Unbroken (2 page)

“Your sister has classes,” mom reminds me. “She’ll drive down with your father next week.”

I sigh. My older sister is twenty-two, finishing up college at UNC. She’s majoring in publicity and marketing, and from what I can tell, that just means she spends most of her time strutting the bars of Raleigh on the lookout for an eligible bachelor. And by eligible, she means a future lawyer or investment banker from the right kind of family, earning six figures with another seven in trust somewhere. I don’t want to call her a shallow bitch, but she earns it.

“We could have waited for them,” I murmur. “I mean, isn’t the whole point of this summer—to be one big happy family?” My voice is full of sarcasm.

I see my mom flinch out of the corner of my eye, but she doesn’t rise to my bait. “Another few days would have turned into another week or more,” she says briskly, instead. “And then summer would be half-way done before we even arrived.”

I don’t reply. One week is nothing when I’m staring down three months of my fucked-up family pretending like everything’s OK.

I turn back to the rain-soaked view outside the window, lifting my beloved camera to peer through the viewfinder lens. It’s a manual Pentax SLR, a bulky old antique that my grandpa gave to me, years ago, back before he died. Everyone uses their cellphones now, snapping digital pictures to post online and pass around, but I like the weight of the old camera in my hand, and the hours I have to spend in the dark-room, gently coaxing each photograph into life.

I carefully twist the focus, bringing the view clearer. The sea foams, restless beyond the strip of brush-land and sand dividing the highway from the shore. I press my finger on the shutter and click, praying I make it through the summer without losing my mind.

“You’ll be coming here with your own kids soon,” mom adds brightly. “A tradition. You know, I came here with your grandparents, every summer since I was—“

A loud bang sounds, drowning out her voice. The car swerves wildly, suddenly out of control. My chest slams against my seatbelt, painful and my camera slips from my hands. I grab for it, desperate, as we careen across the wet highway.

“Mom!” I yell, terrified. I see a flash of red through the window—the truck behind us in lane. It heads straight for us, then swerves past at the last second.

“It’s OK!” Mom’s knuckles are white, gripping the steering wheel as she wrestles to regain control. “Just hold on!”

I cling on to the sides of my seat, thrown to the side as the car keeps spinning. We’re weightless, drifting in the road. Then, at last, I feel the tires get traction again. The car slows, until finally, we come to a stop along the side of the highway.

I gasp for breath, my heart pounding. The red truck we nearly hit has gone off the road further up the highway, front wheels buried up to the bumper in mud and sand.

My mom is still gripping onto the wheel, staring straight ahead, her face chalk-white. “Are you OK?” I ask in a quiet voice. She doesn’t reply.

“Mom?” I ask again, reaching out to touch her arm. She flinches back.

“What? Oh, yes, honey, I’m fine.” She swallows. “The tire went out, I think. I don’t know what happened. A lucky miss.” Mom gives me a trembling smile, but I feel a tide of anger rise up.

“Lucky?” I exclaim, furious. “We shouldn’t even be here! None of us wanted to come this summer, and now we nearly just died. And for what?!”

Suddenly, it’s like a mack truck is crushing down on my chest. I can’t breathe, I can’t even think straight. I fumble at my seatbelt with shaking hands and then fling the car door open, stumbling out onto the road.

“Juliet?” She calls after me, but I don’t stop. I don’t care that it’s raining, wet and cold against my thin T-shirt and cutoff shorts, I just need to get out. I need to breathe.

I stride away from the car, gasping for air.

None of this was my idea. We haven’t been back to the beach house in years, not since I was a kid. We haven’t been much of a family in years either, but mom got it in her head that we had to spend one last summer there together—before I went off to college, and Carina graduated, and we could all finally stop acting we were anything more than distant strangers living under the same roof, trying like hell to pretend to the world that everything was OK.

Not that we don’t have practice. After all, pretending is what my family does best. Dad pretends he’s not a washed-up academic with one failed book to his name, and a taste for vodka martinis at four PM. My sister pretends she cares about more than landing herself a rich lawyer husband with a country club membership and a six-figure bonus. My mom pretends she doesn’t regret throwing her life away on a charming British writer, or notice his late nights ‘advising’ students at the office, and the disdain in his voice whenever he does remember to stumble home.

