Once Again (20 page)

And just how could I argue with that?

“Okay.” I smiled, feeling my heart latch onto
him with an even firmer grasp.

The
rain began before we made it back to Sky Cove. The thunder and
lightening started sometime in the middle of the movie. Odd as a
thunderstorm in October seemed, in the beginning it appeared to be
nothing but a typical storm.

The rain was pelting down in sheets and the
sky a constant flash by the time Nickie’s voice came from the
television saying “What makes life so difficult?”

“People,” Terry replied. Luke’s arm tightened
around my shoulders, and I knew that Terry’s words echoed what was
swirling inside each of us.

Whatever difficulty had tortured the people
we’d been, it was brought on by the actions of other people. Which
was monumentally unfair. But I supposed that was just part of
life.

“Rain keeps on like this, the water will be
over White Bridge.”

I sat up straighter, thinking about the
fifteen-minute drive back to my house. Even if the water didn’t
rise over the bridge, there was still ponding and hydroplaning to
consider.

“Don’t worry about it,” he added. “There’s
always a lot of water on this road when it rains like this. I’m
used to it.”

Yes, he would be, having lived here all his
life. In Nashville, my experience driving in the rain mostly
included traffic lights that had been knocked out due to
lightning.

The storm raged on, more and more violent as
the movie finished and we stood up from the sofa. Peering out the
window, worry settled in my chest about the drive back to my house.
There was so much water, and the wind howled and swirled with a
vengeance.

I thought of myself as independent, but I was
really glad Luke would be the one doing the driving.

He stepped up behind me, keys jingling in his
hands, when a strike of lightening broke the sky and lit it up like
it was the middle of the afternoon. The thunder that accompanied it
was instant and deafening.

Gwen’s bedroom door opened, her footsteps
bringing her closer until she appeared in the living room.

“Can you believe this?” she said. “A
thunderstorm this bad in October.”

Somewhere in the house her cell phone rang.
She disappeared down the hall, reemerging in the living room with
the device pressed tight to her ear.

It was almost midnight, my curfew, so for
anyone to be calling this late seemed odd. Something must be
wrong.

“I see,” she said. “And the road is
impassable?”

I cut my eyes toward Luke and he
shrugged.

Gwen ended the call and looked at us. “That
was Mr. Geary who lives up the road, just past the bridge. White
Bridge is flooded and one of the trees from his yard has fallen
across the road.”

“So we’re stuck?” Luke asked.

“It seems so,” she replied. “Even if there
was another way back into town, I wouldn’t want the two of you out
in this. I’m just so thankful you weren’t already out there
driving. I’ll call your mom, Layla.”

Luke and I sat on the sofa as Gwen talked
with my mother and assured her I was taken care of and that as soon
as the road was cleared she or Lucas would drive me back home.

Before I knew it, pillows and blankets had
been retrieved and an inviting bed had been made for me on the
sofa.

Luke brought me a tee shirt and a pair of
sweatpants that had to be his given how long the legs were.
“They’re probably way too big, but there’s a drawstring.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling. I liked the
thought of sleeping in his clothes.

After changing in the downstairs bathroom, I
made my way back to the living room, where I said a quick goodnight
to Gwen and Luke. He kissed my cheek and winked before heading
upstairs to his room.

Settling in under the covers on the couch, I
replayed the events of the evening.

My talk with my mother and the discovery that
I was born in Boston.

Running into Patsy Emerson in Camden and
hearing the old family tale of a possibly psychotic Leo
Emerson.

Discovering Amelia Cutler Light’s
great-granddaughter was a maternity nurse at a Boston Hospital.

The oddity of a thunderstorm in October and
the road from Luke’s house becoming impassable.

I wondered if the universe was aligning in an
attempt to help us, or if opposing forces were conspiring to stand
in our way.

Probably a little of both.

I decided sleep was a must, because in the
morning there was sure to be a dissection of tonight’s events.
Plus, I still had to tell him what I’d learned about my
adoption.

