I'll Be Waiting (San Juan Island Stories Book 6)

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  Luke’s friend, who rested his forearms on Luke’s desk, carried right on talking about how it was “so boss” to see the AH-64A helicopter appear above the horizon and the dawn’s streaks through its rotor mast, and wait, wait, wait, the enemies aimed their RPGs, and without any warning it took sweet evasive action, so it was, like, wait—

  Skylar cleared her throat. The friend kept talking.

  Luke’s eyes widened very slightly, like he couldn’t do anything because his friend didn’t possess a pause button, and Skylar started giggling, and he started grinning, and she covered her mouth and he finally put his hand on his friend’s arm, and only then did his friend stop and squint up at her in annoyance.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, the giggle still in her throat. “Is that from a movie? It sounds intense.”

  The friend curled his lip. “It’s Apache Havoc.”

  So…maybe a movie? Well, whatever. She turned to Luke and held out the origami heart. “For you.”

  He fixed on it.

  “Are you kidding?” the friend asked. “That couldn’t wait?”

  Skylar laughed. “Um, it’s my cousin’s number. You can ask him for advice on enlisting and helicopters and stuff.”

  Luke’s fingers closed over the paper, nearly brushing hers. He opened the note to see the purple glitter pen strokes, and Skylar busied herself by tucking her long hair behind her ears.

  “Which models does he work on?” Luke’s friend asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. All of them, I guess.”

  Luke folded the paper closed. In half, not along her lines. “Thanks.”

  She linked her fingers in front of her. “You bet.”

  He looked up, and Skylar looked down, and her chest lifted and lifted and lifted in a strange sensation like a helicopter slowly taking off. Luke’s friend also stared at her, waiting for her to go away, like you’d watch an enemy with a rocket launcher.

  She touched the corner of Luke’s desk as though wiping off a bit of pencil mark. “Did you turn in your paper okay?”

  He nodded. “How about you?”

  She laughed and made a forget-about-it noise. “I’ll probably fail. But who cares, right?”

  The bell rang, and people started taking their seats. Skylar turned to go to hers.

  “Hey,” Luke said.

  Her heart thumped. She paused and looked over her shoulder.

  “Is it true you’re going to Winter Formal with Brendan Hayes?”

  She twisted all the way back, her chest lift-lifting with that same sensation. “Are you asking me out?”

  He regarded her steadily, brown eyes penetrating deep into the question, as though seeking something specific.

  “Skylar, class is starting,” her teacher said.

  But she couldn’t look away from Luke. Because something about his gaze told her—

  He slowly shook his head.

  Aw.

  “Skylar, sit down,” her teacher said.

  She rocked back on her heels. “Then, yes—we’re going as friends.”

  “Please flirt after class,” the teacher said, and Skylar tripped back to her seat while the rest of the class laughed, even though she wasn’t flirting, she wasn’t. Especially since it hadn’t been successful.

  Volleyball ended, and wrestling ended, and Winter Formal passed, and so did her belief that Luke actually liked her. He never contacted her cousin, he never stopped by her desk to talk to her even though she went to his desk all the time, and he never seemed to be glancing at her; never. And she checked, a lot. And thanks to her obsession, she also knew that he always advanced his mechanical pencil in three decisive clicks and tapped his eraser on his pointed chin when he was thinking, and he curled his powerful left hand around the top of his neat notebook to write.

  What was she checking for? When he’d said he liked her in the weight room, he must have meant something different from like-like. He must have just meant what he’d said. He thought she was nice.

  When tickets finally went on sale for Sadie Hawkins, she bought two. Then she chased Luke down after school in the busy parking lot. Her face burned from her speed across the asphalt and she interrupted his friend’s stream of military facts in one frantic burst. “Will you go with me to the dance on Friday?”

  Luke stumbled and whirled to face her, his dark eyes rimmed with shocked white.

  Oh God. The whole day blew up. Orange sky, black ground, green school bus… Total miscalculation. So she attempted a grin. “You know. As friends?”

  He blinked.

  “No.” Luke’s friend frowned. “He can’t.”

