Push and Shove: The Ghost Bird Series: #6 (The Academy) (27 page)

“It’s wrong,” I said in a weak voice. Even as I said it, I wasn’t totally convinced because North was telling me it was okay. Still, I didn’t think anyone deserved to be beaten like that. Defensively was different. This time, Silas threw the first punch. “We could have walked away. I should have backed up. I should have stayed away from him.”

North frowned, shaking his head. He focused on me. “This,” he said, motioning to the woods and my house beyond it, “wasn’t you. It had nothing to do with you. Rocky’s been on Silas ever since he joined the football team. The other guys accepted him. Rocky’s been a bully all his life and everyone’s finally tired of it. The whole team has been itching to get at him. When the push came, Silas finally shoved back. I’ve been telling him to do it for a while.”

My hand slipped up, cupping around the tender spot Rocky had created on my neck. Rocky did something I never thought he’d do to me. He was arrogant, abrasive, but he’d never before been this way. “Something’s wrong with Rocky,” I said. “Jay said it. He’s not himself.”

“Maybe Silas knocked whatever’s wrong with him out of his system. Whatever it is, it can’t continue. And Rocky can’t keep coming after you. If he wants to take on Silas, he’s going to have to face him head on and not use you as a pawn in his game.” His motorcycle was parked alongside a few cars close to the edge of the diner’s parking lot. He turned and headed for it.

“Where are you going?” I asked, starting to follow.

“I need to take you out of here. This whole day has been a disaster. It’s about time I kept my promise to you.” He opened up one of the hard saddlebags on his bike and pulled out a black leather jacket and a helmet. He returned to me and hooked the jacket around my shoulders. I slipped my arms into the sleeves as he zipped it up. “Keep your legs close to the bike and you’ll keep them warm.” He plopped the helmet on top of my head and clicked the strap under my chin. He released me so he could straddle the bike. He pushed his foot on a lever and the bike roared to life. He kicked the stand away and when he had the bike balanced between his legs, he held a hand out, palm up in invitation.

I wanted to stay. It felt wrong to run off with North, when Silas was out there and needed me, and Nathan ... I didn’t want to leave him alone with my mess. What about Kota and the others? I wanted to help but didn’t know how, didn’t know what to suggest. The terrors of the evening had gotten to me.

It was North’s intense eyes that lured me. He’d asked me to trust him. I needed to.

I hadn’t been really alone with him for a couple of weeks. The last time we were alone together for any length of time, I had slept at his house, and ever since we had been so busy. Nervousness threatened to consume me but I tucked it away. I couldn’t hesitate now.

I dropped my hand into his. He guided me to sit behind him. I wedged my hand into the helmet to let the hair loose from the hair clip from the back of my head and twisted my hair into a bun at the base. I tucked it back up into the helmet. I just managed to reclip it to hold it when he started backing up. With a loud roar of the engine, the motorcycle zoomed out of the lot.

I held on, my hands finding his chest. When the bike straightened on the road, North’s hand found mine. He dragged each one down until I was holding him around his stomach. I guessed he was telling me he preferred I held on there.

I felt his black T-shirt billowing a little. I imagined he must have been cold. His jacket kept my back and arms worm, and the bike did warm the inside of my legs. The breeze blowing around us stung at my cheeks and at my calves. I tucked in close.

North pulled onto the highway, and started heading east. I couldn’t look around him to check his speed, but he drove faster than Luke had when I’d ridden with him.

With the bike vibrating through me, rattling my bones, I held tight. I couldn’t see forward, just side to side, and with the helmet, it made it awkward to hold him too close. I closed my eyes a lot.

Even with the roads fairly clear, it was forty minutes before North pulled off the highway. He took a road past a sign that said Folly Beach. When he started across a long bridge, he slowed enough that I could sit back a little without fear of flying off the back. My insides started to flutter more at the heavy salt taste thickening in the air.

Folly Beach’s main road was clustered with boutique shops, restaurants and bars. A couple of the bars were open still, but nearly everything else was locked up. I imagined late October wasn’t exactly the best time for tourists.

