by Lena North
“I’ve got a family thing I’ve been pushing back for a while. I might just as well go back home too if you’re going to be there.”
“Yeah?” I said, suddenly feeling lighter and happier about my trip.
“Yeah,” he confirmed, but he didn’t sound enthusiastic about it.
“I’ll be fine, Nicky. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
There was another long silence, and then he said calmly, “It’ll be good to go back, Snow.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Really sure?” I asked because he didn’t sound convinced.
“Yes.”
“Re –”
“Shut up,” he growled, but I heard how he was laughing a little.
“I never do, you know that,” I said breezily. “It’ll be fun. You can show me around.”
“Maybe,” he retorted. “Where are you staying?”
“I have no clue,” I replied. “I heard about it just before you picked me up actually, and I don’t think anyone has organized something yet.”
“I’ll call grandmama. You can stay with her.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’m not sure where my Professor wants me to be, and I’m sure someone will set something up,” I said immediately.
“Only one place to be and that’s Croxier,” he countered, mentioning the main town on the biggest island. “There are a few hotels, but they’re full of tourists, crappy food, and cheap imported wine. Lots of people rent out rooms, though. You want one of those.”
“Okay, let me –”
“I’ll call her, let you know,” he said.
I turned to him and raised my brows, liking that he wanted to help but not so happy about his high-handed ways.
“I will check with the Uni tomorrow. If you give me your grandmother’s phone number, I can call her myself,” I retorted.
I felt his body shake a little next to me and wondered if he was laughing at me.
“Jesus, you’re stubborn,” he muttered before I could say anything. “I’ll text you the number.”
“Thank you,” I said primly.
“Can I call her and let her know she’ll hear from you?” he asked, leaning in and pulling a strand of my hair that had slipped out of the ponytail.
I could hear clearly that he was mocking me, but since I’d gotten what I wanted, I decided to let that pass.
“Totally,” I said, and felt more than heard his chuckle.
We sat in silence for a long while, eating and drinking water. The night was dark and silent, and I felt calm, which was unexpected considering how wound up I’d been before.
“Can I ask you something?” Nick murmured.
“Sure,” I said.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That jump you made. It was dark, and you just jumped straight into nothing. So how did you know about the overhang?”
Well, crap.
“I just –”
“I think it was the bird,” he said quietly.
I turned slowly but didn’t say a thing.
“Tell him,” my bird suddenly said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I’m from the Islands,” he said abruptly.
“I know,” I said because I did.
“You’ll find that things are a little different on the Islands.”
“How?”
“I think the osprey told you,” he said calmly, not answering my question.
“Don’t lie, not to him, Snow. He already knows,” the osprey said, and it sounded a bit like a warning.
“He knows?” I asked back.
“Maybe,” she answered. “He’s talking to me sometimes.”
“Like I do?”
“No, he just talks to me, but he doesn’t hear what I say. It’s like he knows, though.”
I leaned my head back and searched the sky, but I couldn’t see her. Then she swept in from the side and landed right in front of us.
“Hey there,” Nick murmured and leaned forward to pet her gently.
My friggin’ bird made a cooing sound and seemed to lean into his hand.
“Why do you behave like a stupid love bird suddenly?” I asked her sourly.
It wasn’t that I wanted that hand to pet me. Not at all.
“He’s pretty,” she smirked.
Nick wasn’t pretty. His looks were striking, but he wasn’t beautiful, not in a conventional way. I’d grown up alongside Falk “Mac” Mackenzie and Dante, and they were both stunningly gorgeous, so I knew what beautiful looked like.
“What is she saying?” Nick asked curiously.
“She thinks you’re cute,” I answered without thinking
I wanted to bite my tongue, and he started laughing.
“Thank you,” he said to the bird. “You’re cute too.”
“Thank you,” the love-struck bird cooed.
“She says thank you,” I muttered sourly.
He chuckled again and leaned into me.
“How is it that you can do it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Tell him,” the bird urged me.
“I can’t,” I replied. “I don’t know. Someone might have explained it to me when I was a child but I don’t remember, and no one in Marshes talks about it.”
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“Do you know?”
“No,” she replied.
“You don’t know?” Nick cut into our discussion.
“No,” I said. “It just is,” I added lamely.
“Okay,” he said and pulled me to my feet. “Let’s walk down and go home. You need to put something on that shoulder before it bruises too badly.”
“Walk safely, snowy Snow,” the bird chirped and I snorted out laughter at her unexpected use of a nickname Jamie had come up with.
“What?” Nick asked.
“Jamie nicknamed me snowy Snow, and she just called me that.”
“What a dork,” he muttered.
“A cute dork,” I said.
Jamie certainly was prettier than Nick, with his lanky build and stunning colors.
“Huh,” Nick said, and then we walked down a path to the bike, and drove home.
