A View From Forever (Thompson Sisters Book 3) (10 page)

“We can…”

He nods.

I do too.

It’s
quiet—almost 2:30 am. Dari, across the room from me, is snoring lightly. It’s not loud. Just loud enough to keep me awake, tossing and turning.

Except, let’s be honest. It isn’t Dari’s snoring that’s keeping me awake. It’s the party at Rami’s.

My mind pores over the evening. I stayed in the corner for the first hour, just smoking and playing my guitar. Sticking to myself, because
everyone
was drinking, and I don’t drink, and I’ll never drink, because for me drinking is death. Or close enough to death you can hardly tell the difference. One look at Lawrence Paris is enough. One thought of him, one thought of his sarcasm, his bitterness, his abusive words and fists, is enough to remind me that I don’t ever want to be him. I don’t want to be anything
like
him.

I don’t know what I was thinking asking Alex out.

Anyway, the thing is, Alex, I’m… really attracted to you. A lot.

I’m laying on my back, staring at the ceiling. Asking myself over and over again, did I make a mistake? That moment when she answered. Her eyes widened a little as I spoke, her pupils dilated, slight color on her cheeks. Her lips separated just enough to let a breath out before she whispered the words “I do.”

I close my eyes, feeling the warmth of those words. The warmth of her eyes. We stayed and talked for a long time, before she finally left with Elle and Hadar. After, I walked the three blocks back to Dari’s apartment in a daze. He asked me what was wrong on the way back. My answer: “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

He must have thought I was crazy.

I do.

This can never last. We’re only here for a few weeks, and that’s probably a good thing, because I would screw it up for sure. I’m not cut out to be her boyfriend. She’s an ambassador’s daughter. I’m a … a nobody
.

I sigh, thinking of how the light played over her hair. We hadn’t kissed. We just talked. For a long time. On her way out of the apartment, she put a hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “I like you, Dylan Paris.”

Those words made me feel like I’d had a few drinks. I won’t lie. Lightheaded. Dazed. I can still smell the faint strawberry smell of her hair.

I turn over on my right side, pulling the blanket over my head.

Then I sigh. I’m wide awake. I sneak a peek out from under the blanket to the clock on the table beside Dari’s bed.

2:45. I’ve been laying here almost two hours.

I sit up. I’m wasting my time trying to sleep right now. Instead, I slip out of the bed, trying to be quiet. I don’t want to wake Dari up. I tiptoe toward the door. He doesn’t stir. I slide the pocket door open, step into the hall and slide it closed.

In the living room is an old iMac. It’s on, the screensaver showing a succession of images of Dari, his parents and siblings on their various trips around Israel and Europe. The screensaver vanishes when I move the mouse. I check first to make sure the volume is off, then open a browser.

I don’t know where Spot is, but I
do
know the names of a few people who knew her. Scott McLellan knew her—I went to school with him freshman year, before both of us dropped out and went our separate ways. I’d returned to school. He ended up in rehab. It wasn’t likely, but it was
possible
he had an account.

Bingo.

Scott McLellan of Atlanta, Georgia. 19 years old. I didn’t realize he was older than me. In his profile picture, he looks a lot older than last time I saw him. He had a scraggly beard covering his pockmarked face in uneven patches.

My mouse hovers over the “Add Friend” for too long. I finally click on it.

I take a breath.
I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath. But I had. I close my eyes for a second and give myself a pep talk. Something like,
Dude, get it together.
Then I take another long breath and click on the message button. Quickly I type in a message:

Scott! How’s it going? I know we were never good friends, but we knew some of the same people. I’ve been looking for Spot. You ever hear anything about her? Take it easy. Dylan.

I almost gasp as I finish typing the message. Scott represents some of the worst of my past. I remember sitting around in the alley behind the Masquerade, passing around a joint and sometimes a bottle. Scott was a major asshole sometimes—he would jerk people around. Take their money, make promises he couldn’t keep. For a while there he let Spot think he might have a place she could go to stay long term. He was angling to get her to sleep with him, no matter that she wasn’t into guys. What she wanted wouldn’t have mattered to a guy like Scott anyway.

