Chapter Seven
“Ithink I know how we can find the remaining containers of dirt,” I announced as I stumbled through the door of the shop.
“Where have you been? You were supposed to call one of us to walk you home.” Heathcliff grabbed my shoulders, jerking my body against him. “What if Dracula attacked you?”
Oscar whimpered at the sound of Heathcliff’s raised voice. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but Heathcliff’s words dripped with panic. His fingers dug into my skin.
“Relax, Old Toothy is hardly about to jump out at me on the town green with all of Mrs. Ellis’ minions out there setting up the festival. He won’t kill me, because he knows I’m Homer’s daughter.”
“You infuriating woman,” Heathcliff roared, tearing his hands from me and spinning away. “He doesn’t have to kill you. He could make you a vampire like him. He could take you away from us.”
“I’m being careful.” I pulled down the neck of my red sweater, showing him the silver crucifix glittering at my throat. “I’ve got a purse full of holy water and communion wafers. I’m not some damsel in distress who needs supervision, especially not from a boyfriend who’s spent the last few months acting like he doesn’t give a fuck.”
Heathcliff stormed across the room. He turned his back to me and gripped the side of the desk. The rage rolled off him in waves that shook the room.
“I care.” He rasped the words so quietly I barely heard them. “I care so much I can’t breathe.”
“Then act like it. I don’t need someone yelling at me. I needyou, Heathcliff. I need you by my side, sword swinging. Instead, I get this limp indifference—”
Heathcliff roared, tearing his hands through his hair. “Don’t you understand that I cannot live without you? If he took you from me, fromus, then he’d take my soul along with him.”
“How can I believe that when you treat me with such indifference?” I shot back. “And what about Morrie? What if Dracula took him instead of me?”
CRASH.
Heathcliff smashed his fist into the desk. The old-fashioned till toppled off the end, scattering coins and money across the rug.
“Then my soul would die twice.” Heathcliff’s whole body shuddered.
“Heathcliff—”
I reached for his shoulder. I wanted him to face me, to look me in the eye and tell me why he’d been behaving the way he had. But before I could grab him, another hand plunged out of the gloom and snatched him from me.
I swallowed down a scream as the shadowed figure loomed over us. I caught the edge of Morrie’s distinct scent.
“Do you mean it?”
“Fuck off,” Heathcliff growled.
Morrie tightened his grip on Heathcliff, shaking him with a strength I didn’t realize he possessed. “Do you mean that you would die twice if you lost us?”
The pair of them glared at each other, but I saw now it wasn’t hate that flashed between them like a storm crashing against the cliffs. “There’s a coal in my chest where my heart should be,” Heathcliff choked out. “You and Mina are better off without me. My love is poison. I won’t taint you with that the way I’ve been tainted.”
“That’s not true.” Tears welled in my eyes. “It’s the greatest honor of my life to love and to be loved by you. I love you the way a writer loves a story that refuses to fall from their fingers – I love you because you’re infuriating and precious and always just out of reach. I don’t want you to save me from loving you. I want to throw myself into your fire and burn up inside it. And it’s because I love you that what you’re doinghurts—”
“This isn’t about us, gorgeous.” Morrie’s words dripped with danger. “I know what he’s doing. I never thought I’d see the great Heathcliff Earnshaw give way to cowardice.”
Heathcliff snarled. He curled his big hands around Morrie’s throat, and for a flicker of a moment I wondered how far he’d go to stop Morrie talking.
“I’m terrified of losing you both, you idiot!” Heathcliff yelled into Morrie’s face. “Don’t you understand that you and Mina mean more to me than myself?”
“Don’t you see, Mina? His heart’s not coal – it’s made of paper. An origami heart that’s torn and frayed at the edges, and he thinks to encase it with glass so it can’t be torn again. He wants to save us from having our hearts torn up, too. He doesn’t seem to realize that the cuts and the rips and the puncture woundsarelove. You can never keep your heart whole and safe, but when imperfect hearts join together, they—”
Heathcliff cut Morrie off with a searing kiss – a kiss that no man with a coal for his heart could be capable of. In that kiss, I felt everything I’d feared about Heathcliff flip on its head. It wasn’t that he was falling out of love with us. He loved us too much, and the idea of hurting us if we lost him burned so deep that he thought the only thing he could do to save us from that hurt was to make us indifferent to him. As if that could ever be possible.
Heathcliff tore himself from Morrie to grip my shoulders again, only this time he mashed his lips to mine. I gasped against the onslaught of his kiss. On his punishing tongue, I read the torment he’d put himself through these last months, believing he had to make us hate him, believing he could possiblydo anythingthat would make us hate him, so we could be safe from the pain of losing him.
Behind me, Morrie pressed his body to me, his long arms wrapping around us both. He tangled his fingers in Heathcliff’s hair as his lips pressed against the stubble on Heathcliff’s cheek.
