by Gwen Cole
“Glad you’re feeling well enough for sarcasm.” I took the empty chair next to his bed and grinned at him. “You hungry?”
Gavin rolled his eyes. “Sorry, the bank is closed today.” He lay back on his pillows and asked, “Is that all you came here for?”
I knew what I needed to say—I just didn’t know how to start. Gavin was my best friend, so why was it so hard to talk about this?
Seeing my hesitation, Gavin asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I came to say I’m sorry,” I said in a rush.
“For what?”
Shouldn’t he have already known? Shouldn’t he have been angry at me? This would have been easier if he had told me to leave, or maybe if he had even thrown something at me. At least then I wouldn’t have to explain.
“I left you, Gavin. I left you when you needed me the most. I—” I opened and closed my mouth, finally shaking my head. “And I’ll always regret it.”
“Reid.” Gavin stopped there, like he didn’t know what to say. “What I saw . . . was you taking away the threat. Buck. If you hadn’t taken him away, who knows what he could have done. He probably would have finished me off just to piss off my dad. You didn’t leave me, Reid.” He took a breath. “You saved me.”
I searched Gavin’s eyes, trying to understand what he had just said. Whatever way I thought about it, it wasn’t what I knew to be true.
“I don’t see it that way,” I whispered.
“You came to find me when nobody else did,” he said. “And then when you left, you left me with one of the only people you trust. If Jake hadn’t been there, would you have done it?”
“Of course not.”
“Then please, stop beating yourself up about things that don’t matter. I was hurt, and you were making sure I would be safe.”
I couldn’t hold his gaze any longer and glanced at the TV for a distraction. It was on a home improvement show, and I wondered if it was on mute because he just wanted something to sleep to or if he actually enjoyed watching it.
I wish I already knew the answer and didn’t have to guess.
Did it make me a bad friend for not knowing something so simple?
“Do you like this show?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen it.”
Gavin found the remote and turned the sound back on. “You’ll love it after one episode,” he promised.
I guess I had my answer.
That’s what I loved most about Gavin—he always made me feel like I was enough.
SAM
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
I’D GONE BACK AND FORTH TO SCHOOL THE NEXT day with nobody sitting next to me and no sign of the boy who had once smiled at me and made me a paper elephant. The temptation to take a glimpse of him was strong, especially knowing I could at any moment. But I kept my promise, knowing he’d come when he was ready.
Mom and Dad kept asking me questions about Reid, and I told them as much as I could. As much as I knew about him, anyway.
When I got home from school, I avoided both of them and went up to my room. Logan was already there, lounging across my bed.
“Hey, slacker, you ready to go back to school?” I asked, dropping my bag on the floor.
School sucked. I couldn’t concentrate in any of my classes and I didn’t want to be there at all. Nella kept looking at me weird too, like I was going to disappear at any given moment. But all things considered, she was taking it well.
Mom yelled from downstairs, “Family dinner tonight! Logan is leaving tomorrow!”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Finally, huh?”
“Can’t miss any more classes.”
“Want to take an early field trip?” I asked.
It took him a moment to catch on and he sat up. “Where do you have in mind?”
“Before we do anything that you might be thinking, I need to make a stop first.”
Logan swung his legs off the bed. “Let me find my shoes,” he said, looking a little too eager to get out of the house.
When he was ready to go, I took him to L.A., drifting in front of the door of a house that was way too big. The driveway was gated and the hedges were high enough to block out everything around.
Logan raised an eyebrow as I pressed the doorbell.
A guy answered the door wearing nothing but sweatpants. His hair said he had woken up not too long ago.
“Do I know you?”
“Is Kiato here?”
Logan looked over sharply, somehow holding his tongue. I pretended not to notice, and the guy finally nodded and let us in.
“Kiato! Someone’s here to see you!”
Noise came from the kitchen and Kiato stepped into the hall. His shoulders tensed when he saw us.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I just want to talk.”
He hesitated, finally nodding for us to come in. The guy who opened the door followed us to the living room, where the remnants of a late breakfast sat on the coffee table.
“You good?” the guy asked Kiato.
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
“I’m gonna go take that shower then.”
Logan waited until the guy was gone before asking, “Does he know about you?”
Kiato eyed where he left and shook his head. “Not yet. I’m trying to gain the courage.”
Logan nodded. “I feel like there’s always a sweet spot. Too soon, they go running. Too late and they won’t trust you anymore.”
I eyed Logan, wondering if he had firsthand experience. It’s not something we had ever talked about, obviously.
“I feel like it’s almost there,” Kiato agreed. He finally looked at me and asked, “Why are you here?”
