Other Side Of Forever (Other Side Of Forever Series Book 1)

by Shannon Eckrich

  “Really?” He smiled, leaning his body into mine.

  I couldn’t tell if he’d picked up on my lie. “Yes.” I swallowed hard, my throat swollen.

  “Well, apparently he’s not giving you what you need,” he whispered, bringing his hand back up. His fingers grazed along my cheek, over my shoulder, and down the length of my arm. I closed my eyes and imagined myself crawling up deep inside my body. I wanted to disappear.

  “He’s giving her exactly what she needs.” A calm and casual voice sounded from behind Aaron.

  My eyes opened.

  Aaron turned his head and we both watched as Ethan stepped out from behind the trees. His dark eyes, which normally drew me in, were shadowed by rage. It frightened me. But it didn’t stop me from wanting to rush into his arms.

  I couldn’t see Aaron’s face, but his body grew rigid. Ethan glanced over at me. His eyes met mine and they softened. I attempted to slip my arms out of Aaron’s hands, but his grip tightened.

  Ethan focused on Aaron. “Let. Her. Go.” He said each word slowly. Surprisingly, his voice remained calm.

  “Who are you to tell me to let her go?” Aaron snapped. Even though Aaron was slightly broader than Ethan, I couldn’t help but think he was making a mistake. Especially when Ethan’s normally calm energy was overpowered with rage. And rage triggered adrenaline. Which no doubt was flowing rapidly through his veins. From the look in Ethan’s eyes, he was full of rage. And adrenaline.

  “This is the last time I’m going to ask you nicely,” Ethan warned. “Now, remove your hands from her before I remove them for you.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Aaron’s eyes brightened at the thought of a challenge.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Ethan smiled with his lips pressed tightly together. Then he lowered his head, and when he lifted it back up, Aaron’s body flew away from mine and landed four feet away in the dirt. His head barely missed the trees. He scrambled to his feet and looked at Ethan. His eyes were wide. Terrified. Then he turned and ran.

  I couldn’t move. Nothing around me made sense.

  Ethan walked toward me, and then stopped. His eyes had changed back to the way I remembered. Deep, dark, and captivating. “Allie, are you okay?” he asked gently.

  Unable to speak from the shock, I nodded.

  He stepped forward and pulled me into his arms, pressing his body fully against mine. I had never been so close to him before. It felt good. I pushed my face into his chest and let his sweet scent wrap around me. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered into my ear as he stroked the back of my hair. “I should have made it here sooner.”

  I lifted my head up and glanced at him. “Made it here sooner?” I asked. My voice was rough. I coughed to clear my throat and continued. “I thought you were busy.”

  “Change of plans.” He grinned at me. Then he pushed my head back to his chest.

  We stayed like that for a while. That didn’t matter to me. I enjoyed the close up feeling of his warmth instead of only tasting it from a distance. It circulated through me, numbing me from the pain Aaron had caused.

  “Do you need a ride home?” he finally asked, breaking the silence around us.

  “Yeah…probably,” I mumbled against his chest. “I don’t think I can tolerate riding next to Aaron.”

  “I don’t think I could tolerate that,” he said with an edge to his voice.

  Ethan let go of me, and I immediately missed his warmth. He walked me over to Erica’s car. There was no gap between us, but he never reached for my hand. I began to wonder if the time we’d spent behind the shed was because he actually felt sorry for me instead of something more.

  Ben rolled down his window as we approached.

  “Hey, where have you been?” Erica asked me from across the seat.

  “Ethan showed up while I was at the concession stand and we started talking,” I said, hoping she would buy it.

  “I thought you couldn’t make it.” She smiled at Ethan.

  “I was freed up at the last minute.” He shrugged. “So I swung by to see you guys and found Allie first.”

  Erica turned around and looked at Aaron. “I thought you didn’t see her.”

  “Well, there were a bunch of people over there,” Ethan said before Aaron could utter a word.