And from the looks of the books on the
kitchen table, Gwen had been doing more reading.

I closed my eyes, forcing my mind away from
the questions, and eventually, sleep came.

***

The beach was silent, save for the drizzling
rain and light wind. It appeared a calm October rain, but I knew
different. I knew the brutality that had so recently filled this
place. The rock outcropping stood tall and motionless, a mocking
tribute to the violent act that had taken his life.

I knew I wasn’t really here. In my mind I
knew they’d already taken me from the beach where I’d fallen after
they killed him. But somehow, I
was
here, and my
consciousness was taking me to the opposite side of the rocks,
where I’d never been before.

With startling clarity, even though I knew I
was dreaming, I realized I was going to see what happened.

I was going to see him die.

The moment the flat ground beyond the
outcropping came into view, my dream dropped into deafening
silence. The waves that lapped at the shore were soundless. And
though I still felt the cold rain and the chilly wind, the only
thing that registered in my ears was stillness.

The branches they beat him with were huge, as
big around as tree trunks it seemed. Over and over again they hit
him, and with each blow I felt a corresponding jolt in my own body,
a ripping and tearing through my heart. His face was bloody. His
clothes torn. His body battered by their assault.

And when they were done, when he lay there
lifeless and broken, they tossed his body into the tide, where it
would soon wash away.

The leader of the mob turned toward me, but
my eyes refused to focus. His features blurred to the point that he
was hardly recognizable as a human being. I tried to move closer,
but my dream held me immobile. The desire to discover the man
responsible for the death of my beloved burned inside me like a
furnace, and I cursed the dream that would not let me see him.

Anguish and misery washed over me, immense
and powerful. The part of my mind that remembered I was sleeping on
Lucas’s couch and that he was safe upstairs in his own bed slipped
further back in my awareness. I was lost in a sea of grief, the
will to go on ebbing from my being with each breath.

And then I was not on the beach anymore, but
rather inside a dark, damp shack. The floor was dirt. The walls
some manner of stone that dripped with moisture from the humidity
in the summer air.

Summer? When had it become summer?

Someone cried.

When had the sound returned to my dream?

She was alone. The woman who had my face and
whose memories I had. Alone, writhing on an old wooden cot in the
corner of the tiny room. She sobbed softly one moment, and moaned
as if in pain the next.

My eyes narrowed, and my vision zoomed in on
her face, the fear obvious and palpable. Whatever was happening to
her was painful and frightening.

But worse than the pain and the fear was the
loneliness. No one was there with her.

The smell of wet earth invaded my nostrils,
coupled with the sweat from her skin. The light straining through
the cracks between the stones in the wall was weak, as if the last
vestiges of sunlight could not penetrate the darkness of the
room.

Her dress hung halfway off one shoulder and a
pitiful blanket draped her from the waist down. Her legs never
stilled, with knees pulled toward her body, then laid flat on the
cot.

The scream that ripped from her body seemed
to reach inside me and shred my guts into minuscule pieces. The
pain I felt for her... from her... was both emotional and physical.
My abdomen burned and heaved and I wondered if either of us would
survive this terrible ordeal.

Suddenly she was silent.

And the fire that had burned inside me
cooled, the fear that had gripped my heart quieted.

Her face was blank, eyes opened wide, staring
toward the ceiling. Frozen.

Blood poured on the floor beneath the cot in
an increasing pool.

She was dead.

I
bolted up from the sofa. My breath came in gasping gulps. I could
not pull it into my body fast enough. Clammy sweat covered my
forehead and my neck, and my pulse throbbed with frenzied speed in
my temples.

My mind reeled, a tumult of feelings too raw
and immediate to name. I tried to take note of my surroundings. The
clock on the DVD player read 2:30 a.m. I reminded myself it had
only been a dream, but the emotions coursing through me were so
strong it was difficult to focus on reality.

Then he was there.

