The Shadow Girl (9 page)

He reaches out a hand and helps me across the uneven jumble of rocks in the gulley and over to the edge of the burbling creek. “I was afraid you might not come.”

“Mom decided to take a nap instead of going into town so I was able to sneak out.” I realize that I’m still gripping his hand, and drop it, although I don’t want to. “You have any trouble finding this place?”

“Not at all. It’s an amazing spot. Isolated.” His eyes meet mine.

“Not always. The bears like it.” I point out the green plants flanking both sides of the slender stream and poking up between low-lying, slick gray boulders. “This is a raspberry patch. By mid-August it’ll be thick with fruit. More than enough for the bears and us, too.”

“I doubt the bears would be happy to share,” Ty says with a laugh.

“You just have to hold your ground. Stare them down.”

He squints at me, his amused expression doing crazy things to my insides. “You’ve done that?” he asks, tilting his head to one side.

“Yeah. A black bear came up on me here a couple of years ago. I figured she could run faster over rocks than I could, so I just stayed put and glared at her with my mouth stuffed with raspberries.”

“What happened?”

“She eventually took off, and I threw up.”

He leans his head back and laughs.

I laugh, too, then go quiet. “I guess you must think it’s ridiculous that I have to sneak off to meet up with you.”

“Not ridiculous.” Ty crouches and dips his hand into the stream, letting the water flow through his fingers. “Maybe a little old-fashioned, but that’s cool. It just shows that your mom cares about you.”

“I guess. What about your parents? Are they strict?” I cringe inside. Stupid question. He’s traveling alone. How strict could they be?

“They probably aren’t strict enough,” Ty says, as if reading my thoughts. He picks up a stone and tosses it across the stream, lightly this time, but I detect a hint of tension in his shoulders and his words. Sitting down on the boulder, he says, “Come on,” then gestures to the space at his side.

Hoping he can’t tell how jittery I am, I plop down next to him and grip my knees, fighting the urge to touch his hair and find out if it’s as soft as it looks.

Ty begins unlacing his boots.

“What are you doing?” I ask, sending him a suspicious look.

Tugging the boots off, he sets them aside, strips off his socks, and rolls up the legs of his jeans, then lowers his feet into the creek.

“Are you nuts? That water’s freezing!” I say.

“It feels good. Come on. You should try it.” He grins. “Do something crazy for a change.”

“Please. I’m the queen of crazy. Once I dunked my entire head in the creek in November on a dare.”

“Who dared you?”

“Wyatt.”

“Ah,” he says in a tone that seems to imply he has Wyatt figured out. “The guy who gave me the evil eye the entire time we were talking at your Dad’s memorial.”

“Wyatt gave you the evil eye?”

“Blond hair? Skinny?”

“That’s him. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything. He’s just protective. We’re best friends.”

Ty’s brows lift. “Best friends, huh?”

“Yeah.” Wyatt’s expression after we kissed flashes through my mind, and my body tenses with guilt. I have a feeling he’d be hurt if he knew I was flirting with Ty. “Wyatt and I have been best friends since we were this tall,” I say, raising my hand four feet off the ground.

Ty shoves his hair back from his eyes, then looks down at his toes in the water. So do I. The sight of his long, bony feet unsettles me in a way that I like.

“So, should I be afraid of him?” he asks, his head still down.

“Who? Wyatt?”

“You said he’s protective of you.” He slides me a teasing look. “I just thought he might try to protect you from
me.
”

I’m not sure I want to be protected from him, but I give Ty a playful shove and say, “I can take care of myself.” I duck my head, embarrassed and too aware of him, and when I look up again he’s watching me with an amused look that blows every rational thought right out of my mind. “What?” I say, then dip my hand into the water, scoop some up, and splash him with it.

“Hey!” he shouts, laughing and shaking droplets from his hair. “If you’re so tough, why are you afraid of putting your feet in a little cold water?”

“I’m not afraid, I’m smart.”

He smirks. “I’m not buying it.”

Sighing, I remove my boots, peel off my socks, and roll my jeans up my calves, like he did. I lower one foot into the creek beside his and squeal as the shock of cold rushes up my leg. I try to yank my foot out, but Ty gently presses his hand on my knee.

“Count to ten and it won’t feel so cold anymore. I promise.”