I tried to talk Nick out of helping me with the shoulder, but he ignored that, and walked straight into my tiny bathroom and started shuffling things around in the cabinet, looking for my first aid kit. I pushed him away, and he took a step back. He’d not let go of the boxes he’d been in the process of moving, though, and we both froze.
He held a pink box of sanitary pads in one hand, and in the other, a blue box of tampons.
“Uh,” he said, and I could see laughter creep into his eyes.
Oh my God, what a stupid situation, I thought.
“I’ll just…” I said, blustering my way through embarrassment by snatching the boxes out of his hands.
Then I threw them in the tub and pulled the curtain with a snap.
Nick promptly started both laughing and pulling off my tee.
“Grew up around women, so I’ve held, uh, feminine products before, Snow,” he chuckled and calmly moved my hands away when I tried to stop him from undressing me. “Stop it,” he added.
“But –”
“Snow, stop it. I’ve seen you in your underwear before, and it’s not like I have any plans to put my hands anywhere except on your shoulder as I smear ointment on your bruise.”
I felt like an idiot because why would he want to put his hands anywhere on me? Like Nick, I wasn’t beautiful either, and he’d had ample opportunities to hit on me in the past year, something he’d not done.
“Okay,” I said and stretched my hand out to snag the tube of pain relief from the top of my cabinet as he threw my tee in the hamper.
His hands were gentle as he tended to my sho
ulder, and we both concluded that I’d get a huge bruise, but that the scratch was shallow and nothing seemed to be damaged for real.
“Ask the geek if it gets painful,” Nick said as we stood by the door.
“Okay,” I replied, interpreting his comment to mean that I should discuss further medical issues with Jamie, which made sense since he was a doctor.
“I’ll text you the number to my grandmother. Let me know when you arrive, yeah?”
“Will I enjoy the Islands?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure why I asked, and wished I could take my words back because how would he know?
“Probably,” he said. “I know one thing, though,” he added. “The Islands will enjoy you.”
Before I could ask him to explain his weird comment, he walked out the door and closed it behind him.
I flipped the four crappy locks and pulled the deadbolt. Then I sat on the couch and looked at the night. The darkness was shifting subtly, and I realized that we’d been out almost until dawn, again. Then my phone buzzed with two messages from Nick. The first contained a phone number and no name, and the second said, “Yes, you’ll enjoy the Islands snowy Snow. I’ll make sure you do.”
Then I got another text.
“Work was beyond boringo. Movies next week instead?”
Jamie.
Chapter Three
Sweetness
I was laughing so hard my eyes teared up, and my belly hurt.
“You have got to be joking, Jamie,” I gasped.
“How would I even come up with something like that?” he grinned.
We were having lunch, although it was just an incredibly dry sandwich in the hospital cafeteria because Jamie was working and couldn’t get off. I hadn’t wanted Jiminella to be the one telling him about my upcoming trip so I’d suggested that I’d stop by when he had a break. There were plenty of doctor and nurse-looking people moving around, watching us curiously. They seemed a bit surprised to see me, so I guessed that he’d not talked about me with his co-workers.
“So, why did you want to meet up in this unexpected way?” he asked.
“I’m going away for a while on a school assignment, Jamie,” I said slowly. “It came up unexpectedly just a few days ago, and it’s an opportunity…” I paused and squeezed his hand briefly. “I couldn’t say no.”
The last part wasn’t a lie, at least.
“Where are you going?”
“The Islands.”
“Really?” he exclaimed. “Wow!”
My trip hadn’t been planned, but I thought his surprise seemed a little over the top, although it could be since, just like Nick, Jamie had grown up on the Islands. I hadn’t wanted to talk to Jamie about Nick because that meant explaining the stuff Nick and I did together. Jamie would disapprove of most activities, and I also suspected he’d tell Jiminella immediately. They’d grown close in the past months, and Jamie spent a lot of his free time with them in Marshes. I’d asked Nick about the Islands in general, but he just shrugged and said that everyone knew everyone there. I’d grown up in two small villages, so I knew what that was like. Everyone who’d ever met anyone from Marshes always assumed we were best friends, which I thought was ridiculous, so when Nick hadn’t seemed all that interested in discussing the Islands, I’d dropped it.
“I’m leaving Saturday,” I said.
“Now? This Saturday?” Jamie asked. “The day after tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Wowski,” he muttered, and I started smiling.
The way Jamie always used nerdy expressions and in general behaved like a total geek was hilarious, although I suspected that it mostly was an act.
“Why do you do that?” I asked curiously.
“Do what?” he asked and turned his sandwich around, surveying it as if it was a nuclear bomb. “Jesus, this is such shitola,” he muttered.
“Say things like that. Wowski. Shitola,” I clarified. “It’s you, but Jamie… It also isn’t. So why are you acting that way?”
He grinned, put the offensive piece of bread down, and pulled out his phone. My mouth fell open when he held it out, showing me a picture.
“Me. Fifteen,” he said calmly.
