Sleeping in Eden (8 page)

“Oh, yes I can.”

“You're only set for life because of me. Eternal coolness,” he teased. “You can thank me now.”

“I could have gotten killed.”

Dylan sighed. “Don't be melodramatic.” But then he pulled her hand from beneath the crease of her coat and examined it intently. The knuckles were scraped and bleeding, but the abrasions were shallow. “How's your thumb?” he asked, tracing the puffy skin that was already beginning to turn purple.

Meg waggled it, wincing.

“It's not broken,” he proclaimed. “I give you a clean bill of health.”

“What about my face?”

“It's lovely,” he told her, dropping his gaze so quickly she didn't have a chance to read it.

Meg swallowed. “I mean my cheek.”

“So do I,” Dylan said lightly. “Battle wounds look good on everyone.”

It was Meg's turn to sigh. “I'm going in. I have a headache.”

Dylan leaned over the bike and lifted it, straightening out the handlebars and kicking the front tire back into alignment. “It'll be fine,” he reassured her. “It just needs a little TLC. I'll bring my tools tomorrow and tighten everything up.”

“Whatever,” Meg mumbled.

He looked lost for a moment before he shrugged and told her, “I need to call my brother for a ride. It's getting cold and I don't feel like walking.”

Meg rolled her eyes. “You live less than a mile away.”

“But I have at least fifty pounds of books in my backpack.”

They started toward the house side by side, Dylan walking the bike and Meg gingerly fingering the raw skin of her cheek. When they made it to the garage, he stopped and studied her in profile for a moment. Then he stretched out his hand to curl it around her ponytail. He lifted the blond waves out of the collar of her coat, smoothing the strands down her back.

“You did good.”

Meg felt like his dog, like she was being petted. She snatched the ponytail from his grasp and swung it over her shoulder, away from him. “If you're so determined to turn me into a boy, I'm cutting this thing off.”

Dylan's gaze turned serious. “No,” he said. “Don't do that. I like you just the way you are.”

Meg scooted up to her room before her mother could get a good look at the damage inflicted by the jagged concrete of the cul-de-sac. “Dylan's gonna use the phone!” she yelled, taking the stairs two at a time and avoiding the hallway that led to the kitchen.

From the back of the house, Linda Painter called, “He can stay for supper! We're having roast and mashed potatoes.”

It was Dylan's favorite, and Meg paused on the landing to see if her mother's invitation was too tempting for him to resist.
But though his smile sagged visibly when the warm aroma hit him, Dylan was already shaking his head no.

“Sorry, Mrs. Painter,” he started, heading off toward the kitchen. “My mom's expecting me home.”

Relieved, Meg left him to make the phone call and sprinted the last of the steps. Steering clear of her brother's closed bedroom door and the throbbing bass that made the hinges squeak, she locked herself in the bathroom, where she tried to evaluate her injuries. Nothing too serious, but the scrapes on her cheek would soon be accented by a long, purple bruise. Her cheekbone was already beginning to discolor.

After she had washed her face and held her burning hand beneath a stream of ice-cold water long enough to make it numb, Meg found herself staring at her reflection in the mirror. The girl before her was perhaps a little too thin, with angular features that echoed her slight frame. Her nose was narrow, her eyes wide, her mouth shapely but a bit too big for the rest of her face. Meg's mother always told her that Painter girls grew into their beauty, and looking at herself now, Meg knew what she meant. In her own face she saw the potential for loveliness, but it was not a present reality. It didn't make her sad; it made her anxious.

Raising her hands to her hair, Meg loosed the ponytail that Dylan had clutched only minutes before. Blond locks the color of harvest spread across her shoulders and down the camouflage arms of her heavy jacket. The waves were twisted and tangled, half curly and half kinked. They looked messy and unkempt, too long by a good six inches.

Meg stepped back from the counter, put her hands on her hips, and sighed. “I need a haircut,” she told the girl in the mirror. “And maybe . . .” She crossed to the top drawer beside the sink and rifled through the flower-print bag containing her mother's makeup. “This.”

The sticker on the bottom of the tube of lip gloss told Meg the color was Summer Sunset, but she thought it looked like blood on her mouth. She grimaced at her reflection for a
moment, then swiped at the offensive makeup with a tissue. When she found that her lips were still stained with the tint, she washed her face again.

Dylan had said that he liked her the way she was. She hoped he meant it.

“What happened to you?” Greg Painter asked Meg when she finally made her way downstairs for dinner.

“I fell, Dad.”

His hand found her cheek and grazed the broken skin with a gentle thumb. “How did you fall?”

Of course, he knew exactly how she fell and who she was with when it happened. The seemingly never-ending parade of cuts, bruises, sprains, and strains she regularly sported didn't sit well with her father, and Meg had learned early on that he couldn't stop himself from pointing out the obvious where Dylan was concerned. It was as if he didn't quite dare forbid her to see her new friend, but hoped that by reminding her of the trouble she got herself into when Dylan was around, she'd change her mind about the relationship entirely.

“How?” he pressed.

Meg pursed her lips and tolerated her dad's ministrations in silence. She only admitted the truth about what happened when her mother slipped into the dining room carrying the final serving bowl.

“I fell off my bike,” she said then, extracting herself from beneath her dad's hand and going to take her place beside Linda at the table.

Greg rolled his eyes. “I'm giving that bike away,” he snapped, dropping into his own chair.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Linda told her husband. “She loves that bike.”

“Look at what it does to her!”

Linda turned to Meg and cupped her daughter's face in her hands. “It'll heal,” she said. “Not even a hint of a scar.” She smiled a secret smile at Meg, a mother-daughter vow of understanding contained in the private lift of her lips.

Meg wasn't completely clueless. She fully understood that her dad bristled at the thought of Dylan because he was older, virtually unknown, and a boy. And she knew that her mom had a soft spot for Dylan because of those very same things. Linda treated her only son with the same mix of adoration and resolve, her affection tempered with an even hand that seemed to say, “I know you need tough love.”

As if she could read Meg's mind, Linda looked up from the table and asked, “Where's Bennett? Did you tell him it was suppertime?”

“Five times at least,” Meg assured her.

“Knocking on the door doesn't count.”

Meg shrugged. “Then no. I didn't tell him it was suppertime.”

“I'm on it,” Greg said with a sigh. He pushed himself away from the table and took the steps two at a time on his way to claim his son from the smelly dungeon that was his room.

“I want details,” Linda whispered when he was gone.

“We were doing jumps off the ramp,” Meg started, editing ruthlessly. “I tried to spin the handlebars and fell.”

Linda bit the inside of her cheek and gave her daughter a stern look.

“What?”

“Spill it.”

Meg picked up her fork and spun it between her fingers like a baton. “Jess had some friends over,” she confessed. “They saw me and Dylan, and . . . it was no big deal.”

“You were showing off?”

“Mom.” Meg glared. “I was not showing off.”

“Proving yourself.”

“Something like that.”

Linda looked hard at her daughter for a long moment. Then, sitting back in her chair, she crossed her arms over her chest and muttered, “Mm-hmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Linda said, but she leaned over and gave Meg a quick, smacking kiss on the forehead.

“What?”

“What, what?” Greg asked walking back into the dining room with sixteen-year-old Bennett in tow.

“Nothing,” Linda said again. “Sit down, both of you. Supper's getting cold.”

Meg watched as Bennett slumped down opposite her. He studied the table with all the disinterest of a stereotypical angst-ridden teen. His half-closed eyes and the way he swiped his hand beneath his nose as if he hardly realized the appendage was attached to his body made Meg giggle. It was all an act. She knew that when the music blared in his bedroom and he was supposed to be staring blankly at the ceiling daydreaming about girls—maybe even her own best friend—he was actually penning advanced calculus homework in his careful hand. More than once she had caught him in the act, and by the way he reacted, Meg was convinced that he couldn't have been more embarrassed if she had caught him smoking a joint. The thought only made her giggle harder.

Bennett looked up at her for the first time since walking into the room. “What's your problem?” he challenged. Then, seeing her cheek, he added, “Another fall, Little Miss Tony Hawk?”

“He's a skater,” Meg said, rolling her eyes.

“Oh, I forgot. You're a biker.” The way Bennett said the word made it sound as if nothing could be more distasteful. “So lame, Megs. So completely pathetic.”

Meg was about to bite back when her parents both cut in.

“It was an accident,” Linda said.

“Dylan talked her into it,” Greg accused.

Bennett looked from parent to parent, apparently measuring their words before he turned his gaze to his sister. “This Dylan boy sounds like trouble to me.”

Meg was incensed. Bennett took no interest in her life whatsoever except to screw it up when given the chance. She longed to leap across the table and yank at his longish curls. She'd call him a wannabe, a poseur. It was common knowledge that she
had more nerve, spunk, and spirit than her quiet, straight-A brother. He was a closet nerd.

But Meg never got the chance.

Linda grabbed her daughter's hand forcefully and gave her husband a pointed look. “Pray,” she said, her request a thinly veiled command.

And though Meg could tell that her dad wanted to follow up Bennett's commentary with more Dylan abuse, he obeyed his wife and bowed his head.

Meg followed suit, but after her father had said a few lines, she dared to sneak a peek across the table at her brother. He was looking at her, and when she caught his eye, he thrust his chin at her in an unspoken challenge. She grinned, and knowing that he wouldn't make a sound, kicked his shin beneath the table with all the strength she could muster.

Bennett's gaze flickered, but he didn't even wince. Instead, he winked, and mouthed something that looked an awful lot like “He's using you.”

Or maybe Meg only saw what she had already started to believe.

L
ucas woke up with light behind his eyes. The sun was streaming in the window beside the bed he used to share with Jenna, and without looking, Lucas knew that a glowing sliver of gold was pouring itself across the pillow. His mouth was dry. His bones hummed with the ache of a deep, dreamless sleep, the kind of twinge that invited his body to stretch and unfold itself in a morning jog. But instead of rolling out of bed, he rolled over. His years-old routine was becoming more of a memory than a daily habit.

The house was silent. So far this fall, Lucas hadn't turned on the furnace, but it was just about time to do so. The air around his face was cool, but underneath the down comforter, Lucas was bathed in humid heat. Too hot inside but too cool outside—he could feel the frostiness of the air nip at his face even as his body radiated an almost sticky warmth. Not time to get up just yet.