Splendor (4 page)

I looked at Will. His expression was blank, but his jaw was tensed.

“Actually, we were just heading home, Lil. Want to walk with us?”

“No way,” Lily motioned to Connell to refill her glass. “I just got here.”

I watched her raise the drink to her mouth. Her hand was unsteady. She’d been drinking for a while.

“I think you’ve had enough to drink.” But when I tried to take Lily’s glass, Connell moved to block my way.

“Hey, Big Red,” he said, but his grin was cold. “Want a drink?”

“No thanks.”

“Oh, come on, Scar, loosen up,” said Mike.

“Yeah, Red Vine. Live a little.” Connell draped his arm across my shoulder, but he looked past me at Will, clearly taunting him. “You must be getting tired of Jew Boy by now.”

I felt the restraint it took Will not to move from his place by the door.

“Lil, we really should get you home.”

She had finished off another shot and was peeling Brandon Becker’s fingers away from his cup of beer so that she could commandeer it.

“Your parents will be worried.”

“My parents can blow me.”

This earned appreciative laughter from the boys at the table, and Brandon handed over his cup.

I looked to Will for help. He shrugged. I knew he wasn’t afraid to get involved—I’d seen him in action before—but probably he figured that if Lily wouldn’t listen to me, she wouldn’t listen to anyone.

Time to change tactics. I smiled at Connell and squeezed past him, sliding in next to Lily on her chair. I leaned into her, smelling the bitter-stale scent of beer on her breath. “Lily,” I murmured, as calmly as I could, loud enough for just her to hear, “Will and I are going to take you home. If you go quietly, we’ll try to sneak you in without your parents hearing. But if you make a fuss…I’ll tell your parents where you are. I swear I will.”

Lily looked at me through the haze of her drunkenness. “You’d do that to me?”

“Absolutely.”

She sipped her beer while she considered this. “I can see you’ve gone to the dark side,” she said at last. “I’ll go with you, Scar, but I’ll remember this.”

She drained her beer and then threw the plastic cup in Will’s general direction. When she stood up I had to grab her arm to keep her from toppling over. Honestly, I doubted she’d remember anything about tonight…but her words hurt.

“Really know how to kill a party, Big Red.”

I ignored Connell. Will held open the door for us and moved to take Lily’s other arm. “Not a chance,” she snapped.

Halfway down the block, Lily stopped and hurled in Mrs. Pearson’s flower bushes. After that, she didn’t complain when Will tried to help her walk.

But when she headed up the path to her house and slipped inside her front door, she didn’t turn to wave goodbye. In all the years we’d been friends—all my life, since preschool—she’d never not waved goodbye.

S
ome things can’t be prevented, like the passing of time. And so the final days of our summer slipped away from us, and the day came when Will left for college.

I’d been neglecting my duties at the B&B and around the stable all week. It came to the point where I almost wished Will was already gone, that his leaving was behind me.

But on the morning that he was to board the ferry for the mainland, then an airplane for the five-hour flight to the East Coast, I would have given anything for just one more sunset with the boy I loved.

Dad and I had laid out breakfast for the guests; then we’d retreated to our little kitchen on the third floor. Usually we ate with the guests, but after a summer full of croissants and quiches, a bowl of cereal, alone, was more what I needed.

Dad sensed my mood. He sat across from me, sipping his coffee, watching me eat.

“So today’s the day,” he said. Not a question.

“Yep.”

He looked as though he was struggling for the right words, but when he spoke, they were all wrong. “It may be for the best, sweetheart. You and Will have been inseparable this summer. It might be nice for you to have more time for your girlfriends. Like Lily. I haven’t seen her once since she got back.”

There was a good reason for this. Since the night Will and I had extracted Lily from Brandon’s party, Lily hadn’t been exactly receptive to my calls. Not that I had been trying too hard to get ahold of her; there would be time for that after Will was gone. Too much time.

And I was pretty sure that my dad wouldn’t be so keen for me to hang out with Lily if I gave him an earful about her steamy nights with Adrian, not to mention her new tattoo. But of course I didn’t tell him any of this; my loyalties were clear.

Instead I mumbled a cursory “uh-huh” and carried the empty bowl to the sink. Inside, though, I seethed. Relationship advice from my dad, really? I still wondered how much of my mother’s decision to leave the island was fueled by my dad’s passivity.