And me? I pretend it doesn’t hurt me to keep pretending. That it doesn’t eat away at me to see how much she still loves him, meek and cowering for the slightest bit of his attention. That I don’t get these awful panic attacks, every time I think about leaving her behind when I head off to college this fall.

That’s why I agreed to this joke of a happily family vacation in the end, to try and numb this sense I’m abandoning her. She wants one last summer to pretend? I’ll give it to her. But look where all that pretending has gotten us now: nearly winding up dead in a car wreck before her precious summer even begins.

“Hey!”

I hear a guy’s voice behind me, but I’m so desperate, I don’t slow down. My heart is pounding now, so fast I feel like it’s going to burst out of my chest. I know I just need to calm down and wait for the panic to pass, but when I’m caught up in the whirlwind, I can’t see straight long enough to try.

“Hey, wait up!” The voice comes, louder, and then there’s a heavy hand on my arm, pulling me around.

“What?” I gasp, violently yanking back. “What the fuck do you…” my protest dies on my lips as I stare up into the face of the most beautiful guy I’ve ever seen.

His eyes are the first thing I notice. They’re dark blue, mesmerizing, the color of skies after sunset. It’s always been my favorite time, that moment when the last light of day has faded away, and the first stars come out. Now I’m looking right up into them, endless midnight constellations. Ringed with thick, dark lashes, they burn into me, intense. Full of secrets, full of scars.

“Where are you going?” the guy demands, still gripping painfully onto my arm. “You can’t just walk away from this!”

I pull away, still dazed. He’s older than me, but not by much, his early twenties maybe: tall and broad-shouldered, skin tanned a deep bronze by the sun. His arms are taut beneath the black T-shirt he’s wearing, damp and clinging to his muscular torso. His body is slim but compact, almost radiating with tightly-coiled power in his black jeans and beat-up workman’s boots. Rain drips from his dark hair, curling too-long around his collar, and on his right bicep, I can see the dark ink of a tattoo snaking up beneath his shirt.

He takes my breath away.

The world shifts back into focus, and I find that I can breathe again OK. Just like that, my panic begins to ease.

“Are you listening?” he demands, face set and angry. Then the anger fades, replaced with concern. “Wait, are you hurt? Did you hit your head?”

He reaches for my face, fingers grazing against my forehead with surprising gentleness. I look into those deep blue eyes again and feel a shock ripple through me. Electric.

I lurch away, startled. “I’m fine,” I manage, my heart-rate finally slowing. What the hell am I doing? I scold myself. Drooling over some guy on the side of the highway? Don’t I have more important things to worry about—like the fact I was
this
close to dying just a few minutes ago?

Now he knows I’m not injured, the guy’s angry expression returns. “Then you’re lucky I don’t kill you myself right now.” he tells me, grim. “What the hell was that back there? Don’t you know you shouldn’t drive fast in a storm?”

I catch my breath, my frustrations all boiling over at once. “First of all, I wasn’t driving,” I yell back. “And second, it was an accident! Our tire blew, it happens. How is any of this my fault?” I challenge him, folding my arms.

His eyes follow the motion of my arms, and I’m suddenly painfully aware of my thin T-shirt, now wet through and clinging against my chest. I shiver, seeing a new hunger in his eyes as his gaze trails down my body, lingering on my bare legs. I feel my skin prickle, and my breath catch, not with discomfort, but something new, some kind of heightened awareness. I feel a heat pool, low in my stomach.

The guy drags his gaze back up to meet mine, and then he looks at me with what I swear is a smirk curling at the edges of his perfect mouth. “How are you the mad one right now?” he asks. “I’m the one with my truck totally fucked back there.”

I look past him. His truck is nose deep in a sandbank, back wheels spinning. “Yeah, well we’ve got a flat tire and no spare.”