But if he knows where she is, I want to talk to him.

I go back to Alex’s page. Then I freeze.

Her status is two words: I do.

That’s followed by a barrage of comments from friends, the first one from a Carrie Thompson. That must be one of her sisters. Carrie wrote,
You do? To who? When? Why wasn’t I invited?

I click on to Carrie’s page. Her profile picture is a shock. Beautiful woman, kneeling as a
mountain lion
licks her face. That’s one ballsy chick. Who does that? She’s beautiful, but not like Alex. Alex is like the sun, Carrie a pale (very pale) shadow beside her.

I sigh. It’s 3:30, and I’m still not sleepy. Figures. I’ll
crash right about when it’s time to get up. I look up a couple more people who might know Spot. I don’t want to reestablish contact with any of these people. They represent a life that isn’t mine anymore, a life I don’t need or want to have any part of.

I sigh and close my eyes. Funny, I never even thought to look online for her. Until Alex suggested it, I’d never been on Facebook, I didn’t see the point. Same with MySpace. Bunch of people taking
selfies and making weird faces at themselves in mirrors. But once I’d gotten on here, and people I knew from school started popping up—now I was obsessed. Because
somebody
must know what happened to her.

Enough. It’s time for bed. I log out of Facebook, step away from the computer, and quietly slip back to the bed.

It’s six forty-five in the morning in Ramat Gan as I stumble behind Elle along the sidewalk toward the tour bus. At six forty-five here, it’s … what… eight-forty five at night in California? I think so. I’ve lost track. I’ve lost track of where I am and what day it is, partly because on top of the jet-lag, which is
finally
hitting me, I was up late.

Really
late.

No sooner had we gotten to the street last night when Elle jumped up and down and squealed. Understand—Elle is from New York and normally talks in a sort of sultry,
Sophia Loren voice. To be honest, I think she practices it when she’s alone, because it certainly doesn’t sound natural. But the squeal? That is natural. And grating.

“He asked me out!” she shouted.

“He?” I knew that Dylan had given John a pep-talk about asking out Elle, so I knew the answer to my own question. I asked because Elle annoyed me. She was so self-centered, I could probably have made out with Dylan right in front of everybody and she wouldn’t have noticed. So we walked back to Hadar’s house (Hadar trailing behind us, as if she were the guest and not the other way around), with Elle talking a thousand words a minute about John Modesta. He’s
so
cute and
so
smart and
so
masculine. She didn’t say that he was gruff, opinionated, and sometimes uncivil—also characteristics of his. Though to be fair, John and Dylan seemed to be getting to be pretty good friends.

Whatever. What
did
happen was that Elle talked about John to the exclusion of anything (or anybody) else until nearly two in the morning. By the end of it, Hadar and I both had glassy eyes and I was almost regretting leaving
Ariel AKA hormone-boy’s house. His carnal advances were actually easier to fend off than Elle’s voice.

Eventually, though, Hadar noted, “I saw you and Dylan talking a long talk.”

“A long
time
,” Elle said. Like I said. Annoying.

“Yeah. ”I found myself biting my lip as I looked at Hadar. “He um… asked me out.”

At that, Hadar squealed, probably the loudest sound I’d ever heard from her.

My point is, it was three in the morning before I finally got to sleep. Then up again not quite three hours later. I’m bleary-eyed as I stumble toward the tour bus, a long, monster-sized bus with a large cargo area underneath. I join the line of students loading their stuff, and throw my bag in.

The bus driver, a youngish Israeli man in an olive-green t-shirt, his face looking as if he shaved it no more than once a week, poked at the cargo area, repositioning bags. Once mine was in place, I turn away and come face to face with Dylan.

He gives me a crooked smile. “Morning,” he says. He’s tired—I can tell, because his southern accent, often barely detectable, is now pretty thick.

“Good morning to you,” I say. I feel heat on my cheeks. He leans in and tosses his bag into the cargo area under the bus,
then slips his hand around my forearm
.