“I wanted to make sure you and your sister were okay. You disappeared pretty fast.”
“Because everyone knows what I did,” he said, anger underlining his tone. “I’m honestly surprised nobody has tried to come for me yet.”
“Everyone knows what you did,” I agreed. “But they also know you helped us in the end. Any one of us would have done the same if Buck had decided to target our family instead of yours.”
Kiato sat back and looked out the window. “My sister is staying with my parents for a while. She was in college but that’s put on hold now.”
“Was she hurt?”
“Not physically.”
Logan said, “I’m sorry.”
Kiato glanced at him. “I’m sorry too.”
“I can’t speak for everyone, but nobody in our family has hard feelings,” I told him. “We all saw what was happening.”
“Without Reid, I’m not sure it would have gone the way it did.” He shrugged. “He made me see there was another option.”
Reid had a way of doing that—I was seeing that more and more.
There wasn’t much more to say. Kiato showed us out, and once the door was closed, Logan clapped his hands and said, “Now let’s go do something fun. We have about an hour before dinner—which means I can’t take you to my favorite ramen place—but I can show you another cool place.”
He took me to Universal Studios, giddy with himself because we didn’t have to pay to get inside. The only thing he wanted to do was the Transformers 3-D ride, and I had to admit, it was a lot of fun even though the line was really long for it. I caught a glimpse of Hogwarts from a distance but we had to get back.
Logan told me, “Next time. You can finally get that wand.”
Next time. Because this was never going away.
On Friday, days after leaving Reid at the hospital, I stood on the platform and waited for my train. The cold nipped at my neck and face, reminding me of the coming season. I had always loved winter. I loved wearing coats and hats, and especially boots. I loved the way the city looked after a fresh snow.
Now snow reminded me of Reid’s family home and I wondered if it had the same effect on him.
I could have started drifting to school, but I couldn’t give up the chance to see Reid. The train reminded
me of him too much to stop riding it.
Over the normal subway sounds—people walking by and chatting with their friends, the constant hum from the subway tunnel—something very soft touched my ears, like a whisper.
I knew exactly what it was, and I closed my eyes, hoping more than anything it was him.
With a beating heart, I opened my eyes and turned. Reid stood on the platform, looking the same as the first day I saw him. His messenger bag across his chest, dark hair windswept as always, and his relaxed posture was every bit him. My heart wouldn’t stop; I was worried it was a dream.
There was only one thing I wanted to do.
“You promised me something,” I said.
Reid smiled, not fully, but enough for a hint of his dimple to appear. His dark eyes were bright, more alive than I’d ever seen.
When he took a step toward me, I could feel every vein pulsing fast and steady. Then he was there, he was next to me, inches away. I took in his scent of fresh air and wind. When he leaned in closer, his hand came up, his fingers slipping through my hair, past my ear.
“Your train just left without you,” he whispered against my mouth.
I closed my eyes and smiled. “I know a way to catch it.”
Then he kissed me, and his lips tasted like the wind.
ONE WEEK LATER
SOMETIMES I WANTED TO DISAPPEAR, AND SOME-times I forgot I could, like old habits dying hard. I would daydream about being somewhere, wishing and hoping, and then I would remember who I was.
Mrs. Stevens cleared her throat, and the whole class stared at me, waiting for an answer that wouldn’t come. The whiteboard was wiped clean, giving away no hints. For a moment, I even forgot what class I was in.
History. But what were we learning about?
“I take it you don’t have an answer then?” Mrs. Stevens asked.
I shook my head and someone let out a breath of a laugh.
Mrs. Stevens looked over sharply, “Clara, don’t think you can hide that smile behind your book. Would you like to answer for Sam? It seems her mind is on more important things than this class.”
If only she knew.
Even after returning to school, my mind was on everything except schoolwork. It was hard to act normal when I knew I wasn’t.
I had no idea how Logan did it, especially being in college. It definitely helped in the evenings when our family would go somewhere special for dinner—as in Italy or Tokyo—or Mom would want to show me her favorite places.
But during the day, when we all had to act normal, it was the hardest.
I wanted to see places nobody had ever seen and go to countries I’d never been to, because I was definitely keeping track.
But most of all, I wanted to spend more time with Reid.
It had been a week since we’d kissed on the subway platform, and we had seen each other every day since. They were short moments, though, between school and my family, who were still getting used to me wanting to spend time with a boy.
I could see them slowly warming up to him, though, and they even invited him to dinner the next day.
The bell rang a couple minutes after my humiliation, and I hurried out the door and into the busy stream of the hallway. I usually didn’t see Nella until lunch, so I made for the bathroom to grab a couple minutes of peace before my next class.
