Holding On Chapter Excerpts

     Lin looked back out over the steering wheel as her eyes filled with fresh tears.
     “Gabby, I think I know what you are, but I can’t believe that you’ve spent over three decades watching out for me. All that time, Gabby!”
     “It really has been a wonderful time for me, Lin. Please don’t ever doubt that. The rest – your understanding and acceptance of it all – will come to you with time.”
     “I hope so, Gabby. Right now I feel that amazing power inside me – my mayhem – and I know I’ll never lose it. It’s unbelievable, Gabby. But I also feel like a balloon whose string broke, and I’m floating off somewhere. I spent over thirty years not completely knowing what was going on in my life.”
     “Ah, Lin…do you think you ever will know completely?”

     “Wow, my Lin, you’re really something. How did you finish all that?”
     “It wasn’t easy, Dad. But I did it.”
     “Are you ready for that hot chocolate, Honey?”
     “Yeah, Mom. I thought about that the whole time!”
     “Aren’t you tired after all that? I thought we figured you’d try one square, see how that went.”
     “I did, Dad. I tried one square, and then I thought…well, what if I try just one more? Just one more square?”
     “And you kept going. I wouldn’t have believed you could do that much. I never would have asked you to, that’s for sure.”
     “At first, I didn’t think I could either!”

     “Lin, you really do love the ocean! You might miss Pennsylvania sometimes, but this is pretty nice, isn’t it?”
     “Yeah, Dad. It’s amazing. And look at the water – it’s so calm.”
     “Not always though, right? I know you know about hurricanes. We watched that show the other day, you remember?”
     “I remember. I can’t even imagine a storm that big. And that comes from the ocean?”
     “Not just the ocean. It’s a bunch of things: the air, the wind currents, sunshine…all of it teams up sometimes and BOOM!”
     “BOOM is right! I like it better like this. A storm that big is scary. But a storm like that starts there, out in the ocean?” Lin pointed out over the water.
     “Yeah, Lin. But not today. Today’s a good day for ice cream. Was yours good?”
     Lin giggled again and said, “Chocolate is always good, Dad. You know that!”
     “Yeah, I do know that. I bet you’d like to come back here again sometime, huh?”
     “I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it, Dad.”

     “And you couldn’t tell anyone?”
     “No. At least I didn’t believe I could then. Maybe now I’d know better and figure something out. Hell, now I’d destroy him in a heartbeat. Broken hearts or broken bones, Gabby.”
     Lin took a deep breath and let it out. The moon had risen higher, and she leaned toward the windshield to get a full view of it. It still didn’t appear to have any interest, even though it must have witnessed all the darkness that had flooded her young life.
     “But I knew he meant what he said. I didn’t think about it this clearly, but even if I would have had him arrested somehow, my parents were still in trouble. As a family, we needed him to help with the bills. So I took punch after punch after punch after…”
     Lin finally had to inhale, and she felt a fresh tear warming her cheek. She sensed Gabriel watching her in the moonlit car, and she knew how much Gabriel cared. Even though Gabriel might not show it, she felt there might be a heart breaking in her best friend beside her.

     Like a stretched rubber band snapping itself back, Lin got yanked into her own body. She looked toward the doorway to the kitchen and a satisfied and relieved smile sprung up at the knowledge that her ordeal had ended. Ray would never hurt anyone again.
     The smile vanished seconds later when Lin recalled the brutality of what she’d just done. And the unexplainable way she’d done it hit her like a hurricane.
     How did that just happen?
     How was that even possible?
     Did I really do that to him?
     What did I do?
     What am I?
     The questions attacked her from every direction as her heart raced and her breaths wheezed in and out. She tried to remain standing, but her strong legs went weak and the room continued to spin about her even after she’d collapsed.
     And before she lost consciousness completely, she felt the terror, the impossibility and the insanity of what she’d just done. She laid there with her eyes closed in a dead silent house, knowing exactly what horrors stood mutely bleeding in the next room.
     Left with only one possible conclusion – that she was a monster – Lin let her head rest on the wood floor and welcomed her slow spiral into a numbing darkness.

     Lin quit fighting and let her arms drop to her sides. She watched as Ben’s face broke into a self-satisfied smile. He reached down to the bottom hem of her t-shirt.
     She didn’t know why, but she felt her eyes begin to close, and the indescribable flood within her continued to rise, filling her with a sweet pressure.
     And she still felt Gabriel’s presence and understood the words that came to her: “You can choose to be kind, Lin.”
     The world around her had become a calm, beautiful, completely still surface. Ben and everyone else appeared frozen. Lin felt, more than she saw, unexplainable masses of something churning beneath the world, and it was flowing into her. She looked into Ben’s eyes, which were now sad and scared, not angry.
     The pressure reached a pleasantly unbearable level, and Lin felt a wave rush out from her in every direction. She saw through Ben’s eyes that she stood there very still with a faint green glow in her eyes.
     There was no longer any threat. No fear. And no doubts.
     She’d taken Ben’s life.