“I guess you’re going to spend the morning with Will?”

“Yeah. Can I take the Volvo for a few hours? I told Will I’d drive him to the ferry.”

It looked like my dad was going to say no. Even though I had my license, I rarely drove alone.

But he nodded and dug the keys out of his pocket. “Just be careful, okay?”

To get to Will’s little village of Two Harbors I took the winding road that bisected the island so I could stop in at the stable and check on Delilah. The vet would be coming out next month, right around the first day of school. But I felt pretty sure the insemination had been successful.

Delilah didn’t
look
any different, but she
seemed
different…softer, somehow. When I set her loose in the arena that morning she didn’t race so wildly. She trotted halfheartedly across the sand and put her neck through the far fence to go after a crop of grass that was just out of reach.

I climbed up on the railing. It was early still, just after nine, but already the chill was gone from the air. Today would be hot. Again.

After a while I hopped down and slogged through the sand after Delilah. She hadn’t gotten any grass, so I fetched a handful and offered it to her. Her breath was warm and damp against my wrist as she started munching.

Driving out to the stable, I’d had to fight back tears several times. But now I felt calmer than I had in days, maybe weeks. Will was leaving. But Delilah was here. Her coat was soft; her breath was warm. Life would go on.

I made it to Will’s house just before eleven. From the outside, his cottage looked the same as it always did: brown shingles, a slightly overgrown lawn, a flowering vine that wound through the wooden pickets of the front gate.

Will’s dad, Martin, opened the door when I knocked. He looked the same, too: Will’s unruly wavy hair, but streaked with gray; a full beard; a belly that showed proof of his love for rich meals and good wine.

“Ah, Scarlett, welcome!” As usual, Martin seemed genuinely glad to see me. Behind him in the hallway sat Will’s green canvas duffel bag, stuffed full, and his backpack.

Martin saw me looking at Will’s bags. His expression of empathy was painful to bear.

“Is Will in his room?”

“He is. Gathering up the last of his things. Scarlett, I’ll be on the island for a little while longer and I’d like to have you out for a meal before I leave, if you’re up for it.”

I smiled. Martin was a good guy. He’d helped me last year when I’d needed someone to talk to. And he was letting me take Will to the ferry without him.

“That sounds nice,” I said. “Especially if you bake some of your famous bread.”

“It wouldn’t be a meal without bread.”

I found Will sitting on the edge of his bed, flipping through a book. I stopped in the doorway and watched him for a minute—the grace of his hands holding the book, the tilt of his head, the lovely line of his throat.

“You going to stand there and stare at me, or are you coming in?”

I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I slid next to him on the bed. He closed the book and set it down, entwining his fingers with mine. His chin rested on the top of my head. His warm breath in my hair reminded me of Delilah.

Normally if we were too quiet in Will’s room, Martin started whistling or banging pans together to keep us honest, but just then the house was quiet all around us. Will caressed my cheek and tilted my face up to his. I didn’t realize I was crying until Will bent his face down and kissed my tears away—first my left cheek, then my right. And then his lips caught mine.

This time when I wound my arms around his neck, I held him so tightly it must have hurt, but Will didn’t complain. He answered my fierceness with a matching heat, his hands around my waist, in my hair, pulling me into his chest as the kiss deepened.

I welcomed the crush of his arms. If only he could crush me completely against him until we were enmeshed, until we were one body. If only we could stay like this forever.

Suddenly I heard Martin opening and closing cabinets in the hallway, rustling around inside of them and muttering to himself. I guess Will and I had been silent a little too long. But Will didn’t seem to hear his dad; his attention to me didn’t slacken, not at all. If anything it was the opposite; his hands held my face just so, and his mouth, soft and hard all at once, devoured mine.

I made a little sound, a whimpering of pleasure, and guided one of Will’s hands down from my cheek, encouraging him to reach beneath my shirt. Everywhere my skin was tingling, awake, aware.

He would have pressed me back into the pillows on his bed. He would have pulled my shirt up and away from my body. He would have lost himself in me—but Martin let something heavy fall from the cabinet just past the door, and the thud of it against the wood floor drew Will away, cursing softly.

My heart pounded and my lips felt swollen from Will’s kisses, but he looked even more pulled apart than I felt; there was a shift in his eyes, a hunger that I hadn’t seen there before.