I grit my teeth, stick my other foot in the water, gasp, and start counting.

“Was I right?” he asks when I reach ten and I’m no longer shuddering.

“I have a feeling you always are,” I say, heaping on the sarcasm.

“I am.” Reaching up, he tugs my ponytail gently and grins. “Don’t forget that.”

Silence blooms in the space between us, as thick as the spring wildflowers crowding the edge of the creek. I’m amazed that after everything that’s happened in my life recently, I can feel this good. My pulse ricochets as I ask him, “Have you always lived in the Northeast?”

“Yep. Eighteen years.”

“That explains the accent.”

“It’s that obvious, huh?” He cocks his head. “You should be used to it. I catch a hint of Yankee in your mom’s accent, too.”

“That’s weird.” I slide my toe along the slick, wet surface of a mossy stone. “Mom was born and raised in Colorado. Dad, too.”

Ty searches my face, his narrowed eyes touching each feature, forehead to chin. “I guess I imagined it,” he says quietly.

Shaken by the intimate way he looked at me, I grasp frantically for something to say to keep the conversation going. I finally settle on school and ask, “What’s Columbia like?”

“Fun. Busy. New York has an energy like no place else.”

“I’d like to go there sometime. I’ve never been anywhere, really. Besides Colorado, the only state I remember visiting is New Mexico.” My strange snatches of memory surrounding the lake and dock in Winterhaven come to mind, and I add, “And I’m pretty sure my parents and I went to Massachusetts when I was really small. A town called Winterhaven, but I don’t remember much about it.”

“Winterhaven’s near Boston,” Ty says. He tosses another pebble into the water, creating ripples around our feet. “Do you have family there?”

“No, my grandparents died before I was born, and Mom and Dad are both only children. Do you have a big family?”

“Big enough. Four grandparents and a slew of aunts, uncles, and cousins.”

“And your parents and a brother, right?”

“Yeah. Kyle.” Ty tugs a weed from between the rocks, watching his fingers as he twists the stem into a knot. “Kyle would love it here. He’s crazy about mountains. His goal is to climb all the fourteeners in the United States before he’s thirty.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirteen.”

I laugh. “So he has plenty of time.”

His fingers still, and it’s almost as if he stops breathing. Certain I said something to upset him, I open my mouth to ask what’s wrong. But before I can, Ty looks up at me, smiles, and says, “We climbed our first one last year. Mount Muir in the Sierra Nevada Range in California. My parents took us. Kyle kicked my butt. He’s a natural.”

I notice the tattoo on his arm and realize it’s the outline of a mountain range with three spiked pinnacles. The date stenciled beneath it is August of last year. I stroke my fingertips across it, the contact spreading a tingle up my arm. “Is this Mount Muir?”

“Yeah.” He gives a short laugh. “I thought about getting a tattoo of each mountain I climb, but I’d be covered from head to toe if Kyle has his way, so maybe I’ll just stick to this one.”

Relieved that whatever happened to upset him a moment ago has passed, I say, “You should bring your brother here to climb the west peak. It’s almost a fourteener.”

“I’d like to,” says Ty. “Maybe I’ll climb it first, though. While I’m here. I’ve been planning to.”

“I can take you up if you want.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I’ve climbed it at least a dozen times.” Reaching for my boots, I say, “You want to go for a walk? I should start home soon, but I could show you around a little first.”

“Sure.” Ty stands up in the water, but then he grabs my boots from my hand and tosses them back onto the bank. Before I can figure out what he’s up to, he takes hold of my arm and pulls me up so that I’m standing in the creek, too close to him. I tilt my head back, look up into his face.

“I owe you something,” he says, pointing to his hair, which is still damp from when I splashed him earlier.

I pull back, but he snags my hand. I squint at him. “You wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t I?” Ty grins.

“Don’t even think about it!” I shout, giggling and trying to squirm free. “You’ll be sorry. I mean it!”

“Ooh, I’m afraid!” he says in a shrill, teasing voice, mocking mine. “Make me an offer I can’t refuse and maybe I’ll reconsider.”

“I’ll make your lunch again tomorrow,” I say, backing away from him. But he holds tight to my hand until our arms are stretched out as far as they’ll go between us, and I can’t move another inch.

“My lunch?” He gives an exaggerated frown and slumps his shoulders. “That’s not the offer I was hoping for, but your sandwiches aren’t bad, so I guess I’ll let you off the hook.” He drops my hand.

