44 Book Five (7 page)

“You seem good, Kate,” I said because it was true and because maybe she needed to hear it.

“Yeah, I kinda feel like my old self lately,” she said. “Well, I better start getting ready for work.”

“Really?” I said. “What time is it?”

The darkness was fading, but it still had to be early.

“Almost five,” she said. “I have an interview at seven and need to prepare.”

I followed her inside, leaving the peace of the pond behind.

CHAPTER 14

After the third run of the day, something changed.

Dark clouds had blown in from the mountains. The hail and thunderstorm alert seemed to be getting closer to becoming real. We stood waiting to hear from the front office to see if they were going to cancel the last go around.

I looked up at the dark sky. The sun, so strong just a few minutes earlier, was gone. It wasn’t raining, but there was no other way this could end.

Blue jays squawked high up in the pines. I watched the water glide by. I visualized how it had looked for most of the morning. Warm with the sun threading through the thick trees along the shore, hitting the water, making it look like there were little diamonds riding the waves. I wanted to remember it like this through the upcoming fall and winter.

Ty came up from behind and wrapped his strong arms around me.

He was his old self and wasn’t upset at me anymore about Paloma. I promised him that in the future I would just tell him about those things right away. And then it would be on him.

“So what do you think?” he said. “Wanna come?

Ty was going backpacking up in the mountains, hiking in about eight or nine miles and spending the night. I wanted to go but was still thinking about it. Being in a tent all night with Ty made me nervous. More than nervous.

My heart raced and I was quiet.

He held me tightly and whispered in my ear.

“Come with me, Abby. It’ll be a great night, I promise. I’ll take care of you up there.”

His gentle words sent an electric current up and down my arms and back.

“Plus, I’ll carry all the heavy stuff.”

“Well, that was a given,” I said.

“Do I scare you that much?” he said after a moment of silence.

“Yes.” I laughed nervously. “But I was just thinking about work. I’d have to get the time off. You know, Mike already scheduled me. I don’t know. I guess I could ask him.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let me know. I want you to be there.”

Amber announced that we were approved for the final run. I finished putting the life vests in piles according to size while Ty got the rafts ready. The wind picked up and I felt a few drops. You had to expect to get a little wet out here.

CHAPTER 15

It was a good beginning to the new season.

We won our first game in the coolness of a clear September evening. I didn’t score but had a nice assist on the game’s lone goal.

I felt like my new running regimen was paying off already.

“That’s how it’s done,” Ty said, clapping from the sidelines. “Great game!”

“Yeah,” I said. “That was all right.”

“You guys meeting us, right?” Tim said, walking up. “We’re stopping over at McMenamins for a victory beer.”

I looked over at Ty and he nodded.

“Sure,” I said.

“I’ll get us a table in the back by the fire pit. See you guys in about half an hour.”

I stretched for a few minutes.

“I like watching you play,” Ty said. “You’re really good out there.”

I smiled.

We drove over and found the team. They were in the back, by the pit like Tim said, already with pints in front of them, talking in a large circle. We joined them.

“Ty, you should play with us,” Sam said. “Victor sprained his ankle last week. We have an opening.”

Ty laughed.

“No way. I would sprain more than that if I actually had to play in a game.”

We didn’t have instant replay, but we did have Tim. He relived his goal for us, from several different angles, in super slow motion.

“I knew their goalie was super aggressive, so I figured I’d use that against him. I just waited for him to commit himself.”

“You totally outwitted that guy,” Bree said. “It was awesome.”

 “It’s just the beginning,” he said. “But it’s nice to get off to a good start. I tell you what. There’s nothing like winning. I think we can all appreciate how good it feels after last season.”

“Well, we didn’t have Jack last season,” Bree said. “That would have made a difference.”

I hadn’t thought about Jack that much lately. And because no one on the team had mentioned him in a long time, I sometimes forgot that they still didn’t know what had really happened, that he had kidnapped me and taken me to a remote island where Nathaniel Mortimer was waiting. They still thought of him as a friend and a good guy.

