Black Snow

by Lena North

  “Can I hold you when we sleep, Snow?” he whispered, turning me toward him until we were facing each other, so close I could feel his breath on my cheek.

  Without a word, I took his hand and pulled him with me into his bedroom.

  Chapter Twelve

  Breakfast on the beach

  I drifted out of my dreams slowly. Nick was in bed with me, curled around my back with one strong leg thrown over mine and an arm around my waist. A couple of his dreads had fallen over my shoulder, and he was breathing into my neck. When I opened my eyes, I could see the beach through the glass doors, and I watched the waves roll in for a while, feeling safe and happy.

  “Sleep well?” Nick murmured into my ear.

  I smiled and nodded, but didn’t reply.

  He got it anyway, and I felt more than heard his rumbled, “Good.”

  “We should get up,” I whispered.

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yeah, why?” he repeated.

  I couldn’t come up with one single reason for why we should leave his bed and when I heard his deep chuckle I laughed silently with him. The day before had been emotional, and we’d both fallen asleep immediately. It felt strange to wake up with him so close, although it was mostly strange in a good way, so I moved a little, shuffling closer to him.

  “Snow,” he breathed into my neck, and I started twisting my head around to look at him when my eyes landed on a man strolling along the beach.

  Jamie.

  He had taken his shoes off and was walking in the water, apparently not in a hurry, but clearly aiming for Nick’s house.

  “Shit,” I said as Nick froze.

  “He’s early,” he said.

  “Did you know he was coming?”

  “Guessed he would,” Nick said and sat up, tying the dreads back from his face.

  I got momentarily side tracked by the way he looked, sitting there in the bed we’d shared. He had a sheet over his legs but no shirt, so his torso and strong arms were on full display. Yummy, I thought before I could stop myself, and then I blushed. We’d been friends for a long time, but we were starting to change who we were together, and the intimacy of getting out of bed together felt weird. Nick put a hand under my chin and pushed gently until our eyes met. His eyes got that focused look, although he must have liked whatever he saw because they softened.

  “I like waking up with you,” he murmured.

  Then he leaned forward and kissed me, softly, almost innocently. His hand moved up to cup my cheek, and I leaned into it and kissed him back.

  It was a fantastic kiss, and I could gladly have let it continue forever, but I suddenly remembered where we were, and who I’d seen coming our way. I pulled back abruptly and swung around to look out through the glass doors. Jamie was still some distance away so he wouldn’t have seen us. I wasn’t ashamed, but I thought that I should at least explain to Jamie how I knew Nick before he saw us kissing on a bed where it was clear we’d both slept.

  “We have ten more minutes,” Nick murmured, but he swung out of bed and started dressing, so I did too.

  “What will you tell him?”

  “Nothing,” Nick said calmly. “He’s not here to see me. He’s here to see you, babe.”

  “Yikes,” I muttered.

  Jamie had not been in a happy mood when he left me on the beach so I wasn’t sure why he’d want to talk to me, or what he’d say. I was also not happy with him walking away when I needed help.

  “You need to listen to him, Snow. You’ve heard my side of everything, but you should hear his too.”

  I stopped moving and stared at him.

  “He’ll say shit about me, and some of it will be true. It’ll sting, baby, and you have a temper, so you’ll likely get furious. Try to clamp that down and remember that you know the parts of me that count.”

  “Nicky,” I started, but he kept talking.

  “You owe it to him to listen.”

  “I don’t –”

  “He’s in love with you.”

  I froze and stared at him, wheezing out a hoarse, “No he isn’t.”

  “Sure he is.”

  Our gazes held for long seconds, and then I exhaled softly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were cousins?” I asked.

  “If you knew, you’d talk to him about it, and he would tell you what you’re about to hear today. Thought you’d stop seeing me then. Couldn’t take that risk,” he said immediately. “Then I learned about all the crazy shit you do, and…”

  He trailed off, and I didn’t know what to say, so I remained silent. When he started talking it was slow and thoughtful.

  “Sometimes when we went out it was as if you were overflowing with emotions. It felt like you needed to work them off, and every time that happened, I got better. As if I was absorbing the emotions you didn’t need, making them mine.”

  I knew what he meant, and what kind of emotions that had been swirling around me. When dark thoughts had closed in, and I’d felt trapped and lonely, he’d been there. We’d gone climbing or diving. Done insanely dangerous things, or so I’d thought, at least. He’d told me about the rusty anchors he’d placed before taking me there, and I suspected there had been other occasions when he’d done similar things. It was a little bit insulting that he’d thought I needed the protection, at the same time as it wasn’t. When my belly hurt too bad, I would have done anything to get rid of the pain.

  “Snow,” he said and pulled me into his arms. “You were not in a good place sometimes when we went out, but it helped me. Can you see why I had to protect you? And why I couldn’t risk losing you?”

  “Yeah,” I murmured.

  “I know why you were like that,” he said quietly.

  I straightened, but he held on tighter so I couldn’t step back like I wanted.

  “I can’t talk about that,” I said.

  “I know. One day, we’ll talk about your parents but today is not that day.”