I
had ignited it, that need. A surge of something that felt like triumph flashed through me.

“We’d better go,” Will managed to say. “I don’t want to miss the ferry.”

I rearranged my hair and straightened my shirt while Will pulled a last few things from his bedside table—his wallet, his phone, a pocketknife. The book he’d been reading slipped to the floor, and I picked it up.

It was his playbook from last spring—
The Importance of Being Earnest.
We had performed the leads opposite each other.

“Well, my boy,” Martin said, walking us to the door, “you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

Normally every parent cautions his kid, but Will’s psychic ability—which he had once seen as a curse, but had come to accept as a blessing, strange as it was—lent deeper meaning to Martin’s worry.

“Yes, Dad. I’ll be careful. I always am.”

Strictly, this wasn’t really true. I remembered the way Will had looked last spring when he’d rushed into a burning building, sure someone was trapped inside, and earlier, last Halloween, when he’d come barreling into Andy’s bedroom and yanked Andy off me. Will hadn’t looked like he was being careful then.

Martin was right to be concerned. I understood how hard it must be for him to watch his son venture off on his own. Of course, Martin wouldn’t be far away for long; he’d be returning to Connecticut, too, though Will would be living in the Yale dorms and not in the family home, which had been shut up since they came to the island a year ago.

Martin had spent the past five years—since Will had his bar mitzvah at thirteen—trying to protect Will from himself. But things were different now. Will had told us both that his abilities were changing. He wasn’t driven in quite the same way to intercede and stop violent crimes from being committed. For better or worse, now his awareness of danger and suffering was more diffused, more universal.

Still, he could attune himself to specifics if he wanted. What kind of trouble might have manifested for Lily at Brandon’s party if Will hadn’t brought me there to take Lily home?

I remembered what Will had told me: many of the crimes he’d stopped were similar to what Andy had almost done to me at last year’s Halloween party. I shuddered a little. That wasn’t how it should be, sex.

That wasn’t how it would be with Will, if he and I ever made love. It would be beautiful.

“Call me when you get to LAX,” Martin directed. “And again when you land. Betty is going to meet you at the airport. She’ll see you safely to campus.”

“Betty?” I heard the edge in my voice, and blushed.

Martin laughed, but gently. “A family friend.”

“I’ll call,” Will promised. “And I’ll be safe.”

They hugged then, patting each other on the back. Martin held Will tightly for an extra moment, and when he released him he held on to his son’s shoulders, looking into his eyes.
“Yasher koach,”
he said.

Will looked back at him, and nodded.

Martin cleared his throat. “Better get going.”

I watched Will heft his duffel bag into the back of the station wagon and place his backpack beside it.

“Let me know if you need me to send anything,” Martin offered. “And I’ll see you in a few weeks.”

I said goodbye to Martin and hugged him, then climbed behind the wheel to give them a moment alone.

As I drove us back through the heart of the island and toward Avalon, where Will would board the ferry that would take him away from me, I asked, “What did that mean, Will? The thing your dad said to you?”

“Yasher koach,”
said Will. “It’s a blessing. It means ‘strength’—may you have it, or may your strength be increased.”

“He wants you to be strong?”

“That’s one thing he wants for me, strength. It’s a way of wishing a person the strength to continue doing good in the world. It’s a way too of showing that he understands the effort it takes. Understands the effort doing good—performing mitzvahs—takes for me. For
anyone,
but I guess me, particularly.”

The old Volvo didn’t have air-conditioning, so we drove with the windows down. The sound of the wind rushing by didn’t leave much room for conversation, but there wasn’t much to say. A new driver, I kept both hands on the wheel, and even though he was right across from me, it felt like Will was already very far away. He looked relaxed, though, as he gazed out the window at our island’s chaparral; his green eyes were heavy-lidded against the wind.

“I can catch the three o’clock ferry instead of the one-thirty.” He continued to look away rather than at me when he spoke. “My flight doesn’t leave until nine tonight.”

So rather than driving down the winding road into Avalon, I cut the engine not far from the stable, pulling the car to the side of the road where it widened slightly to leave room for any cars that might need to pass.

Will climbed out and came around to my side, where I sat as if frozen behind the wheel. He opened my door and offered me his hand.

I looked up into his eyes. They were so incredibly green. The color of life. I smiled and took his hand. I knew wherever Will led me, I would follow.