North took the road to the end and made a left. I grasped at North’s stomach, leaning back a little to try to look. There was a large hotel, followed by condos and houses on stilts. I stared at the homes, wondering why and how they built them on top of those frames like that.

It was another couple of miles before North finally stopped the bike. My legs and stomach were a mess from the excitement and the vibration of the bike rattling through me for so long. North leaned the motorcycle slightly, planting a foot on the road. He clutched at my hands on his stomach, pulling one away to urge me to climb off.

I stood with shaking knees and my skin electrified. I turned, seeing that North had stopped because the road had ended. In front of us was a road barrier, with iron beams blocking the way and a bright yellow sign warning people to stay out. Beyond it was a road that appeared to twist into the darkness beyond two large sand dunes.

North turned the motorcycle off, kicking the stand into place before stepping away from it.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” he said. He turned, glancing down at me. He removed my helmet, putting it back into his bike. He studied me for a moment. He turned and squatted. “Climb on my back.”

I wanted to tell him I could walk, but he seemed to have something in mind. I eased over, encircling my arms around his shoulders. His hands found my thighs and he lifted me as he stood. He walked around the iron barrier, ignoring the warning signs and followed the road between the sand dunes.

The moment we were beyond the dunes, the streetlights fell behind us and the only light was the moon, almost full and as bright as I’d ever seen it. A million stars tried to compete with it.

North continued down the path despite the low light. Surrounding us was what I thought at first were just random walls built into the sand. When he turned a bend in the road and I caught the shapes from a different angle, I realized they had once been buildings, and now were only rubble. Iron bar framework had twisted against time and weather, holding up the last remnants of concrete walls. There were heavy cracks in the foundation, and sand had collected in the corners, wind swept in from the dunes.

“What happened?” I asked in a quiet voice.

“A hurricane,” he said. “It blew through here and took out nearly half the island.”

“Hurricanes?” I asked. I was from Illinois. The worst we got were tornados. “They don't have those in the fall, right?”

“There's a few weeks left before hurricane season is over,” he said. “But I doubt we’ll see another one this year. You'll have to wait until next summer.”

“Have you ever been through a hurricane?”

“Yup,” he said. His fingers tightened under my thighs and he hefted me higher on his back. “Look ahead.”

I leaned over his shoulder, feeling the bristle of his unshaven cheek. I breathed in his musk on top of the salty breeze sweeping around us. Even with the moon glowing above us, I couldn’t tell what he wanted me to look at. It was a mass of shapes.

North climbed a short sand dune. I could just make out a particular shadow, a singular, slim building standing out among the slopes of sand.

When he got to the top, the sand stretched out at our feet, meeting dark waves, barely distinguishable in the moonlight. The building stood out alone atop a tiny island about a hundred feet from the shore. It was too small to be of any use that I could imagine.

“What is it?” I asked.

North’s fingers rubbed my skin gently, massaging. “It’s a lighthouse,” he said. “It used to be attached to the island until a couple of big storms wiped out this part of the island.”

“Oh,” I said quietly. Now that he told me what it was, I realized I probably wouldn’t have recognized it in the dark, since the light was out. “It’s kind of lonely.”

“Not now,” he said. “We’re here to visit.” He marched forward, until his footing became unstable over the uneven sand. He moved away from the road a little, finding a small patch of sand to stop in, where he knelt. “Want to climb down?”

I released his shoulders and he lowered until I stood. My shoes sunk into the sand. The wind swept over my face as if I was back on his motorcycle. I hugged his jacket around my shoulders.

My eyes caught on the water. Even in the dark, I could see the movement and was dazzled by the crashing sound and the tang of the salt taste in the air. The moonlight colored the water a dark blue and gray.

I grasped North’s forearm to balance my footing in the uneven sand and to feel him nearby. I was a little taken aback by the scenery and by the overwhelming sensation of being so isolated: the only two people in the middle of nowhere. “What is this place?”

“They call this the North Shore,” he said. “So I claimed it.” He knelt down, dropping onto his butt in the sand. He found my hand and tugged at me. “Sit and stay a while.”

I started to kneel, but North positioned me between his legs in the sand. He planted his legs on either side of mine and eased me back until I was relaxing, my back against his chest. He planted his chin on top of my head.