  I exhaled as I leaned my forehead on his chest.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he murmured into my hair.

  Slowly my arms came up, and I wrapped them around his waist. He was strong and warm, and I wished Jamie wasn’t strolling along the beach.

  “Geek alert,” Nick muttered.

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll go and see what he has to say.”

  “He’s a good guy,” Nick said when I’d opened the door and was stepping out on the porch. “Kind, and generous. Solid. Funny.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed.

  “He’d be better for you, Snow, but I’m not letting him have you.”

  The words were so low I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right, and when I turned around, he was gone. Oh, God. He didn’t know that he was kind and generous? How dependable he was and how much I laughed when I was with him?

  “Hey there,” Jamie called from the beach, and I pushed my thoughts back.

  “Jamie,” I said calmly.

  “You’re angry,” he stated.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m angry too,” he said.

  I kept looking at him, and he moved a little. The sound of a bike came from the other side of the house, and I knew it was Nick leaving, but Jamie didn’t seem to notice.

  “My cousin is an asshole,” he said, and when I just raised my brows, he went on, “You don’t know him.”

  “Actually, Jamie, I do know him. The question is – do you?”

  “Can we sit down for a while?”

  I nodded, took a couple of towels with me and walked toward the water until I was well away from the house. Then I threw him a towel and sat down on the other one. He sank down next to me with a sigh and stared out over the water. We just sat there for a long while, watching the waves and breathing in the sweet wind. Then he started talking, quietly and not in his usual confident way.

  “It killed me when Tommy died. I didn’t show anyone how much it hu
rt, but I wept for weeks. Did it when I was alone in my small room in Prosper because I couldn’t break down in front of everyone. My parents needed me to stay strong, and Dee was an asshole. He –”

  “Nicky,” I interrupted him.

  I could hear in his voice that he would say something unpleasant, and Nick had warned me that he would, but I wasn’t going to let him. If Jamie needed to vent about Nick, he’d have to do it with someone else.

  “What?”

  He looked astonished.

  “His name is Domenico. You can call him that or Nick, but not Dee. Not so I hear it.”

  He winced and said, “We called him Nicky when we grew up, but when Tommy died he wouldn’t let us anymore. Refused to listen to it, said it wasn’t who he was, and he was right. He’d become…”

  “Hard,” I filled in.

  “Yeah.”

  “When you talk to him, you should ask him why,” I said, and went on immediately, “Not my story to tell so I won’t. Talk to Nick.”

  He swallowed and turned toward the water again.

  “Just one thing, Snow. Was it because of the program?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit.”

  We were silent for a while again, and then he talked about the hospital. What he’d been through wasn’t the same as Nick or Jiminella, but it was similar. It hurt to hear him describe it, but he needed to tell me, so I listened. When he was done, I leaned my head on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Jamie,” I whispered.

  He leaned his cheek on the top of my head and was about to say something when a deep voice murmured, “Breakfast.”

  Nick put a bag in front of us, and two cups of coffee. I leaned back and mouthed, “Thank you.”

  He flashed me a grin and turned to his cousin.

  “You have the time you need with her today, Jamie. I’ll be with my parents, and if you could drop Snow off there on your way to the airport, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure,” Jamie said, not taking his eyes from Nick’s back as he walked back into his house.

  Then we heard the bike roar, and Jamie turned to me.

  “I have hated him for years, Snow,” Jamie murmured. “Blamed him for everything that happened.” He sighed and picked up his coffee. “Maybe it wasn’t all him.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t,” I said, thought about how much I could tell him without betraying Nick, and added, “I’m sure he made mistakes, but he was a victim too.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  I told him that we belonged to the same rock climbing group, which in a way was true, although I made it sound more like an organized sports activity. My friends were great, but there were occasions when they weren’t staying entirely within the boundaries of the law, and when I thought about it – neither did I. It wasn’t like we were thieves or in any way caused damage to anyone. Some of the places we liked to go were kind of reserved for the ones who owned them, though. Most of us, including me, practiced a light version of parkour regularly. One of the guys were good at picking locks, and another one a tech whiz who could disable any alarm system known to man, so moving around wherever we wanted was just something we did.

  Jamie seemed surprised but said calmly that it was good of his cousin to help me out while I was on the Islands, and didn’t ask more questions. We moved on to talk about him and what he’d done in the past week, the research I did and how I liked the Islands. It felt weird to talk about mundane topics, but we needed it, to find our way back to common ground again. When it seemed safe, I brought us back to the day before.

  “I took some risks yesterday, Jamie. I didn’t think I had any other choice, but you could have been hurt. I’m sorry.”

  “Better fly over a reef than becoming cheese,” he said.

  What?

  “Full of holes,” he added and wiggled his brows.

  I laughed, because of his dorky joke, but mostly because this was familiar. This was the Jamie I knew from Prosper.

  “What a freakish thing, to have a drug delivery happening right in front of our eyes,” he muttered. “Wish Joao had told me.”

  “Told you what?” I asked innocently.