  Aaron glared out the window at me until Ethan turned his eyes on him, then Aaron quickly looked away.

  “I’m not feeling so great. I just wanted to let you know I was catching a ride home with Ethan,” I told her.

  “Are you sure?” Erica watched me cautiously. She was making sure this was something I was okay with.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “He said he was going by my house anyway.”

  Apparently that answer satisfied her. “Okay. Guess we’ll see you guys in school on Monday,” she said.

  Ben rolled up the window.

  Ethan and I walked across the parking lot until we reached his car. He opened the passenger’s side door and held it while I slipped into the black leather seat. I grabbed the handle and shut the door myself before he had a chance to close it for me. Just because I took Jeremy’s advice didn’t mean I had to accept Ethan doing things for me. That wasn’t going to happen.

  Ethan walked around the car, shaking his head the entire time. He got into the driver’s seat, a smile playing at the corner of his lips.

  “What?” I asked, wondering what he thought was so funny.

  “Nothing,” he said, then started the engine and drove out of the theater parking lot.

  I waited for a few moments, watching the yellow divider slide by, then asked, “What did you mean earlier?” My eyes caught the side of his face in the dashboard lights.

  “What are you talking about?” he said. His face tensed up as his eyes burned into the road.

  “You know…when you said you should have made it there sooner. What did you mean? And how did you know where I was?”

  “Just what I said.” His voice became uneasy. “I should have gotten there before Aaron had a chance to touch you. And I knew where you were because I saw you when I turned into the parking lot.” Ethan glanced at me briefly and tossed me a mock smile. Then he returned his gaze back to the road as if he was hiding something.

  “There was no way you saw me,” I argued. “The shed is on the other side of the drive-in.” I waited to see what his answer was for that one.

  “You walked through the parking lot. I knew you were in the vicinity.”

  Oh, he was good.

  My eyes narrowed in on him. “Okay, then how did you manage to push Aaron off me and onto the ground without touching him?”

  He laughed. “What? Do you have any idea how absurd that sounds?”

  “I’m not crazy, Ethan,” I said. “I saw you do it.”

  “What do you think, that I have some kind of supernatural power that gives me the ability to toss someone through the air with my mind?” He laughed harder, but his hands strangled the steering wheel.

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  “Allie, he tripped.”

  “I know what I saw,” I fired back. The heat inside me rose.

  He turned to me, smiling. The intensity of his eyes began to lure me in. “You saw him trip.”

  I looked away from him and watched the darkness through my window. “I know what I saw,” I mumbled.

  “Is this how you thank me from saving you from something you could have prevented?”

  I snapped my head around. “What?”

  “Allie, you knew Aaron was tagging along tonight,” he said casually. “And I know how you feel about him with the way you act in the cafeteria. But you chose to go anyway.”

  “You think I did this? How dare you think I caused this to happen?” I yelled. My face burned.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said quickly. “It came out wrong.”

  Too late. The car’s interior lights dimmed and flickered. “Oh, no.” I placed my face in my hands and tried to relax.

  “What’s wro
ng?” He sounded amused.

  “Nothing,” I answered. “I thought you were ignoring me, anyway. What happened to that?” I was willing to say anything to get him to be quiet until I had myself under control. Even if that meant I had to go to extremes.

  He chuckled. “I was never ignoring you.”

  “What?” I lifted my face up and looked at him. “You haven’t looked at me, let alone talked to me in two whole days. And you say you weren’t ignoring me?”

  “That’s precisely what I’m saying.”

  “Then what were you doing?”

  “I was giving you some space,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  I stared at him while he continued to drive. “I can’t believe this,” I said, shaking my head. Then the interior of the car went black.

  The lights came right back on. I watched him in total disbelief as his eyes sucked me in.

  There’s no way he did that, I thought.

  “Allie, are you okay?” he asked softly.

  “Yeah, I’m good.” I was dazed.

  “Is this your road?”

  I nodded.

