COMPLEMENTARY [GxG]

Chapter 24 | Shades of Betrayal

My mother died with a guilty conscience. Sometimes, the sense of abandonment she left behind in Haiti permeates through my dreams in sweltering island landscapes I've never seen and faceless relatives I've never met.

Today, Eris is with me. In the dream, we fall from a helicopter and crash through the Caribbean forest, the spindling branches not enough to break our fall. The second before we hit the ground, two giant hands extend from the clouds and pluck us from the air, then set us down, unharmed.

And then the hands, one wrinkled and dark brown, and the other lighter with delicate fingers, press against the base of our spines. Our eyes roll back, Eris' veins emit a golden glow, and we're laughing. The goddesses Nana Buluku and Chalchiuhtlicue are giddy at their new, mortal bodies. I'm speaking fluent Nahuatl and Eris Yoruba, and the bugs and animals and trunks of trees understand every word, talking back to us in a myriad of languages.

The scene changes. We're in Port-Au-Prince with the sea of square, multicolored houses along the hills, and the price is on my head now. The government can't have William's head, so they'll have mine. The goddess possessing my body warns me that they've contracted a local gang to ensure my capture. Not for ransom, but for my blood—I will die here, sacrificed on an altar lined with bottles of alcohol, porcelain saints, and cheap plastic rosaries.

Eris shoots golden bullets at the masked men. They're armed with AK-47s, but Nana Buluku makes her skin into iron. One of them manages to restrain me and lock me in a car trunk.

And then I wake, comfortable in my bed with my silk hair wrap and eye mask, and Eris' name is on my lips, because the last thing I remember was screaming for her help.

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Through the weekend, as I dive head-first into my ever-increasing to-do lists and work with an inhuman productivity, the kiss with Eris doesn't leave my mind.

Whenever I close my eyes, it loops on repeat. Her teeth biting my lip, the hitches in her breath, the soft curves of her spine, the way she stands on the tips of her toes to make up for our height difference. And now, with that boundary breached, I let myself remember all the times she's glanced at my mouth. Her confession that she thought of kissing me since the day we met, and I feel faint at the possibility such forbidden desires lingered in the back of her mind every time she dragged me to filth. And then the day I met her... I thought she was nervous under the pressure of the competition, but she only averted her gaze around me, stumbling over her words, branded with that same doe-eyed vulnerability.

She's repulsive. But there's been some bizarre alchemy, some form of Stockholm syndrome because maybe I'm so alone I'm latching onto the closest thing, but even that doesn't explain this twisted attraction.

Attraction to what, though? Her danger? The shameless way she walks like she's in control of whatever ground she steps on? Or the fact she's utterly doomed, utterly alone with no one else to confide in but me?

It doesn't have to mean anything. Nothing but a lapse in judgment, it doesn't mean anything. All she wanted was to make me question myself, lowering my resolve in the only way she could after I lowered hers. I gave her the satisfaction of having her little lesbo moment with a straight girl, and it cost me nothing but my pride.

At least my brain is fixated on the kiss instead of the way her paintbrush perfectly forged my triangles.

But then, as I'm sitting alone in the library during lunch, she storms into my line of vision with a different concern.

"You made out with my brother?"

I give her a dumb look as if I have no idea what she's talking about. I'm about to tell her to stop believing rumors, but then she clarifies: