Page 5
It was hypocritical of me to blame him for trying to figure me out when I deliberately kept so much of myself a mystery. But I did blame him—it was easier than blaming myself.
Easier than blaming a mother who was never around to accept it.
Certainly easier than blaming fate or God or any other supernatural force out there that people thanked or cursed, depending on which twists and turns their lives took.
I’d never had that privilege, that choice between giving thanks or pleading for salvation. I’d been cursed from the day I was born—though I was too smart to sit around whining about it.
Usually.
“I am fine,” I insisted. “It wasn’t that big a deal. ” I was proud of how steady my voice sounded—maybe I was better at the whole lying thing than I thought.
“Yeah, right. ” Or maybe not.
But then, why was I surprised? Mark was a lot deeper than he looked—and a lot more observant. We’d been going out, off and on (mostly on), for two and a half years—had been friends a lot longer than that. He might not know all my secrets, but he did know me better than just about anyone.
A fact that was reflected in his brown eyes, as he stared at me worriedly. “You were underwater for a good three or four minutes. ” He reached up and tucked a wet clump of hair behind my ear, then leaned forward until his face was only inches from mine. My breath caught—like it always did when he was close—but I did my best to ignore it. Now wasn’t the time for hormone-induced weakness.
“I kept looking, but I couldn’t find you. ” His voice broke and I realized, with a shock, that he had tears in his eyes. My resistance melted, even as I told myself to stay strong. To hold myself, and my emotions, in check. “You were right next to me one second and then you were just gone. I really thought you were going to drown. ”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to laugh, to make a joke out of everything—I probably would have if my life hadn’t just taken the mother of all turns into the land of the abysmally unfunny.
Then Mark was dropping his board, wrapping his arms around me, and pulling me into his chest like I belonged there. Though I told myself I didn’t need it, didn’t need him, it was all I could do not to cling. He smelled so good—a strange combination of sandalwood and salt water that was uniquely Mark.
I took a deep breath, held that scent in my lungs for long seconds as I tried to inhale the normalcy that made up his very essence. The normalcy I craved like a junkie with an open, aching vein.
He held me for a while, his wet-suit shirt cold against the bare skin of my stomach. I wasn’t wearing a wet suit—I didn’t need one in the ocean, no matter how cold it got. But here on land I was freezing, as usual. These days I almost always was when I wasn’t in the water—and the shock of nearly drowning had only made the cold that much worse. If I stayed against Mark, let my body absorb the coolness of his, I would pay for it later.
And yet, I couldn’t force myself to move, to let him go. The chill of his body against mine was no match for the ice scraping me raw from the inside out: frigid, frozen, frightening as hell. I’d like to blame it on my near-death experience, but once again, that would be a lie. The iciness had been growing in me for a while, getting a little worse every day until I swore I could feel my humanity slowly freezing beneath the onslaught.
My knees trembled.
I rested against Mark for as long as I dared—until my teeth were chattering and I was sure my lips were the same color as the Pacific. Then I took one last sniff, one last moment of comfort, and pulled away.
“Look, I gotta go in,” I told him, working to keep my voice even.
“I know. ” Once again, his lips turned up in that bad-boy grin of his—the one that had first attracted me because it was so very different from my own restrained smile—and he said, “Are you going to make an appointment with the doctor? Get checked out?”
“No!” It was almost a shout and I felt guilty when I saw him rear back in surprise. But going to the doctor meant telling my dad and I couldn’t—wouldn’t—put him through that. Not now, when my seventeenth birthday loomed over the house like a particularly unwelcome specter.
I worked to soften my voice. “I’m fine. Just a little shaken up. ”
“Tempest. ” He didn’t look convinced.
I shook my head, utterly exhausted by the whole situation. “I can’t do this now, Mark. ”
His jaw tightened and as I stared at him I realized, with more than a little shock, that he wasn’t going to let this go. Not now. Not this time.
“It’s never now, Tempest. That’s the whole problem. ” His hands clenched into fists. “You always put me off, always tell me we’ll talk about it later. But we never do. ”
“Mark. ” I reached out, put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s comp—”
He shrugged off my hand. “Don’t tell me it’s complicated. I’m not an idiot. And don’t just ignore me like you usually do. ” He glanced over his shoulder at the ocean, and for the first time that I could remember, he looked angry. Really angry. “Do you actually think I’m so stupid that I don’t know something weird happened out there? Something screwed up?”
My stomach tightened. “I don’t know what you mean. The wave—”
“Yeah, right. The wave. ” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his board shorts and stared at me with an intensity that had my heart threatening to pound right out of my chest. “The day a wave like that knocks you around is the day I eat my freakin’ surfboard. I’m not an idiot, Tempest. ”
“I never said you were. ”
“Of course not. You just treat me like I am. ”
“I really don’t want to talk about this. ” I forced the words past my still-tight throat.
“Well, I do. ” His jaw was clenched, his eyes a deep, molten chocolate. “You tell everyone I’m your boyfriend. You tell me that you’re crazy about me. But you don’t trust me for shit. ”
“That’s not true,” I insisted, with a lot more confidence than I was feeling.
“No?” he asked. “Then prove it. ” Yanking his hands out of his pockets, he wrapped them around my upper arms and shook me a little. “Tell me what happened out there. Tell me why you won’t talk to me. Tell me what’s going on with you—for once. Do I have to beg?”
He wasn’t rough, but pain shot down my arms at the first squeeze of his fingers. It took my breath, had me struggling for air for the second time that morning.
“Nothing’s going on,” I repeated, but I could barely choke out the lie. I was disgusted—with myself, with him, with the whole crazy situation. And it pissed me off that he was pushing me to talk to him about stuff even I didn’t understand.
I fought to keep the anger out of my voice as I glanced over his shoulder at the ocean that had just begun to roar and thrash. Storms were rare on this stretch of beach, even in winter. But when the Pacific decided to put on a show, it did it with a lot of style. “Besides, we don’t have time for this. If you don’t beat the rain home, you’ll be screwed. Traffic—”
He dropped my arms like I’d burned him, started to back away even as he stared at me incredulously. “That’s it? Seriously? ‘Go home, Mark, it’s going to rain’?”