Lucas strode into the room with purpose,
dropping to his knees on the floor in front of me. He took my face
in his hands, forced my eyes to his.

“It was a dream.” His eyes moved over my
face, rapid and anxious. “It was a dream.”

I knew he’d repeated it for his own sake, as
well as mine.

“I saw it, Luke. I saw it all.” My hands went
to his face, gently touching him from forehead to cheeks to chin,
reassuring myself he was alive. His skin was hot and flushed. “I
saw him die. I saw her die. I saw both of us die.”

Tears escaped my eyes and I dropped my head
to his shoulder. He cradled me there, arms encircling me and
running along my back.

“I know,” he whispered. “I saw it too.”

I burrowed my face against his neck, sliding
my hands up the length of his back. My arms tightened around him,
and his around me, as we tried to get close enough to each other to
rid ourselves of the misery of our dream.

For a long moment we clung to each other
there, in the dark of his living room, me on the sofa and him
kneeling on the floor. And then I lifted my head and looked at
him.

His mouth found mine, urgent and hot. He
practically fused our lips together, as he climbed onto the couch
with me. Careful not to make any noise, he leaned me back until I
lay against the cushions.

One of his hands cradled my face, thumb
stroking across my cheek. His other arm snaked around my waist,
hand planted on the small of my back, pulling me closer still as he
lowered his body on top of mine.

His mouth never left mine.

My arms went around him, inherent, as if
they’d done it a thousand times before. The muscles in his
shoulders rippled and bulged as he worked to keep the bulk of his
weight off me.

Everything else in the world ceased to exist.
The dream in which I’d watched him die faded, and I wanted nothing
more than to be in this moment with him. Breath mingling, skin to
skin, heartbeat to heartbeat.

I’d never been this close to a boy before.
The few kisses I’d experienced before Lucas were clumsy and bland,
the typical teenage attempt to be more grown up than we actually
were. None of them actually showed affection.

Nothing close to
this
.

In my mind I knew I should feel nervous,
tentative, but those feelings were nowhere to be found. I had no
conscious memories from my past life of the two of us together in
this way, but I supposed our souls must remember, because kissing
Luke, holding him, being this close to him was easy and
instinctive.

I was elated, and yet conflicted. I loved
Lucas, of that I was certain. An expression of my love for him felt
natural and perfect. A part of me wanted that so badly. But I knew
going further would change things between us irrevocably. Going to
the level of physical intimacy, no matter how right it felt, would
somehow alter the course we were on. And our current course was
difficult enough as it was.

And it was just too soon. Not to mention the
doubts that still plagued me about the legitimacy of Luke’s
feelings for me. Teenage sex was an obstacle course fraught with
dangers and baggage and was best left alone.

Luke slowed the kiss, but didn’t pull away.
All at once it changed from an urgent, blinding need to a sweet,
tender show of love.

Surely it wouldn’t hurt to enjoy it just a
moment longer before I put the brakes on. Told him sex was just not
in the equation at this point.

Part of me wondered how he’d react to that,
even as he lifted his head to look at me, then pressed his lips to
my forehead. I’d heard guys could be pretty upset when denied,
especially when a girl seemed to be headed in that direction.

I hadn’t meant to be a tease.

Abruptly, he pulled back and sat up.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Huh?” I blinked a few times, pushing up on
my elbows, cringing at my stellar response.

“We can’t let things get out of hand.” He
shoved his hands through his hair and whispered, “Physically, I
mean.”

Of course he would be sensible. I shouldn’t
have worried. Although a tiny part of me would’ve liked it if he
didn’t want to stop.

Just like that, fear punched me in the
stomach. What if that was it? What if he stopped because he didn’t
want to be with me that way? What if this was the first step in my
ultimate rejection?

And why did I care when I knew very well sex
was not something I was ready for?

Because I wanted him to want me, to love me,
to feel for me what I felt for him. And the thought that maybe he
didn’t just killed me.