“Sit with me?” he asks.

I open my mouth to say something, but I literally
can’t.
No one is this confident. He must be faking it. Or he’s drunk. Or—I don’t know. But the touch of his fingertips along the inside of my arm sends a flare of lightning right up my nerve pathways. So I just follow him. He stops next to one of the pairs of seats. Typical tour bus fare, much like we’ve seen already on this trip—comfortable, multicolored seats of fabric with thick padding and comfortable arms. This bus has electric plugs at each row, which
isn’t
all that common.

“After you,” he says.

I feel a shiver run straight up my back. I slip into the window seat, and he slides in beside me.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” he says, his voice still sounded more slurred than usual. “I didn’t sleep well last night, I’m pretty out of it.”

“I didn’t either,” I say. “Elle had me up talking half the night.”

“Oh yeah?” he says, raising one eyebrow. “What about?”

“Like I’d tell you,” I say. My words are a little harsh, but my tone isn’t. I elaborate: “Girl talk.”

His eyes move to the sidewalk outside the bus. John and Elle are standing together. He has an arm casually wrapped around her, one hand
almost
touching her butt. Dylan says, “I’m guessing it had something to do with John boy there.”

I sigh and roll my eyes. He just chuckles. A few minutes later, Mrs. Simpson stands at the front of the bus and counts off the group, just in case we left someone behind. Everyone’s aboard. None of the Israeli host students are along for this trip, which I’ll admit is a bit of a relief. I like Hadar, but the group as a whole can be very overwhelming. As Mrs. Simpson finishes checking everyone, the bus driver says something to her—I don’t quite catch the words—and then he puts the bus in gear and we pull out into traffic. The bus heads toward Bar Illon University—only a few blocks from the high school—then south on Highway 4. It’s slow going getting out of the city—commuter traffic in and out of Tel Aviv is extremely heavy.

“Tell me something,” Dylan says.
Something
comes out almost like
sum-thin.

I lean against the window and look at him. His eyes are a little red—he’s genuinely exhausted. In this state, his lips naturally curl up just a little, a sort of crooked smile that is far sexier than is
healthy.

Shiver.
I feel a wave of lightweight emotion. I just want to reach out and touch him.

Tentatively… very tentatively… I do. I let my hand slide toward his, just barely. I don’t actually take his hand. I just let mine rest next to his, our skin just touching.

He takes my hand in his. I close my eyes and breathe deeply.

“Tell you what?” I ask. The words feel unnatural, because it feels like 95 percent of my attention is fixated on our hands, fingers casually intertwined. As if we did this every day. As if it wasn’t earth shattering on some
level.

He shrugs. “Something. What is your life like?”

I feel lightheaded as I speak. “It’s pretty normal, I guess. I go to school. Piano lessons. Study. I’ve got friends.”

“Do you have a best friend?”

I nod. “Renee. My dad retired and we moved back to San Francisco when I was starting middle school. Everybody knew everyone else—except me. I was the strange kid who had lived in China and Russia but hardly ever in America. Renee was the other new girl. The first day of school no one talked to me or her, so we ended up next to each other by default.”

“Where is she from?”

“Renee’s from Alaska.”

Surprise registers on his face. “Really? How did she end up in San Francisco?”

I’m still trying to keep my attention on him and his questions—not our hands, which are still intertwined. It’s hard to focus. “Her dad works works for some internet company. I don’t know what he does. But she lives just a couple of blocks from me. Which is good, because sometimes I just need to get away, you know?”

He tilts his head. “Like, from home?”

I nod. “I love my sisters… and my parents and all… but they’re not like other people.”

“How so?”

I shrug. “I don’t know how to explain it. Dad’s—remote. He stays wrapped up in his work. He’s always worried, always thinking about important things. People’s lives depend on him, you know?”

“What about your mom?”

I don’t want to answer that question. I give Dylan a somewhat bitter smile and just shake my head. He looks puzzled, so I say in a very quiet voice, “My mom’s kind of unstable.”