by Jeff Hale
I sagged against him in relief, although alarm bells were still going off in my head. He froze in place, then moved his head and buried his face in my hair near the nape of my neck, nuzzling until I felt his nose touch my skin. He inhaled deeply, holding the air in his lungs for several moments before expelling it in a rush of warm air that made me shiver, heat blooming somewhere lower than my stomach.
Was I nuts? Some strange guy had just grabbed me in the middle of a pitch dark cave—okay sure, he had kept me from falling on my ass—and I was getting all tingly over it? His arms tightened around me.
“Darien!”
It was a new voice, so I could only assume it was the pale one. The word made the man holding me snap his head up and he let go of me briefly, then he took hold of my right arm instead.
“Kat? You okay?” There was concern and apprehension in Kris’s voice. After all, things like this were how they found dead bodies in ditches. But for some reason that I couldn’t explain, the one that had caught me, Darien, made me feel safe.
It was a moment before I could articulate coherently. “Yeah, Kris. You?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“She thinks…” Accent again, followed by a chuckle. The one who had warned us.
“Alex.” The voice behind me again, in admonition, sending warm fuzzies down my spine… again.
“Chill, Darien. Let’s just get them outta here before that storm gets any worse.”
See, they’re good Samaritans after all.
Darien didn’t reply, just gave a gentle tug on my arm and I followed along meekly. They had us out of the tunnel within a few minutes, safely to the beach on the other side.
I started to thank Darien, but instead of letting go of my arm and heading off with his friends, he continued to lead me up the beach towards the parking lot. I looked over at Kris through the rain and saw that her escort, Alex, was just as determined. The third one, the nameless pale one, followed a few short steps behind, toting the blanket and boom box. Kris shot me a look that came across as ‘just go with it’.
I stumbled again, the wet sand starting to pull at my shoes, and with a sigh that sounded exasperated, Darien stopped, caught me under the knees with one arm and picked me up, carrying me the rest of the way to the parking lot.
I felt my face flame, giving Kris a murderous glance as she winked at me. I had been swept off my feet, literally, by tall, dark, and handsome. I wondered if he was single, wondered if I was insane, then wondered what a guy like him would even see in someone like me.
It was easy enough to figure out which car was ours. Aside from the motorcycle, it was the only vehicle left in the lot, which did leave me wondering briefly if all three of them had ridden in on the bike. Darien set me on my feet near the car, waiting patiently while I dug out the keys, dropping them once in my nervous awareness of him, and opened the door. They watched as we got in and I started the car, then the pale one handed the boom box and blanket in to Kris, as well as a familiar broken flashlight. He shook his head at both of us as he leaned in the passenger side door.
“What you two were thinking coming out here this late in this kind of weather…” He shook his head, gave Kris a lingering look, then shut the door.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, I could see them watching us as we left, Alex waving merrily. We drove silently for several moments, then Kris uttered the three words that had been going circles in my head for quite some time.
“Oh… my… God…”
THREE
Katelyn
I awoke to the smell of breakfast and the sound of my mother and grandparents in the kitchen. I laid there for a moment staring at the ceiling, trying to get my brain under control, the last bits of some surreal dream of running through a wooded area and a sense of exhilarating freedom slowly vanishing from my thoughts.
How we made it home last night, I wasn’t sure. The drive back was a fuzzy memory to me, done purely by autopilot. I remembered stumbling in the back door, trying not to wake my grandparents or my mother, and then Kris and I had sat on the bed and just stared at each other dumbfounded for several minutes. I remembered the three words ‘oh my God’ being mentioned several times, along with three other words, ‘what the hell’, then feeling extremely tired as we both crashed into sleep.
“You must be awake, yer not snoring anymore.” Kris rolled over and I could feel her eyes staring at me.
“I don’t snore,” I muttered.
She snorted. “Sure ya don’t. It’s okay, though, they’re just baby snores, you’re future husband will probably think it’s cute.” She laughed and sat up, wedging a pillow between her back and the wall.
I rolled over, propping my head up with my right arm, and stared at her. “So, Kris, am I just crazy or what? What was that last night?”
She shook her head. “Yer not crazy, last night was crazy. Those guys were…. It’s not fair, we don’t have guys like that at home!” She pouted then giggled.
I pictured Aerick briefly. “They do in Las Vegas,” I remarked wryly. Then I shivered, remembering the taller one in the long coat, Darien they had called him. “There was something about him, the one with the long hair, about the cute one too. I don’t know, they felt, well, familiar somehow.”
Kris gave me an odd glance. “Like you had seen them before?”
I shook my head. “No, no, I’ve never seen anyone like them before, I would have remembered. But…” I shook my head again, “I need to find them again, Kris, I can feel it.”
She leaned over and poked me in the shoulder, waggling her eyebrows at me. “Yeah, uh huh, I’m sure you can. I kinda liked the pale one myself.”
I smiled, then gave her a serious look. “No, I mean other than the fact that they were all hot. There is something else there, I need to find out what it is. I felt so drawn to them, to him especially, but to both of them, Darien and… Alex was it? The Aussie.”
