your teeth into that the way you are now.”
I’ll admit that was rude of me. But Caleb and I were not tabloid fodder. Or psychiatrist fodder.
“I just think it’s wonderful how much progress you’re making with his help. Even though you seem to think he’ll let you down.” She leaned forward and touched my knee. “Not everyone you love is going to leave you, Kristen.”
“They could,” I said before I could stop myself.
“Well, your mother’s back, isn’t she?”
“Blake isn’t.”
“Death is irreversible, regrettably. It’s normal to feel cheated by it, but –”
“If you’re going to start telling me Blake wouldn’t want me to feel sad, please just save it. You don’t know what Blake would want.”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t. But can I make a suggestion?”
I nodded grudgingly.
“That dream doesn’t only make you fearful, it also adds to your confusion.” She let the words sink in with a pause. “You think you’re betraying Blake by letting yourself give in to your emotions for Caleb.”
“And I think your alternative career option should be a scriptwriter for a soap opera.”
“So you’re saying it’s not true? You don’t feel guilty to Blake, or indebted to Caleb?”
The silence I allowed to settle in betrayed me.
Dr Oliveiro was watching me with a shrewd, knowing look. For some reason, I imagined wringing her neck and telling her to stop analysing everything I said or did.
“I thought so,” she simply said.
“But it doesn’t matter how I feel,” I said. It was, somehow, important that I made her understand.
She tilted her head in question. “Of course it matters, Kristen.”
“It doesn’t. Because Blake’s not coming back, and Caleb will leave with his dad – his parents – in the end. I don’t think he’s ever stopped trying to restore his family. So even if I felt indebted to him, so what?”
“Are you sure that’s all you feel towards him? You’re pretty riled up by all this. I’ve never seen you so passionate about something before.”
“What are you, a relationship expert now?”
“I wasn’t suggesting that you were attracted to him.”
I wanted to tear the smirk off her face.
“Are there any other feelings that you might feel towards him?” she went on blithely. She was enjoying it. “Anger? Frustration? Or maybe pity? Or comradeship, because you both had a parent who left you before?”
“You know, for once, just stop trying to classify my feelings and my problems, okay? And this Caleb character is none of your business. None of mine too.”
She nodded solemnly. “I’d say anger is definitely on the list. Frustration too, maybe.”
The only frustration and anger I felt at the moment was towards her. And I was about to let her understand that.
I got up from the cream-coloured couch, grabbed my bag, and stormed out of the puke-scented room. She watched me calmly, still in her cross-legged position like some New Age meditation guru, as though she had seen it all before.
“Great session, Kristen. We’ll continue this next week,” her voice trailed after me.

*

It wasn’t because she was right.
Of course not. She didn’t know what she was talking about. She knew nothing but she thought she did; she thought she was being really smart by making all those suggestions and filing them under the categories she had studied.
On the way back to Wroughton, to the Old Belle, I had simmered in my thoughts so that I wouldn’t think about them when I was back.
“Okay, so you’ll take this stack” – Hyde handed me a thick stack of flyers –