Great and Precious Things

by Rebecca Yarros

  His forehead puckered. “Right. That’s right. Dangerous place, that mine. You should take me with you. Just in case you get lost. Hate for anything to happen to you or that Bradley girl.”

  The pressure was back in my chest. He knew. In this moment, he knew what was really happening. He was really here.

  “We’ll be okay,” I promised him. “I won’t let anything happen to Willow.”

  “I know you won’t. That girl is wild about you. You know that, right? Everyone knows. It’s all they talk about in town.” He gave me a soft smile, and that pressure eased to something light and sweet.

  “And that’s okay with you?” My keys dug into my palm. Relax. His opinion has never mattered to you before. Except it always had.

  “Of course. You two have been inseparable since you were kids. Figured it would come full circle one of these days. Now, be careful up there. Those train cars will still function on the rails, but you know those tracks stop dead past that first ventilation shaft.”

  “Yeah, I have your old maps. Don’t worry.”

  “Okay. Have fun. Love you, Sullivan.” He gave me another one of those soft smiles and turned back to the television.

  There was a two-ton brick on my chest. There had to be, because the air wouldn’t come and it fucking hurt. I blinked furiously at the prickling pain in my eyes and laid my head back on the doorframe.

  My first breath came in a gasp, filling my lungs but leaving the pain. That was all mine.

  “Love you, too, Dad,” I responded, because it was what he’d expect.

  Because it was the truth.

  I walked down the hallway and tapped Sully’s picture on the wall. “That one was for you, too.”

  My phone rang as I climbed into the Jeep, and Willow’s name flashed across the screen. I started the engine on the second ring.

  On the third, I told myself every single reason I shouldn’t pick it up.

  On the fourth, I did.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, yourself. What are you up to?” I could practically see her smile as her voice filled my car, coming through the speakers.

  “Just finished lunch with my dad, and I was thinking of heading to the mine. I’m meeting with the contractor tomorrow and wanted to get another look at it.” I put the car in gear and headed toward my place.

  “I have a better idea,” she suggested.

  “You sound like you’re up to no good.” Now my lips were curving, too.

  “How about we both skip out on work and you meet me at the hot springs?”

  The hot springs. There were ten thousand different reasons I should say no and only one reason why I should go. And damn if that one reason didn’t outweigh every other one.

  “Cam?” she asked, her voice pitching higher. She was nervous I’d say no.

  Probably because she knew I should. This was a bad idea.

  “Willow Bradley, are you asking me to play hooky with you?” The Jeep rocked back and forth through a stretch of road where ice had built up in little boulders.

  “Maybe. Okay, definitely. Come on. No one else will ever go with me.”

  “That’s because it’s covered in snow.” I looked up through the windshield and saw brilliant blue skies. At least the weather was good for it.

  “Only the outsides. The water is toasty. As you should remember.”

  A couple of hours with Willow sounded like heaven. We’d had zero time alone together since…well, whatever the hell it was that had happened in the kitchen.

  “Come on. Be bad with me.”

  “Be bad, huh? Let me guess. You’re not actually being bad. You have all your work done for the day already.”

  “Okay, fine. I do. Basically, I’m guilting you into being bad so I can blatantly use you for some fun.”

  “That’s a situation I’m well acquainted with. I’ll meet you there in twenty.”

  There was no way this could possibly end well. But nothing ever did.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Camden

  Snow covered every part of the meadow between the ridges, with the exception of the hot springs and the creek that ran beside it, heavy with the beginning of spring thaw.

  The contrast of undisturbed snow against the steaming turquoise mineral pool was something I’d never found an equal to. I’d traveled all over the world, seen both the breathtaking and the brutal, but there was nowhere on earth I found as beautiful, hence the tattoo on my arm.

  Opening this hot springs up to tourists would have made more than a pretty penny, but our great-grandfathers had agreed to keep it for the private use of the Danielses and Bradleys only. With the exception of a few summer parties when we were in high school, this generation had honored that agreement. Relished it, really.

  I parked the Jeep alongside the old bathhouse and got out, hauling my backpack with me. The snow barely gave way under my boots as I trekked above where the bathhouse perched precariously over the north end of the pool and down the other side.

  The structure was still sound, as far as an 1880s piece of ruin left to time could be. Dad had reinforced it the summer Xander broke his wrist after we built a tire swing under it, and the supports still looked good.

  The tire swing had not survived Xander’s misadventure.

  Willow’s 4Runner crested the ridge from the west, and my stomach tensed in anticipation. A month. I’d been home a month, and I’d gone from vowing to never see her, to never touching her, to…I didn’t even know. She was Willow, and even though I knew this was a shit idea, I couldn’t stop myself. I never could when it came to her.

  She was the exception to everything.

  “Hey!” She grinned as she shut the door to her car, toting her own bag over her shoulder.

  “Nice wheel.” I pointed to her front left.