“For sure he would have gotten us into the playoffs,” she said.

I looked over at her, but didn’t say anything.

“Doubt it,” Ty said to my surprise.

“What?” she said. “What are you talking about? Did you even know Jack?”

“I think I know him a lot better than you,” he said.

 “You know nothing,” Bree said. “And you have no right to say that about our friend.”

I looked away at the fire and then at the people at the next table, hoping Ty was done, but he wasn’t.

“I do know him. Jack is a shapeshifter.”

“What are you talking about now?” she said loudly.

“He’s like a character from Native American mythology. A character that changes form. He pretends to be one thing, then another, then another. No one knows who he really is. That’s your Jack.”

No one said anything, their eyes shifting from Ty to Bree and then over to me.

I stared at the flames that were shooting up toward the sky, the smell of wood burning in my nostrils. I wasn’t sure how to feel. While I hated talking about Jack, I hated it even more that they all thought that he was a great guy. Maybe it was time for them to know the truth.

 “You’re really out of line, Ty,” Bree said. “He was a big part of this team and he was our friend.”

“He wasn’t Abby’s friend,” he said.

I swallowed some beer, wishing it was something stronger, and watched Bree. It seemed like she was ready to turn this into an all-out brawl, but instead sank back and just glared at Ty.

“Ty’s right,” I finally said. “About everything. Jack was no friend to me.”

Ty smiled, his face glowing in the firelight. I looked back over at Tim. He was quiet and stared at me for a minute, like he was trying to figure things out.

“Yeah, right,” Bree whispered under her breath as she got up and left.

“So did something happen between you and Jack?” Tim asked, breaking through the silence that followed.

I nodded.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s bad news. Real bad. I can’t get into the details right now. For the time being, you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or not.”

Tim adjusted his black-rimmed glasses.

“All right, I guess,” he said, scratching behind his ear. “I suppose it’s possible, people having different sides to them. Like in that old Brando film,
One-Eyed Jacks
.”

That’s exactly what Jack was. A one-eyed jack. And like Rio in the movie, I had seen the other side of his face.

“Ready?” I asked Ty after a while, a warm sensation rippling through me as I glanced at him. He was quiet, deep in thought, and staring up at the sky.

“Yep,” he said.

We said goodbye to the others and walked to his truck.  

“Are you tired?” he asked.

“No, not really,” I said. “Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

CHAPTER 16

We drove out to the highway and unrolled the windows as we headed out of town, gliding down US 20 and cutting deep into the desert.

I sent a text to Kate to let her know I’d be late.

“Thanks,” I said to Ty after I put my phone away. “What you said about Jack. It meant a lot that you said those things to the team.”

“I’m glad you’re not mad. I was worried you might be. But I couldn’t do it, Abby. I couldn’t sit there and listen to stories about good ‘ol Jack. No way.”

I reached over and took his hand and kissed it.

We kept driving. Finally, he slowed down and turned off the road and into a dusty lot.

“We’re here,” he said.

We were the only ones around. I knew we were somewhere in the Badlands. We got out of the truck into the pitch black night.

“I come here sometimes,” he said. “You know. Late at night. When it’s clear like this.”

My heart skipped a few beats and my breathing was shallow. 

“Really?” I asked, as he moved closer.

“I come to look at the stars. I do a lot of thinking. About you. About us. It’s a good place for it.”

He brought down the bed of the truck and hopped up and then offered me his hand. I took it, hoping he wouldn’t notice how much I was shaking.

“Cold?” he asked.

It wasn’t from the cold.

“No,” I said, staring up into his face, finding his eyes. They were large, full of passion. “Not really.”

But he grabbed the blanket anyway and wrapped it around me. He kissed me, perfect and tender.

“I wanted you to see this,” he said, looking up. “But it’s only a preview of what it’ll be like up in the mountains. I hope you can make it.”

It was dead quiet, our heavy breathing the only sound in the desert night. He leaned over and we kissed again and then he looked up.