“Speaking of Vegas, what about Aerick?”
Her question made me wince a little. When he had taken me back to Vegas for Prom, there had been an almost unspoken thought that it might end up in a relationship, but I was pretty sure that was all ruined now.
“I don’t know what to do about Aerick. Do I still care about him? Yeah. But he’s the one who ran out on me during Prom and I’m still upset with him about it. I’m certainly not going to wait around for him.” I shrugged sadly. “We’ve only got so much time here. I need to find them again, if they’re still around.”
She nodded at me, understanding what I needed to do. It was nice to not have to explain anything further, to know she was behind me all the way.
We got up and headed out to the kitchen. Mom asked if we had had fun the night before. After a brief silence I told her that we had and asked if we could borrow the car for the evening again.
She gave me an odd look but agreed, but only with the provision that we would hang around the house and visit with Gran and Granddad first. It seemed that Gran had already targeted us to play a game of cribbage.
After breakfast and showers we settled down to play the game with Gran. Mom and Granddad had retired to his office so that Granddad could help Mom look into the legal aspects of divorce.
We had just gotten through the first game, which Kris had won despite never having played cribbage before, when Gran gave me a sly smile, patted my hand, and absconded with half of one of my cookies. I normally wouldn’t have minded except Gran was diabetic.
“Ye met someone last night,” she stated, ignoring my exasperated look while she munched the cookie half.
Her comment wiped that look off my face and had Kris tilting her head to one side to stare at Gran in surprise.
“Were we too noisy when we came back?” Kris asked her.
“Oh, no, child. I knew when ye left that ye’d be meeting someone new, interesting. A boy.” She grinned knowingly.
A boy? I wouldn’t call him, any of them, boys, but I guess to Gran they would be.
“How’d you k
now, Gran?” Gran had always seemed to know things when I was little, but I had never really asked before. It was just something that was, well, Gran.
“It’s in the blood, dear, yours too, you just haven’t learned to listen to it yet.” Gran’s answer was somewhat vague, the look on her face the one of someone who knows a secret but isn’t ready to share it with you yet. When I was little, Gran used to tell me stories, old Irish myths and legends, but she had made them sound like factual history, not tales to be told around a campfire.
Gran reached out to pat my hand again and I hovered protectively over my remaining cookie, earning a light laugh from her. “Don’t worry, lass, ye’ll see him again.”
How did she know?
Kris gave me a confounded look, I gave Gran a sheepish look, and we set the board up for another game.
Two more games later, which Kris won as well, we had the afternoon free. A somewhat wild streak seemed to have gotten into me, so I had Kris show me how to apply makeup like she had that Friday night so that I could eventually do it myself. Then we were off for the day, Gran waving at us with a knowing grin as we pulled out of the driveway.
There was still a few hours left before it started getting dark, so we drove around the area and I showed Kris all the tourist spots. This necessitated a trip to the Cheese Factory, which later had Kris informing me she wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to eat cheese again, however it did not keep us from getting ice cream from the shops inside. Once it started getting dark, we headed back down to the beach and spent the rest of a highly uneventful evening wandering along the sand with no luck in finding those guys again.
“So your step-dad turned out to be more of a creep than we originally thought, huh?” Kris had her hands in her pockets, her jacket zipped up against the chill as we plodded along the sand.
We had already checked out the cove, making sure to be extra careful, but there wasn’t anyone on the other side except a group of local teenagers who had set up a bonfire. They had invited us to stay and hang out with them, but we had declined.
“Yeah, it looks like it. I mean, I knew he was a prick, but I never would have guessed that he would consider doing something like… that.” I shuddered at the thought, glad that he hadn’t previously acted on it, glad that my mother had gotten a wakeup call over it. The thought of my step-dad, my step-dad for fuck’s sake, wanting to do that made my skin crawl.
“So, what in all blazes made you stick your hand down Cody’s pants?” Kris must have sensed that the previous topic bothered me, so being a good friend, she changed it.
I stifled a giggle. “Well, I did need to get my keys, but I also wanted to see the looks on their faces when I didn’t let them get the best of me. I just wasn’t quite expecting to get that, er, reaction out of Cody. I thought he detested me. Ya know, I caught him staring at me during Botany class later that day, and it wasn’t a bad stare if ya know what I mean.” I shook my head.
The boys at my school and how they treated me confused me. I don’t know how many times I had been hit on, only to have the guy treat me like I wasn’t alive later on, or be dating some other girl the next day.
“I’m kinda jealous.” Kris kicked at a piece of broken shell with her foot, driving it into the sand.
“Jealous?” I furrowed my brow at her.
She nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been trying for a long time to get you to stand up for yourself, but it never seemed to work. Looks like somebody succeeded.”
I stopped walking and pulled her into a quick hug. “I’m sorry, Kris, I know you have. I think you might have just been too close to the whole thing, and maybe that’s why it took someone outside of it to get through to me.”
“Yeah, I figured as much. But you are my best friend, so I think I can forgive you.” She looked at me sideways, trying to seem pathetic, but I could see the grin she was trying to hide.