     “That was kind of a sad time in my life, Gabby. I saw things falling apart. My mom wasn’t getting any better, and it was dragging my dad down too. He did the best he could, but nothing he did mattered.”
     “Your life at school was okay though?”
     “Yeah. I think it was only because I’d buried everything about my mayhem. I don’t know what I would have done with all of that on my mind.”
     Lin touched below her eyes lightly with her fingertips, picking up the beginning of a tear.
     “With those troubling things hidden away, did you feel you lived a more normal life?”
     Yeah, I really did. Ray was gone and I never saw him again. No one spoke of him, and I heard a couple months later that he’d killed himself. And even that didn’t trigger any memories. I knew something bad happened to him and my dad came home to find me passed out. And I remembered all that evil man had done to me. But I never filled in the blanks about what ended it.”

     “I think I kind of fell in love with him right then and there, Gabby. And I know why now: his eyes. There’s never been anything but truth and honesty in his eyes. I never realized how I’d learned over the years how to see who people really are by what I see in their eyes. I think that all started with Ray and all the evil I saw in his.”
     “That’s a very useful skill to have.”
     “There’s nothing sneaky about Jack. I saw that right away. And that first moment, when he looked up from his menu and studied me – it was in such an innocent, honest way. He wasn’t sneaking a look or leering – he was just being playful. I knew my sweater was kind of tight – I’d bought a smaller size by mistake – but I never caught him checking me out like that. He seemed to want more than anything else what he saw in my eyes.”
     “He’s a good man, Lin. You knew that right away.”
     “But I didn’t know just how good. I got more clues as the dinner went on though…”

     When she stepped into the room it erupted in eager barking and meowing, and Lin looked from cage to cage at all the scared but hopeful faces looking back at her. Only one sat perfectly still and watched her.
     Lin walked closer and stooped down so that their faces were level with each other and she looked him over. He was big, almost too big for the puppy cage. His thick red fur fluffed out in every direction and he had the beginning of a bushy mane circling all around his neck. He sat patiently and waited.
     After her quick study of him was complete, Lin met his staring eyes. They were big eyes, and he looked back at her without blinking. Lin watched as he looked calmly into her eyes and tilted his head a slight amount.
     She reached a finger into the cage near his nose, and he only pressed his snout against her finger and held it there while continuing to hold her gaze.
     Lin knew a big, furry part of her future had begun right there in that quiet moment.

     The sun had spent itself and retired, and between the two of them, the only clothing that remained was Lin’s black heels. Everything else, including the flowers, lay scattered across the bed and the wood floor of Lin’s bedroom. They awoke in a tight embrace in a room lit only by a full moon peeking in through an open window that let in a few cool breezes.
     Lin ran her hands over Jack’s hard muscles and felt his breaths now calm but his skin still hot from the passion they’d chosen over dinner. She saw his closed eyes and a faint smile despite his fatigue, and she glanced past him to see the moon revealing itself as a few wispy clouds fled to the north. She took the time to look at how the pale rays highlighted the lean muscles of the exhausted man lying on his side next to her.
     With her right hand resting on his cheek, she said, “Oh my, Jack. You really meant it.”
     “What’s that?”
     “Three pieces of chocolate, like you said when we first met. I just love getting three, Jack.”
     Jack’s eyes didn’t open, but he smiled and said, “Good, ‘cause I love you getting them.”

     Lin stepped to one side, flipped the light switch and turned the knob. She pulled the door in and Jack looked into the garage with his mouth hanging open.
     “That’s yours? You bought that?”
     “Yeah, Jack. It’s all mine. Like it?”
     “Oh, hell yeah!”
     He jumped down the two steps and stood looking at Lin’s new Temt8tion sparkling under the ceiling lights. For a few seconds, he just grinned and shook his head.
     “That’s really your new car, Lin?”
     “Seems about right for a girl like me, wouldn’t you say?”
     He looked up at her still two steps above him and reached for her hips. He looked into her eyes and said, “Your car should at least try to be as hot as you.”

     Lin poked at the beginning of a tear and looked out through the windshield. The silence and stillness of the world outside her Temt8tion seemed to her to be some natural result of Gabriel becoming real again. As if the whole world had stopped to celebrate it, knowing all that Gabriel had done for her.        
     Lin fought to keep a sob from bubbling up.
     “And now you’re holding on?”
     “What do you mean?”
     “To that string.”
     “What string? What are you talking about?”
     “You might always be like a balloon adrift, Lin. Life is like that if we don’t hang onto things in a panic. Living with faith takes strength, but it allows us to follow our true path.”
     Lin turned to face Gabriel and shook her head slowly. A smile appeared and she understood.
     “Yes, Gabby. I’ve looked back on enough of that string to get a good hold on it. I’ll never let it go again, and I’ll carry those memories to anchor me wherever I go. Thanks, Gabby. You’re still taking care of me.”