  He pulled his car in front of my house. Then he got out and walked around the car to open the door for me. “Is your mom home?” he asked.

  “No, my mom’s working late.” Even though the world was spinning around me, I couldn’t afford to slip.

  “Are you positive you’re okay? Do you want me to come in for a while?”

  “No…I’m fine.” I climbed out of the car.

  “I guess I’ll see you Monday, then.”

  “Sure,” I answered.

  Then he turned around and released his hold as he shut the door.

  I walked into the house, thinking about what had happened in the car. Once inside, I went into the bathroom and filled the tub with hot water. I slowly stripped off my clothes and stepped into the bath. All I wanted to do was wash Aaron’s griminess away. My body felt dirty, like it was covered with the black slime that coated the creases in the faucet at a truck stop bathroom. My mind sought answers as to why Ethan had acted that way.

  Tears welled up in my eyes as I slid down into the water. My face was barely at the surface and my mind was flooded with confusion. I finally had a taste for love. But could it be possible that the guy I was falling in love with was on an entirely different menu?

  One that I couldn’t even afford to look at?

  Chapter 5

  The woods behind my house had always comforted me. And since the beach was probably filled with fishermen and families looking to get away for a Saturday afternoon, this was where I retreated. Jeremy and I used to come back here all the time to play when we were little. We built forts with the sticks and logs scattered across the ground and played hide-and-seek behind the trees. My memories were alive back here, and the woods behind the house gave me plenty of space to think.

  I stepped carefully over the branches and rocks that lined the forest floor, then entered the maze of ancient pines. My thoughts pushed me past the array of willow oaks and cypress trees. Time slipped away as I made my way deeper into the woods. Before I knew it, the trees had opened up and I was standing in a small clearing.

  The beams of the sun reached down from the heavens and softly touched the grass in front of me. A few patches underneath the shadows were brownish in color, while dandelions sprinkled across the thriving green patches across the meadow. I paced around the area, thinking about Ethan. More precisely, thinking about how our conversation had ignited into him blaming me for what happened at the drive-in.

  Had it been a distraction because of what I saw him do to Aaron? I stepped through the flowers. That had been the very thing he’d denied doing. It was as if he wanted to make me angry. I scrunched up my face. But why? There was something off about him. Something he was trying to hide. But what was it?

  A flock of birds suddenly shot up into the air to my left, and I heard twigs snapping a short distance away from me. Like someone or something was walking through the woods on the other side of the clearing. Was someone else out here? I gasped at the thought and spun around, attempting to make my way out of the clearing and back into the woods as fast as I could.

  Once I made it back into the trees, I sped up my pace. The farther I walked, the harder my heart pounded in my chest. A rabbit’s pace. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. I was lost. I hadn’t realized how far I had wandered into the woods. I rushed through the trees, desperate to locate a way out. But everything looked the same no matter what direction I went. I was scared. And my mind had convinced itself that something or someone was watching me. The fear triggered my legs to move faster and faster over the rough terrain until I was running again. My sneakers swept over the dampened leaves while my eyes scanned for an opening.

  Then everything went black, like someone had tossed a blanket over my head, turning off the lights. A force of some kind seemed to press into my body. I froze as panic bubbled up inside me. What was going on? Had I been bitten by a spider and was possibly having some super weird reaction? Or was stress causing me to black out? Was I having an anxiety attack? Brain aneurysm? Oh, god, it had to be a spider. And maybe now I was poisoned. I had no choice but to stop in the middle of the woods. I couldn’t risk running into a tree. But I had to get out of there. Something creepy was in the woods and I needed to get somewhere safe. But god—I couldn’t even see.

  I tried walking, scuffing my feet over the forest floor, hands outreached, feeling for anything that could be in my way while the pressure inside me rose, causing my head to throb. Waves of cold rushed over me. My breath was light and my heart continued to beat hard and fast, thumping around crazily in my chest—my body was as freaked as my mind. I picked up speed, walking faster, desperate to escape the eerie feeling that was consuming me. The feeling that something was attempting to slip inside of me. I wasn’t having a heart attack, was I?