At first, the huge, bright red ball of hair surrounding his head blinded me, and then I noticed the thin arms and thick glasses hiding his eyes. And was that pimples all over his cheeks?
When I looked at him, it seemed impossible that it was the same person sitting there in front of me with a mop of cool, auburn dreads and a body that was still lean, but fit and agile in a way that resembled my body type.
“It’s me. Honest,” he grinned, apparently used to the reaction I had.
“Wow,” I breathed.
“Yeah,” he said. “That about sums it up.” Then he put the phone on the table, watching me calmly. “You know what I am, right?”
I nodded slowly, assuming he meant the genius part of him.
“So, snowy Snow, looking like that and having my kind of brain… Had to survive somehow.”
I was still looking at that picture and thought about what he’d said.
“You look happy,” I murmured.
“Happiest day of my life,” he said immediately. “Jinx had managed to close down that program we were in, and we celebrated.”
“We?”
“Me, my brother and cousin,” he clarified.
Oh. Jiminella had told me that the other two had been in the program as well, and that his brother killed himself. This was not a topic I wanted to embark on, though. Bonding over suicide experiences whilst having a dry sandwich in a hospital cafeteria didn’t appeal to me in any way.
“You lost the glasses,” I said instead.
“They were temporary. Some of the shit they had me do in that hospital were destroying my eyes. Once I got out, they healed again.”
Wow. A sudden surge of anger swept through me, and I wished the man heading the program hadn’t already been killed. I wouldn’t have murdered him, or at least I didn’t think so, but I would certainly have inflicted some pain, and it would have given me great pleasure to do it.
“How did you celebrate?”
“The other two idiots were high as kites for a week, but they were also a few years older, and wouldn’t let me try any of that, so I got drunk as a skunk instead. Probably only took a beer and a half back then,” he chuckled.
“Oh,” I said, not liking how the conversation seemed to steer back toward his dead brother.
He watched me and a shadow of grief passed over his face. I knew I had to say something about his brother. Anything else would be unkind, and he might not even know about my mother and how she had passed.
“I know about your brother, Jamie. I’m so sorry,” I said quietly.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Stupid fool,” he added.
“Were you close?” I asked.
“We were brothers,” he answered. “I loved him. We were very different, though, and Tommy was closer to our cousin in many ways.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling stupid for not having better words to comfort him with.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “It is what it is, and we had a good week of celebration.”
“A whole week?” I asked, thinking that this would have been one hell of a celebration.
“Until they ran out of shit to smoke,” he snorted. “That put an end to it, in a way. Tommy didn’t stop, though,” he smiled sadly. “I didn’t understand how bad things were until too late, and the family tried to get help for him, but then he did what he did and that put another end to things.”
Oh. That was a clear opening to discuss his brother’s suicide, but we were in the hospital cafeteria, Jamie was on a break, and I did not want to talk about that. Not there, and likely not ever, which made me feel like a selfish, horrible person, but I just couldn’t.
“Drugs are easy to come by on the Islands, Snow,” Jamie said calmly, misunderstanding
the look on my face. I didn’t know what to say, but then he surprised me by adding, “Medically, some of it isn’t worse than alcohol.”
Had he just condoned doing drugs?
“But, how –”
I meant to ask him how he could say that, but he cut me off immediately.
“Isolated out there, easy enough to bring it in on small boats. They grow it in their back yards in some places.”
What the hell? This conversation had not gone the way I expected it.
“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked carefully.
I couldn’t believe he was sitting there in the middle of the cafeteria with people moving around us, talking about growing what? Weed? In their back yards?
“Of course it is,” he said as he started pushing the rest of his sandwich around on the table. “I’m not saying it’s okay at all. I’m just telling you because you’ll see it for yourself when you get there. It’s not like the Islands are full of addicts, but some like to smoke, and it isn’t always regular cigarettes.”
He sounded just a little too patronizing for my taste. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen people in various stages of intoxication in my life.
“I’m not exactly twelve years old, Jamie.”.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, and continued quietly, “It’s just that I’ve seen first-hand how easy it is to fall into the trap of using drugs to numb up your pain. Just wanted you to know, and be careful.”
“I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to…” I wasn’t sure what to say, so I put my hand on top of his and squeezed gently. “Thanks.”
He looked down at our hands, and his face softened.
“Hey, Doc Jamieson,” someone chirped next to us.
A cute blonde nurse stood there, watching our hands with a tense look on her face that contradicted the syrupy sweet voice.
“Marie,” Jamie murmured.
I moved my hand away and smiled at the girl.
“Friday, at seven, right?” she asked Jamie.
I turned to Jamie, and the look on his face almost made me laugh out loud. We hadn’t talked about us in terms of dating, and it had always been purely platonic, so it wasn't such a surprise that he’d go out with one of the pretty nurses. I scrunched my nose up a little and grinned at him.
“Yes, Marie. Friday it is,” he said to the girl, and added, “Absolumundo.”