  “You like that?” She posed like a car model. “It’s brand-new from the manufacturer and looks exactly like the other three already installed. But wait, there’s more! It comes with four new tires, since its friend on the back right was also flattened while avoiding a deer. All for the price of I-think-I-just-put-Keith-Mayberry’s-kid-through-college!” She ended with a flashy grin, and I laughed.

  I never knew how she did it, but she could flip my moods with a twist of her lips. Lips I knew the taste and texture of. Lips that had fueled way too many dreams lately. All because I had the self-control of a teenager when she came near.

  Or maybe it was because I’d wanted her since I was a teenager.

  “Let’s get in. It’s freezing out here.”

  She nodded, and we climbed down the stone-ringed embankment until we reached the heavy, flat stones that bordered the north and west ends of the pool. We dropped our bags, and I busied myself with getting my towels out and stripping down, mostly to keep from watching Willow strip down.

  I laid out one towel to step on and folded the other for when I got out, then started dropping clothing until I was in nothing but the black swim trunks I’d worn under my pants. “See you in there!” I called out and jumped, careful not to cannonball, because I wasn’t fifteen anymore.

  The water engulfed me in heat, and I lingered but didn’t hit the bottom before I swam back up. I broke the surface, and the drops of water on my face immediately chilled.

  “How is it?” Willow asked from the edge.

  I turned around and nearly swallowed my tongue.

  She stood on the ledge, pulling her long brown hair up into a knot on the top of her head. Words. I didn’t have words. “Incredible,” maybe. “Beautiful,” definitely. “Sexy as hell”? Yeah, we’d go with that, too. Her suit was a two-piece and straight out of a forties pinup fantasy, complete with navy-blue bottoms, gold buttons up her stomach, and a red-and-white-striped top that looped around her neck and tied between her breasts in a bow that I was going to undo with my teeth.

 
God. Bless. America.

  I locked my jaw to keep those teeth exactly where they were.

  “Well?” she asked, and it took me a second to remember what she’d asked in the first place.

  “It’s a balmy one hundred and four degrees, just like every other day of the year.” Though I really was wishing it was a hell of a lot colder at this moment.

  “Perfect.” She sat on the edge of the stone, then lowered herself into the water until it covered her to her neck. Then she moaned. “This feels amazing.”

  This was the worst idea I’d ever had in my entire life.

  Except that it was her idea.

  She made her way toward, then past me, stopping at the grouping of shallow stones that made up the east end of the pool. “Come sit,” she called out.

  “That’s probably not the best idea.”

  “Why?” She tilted her head to the side and leaned back so her weight was braced on her hands.

  The water hit her neckline, but it was also crystal clear in that section.

  “Trust me. This is close enough.”

  “So you’re going to stay out there in the middle and tread water the entire time we’re here?” She disappeared behind a cloud of steam as the breeze shifted, then reappeared.

  “Maybe.”

  “Suit yourself. So you know the entire town thinks we’re together, right?” she questioned.

  Ah yes, the elephant in the room or, rather, in the hot springs.

  “I am aware.” I swam a little closer when another wave of steam hid her from me. I might not be able to touch her, not in the way I wanted, but I wasn’t going to deny myself the simple pleasure of looking at her.

  “Because you keep putting your hands on me when we’re in public.” She arched an eyebrow in clear challenge.

  “Define ‘hands on you.’” It was nothing compared to what I wanted to do.

  “You put your arm around me at the diner.”

  “You held out your hand first.” I moved through another cloud of steam when I couldn’t see her.

  “You held my hand at the Historical Society meeting.”

  “You…” Shit, I had nothing. “You hugged me.” There.

  “You held on to my waist.”

  “So you didn’t fall off the chair. Do you have any clue how clumsy you get when you’re distracted? You get this laser focus on something shiny, and everything else doesn’t exist, including your own feet. Trust me—I was saving you from yourself.”

  “You kissed my forehead.” All pretense of play dropped in those hazel eyes.

  I’d kissed a hell of a lot more than that in my kitchen. I swallowed and sat on the edge of the ledge that marked the shallow end. “You chose me over your dad.”

  “You pulled me from my car and carried me home.”

  I turned to fully face her, the water falling to my stomach. Cold air prickled at my chest, helping to ground me. “That was just being a good neighbor. Plus, the entire town didn’t see, so I don’t think it counts.”

  A smile tugged at her lips. “Okay. You took a bullet for me.”

  “Six,” I corrected her, feeling that sliver of terror at the reminder of how close I’d come to losing her. “It was six bullets. Buckshot.”

  “I thought you were dying,” she admitted. “I didn’t know about the vest.”

  “I thought he’d kill you before I could get out there.” I ran my hands over my air-cooled face.

  “I thought about you before I saw you.” She shifted and sat up.

  “What?” Game over.

  “I saw the gun, and your dad was talking about cougars, and I thought about you.” She tucked her knees to her chest. “Is that so hard to believe?”

  “Yes.” Believing in anything earned you a shit ton of disappointment.

  “I thought about you every single day, Cam.”

  Fuck me, the woman wasn’t pulling her punches.