I back toward the bank—one step, then another—keeping him in my sight and grinning so wide my face aches. “I don’t trust you.”

“Smart girl,” he says, advancing toward me slowly. One side of his mouth turns up into a lopsided smile that gives me more of a rush than the cold water trickling over my feet. When I connect with the bank, I crouch and reach back, refusing to take my eyes off him. But instead of grabbing the boots, I quickly swing my arms forward through the creek and send another scoop of water flying up toward Ty’s face.

He yells, then lunges.

I fall back onto the bank and he lands beside me. We laugh until my stomach hurts. In the silence that follows, Ty turns toward me, and I feel that same magnetic force drawing us together that I’ve felt before when I’m with him. When our faces are so close that his breath sweeps my cheek, nerves rush up and I pull back, fumbling on the bank for my boots, choked with embarrassment. What’s wrong with me? I wanted to kiss Ty more than anything. Why didn’t I?

Minutes later, we’re walking down the same path we took to get here. “Thanks for asking me to meet you,” I say.

“I thought you could stand to get away for a while.” He shrugs. “And I wanted us to have some time together without your mom around.” Ty slants me a look, and I try to pretend that it doesn’t turn my bones to jelly.

“What?” I ask, my nerve endings humming beneath my skin.

“What,
what
?” he teases. “You keep saying that.”

“And you keep looking at me.”

He stops walking and covers his eyes with one hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know looking wasn’t allowed.”

Pausing on the path, I knock against him with my elbow and giggle, disarmed. “It’s not the
fact
that you’re looking, it’s the
way
you are.”

Spreading his fingers, he peeks through them. “Like?”

A wildfire of heat spreads through my body, all the way up to my face. “Like you’re thinking something,” I say.

“You mean if I want to spend time with you, I not only have to wear blinders, I have to get a lobotomy, too?”

“Shut up.” I cross my arms and try not to laugh.

We start walking again, Ty with his hands in his pockets, me with my arms behind my back. “I’m just trying to figure you out,” he says after a moment. “I’ve never known a girl who dunks her head in mountain streams and stares down bears.”

I send him a smug look. “That’s nothing. Wait until I tell you about the time I wrestled with a mountain lion and won.”

He draws his head back. “You’re kidding.”

I arch a brow.

We reach the place where the waterfall sprays over a jutting cliff above us, just missing the path as it tumbles to a pool twenty feet down the side of the hill. The path follows the cascading water, and it’s an easy climb to the bottom. We make our way down.

“Amazing,” Ty says when we’re standing alongside the pool. “What was it like for you growing up here? I mean, not many people have an entire forest right outside their door.”

The air is damp and musky and alive with energy. I breathe it in, feeling revived like I always do when I come to this spot. “I loved growing up here.”

“Don’t you ever get lonely?”

I think of Iris and how isolated my childhood would have been without her. “Sometimes,” I say. “But I’ve learned to be alone.”

I follow Ty across the trail. We climb over a stack of felled limbs that lie crisscrossed like the old pickup sticks Dad and I used to play with. When we reach an aspen tree with letters carved into the bark, Ty pauses to trace them with his finger.

“‘L.W. and W.P. were here,’” he reads. “Did you do this?”

“Wyatt and I did when we were eight.” I give a short laugh. “Silly, I know.”

“Not when you’re eight.”

“Yeah, you believe nothing will change at that age. That everything will always be good.” I hear the sadness in my voice, and shrug.

“Too bad that’s a lie, huh?” Ty says.

I nod, wondering what good things Ty has lost.

He sticks his hands into his pockets again and says, “I’ll take you up on that offer of climbing the peak together.”

“Good. I mean, you shouldn’t hike alone. No one should, but especially if you’re inexperienced.”

“I’m not a
complete
greenhorn,” he says with mock offense.

“One fourteener doesn’t make you an expert, either.” Smirking at him, I add, “Maybe I can show you how it’s done this weekend.”

As I’m turning toward the waterfall, Ty catches my arm. “Lily.” I face him again, my skin tingling where his fingers push against my arm. “I have something to confess,” he says. “What I said to your mom about needing to make money for the trip home? That’s not really why I’m sticking around Silver Lake longer than I’d planned. I have plenty of money.”