  “Our cuz, Joao. Chief of police. He told me to take you out to the beaches west of Prosper, and I should have listened. Didn’t think it would matter, though.”

  He looked disgruntled, and I wasn’t sure what I could tell him, so I simply agreed that it was crazy, downplayed my brush with death until it sounded as if I’d mostly swallowed some water, and asked him if he could help me pack up my samples. I was supposed to send them in the next few days, and I had to put the vials in special plastic containers, and wrap everything up in layers of bubble-wrap.

  “I can bring the samples back for you,” Jamie offered.

  “Thanks, but I got ridiculously strict instructions that I was supposed to send them with a particular shipping company. I don’t want to mess up my first delivery, Jamie. I’ll send it tomorrow or the day after instead.”

  He shook his head and muttered something about discussing this with the professor, but I declined again, and he gave in. While he helped me wrapping and packing all the little tubes, we talked about the Islands, and how they had been when he grew up. I could easily picture the way life had been before tourists started to come to Croxier, and it would have been hard for the grownups with the constant worry about money, but it sounded like a fantastic place to be as a kid. They’d roamed the island, and the water, as they wished. He tried to pretend that he hadn’t enjoyed it, but it was evident from the wistful tone in his voice that he had.

  Then we walked into town to pick up his things, and it turned out that he’d stayed in one of the small rooms behind the restaurant they hadn’t let me rent. When I asked why he wasn’t staying with his parents, he said something evasive about his mother being ill, which I thought was strange. He was a doctor, and a good one, so it would have been natural for him to be with his mother if she was sick. It was clearly not a topic he wanted to expand on, though, so I didn’t ask.

  “I like Marshes,” he said as we sat at a small restaurant on a side street, having a late lunch before he was going to the small airport and back to Prosper.

  “I like Marshes too,” I replied and stuffed my mouth full of seafood pasta.

  The food on the Islands was fantastic, and I wondered if my grandmother would enjoy visiting with me. She was a great cook, and it would be a good present for a woman who never wanted anything particular for her birthday.

  “I’ll move there, at least part time,” he announced and I blinked.

  Commuting for more than one hour to the hospital in Prosper would eat up a lot of his free time. He noticed my confusion and laughed.

  “I’m setting up a research center together with a former colleague. Won’t work much in Prosper once it’s up and running.”

  “Oh,” I said, and when it seemed as if he wanted me to say something else, I added lamely, “That’s nice.”

  “It will be,” he said confidently. “You’re moving back too, once you’re through Uni?”

  “Um,” I mumbled because I wasn’t so sure about that, but he took it as a yes.

  “Great, you can show me around the village then,” he said with a wink.

  He spent a lot of time with my cousin and Jiminella and the village was quite small, so he would already know his way around. Shit, I thought. Nick had been right about Jamie having serious feelings for me.

  “Won’t something like that cost a lot of money?” I asked to change the topic into something safer.

  “Loads,” he said happily.

  Did he have that kind of money? And if he did, where did he get it?

  I asked a few questions about the financing, but he either didn’t get my veiled questions or, more likely, didn’t feel like answering them. Maybe Jiminella would contribute, or perhaps his colleague had the bulk of the investment already, I thought. Suddenly, he looked at his w
atch, shot out of his chair and threw a few bills on the table.

  “Bummeroo, Snow, we have to go,” he said. “I’m late, and Benito will probably kill me.”

  “You don’t have to drop me off at Nick’s –”

  “Great,” he cut me off. “I’ll drop you off at the beach house instead. There’s no need for you to meet my aunt and uncle.”

  I didn’t share that I’d already met them, more than once, because he’d been rude, and also because he was suddenly pulling me along, clearly in a hurry.

  “I’ll do some shopping, so I’ll walk back to the house,” I said instead.

  “Fantastico,” he murmured and stopped. “I’ll be back in a few days, Snow. Have a couple of night shifts and then I’m off for four days. We’ll have more time then.”

  “Okay, but I might –”

  He pulled me into a hug, but it was brief, and then he grinned at me.

  “See you later, snowy Snow.”

  As I watched him drive away, in a hurry but still not speeding at all, I wondered how he could have missed that I knew Nicky a little bit more than as a climbing buddy. I wasn’t exactly sure what we were, or what to tell Jamie, but I’d have to say something. It wasn’t fair of me to not tell him about Nick. I’d talk to him talk to him next time he came, or perhaps over the phone even before that, I decided.

  It was early in the afternoon, and I didn’t really have any shopping to do, so I went back to my little house to pick up the huge box and take it to one of the hotels where the reception also doubled as a post office.

  I recognized the overdressed girl behind the counter immediately as the one who was engaged to one of Nicky’s cousins. She had just as much makeup on as when we met at the restaurant my first night in Croxier. Enormous, shiny stones glittered in her ears, and I wondered why she was working so hard to look like something that didn’t fit in at all on the Islands. Wearing paste earrings and a bright red silk blouse when everyone else seemed to wear jeans and tees, or simple cotton dresses, was ridiculously pretentious.

  She chatted forever about my big box, who it was sent to, why I was there, and finally I gave in and lied to her.