Vitality (Vitality Series #1)

Chapter 24 Come Back pt.2

The next morning, Ava saw a woman walk across the college grounds who looked an awful lot like a nun who had homeschooled her, and had unfortunately been caught up in a piece of her and Zo's complicated past.

Ava remembered the nun's hands almost above all, the way they were surprisingly strong in their urgency when they grabbed Ava, but especially their warmth, and it had been the first time since her mother that she'd felt that. There was a nasty scare that rose high along one hand, which surprised her, and a striking dark tone to her skin, which was so radiantly beautiful it almost didn't even look like skin, with skin's usual imperfect pores and fine lines.

Sister Clare had caught Ava one night, trying to pilfer their silver. Instead of trying to hand her over to authorities, Sister Clare took pity on Ava, not that Ava wanted it. After some stern words of wisdom, Sister Clare took a promise from Ava that she would come back and help the church, and the nun let her go. Ava had found herself going back, bewildered and unsure why, especially when she had shut out adults completely at that point. For a little while, her worries for food and shelter were lessened.

Well, it didn't take Ava long to squander that. Her only friend at the time, Zo, had run into problems with the biker gang he was an errand boy for. For the most part, the gang was his family, and his protectors, but there were some crueler than others, and there were some rules you just didn't break. He owed one of them for damaging deeds, and the balance due was only part money. One part, neither she nor Zo would ever talk of to another soul. The money part — well there was money at the church from a charity event... and with her inside knowledge, she orchestrated a way to break in and break out without ever being seen. She and Zo hightailed it out of town after paying his debt, Ava feeling sure that she had left a piece of her soul alongside that debt.

Life wasn't easy off the grid, as a scavenger, as a wanderer... soon it had gotten to Zo, and when she was out getting supplies, he had disappeared. He had gone back to his biker family and left her — alone.

Ava hadn't forgotten Sister Clare though. Just so that the woman's time spent on Ava hadn't gone completely to waste, and as a kind of way to pay back her debt to her, some time before Ava turned eighteen, she disappeared for a while from Jason, Keya, and Zo (who by that time had wound up back in her life again), and obtained her GED. That was a blurry time for her... She pushed those thoughts down, pushed all the past back again. She was living a different life now.

Days went by, turning into weeks, and there was no word from Layton. Nothing.

After a while, she began falling apart little by little from his absence, feeling desperation for him grow to new heights. How could she ever go back to how things were now that she had experienced that little peace inside herself from being with him? She looked for him in the face of a stranger, in the creaking of the floorboards in her room, every time she closed her eyes, and that loneliness felt all too familiar to her. So many times Ava thought she heard him or saw his shadow and swung around with a smile, hoping he'd just be there. "Layton." But he wasn't.

She couldn't believe how she wasted inside. The unhealthy attachment hadn't escaped her. Nor did the pathetic-ness of it. But what was she to do? The vulnerability in its unadulterated truth, the undeniable connection with him, felt like the very essence of life, so raw and feeling and free. She was brutally alive with him — and trying not to let herself feel that... was like trying not to let herself breathe.

Why did humans need another person to feel themselves the most? To connect to life the most? He was that mirror for her. And, in honesty, she didn't let things go easily once she finally latched on. She could hold on with a desperation that could smother anything, if she let herself be however she was to be; but she worked hard to suppress that need.