  I did, too. But I couldn’t say those words. Couldn’t cross the lines I’d already stumbled across once. That had been passion and need, but to do so here would be choice. An unforgivable choice, and I’d already made one that broke her heart.

  “I thought about you when you went to college and when you came home and stopped speaking to me. God, you were so cruel that summer.”

  “I know.” The hurt in her eyes made me close mine.

  “Why?”

  My heart slammed in my chest, the reason screaming for release. To say the words I hadn’t been able to. Because she was everything that was good about Alba—about life, really. And he’d been that good, too.

  And they’d been right together.

  And I’d never be either of those things.

  I looked over at her, and she sighed, realizing I wasn’t going to answer her.

  “I thought about you when you left for basic, and when Sully told me you’d been selected for Special Forces training, and every day you were in the evaluation process. Every day. I missed you so much that I wasn’t sure how people kept breathing with that kind of pain, you know?” She looked up at the sky. “I missed you every day for ten years, Cam.”

  I knew exactly the kind of pain she meant, because I’d carried it with me, learning to exist around it, to bury it, only to have it resurface time and again. And she was here, within arm’s reach, and I still couldn’t ease that damned pain. I wouldn’t let myself.

  “We can’t do this,” I said softly.

  Slowly, she brought her eyes back to meet mine in challenge. “Why?”

  “You know why.” Logic told me to end it there. To swim over to the other ledge, grab my clothes, and get the hell out before this went anywhere we couldn’t come back from. “I should go. I never should have come, and I knew it.”

  “But you came anyway.” She shifted up on her knees, and goose bumps covered her shoulders.

  “I have a hard time staying away from you,” I admitted. I could offer her the same honesty she gave me. I owed her at least that much. “Always have. Darkness is drawn to the light, right? And there’s nothing brighter in this town than you.”

  She softened at the compliment, and I instantly wanted to take it back. I should be shoving her as far away from me as possible, not saying shit to make her come closer.

  “You have a choice. You’ve always had a choice.”

  “Not when it came to you. I was never good enough. I’m still not. This”—I gestured between us—“can never happen.”

  “I decide who’s good enough for me, not you,” she argued, slipping to the side so we were only a couple of feet apart.

  “Then, think again, because all I’m good for is building things and destroying people. I destroyed you once, too.”

  She flinched.

  “I saw your tears, your heartbreak when I brought him home. I know what I did to you.”

  “Sullivan’s death was not your fault,” she said in the same tone she’d used when we’d had the same fight in the kitchen. The same fight we’d have forever if I gave in to what I wanted. It didn’t matter how many times she said it. Sully’s death was on my hands.

  “Keep telling yourself that, Willow.”

  “I’ll keep telling you until you believe it,” she promised, coming up on her knees and taking my face between her hands. “You told me your ugliest truth that day, but you never let me say mine.”

  “As if anything you have could compare.” The air between us was charged.

  “You saw me crying the day of Sullivan’s funeral. That’s true. I loved him, and I don’t regret loving him.”

  I turned my face, but she followed until her knee brushed my thigh.

  “So you saw my grief, but you never stopped to see my relief.”

  My gaze snapped back to hers.

  “I was heartbroken that Sullivan died, but, Cam, the only reason
I could breathe was because you survived. I was so ashamed that all I was allowed to feel was the grief when the relief was the bigger emotion.” Her shoulders hunched as she looked away.

  “What are you saying? You were relieved that Sully died?” I whispered.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I was relieved that you didn’t. And I knew that eventually I’d be okay. I’d heal. And I did. I put myself back together and made myself whole. But I knew that if your places had changed, and we’d buried you, I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t—I can’t—picture my world without you in it somewhere.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do.”

  Was she really telling me that if she had to choose one of us to come home that day, she would have chosen me? That was impossible. Everyone chose Sullivan. My father, Xander, even Willow herself.

  How big of an asshole was I that I longed to believe her? That I wanted to think I was worthy of being someone’s first choice?

  I wanted to be her first choice.

  She came closer until our breaths mingled with the steam rising from the mineral pool.

  “Say yes,” she begged, turning my words from our first kiss around on me.

  But I couldn’t. Not when I was only her choice because he couldn’t be. As badly as I wanted her, I couldn’t be her silver medal. Even when the beating in my chest screamed to take what I could get, the lone scrap of pride I’d held on to all these years couldn’t do it.

  “No.” I moved away from her, sliding back into the pool.

  “Why?” she shouted, sitting on the edge of the shallow end. “You fight for your country. For Sullivan. For your dad and even for me. Why can’t you let someone fight for you? Why won’t you let me fight for you?”

  The naked pain in her voice shredded my composure like nothing else could, and my control snapped. “Because I’ll only hurt you.”

  “News flash, we don’t have to be together for you to break my heart. Trust me, I’ve got a few years of evidence to back that up. Try again.”

  “Because you don’t really want me.”

  “Of all the stupid things to say.” She dropped under the water and swam, surfacing past me near the midpoint of the pool, where the steam obscured her again.