As expected, the bathroom was full of girls fixing their hair or texting. I made for the last empty stall when someone said my name.
“Sam, did you hear?” I stopped in my tracks right behind Aria. She glanced up from the mirror and the other girls around her smiled, like there was some secret I didn’t know.
“Hear what?” I said, playing along.
“There’s a new boy who started school today.”
I should have known. Aria and her friends always went crazy over anyone new, especially in the middle of the school year. I usually tried to spot them out of the crowd, just like everyone else did, just out of curiosity. But today I found myself uninterested because I already had the only boy I could ever want.
All I said in response was “Cool.”
A girl pushed past me and took the last stall. I glared at the closed door, noting the missed opportunity.
Aria turned around and cocked an eyebrow. “That’s all you have to say? Come on, Sam! I just saw him before last period. He’s like someone that could be a sexy lead singer of some band.”
“Well, you can have him.”
“Oh, I plan to.” She faced the mirror again and finished applying her lip gloss. “He’s going to be mine by the time this day is over.”
I fought to keep my eyes from rolling. “And I’m sure you’ll succeed. You always do.”
The bell was about to ring, so I had no choice but to follow them out of the bathroom. I was about to head for my next class when they all stopped in front of me, blocking my way.
“Look, there he is.”
I turned to see who they were looking at and my heart pounded, too hard for it to be anyone else.
Reid.
“Oh my gosh,” I said, not even meaning to say it aloud.
“I know, right?” Aria touched her hair while watching Reid talk with someone next to the lockers. He was laughing at something. When he caught my eye, his smile never faded.
Then, all too fast, he was walking toward me.
A couple of books were in his hand against his hip, and he wore his black T-shirt, which I had admittedly been dreaming about. His eyes locked with mine.
“Here we go,” Aria murmured next to me.
Reid stopped, eyeing me. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said.
“I was about to say the same.”
His dimple appeared as he closed the distance between us. It was a short, soft kiss that left my head spinning and elicited gasps from the girls next to me.
“Meet me after school,” he whispered into my ear.
I could only nod as he walked past, leaving me alone, surrounded by the whispers. I didn’t care about any of that.
The moment school let out, I found an empty alleyway to drift from without anyone seeing me. I didn’t even care to notice where Reid was—I just drifted to him without a second thought.
He was waiting for me on the edge of a cliff in South Africa, his bag abandoned on the grass behind him.
The view was stunning from this high up, and there was a waterfall in the distance, its long white stream going all the way down to the bottom. I dropped my bag with his and approached the edge of the cliff and looked down, wondering how far it was.
“You ready to jump?” Reid asked.
I looked at him sharply. “I told you I wasn’t ready for that.”
“How do you know if you don’t try?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Is this the only reason you brought me here? Or maybe it’s a distraction because you’re going to my school. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it was more fun seeing your face,” Reid admitted, grinning.
He took my arm and pulled me close, and I couldn’t even try to be mad at him.
“So you’re going to school,” I said.
“Yeah, one of the terms of staying with Jake.”
“He’s a smart one.”
“It’s just weird living like . . . I don’t know.” He paused, looking out across the cliffs. “Living like I was before, with my parents. Going to school, having friends, just . . . being.”
“Is that a good thing?”
Reid looked over. “It’s better than I ever thought it would be.” Then he took my hand and said, “You ready for this?”
“Promise not to let go?” I asked, nerves jumping in my stomach.
“Never.”
We took a running start and jumped, letting the wind carry us away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Windswept had a long and difficult journey to becoming published, and it wouldn’t have happened without these few select people. So, I’m going to keep this short and sweet, otherwise i
t would be ten pages long and nobody would read it.
First and foremost, to my Wattpad readers. All your support, comments, and love made Windswept into what it is today. It wouldn’t be here without you. Thank you.
Dad, to who this book is dedicated to, Windswept wouldn’t have been published if it wasn’t for your relentless dedication to bring justice. I will always know where I get my stubborn nature from.
Nicole Frail, my editor, even though it took years it finally get this book published, you never gave up on it. You were there in the beginning and you pushed me to make it the best book it could be. I’m proud to have you on my team.
Corri, as always, you are always there to read my books however many times I ask, and I appreciate you.
To my local bookstore, Chop Suey, you guys have always been supportive of me and my books and I could never thank you enough. The world needs more bookstores like you.
The Insomniacs, thank you for being the most awesome people and talking about inappropriate things at inappropriate hours.
To my family and friends, thank you for being on this ride with me. It was a crazy one.
And to the person who stole this story, thank you for making me realize it was worth fighting for.