“Brat,” I said, pointing the flashlight into her eyes briefly.
“That’s me,” she said, laughing and blinking her vision back to normal. “So who was this miracle worker? Aerick?”
I shook my head. “No, actually. It was Nina.”
Nina had been one of the friends I had made in Vegas, who had taken me under her wing and taught me to be, well, me, not what everyone else thought I should be.
“The skank?”
“Kris! That’s not nice, Nina is not a skank!” I scowled at her.
She raised her hands in mock defense. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, you’re the one who said she was cheating on her boyfriend, publicly at that.”
I made a wry face because I had, indeed, caught Nina screwing some guy who was not her boyfriend in the girls’ restroom at school. “Well, yeah, she was, but she’s still a nice person, you’d like her if you knew her. She just kinda has, well, a foible or two.”
“Eating too much chocolate is a foible, buying more pairs of shoes than you could possibly need or wear is a foible, cheating on your boyfriend is not.”
She had a point, but still, I knew that Nina was a good person deep down. She had given me lessons in confidence and shown me that you shouldn’t let anyone push you around.
We kept walking and talking and I told Kris all about the high school in Vegas. I had told her before, but I wasn’t sure she really understood just how different it had been. And not just the school, but living in such a huge city as well. There had always been something to do, something new to discover. Sometime during the middle of our conversation we both received simultaneous text messages, only to find they were from Nate, telling us that he and his parents had arrived in Fresno safely and that he missed us already. We both sent him a text back telling him we missed him too, then carried on with our conversation and hunt, before finally giving up our search and heading back to Gran’s. We plopped down on the bed in the spare room once we got there, and Kris just patted me on the shoulder and smiled.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find them, we still have tomorrow. Maybe they just weren’t on that particular beach tonight, there are several around here, right?”
I sighed. “Yeah, there are, but how are we supposed to guess where they might be? Maybe they don’t live here, maybe they were just passing through?” I pulled a shoe off and it landed upside down, sanding dribbling out onto the carpet.
“Don’t give up yet. Remember, your Gran said you’d meet him again. Maybe if we just wander around town tomorrow, walking around, we might run into them? Who knows?”
I nodded, thinking that maybe I should have asked Gran for a time and location as well, and that set our plans for the next day.
After a similar beginning to the previous one, Mom and my grandparents went to talk to a lawyer and Kris and I spent the rest of the daylight hours wandering Tillamook, hopefully peering around every corner and into every parking lot, keeping an eye out for a sleek black motorcycle.
By the end of the day both our feet were sore, and the idea of plodding around on a beach was just not appealing. So after telling Mom where we were going, we walked down to the local movie theater, which was showing an older movie, Van Helsing. We had already seen it, but drooling over Hugh Jackman on the big screen was one of our favorite pastimes, so we didn’t mind.
The movie had already been playing for a decent amount, and was on a particularly drool worthy scene of Mr. Jackman, when something light hit me in the back of the head and interrupted my giggled whispering to Kris.
It hadn’t hurt, had just been enough of a touch to let me know that something had come into contact with me and when I reached back to feel my hair, I found a piece of popcorn stuck in it. I showed the popcorn to Kris, and we both turned to look behind us out of curiosity. That was when I felt the breath stop in my throat.
Sitting maybe three seats behind us was a certain dark-blonde haired young man with a bomber jacket on, grinning impishly at us as he launched another piece of popcorn our way that missed by only about an inch.
A few seats behind him, all the way in the back, were
the other two. The pale one was wearing a short sleeved dark blue shirt, but Darien was still wearing the trench coat and the dark clothes, still as threatening, and enticing, as a couple nights before.
He leaned toward the pale one, obviously saying something, then straightened up again. The pale one looked toward us, then shrugged at Darien. That was when Darien looked at me and inclined his head in a way that gave me the idea that he wanted me to go back there to him.
“Kris.” I whispered it.
“Yeah, I saw,” she whispered back. “Don’t just sit here, get going!”
“You’re coming with me, right?”
She raised her eyebrows at me as though I was insane, but she was my best friend and if I needed her as back up while I got to know some guy, she would do it. “Do I have a choice?”
“Nope.” I grabbed my purse and my little bag of peanut butter M&Ms and slunk out of my seat to the aisle.
Once I got to the back row, I realized that I would have to scooch past the pale one to get to Darien. Kris was right behind me and I gave him that apologetic ‘sorry for having to squeeze by you’ look.
He just smiled as I brushed past his legs and settled myself into the empty seat between him and Darien. I waited for Kris to squeeze by, but saw that she had dropped into the seat on the other side of him and was smiling at him with a ‘go figure’ look on her face.
That sensation hit me again as I sat next to Darien, the one not borne of lust, but of something else that I just couldn’t quite put my finger on. I looked sideways at him, saw that his glance was on me and not on the screen. He caught my eye and I saw some emotion flit through his eyes, something that I could only describe as pain, before his eyes dropped to my hand. He sighed heavily, then turned his attention back to the movie.