He smirks for real this time. “What kind of idiot doesn’t keep a spare? We’re miles out from anywhere.”

“Maybe the kind of person who drives in the city, where we have little things like cellphone signal and tow-trucks!”

The smirk fades. “You’re summer people.” he says, like it’s a crime.

“Let me guess,” I shoot back. “You’re a townie with a chip on your shoulder. Well, maybe you should save the issues until we both get out of here.”

He opens his mouth in surprise, then stops. He looks around at the wet empty highway, and finally, it sinks in that I may have a point.

“Fine,” he says, grudgingly. “I’ll call for Norm to come get us.”

“I thought there wasn’t signal out here?” I frown, pulling out my phone from my pocket again, just to check.

“I’ve got a CB radio in the truck.” He heads back towards the red pick-up. “Stay there!”

“Where else would I go?” I sigh, watching him walk away. I trace the back of his body with my eyes, absorbing the grace in his gait. Then he turns, catching me. I blush, hoping frantically that he can’t see my pink cheeks in the rain.

“You didn’t tell me your name.” he calls.

“You didn’t ask!” I yell back.

He grins, and waits, until finally I surrender.

“Juliet,” I tell him, and wait for the snarky quip, but instead, he just cocks an eyebrow at me.

“I’m Emerson.” He calls. Then he smiles, a flash of something true and reckless, so darkly beautiful I feel my heart stop all over again. This is what they write stories about, I realize, as if from far away. All those books and movies and poems I’ve read, this is what they all were preparing me for, the day when a strange man smiles at me, and makes me forget who I am.

His eyes meet mine, and I swear, my blood sings, hot in my veins despite the cold, damp rain trickling down my back.

“Welcome to Cedar Cove.”

CHAPTER TWO

I push my memories of Emerson way down and keep on driving. Soon, the empty beach and scrubland start showing signs of life: small shingled cottages, hidden in the tall grasses and set back from the shore. A laundry line. A car rusting on blocks in somebody’s driveway. I cross the bridge over the wide, salt-marsh riverbanks, and turn off the highway, into town.

Even after all these years, not much has changed. I drive slowly down Main Street, feeling like I’ve stepped back in time. There’s the convenience store on the corner, where grandpa would buy me bright red popsicles; Mrs. Olsen’s pancake hut, serving the biggest chocolate-chip short stack I’ve ever seen. Jimmy’s Tavern, out by the water, always attracting a rough crowd, and past that, the harbor, filled with the clashing mix of run-down fishing boats and shiny new cruisers.

Cedar Cove was always a sleepy kind of resort town—too frayed around the edges to attract the big tourist bucks—but it hasn’t been entirely untouched by new development. As I drive on, I see there’s a slick new strip mall with a pizza place, and a coffee shop, and stretch of new beachfront condos lined up where an old bait and tackle shack used to stand.

At least I won’t go into caffeine withdrawl this weekend.

At the fork in the road, I turn off down Sandpiper Lane. The dusty road winds along the shore, lined with wild rosemary and myrtle trees, and in places I can glimpse the golden sands lying just beyond the brush. After a mile, I come to a green mailbox, rusty on the side of the road, and turn into the familiar driveway.

The house sits, baking and quiet in the afternoon sun. Craftsman-style, it has a wide front porch and blue shingles, now faded to a pale grey. The white trim is yellowed, and the roof tiles are crumbling, but the front yawn is neatly tended, with lush grass and roses twisting up around the windows.

I put the Camaro in park beside a shiny Lexus and slowly get out of the car.

My muscles are cramped from hours behind the wheel, so I stretch, looking up at the old house. Coming back, I feel a fresh rush of emotion, only this time it’s more than just the trigger of a sign on the side of the highway. This is a house, a home, full of hundreds of memories over the years—fighting, and laughter, and love, and pain. There’s the place where we would play in the sprinklers. There’s the tree I would climb to escape my parents’ fighting inside.

There’s the hidden spot Emerson would kiss me goodnight, his lips fierce and searching, hands slipping up under my camisole to tease and caress across my bare skin…