Once Time Passed (A Burdened Novel Book 4), page 1
Once Time Passed
A Burdened Novel # 4
Felisha Antonette
Copyright © 2019 by Felisha Antonette
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Prologue
I. First Half
1. Chasing All the Stars
2. When Tomorrows Comes
3. Two times are better than one
4. A Drop in The Ocean
5. A Million Reasons and One
6. What a Heavenly Way to Die
7. Dear No One
8. Breathe Me
9. Nicest Things
10. I Will Remember You
11. I Found
12. Make it Rain
13. Like It or Not
14. Dungeons and Dragons
15. She Used to be Mine
16. Lay Me Down
17. Normalcy: the condition of being normal
18. Shiver
19. A Simple, Pure, Extraordinary Circumstance
20. Skinny Love
21. Nicest Thing
22. This is What it Takes
23. A Dose of Memory
24. Cedar Wood Road
25. The Hardest Thing
26. Written Sins
27. Unwritten Stars
28. Almost Lover
29. Start of Time
30. Only Hope
II. Second Half
1. I Have Been A Fire
2. The Only Exception
3. Blurry
4. An Unhealthy Obsession
5. My Nightmare’s Dream
6. King of the Clouds
7. I Hate You, I Love You
8. veracity – conformity to facts; accuracy
9. Silent Majority
10. All You Ever
11. Far From Perfect
12. Jar of Hearts
13. Parts Per Million
14. Tear in My Heart
15. I Don’t Care
16. Mr. Brightside
17. Hold Me Tight Or Don’t
18. I Heard Goodbye
19. A Silent Heartbeat
20. Dancing with A Stranger
III. Two Halves = One Whole
1. Dive
2. Wake Me Up
3. Just My Soul Responding
4. 5AM
5. Three Empty Words
6. Speechless
7. Don’t be A Fool
8. endurance: the power of enduring an unpleasant situation without giving way
9. Crash This Train
10. I Was Made For Loving You
11. Out of Love
12. Cont.
The End
Afterword
Prologue
Nathan
A cluster of stars flash before my blinded eyes. Gravity yanks me from my knees, slamming my chest to the concrete.
Memories flip through my mind like the pages of a book, turning from left to right, quickly shuffling through one after the other. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, without allowing me the opportunity to know what I’ve lost.
I breathe. It sticks. Like the air was lodged at the opening of my lungs, my attempt to satisfy the need for a cleansing breath goes unattained.
Frustration furrows; a feeling that’s distant as though I were out of body.
But I can’t be, because I lay, numb, blood rushing through my ears like I’m drowning in a rapid river. But the dry air is just that, dry and stingy, depriving me of filling my hungry lungs with its much-needed oxygen. The lack thereof, momentarily, distracts me from my flesh. It’s the only thing I feel that signifies I’m still alive as I soak in the dampness of the ground beneath me.
Hope for life is shortly lived. The courtesy of feeling is strategically accompanied by my disability to breathe, to move and free myself from the bondage.
My body is strangling me.
Seconds pass as I observe with mere regret that my shortness of breaths and the increasingly wetting ground are both evidence of me bleeding out, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
I’m dying.
At least death is painless. For that, I am grateful, because I don’t deserve a painless death. I deserve the pain of whatever punctured my flesh and caused my body to drain until I lay limp and lifeless. I deserve to count the strangled seconds before I’m consumed by the time of death.
A grimace shutters my flesh. An ache crawls up by spine then strikes throughout my entire back. It’s distant, though, and I don’t understand.
An overtaking pain squeezes my stomach and stabs through my chest. It’s evident, with this area of attack, this pain is not my own. Its source is from somewhere else, and wherever it is, it’s an agony far worse than what I’ve suffered through the past ten minutes. I’ve come to accept my fate, but this is damning.
My attacker, the pain, strikes me all over, seizing the little energy I have left to fight it off. A thick smog crowds my face as a misery I’ve not yet dreamed of reveals itself.
. . . My heart.
The torment worsens upon acknowledging it. I hate to think it. . .
I don’t know how much time I have left, but this can’t be our last thought—our final memory. Not this. Not because of me.
Fuckers. . . They brought her here to watch me die. It wasn’t enough pleasure to kill me, to beat me to death. No. Had it been, they would’ve allowed me to feel it. This was their pain, their death, their hell. Because what pains a man bound to death?
Nothing but to know he’s caused his mate the worst pain . . . loss.
Sparky. Baby, this was my punishment. This was my concluding torture before the last of my blood spills from my body. This is my final burden. I’m left to live my scorching eternity remembering this pain, this instant, and this memory knowing that you’ve witnessed my hell. That you’re feeling me die. That I have plagued you with such a tormenting existence. This damned destructive reminiscent that I’m regrettably left with to punish you, by no will of my own. If I could change it in anyway, Sparks, I would. Forgive me for being too selfish to turn away, to not accept the no.