I stared off into the distance and with every moment, I lost a little bit of my voice, my thoughts going with it, until there was only moon and stars and waves from the ocean and a lonely lighthouse in the distance. Rocky, the party, the chaos at school, everything started to settle and quiet, and the nerve-wracking panic ebbed away with the tide. My fingers drifted down, brushing through the sand and feeling the texture between my fingertips. While I’d felt sand before, it took me a while to think of this sand as being from the ocean, and what I was seeing before me was so big, bigger than what I’d imagined in my head as the ocean to be. Pictures, television, never did it a bit of justice.

North seemed content with the silence. It reminded me of the time we’d spent on the roof of my parents’ house. It felt like almost a lifetime ago now. I’d been much more intimidated by North back then. With his intense dark eyes and his tall, strong body, he’d been the hardest out of all of them to even begin to feel comfortable around. When I first met him, I’d never trust him to climb on the back of his motorcycle to ride to such an isolated spot. North, the ferocious protector, and ever-surprising guardian.

As if aware I was thinking about him, his palm slid over my arm, smoothing down the outside of his jacket. “Are you warm?” he asked, his voice raspy.

I started to nod, but realized he probably wouldn’t notice. “Yes,” I said.

“What do you think?” he asked. “I know it probably isn’t the best time to visit. It’s probably better during the day.”

“It’s perfect,” I said, surprising myself again at calling one of his dates perfect before I could think of anything else to say. “Do you come here a lot?”

“Haven’t been here in a while. We’ve been busy.”

I felt my cheeks warming. “I heard that’s happening a lot lately. Something to do with a girl.”

North grunted, the warm puff of air meeting the back of my scalp. He dipped his head and his nose buried into my hair. “Not just any girl.”

My lips trembled as I tried to think of something to say. I stared hard at the lighthouse and the waves, finding it suddenly difficult to focus with North against my back. “Oh?” was all I could manage.

His hand found my hip under the jacket but above my shirt. I sucked in my stomach a little in surprise, but his palm smoothed over my shirt and around my waist, above my belly button. “I’m not complaining,” he said. “Although keeping up with you is turning into a full time job.”

“Sorry,” I said.

He chuckled, and his hand on my stomach brushed lightly from side to side. He tilted his head and his other hand found my chin, directing it to where he wanted. “Look,” he said. He pointed out toward the east, at the expanse of ocean. “Can you see it?”

I thought at first he meant the stars, until a red light flashed in the distance. I squinted, wondering if I’d been seeing things, but the red light returned once, briefly, before disappearing again. “What is it?”

“A ship. Probably a couple miles out.”

“That far?”

“It’s a pretty big ocean, Baby.”

I watched out at the water line, occasionally catching the red light again. Sometimes a white light joined it. I touched the sand below us, crumbling it in my hands, letting it filter through my fingers. It kept me grounded when my mind was dreaming about ocean waves and ships.

“We’ll go out one day,” he said. “Silas and I were talking about a boat.”

“Like that one out there?”

I felt his lips against my head turning upward and I sensed he was smiling. “Maybe something a little smaller. Something to sail around the coast. Maybe take it over to Europe one day and see France and Greece and home again.”

“Home?” My heart suddenly faltered. We weren’t home? Home was with us, wasn’t it?

“Germany,” he said. “Where I was born.”

I blinked against the wind that picked up, but my mind was trying to sort the information. “You were born in Europe?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I never... I thought... I mean for some reason I thought you were from here.”

“Because I don’t have an accent?”

I nodded a little. “I suppose that’s it.”

“I grew up around military bases. My father insisted I was taught English.” His lips lowered until they met with the back of my head. “Sang,” he said against my hair.

“North?”

He breathed in against my hair, lowering his face until his mouth met my ear. “Do you like me?”

I couldn’t help my smile. “Yes,” I said. “Do you like me?”

North’s hand on my stomach tightened. His lips moved against my ear, but no sound came out. When moments passed and he didn’t answer, my heart wanted to stop. What was wrong? Why didn’t he say yes like he usually did?