I followed his eyes and finally understood why we were out here. It was the sky.

“It’s amazing,” I said.

It really was. The sky was out in front of us, horizon to horizon. Black and full of more stars than you could count in a year. 

“Wow,” I said. “Man, oh, man.”

“Best planetarium around. That you can drive to anyway,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to bring you out here all summer.”

I laughed for no reason and knew that he could tell how nervous I was. I wanted to be with him, could feel the pinpricks on my flesh, could feel his fast white energy on my skin, pulling me closer, drawing me in.

“I love you, Abby,” he whispered in my ear. The words hung between us as he waited for me to say something. I hugged him again, unable to speak.

I tried, but the words didn’t come out. I felt it, I knew it. But I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t say them. It was such an incredible night, full of love, full of desire. But those words. I couldn’t say them.

We looked back up at the sky.

I smiled shyly and tried to breathe.

“My dad used to take us out camping a lot when we were kids back home,” he said. “He loves astronomy. He taught us all about the stars and planets and black holes. He made each of us learn about one of the constellations and then we had to teach the others for the next time we were out.”

“That’s so cool,” I said.

“So your dad wasn’t around at all when you were growing up?”

I had told Ty about our dad, about how he had left when I was a baby.

“Nope,” I said. “Never knew him at all. He just left.”

“Left?” Ty repeated. “What an ass.”

“Kate never talks about him. She packed away all his pictures. All she’s really told me was that he broke Mom’s heart and did some bad things. That’s it.”

“Wow,” Ty said. “That must be hard.”

I nodded and let my head fall onto his shoulder.

“You asked me once about my religion,” he said. “This is it. The stars and planets, the trees. The river. This is where I’m happiest, where I can breathe. Where everything makes sense to me. Where I get my answers.”

I understood what Ty was saying, because most of the time, I felt the same way. Being out in nature, out on the river all day, reached me in ways nothing else could. It helped balance things, make them right. I lost my darkness when I was in nature. 

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I feel like that too, sometimes anyway.”

“I know. I can tell that you get this. I find that pretty amazing especially since you almost drowned in a lake.”

“Well, technically I did drown.”

He kissed me again and I melted into him. We kissed for a long time under those stars, that sky, his hand caressing my hair and then dropping down to my waist and pulling me into him.

The wind rushed through the junipers and an owl hooted in the distance.

We sat for a moment longer quietly soaking in the night. I looked back up at the stars, trying to shake off the emotions that were pooling inside.

“It’s late,” he said.

He helped me down from the truck and closed the back of the bed. He put his lips on my mouth again, the cool empty land vast around us.

“I had a great time, Ty,” I said when he dropped me off back home. “I loved looking at the stars with you. It was…” I paused, searching for the right word. “Magical.”

He nodded, but I could tell he was troubled about something, that something was on his mind. I closed the door over and the truck’s light went out and we sat quiet for a moment.

“I know when you give your heart to someone it’s not a small thing,” he said. “It’s the biggest thing. The hardest thing, to love someone like that, to give them everything you have. Everything that matters.”

I nodded.

“And I know that you are sensitive and see worlds around you that I can’t see. I know that you’re unsure of us in that way.”

“I’m not unsure of you.”

“And I know that you still love Jesse, and that you feel like you’ll betray him if you’re with me.”

“It’s not exactly like—”

“Listen, Abby,” he said. “I’m here. I’m alive. And I’m crazy mad in love with you. I think about you on the river, I think about you before I fall asleep. When I wake up. When I’m out looking at the stars. When I shouldn’t be thinking about you, I’m thinking about you. And all I want is to be with you. For us to be together. That’s all I can think about. It burns inside sometimes.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“But I can’t settle,” he said. “I can’t have just a part of you. I want, I need, all of you. I’ll wait for you forever if I really have a chance. If you’re really able to move on. But if you gave your heart to him and you can’t take it back, you need to let me know so I can find a way to release this, this… hold you have on me.”