Not a sliver of hope infuses my paralyzed limbs. Breathing becomes far worse of a struggle as the chill of death covers my corpse. I manage my last breath, knowing if there was one last thing I wanted my heart to hear, it wouldn’t be I love you, I’ve told her that enough. It wouldn’t be miss me, she knows I can’t live without her. And it wouldn’t it be don’t cry, because though she’s strong this’ll tear her apart. But instead, my final thought. . .
If we only had a second chance.
Tracey
Part I
First Half
Chasing All the Stars
Death is only a noun.
It’s just a word used to explain life has ended. For me though, it’s a verb, a feeling, a sensation that slinks over my flesh and sucks nearly all the life from me.
But, this death knows mercy. It wants to suck me dry, but decides to not be as cruel and hands me over to life, who, knows no mercy.
I ball my aching fingers into a tired fist. The bunched sheets clutched in my grasp does little against my nails digging into my skin, reopening the scars on my palm that have had minimal time to heal. Nearly gnawing through my bottom lip, I belt out a cry.
A cough.
Another cough that helps release my sigh.
I make myself believe that it’ll be okay through coos and empty sentiments, that one day the pain will subside, and I’ll no longer feel the effects of every atom in my body being ripped in two, and that now detached half swelter into nothing.
Death is supposed to only occur once, but for me—for people like me—it’s daily.
I cough into my hand, and the splatters of crimson stained saliva, I wipe on the sheet. The separation’s a cancer, refusing remission usually granted by medication and time. It eats me up, inside out, starting in my heart and working its way backwards, following the path once glazed by love. Mating. . . Bonding.
I relax onto the cracked, creaking wood floor beneath me. Staring at the stained, paint peeled ceiling, I welcome the cool breeze rushing in through the space at the bottom of the front door. It smells of dirt and the tile of a public shower, but the air lessens the stings scattering over my temperature flushed skin.
There’s a knock on the door; a triple thud rapping against the tired wood frame. It’s ready to cave in. This entire building is ready to cave in. It howls when the wind blows a bit too roughly, the floors cry even when crept upon by tiptoes, the siren-like whine when the cold water is turned on. . .
This building may give at any moment.
The set of knocks come again, and I ignore it as I’ve done for . . .
Bringing my fingers before my eyes, I try to count the months, but I get stuck somewhere between the second or third November. It’s been a while, I tell myself, and let the thought fade from my mind.
I sigh when the person knocks again and grumble when I see their feet shuffle to a stance that appears as if they’re getting comfortable in the hall of my apartment. Maybe they leaned their shoulder against the wall aside the door, or planted their hand against the grimy, brown, time-stained door panel.
“I’ll sleep out here if I have to,”
The same voice stops by every day, knocks the same way, and says the exact same thing as if the script were written on the outer side of the door. I keep my silence, not daring to bring my past into the present I’ve created for myself. Nothing beyond these four walls is good for me. For anyone. I’ve stayed locked in here for two or three Novembers without a compliant, and if it takes another two I’ll be happy to comply.
“Tracey,” he begs. “Please?”
I hold my breath, shocked by the new lines, the empathy in the plea, the sorrow in my spoken name.
The door reacts from the pressure of him leaning against it. His whisper follows, “I’m sorry.”
I rise to my feet but will not move from my spot to keep the floor from giving me away.
“Can you come home? We all miss you so much. Jason is getting so big, and Taylor’s doing much better. She’s trying at the mom thing. Little Nathan got a job at that restaurant over on fifth and Grannen, where they make you where cowboy hats or hooves.” His soft chuckle fades. “It’s a hoot every time he walks in the door.” A door slams from somewhere in the hall. It shakes the walls of my studio and rattles the two ceramic mugs sat beside each other in the cabinet over the sink. Angered shouts follow as a woman thunders down the stairs, heels clacking over the grimy tile. “You don’t need to live in this dump. Come home,” he urges. “You’re still a Newcomb. You’re still family. You belong with us. Nathan wouldn’t–”
I race across the floor and rip open the door. The eyes I meet spark an angry fire in my gut I wish I could discharge from my throat like a raging dragon. “You,” I spit, “shouldn’t even think you have the right to speak his name, yet alone speak on his behalf!”
“My—”
My palm connects with Olar’s face, hitting him so hard my it stings. “Never come back here. Ever!”
He stares me down. A mixture of gray and blue swirls in his deep-set eyes as the furrow of his brows settle and a pain takes over his hostel expression. “If you could hear me out.”