  My left foot slid underneath a log. As my body continued forward and my foot stayed behind, my ankle twisted and made a sickening pop. The pain was excruciating as it shot up through my leg. I fell to the ground, still unable to see. My stomach heaved and the muffin I ate for breakfast hiked up my esophagus, but I swallowed hard, pushing it back down into the pit of my stomach. I rolled onto my side, clutching one hand around my ankle and placing the other to my head, trying hard to push away the mysterious pressure.

  Anxiety attack. Spider bite. Heart attack. And now a possibly broken ankle while lost in the woods. And here I thought Mom taking off had been the worst of my problems. Not a chance.

  I forced my body up until I was sitting on the ground. “Help!” My voice cracked as my eyes welled up. I fought back the tears and attempted to clear my mind so I could think of a way to get out. Then I heard his voice.

  “Allie,” Ethan called from a distance.

  There was no way he could be out here. I thought I was hearing things. That I was also going delirious on top of everything else. But then I heard him again.

  The pressure intensified. I swore my head was about to explode.

  “Allie!” He was closer this time.

  Then, just as sudden as the pressure had entered my body and blackened my vision, it went away. Lightness and warmth wrapped around me. I could see again.

  Ethan rushed out of the trees and raced over. He knelt down beside me, his expression matching the feeling that throbbed through my leg. “Are you okay?” he asked. His breathing remained steady, even though I knew he had been running through the woods. How weird. But I was in too much agony and too confused about what happened only minutes ago to ask him about it.

  “My ankle,” I said.

  He lifted his gaze from my face to stare at my hands. He pushed my hands away and replaced them with his. The warmth zipping through my ankle began to numb the pain.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked, watching his hands in disbelief.

  “I live on the other side of the woods,” he answered, shooting me a sideways glance before focusing back on my injury.<
br />
  “How convenient for me that Ethan Bradley lives on the other side of the woods.” The memory of our argument the night before flashed back into my mind.

  “Apparently it’s very convenient.” He pressed his lips together. “If not, you would be stuck out here in the middle of nowhere without a way to get home.”

  The heat from his hands intensified, and I was no longer able to speak. A tingling sensation snaked its way into my ankle and slithered up my body. His energy completely relaxed me. And then, all traces of pain were gone. It was if I had never been injured at all.

  “How…how did you do that?”

  He looked over at me, his dark eyes drowning in hesitation. I thought he was going to tell me the truth this time, but I was wrong. All I got was another one of his lame excuses.

  “It wasn’t that bad. All it needed was a little rest.”

  Before I could respond, he scooped me into his arms and stood up.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded, outraged.

  He held me against his chest and began walking through the woods. “I’m taking you home. Clearly you can’t walk right now.”

  I couldn’t believe he found my situation funny. “Fine.” I was suddenly too exhausted to argue.

  The weight of my body didn’t seem to faze Ethan at all as he stepped over the branches and rocks that covered the ground. Not that I was that heavy to begin with, but given the distance before us, even the strongest of men wouldn’t be able to keep up with his pace.

  “Why were you out here anyway?” he asked casually. He glanced down and flashed me a heart-stopping smile.

  “I was thinking,” I admitted.

  He laughed silently. “You had to come all the way out here to think? Why didn’t you just think inside of your house? You know, like a normal person?”

  “I guess I’m not as normal as you think I am.” I stifled a laugh, thankful that he was clueless to how abnormal I really was.

  It didn’t take long before Ethan made it back to my house. Once we were at the front door, he insisted I let him carry me in so I wouldn’t put any pressure on my ankle. He gently placed me on the sofa and took off my shoes. Then he pulled my mother’s afghan off the back of the sofa and draped it over me. He turned and disappeared into the kitchen without saying a word, which was so unlike him. He reappeared with a plastic baggie filled with ice, then knelt down beside me.