“You have nothing to say to me.” I back into the apartment and push the door closed.
Olar shoves it back open, and the knob rips from my hand.
An anger I’ve not felt in years warms my face. I’m seeing red as I’m charging for Olar. I throw punch after punch at him, putting all the might I have behind every attack. Tears burn my raw cheeks. My breaths are heavy and my revenge is strong. I want Olar dead, as dead as the corpse I see every time I close my eyes, as I wish I were in place of who made it possible for me to breath and suffocate. I want him dead as love, as hope, as desire.
Olar snatches my wrists in his hands, keeping my petty punches at bay. He yanks me to him and hugs me tightly. “Tracey,” he cries. “My lost too. Remember? I lost my best friend, and by my own hands. If I could’ve done anything to change it. To take it back. To replace him. It’s time you realize that I would never kill my cousin.” He wrenches away and looks me dead in my eyes. “Do you understand that? I would never do this to us.”
I shuffle out of his grasp and walk to the cloudy window dirtied by lack of attention, time, and dust. “I don’t care for blinds,” I say, wiping the glass with the side of my fist. “I like to watch the cars pass.”
Olar comes to my side and pushes his arm around my shoulders. He hugs me to him and though I rest my head on his chest and wrap my arm around his middle, I don’t find solace. What I do find is someone who shares my pain, someone who can, maybe, relate to the mountain-sized boulders packed tightly in my chest, and the ocean of tears on the cusp of falling from my eyes. “It hurts all the time,” I mutter.
“A million tomorrows won’t alleviate that hurt, Tracey. But let us help ease it. Don’t give up on us too.”
When Tomorrows Comes
“It’ll be easier on all of us if we were all together, Tracey. There’s a lot going on and we can’t fight it separated.” Olar’s attempt to persuade me is futile.
“I’m away selflessly. For everyone’s protection. They are not after you all, they’re after me. The further I’m away, the safer you all are.”
“And how safe are you?” he snaps, slapping his hand on the table. The sound echoes through the empty apartment. He’s refused to sit on one of the four pillows I have placed around the short table, but squats down as though he doesn’t intend to stay for long.
“I’ve been okay,” I argue, pointing at my chest. “Away from the house, they don’t know where to find me.”
“Why are you trying to make your being gone about our safety? You know that’s not what this is about.”
I grumble an exasperated sigh. “Then what is it about, Olar?”
“You, running. You’re running away from us to get further from memories of him!”
I snap, “You don’t know anything about me!”
He waves his hand dismissively. “Miss me with that, Tracey. Admit it!” he demands. “We can take care of ourselves, always have. You and I both know that you don’t need to be away to keep us safe.”
I look toward the door.
The handle jiggles before the lock’s turned, and the hinges whine from the door slowly swinging open. Olar’s on his feet, a bloodshot complexion of Burdened I’ve not seen in years.
Laine and Little Nathan come around the opened door, grocery bags in hand. “What are you doing here?” the two say to Olar as he’s saying the same to them.
“I’m not completely disconnected from the family, only those who don’t know how to let go of the past and live with the future I’m dictating.”
“Your past is your future and there’s no way of avoiding that,” Olar declares.
“Un-un. Don’t try to convince her, Olar. We’ll all be kicked out, and it’ll take another year to get us back where we are today,” Little Nathan says with a chuckle. “Tracey, we just did a little,” he sings, “shopping for you. Don’t throw a fit about it either. I’ll be back to chat with you this weekend. I have class the next couple of days so I won’t make it out here until then.” Little Nathan hugs me. I wrap my arms around his middle. I could argue him on buying groceries after I’ve told him not to, but after fighting with Olar, I’m weak. The miffed eye he gives me when I combat him hits me in a sore spot too.
Little Nathan was the first to find me; tied to a tree, arms bound with rope. He knew not to bring me to the house, fearful of an enemy finding me. I was dead weight in his arms as he carried me from one place to another, in search of somewhere safe for us to rest. My life . . . Nathan’s life had departed from me in a way a butterfly brakes from a cocoon; first slowly, and then all in an instant. Ever since that day I’ve been a half, feeling the toll of my whole lacked by the missing piece. It is an affliction silence nor sound can ease. It often resurfaces and rips me apart again and again; a cold reminder of a loss I wish to grow past.
To lose a mate. . . Again, it is a cancer, one that not even time or medication will cure.
Little Nathan and I found this studio apartment in the middle of the city, away from any relative and remains. It’s a whole in the wall, but the gritty wall paper, stale air, and my pallet of sheets and quilts bunched up in the middle of the aged-wood floor is my new home. I’m comfortable.