  Skylar bit a hangnail, trying not to show how she felt. “Someone else already asked you?”

  “We’re going to a recruitment weekend at Fort Lewis,” the friend said. “We’ll see Apaches and Black Hawks, and they’re actually going to let us fly.”

  Luke cleared his throat. “In a simulator.”

  “But a real simulator, okay, with all the dials—”

  So, Skylar didn’t sicken him on sight. He had prior plans. Okay. The day slowly eased to normal.

  “That sounds like fun.” She shifted in her tennis shoes. “Is it open to anyone?”

  Luke’s friend recoiled. “Only those who score above ninety on the AFQT.”

  Ha. Crash and burn. She had no idea what the AFQT even was. Skylar took a step backward…and nearly got run over by a car.

  Luke frowned at his friend and then faced her again. He seemed calmer. And interested. Focused on her with a laser-hot intensity he’d not shown since they’d gotten locked together in that storage closet months ago. “Another time.”

  “You’re on.” But she didn’t want to let Luke’s dark eyes go. “What kind of cookies do you like? I’ll send you a care package.”

  His expressive lips started to curve. He put a hand to the back of his neck, thinking, but his friend’s face squeezed in irritation.

  “We’re only gone for three days.”

  Skylar grinned. “I know.”

  “Peanut butter,” Luke said. Skylar’s chest lifted again, just a little.

  “Got it,” she said.

  The friend checked his watch. “This is so dumb.”

  Skylar skipped away across the parking lot to her car where her younger sister was waiting.

  All week she gathered ingredients and chatted with her family about the perfect recipe to make a boy fall in love with you. Everyone, all of her aunts and uncles and her grandma, thoroughly approved of her plan.

  On Thursday, she carried the neat pink package into class and set it on Luke’s desk. He looked up at her with amazement.

  The friend wrinkled his nose. “You actually did it? You know how dumb that is, right?”

  She did not tell Luke’s friend that he couldn’t have any, although a meaner person might have said so. Instead, she saluted Luke. “Good luck, soldier.”

  Luke’s shoulders moved. Laughter. He put both hands over the pink box. “Thanks.”

  Skylar wanted to say more, but Dennis, Renee’s twin, called out to her at the doorway. “Hey, Skylar, what time do you want me to pick you up for Sadie Hawkins tomorrow?”

  Luke tapped his fingers on the pink box.

  Jeesh, of all the timing. She waved Dennis away. “I’ll call you later, okay? See you, bye!”

  Dennis glanced at the teacher, who was writing on the board, pushed his glasses up his nose and retreated back into the crowd and the busy hall.

  Luke squinted sideways up at her. “You’re going out with him?”

  “Just to the dance. As friends.” She squeezed her messenger bag to her chest to keep from clutching his arm and wailing that he was the one she wanted to be going out with. “Why?”

  “Skylar.” Her teacher’s voice floated over the bell. “I thought I told you no flirting in class.”

  Luke looked away.

  “It’s not flirting.” Skylar marched back to her seat. “I’m supporting our troops.”

  The
whole class cracked up.

  Even better, Luke waited at her car after school. He set his feet and stood tall. Unlike the boys who slouched and slacked, he seemed more an adult, more a man, than even their teachers. More a man, and definitely mouthwatering. “Do you already have a date for Senior Prom?”

  Argh. She squeezed her bag tighter. “Kind of. But just as friends.” Because, if he wanted to ask her out, she would totally break her date for him.

  He said nothing.

  Double argh.

  She bent her knees and then straightened, diving into an imaginary ball to set up a spike for him. “Um, ah, if you wanted to hang out on a weekend sometime, just let me know.”

  He sucked in a breath and squinted one eye at her worn tires. “Things are starting to get busy for me.”

  Oh. Well. She strove for a flippant reply, for a smile, for anything that sounded cheerful and not like she’d just been smacked down for a point against herself. “Ah, ha. Good luck.”

  “What about…?” He frowned at the asphalt and shook his head, then fixed on her. Intense and unfiltered, like hot coffee. “What about the event after graduation?”

  “What, you mean the senior trip?”

  Their class had raised so little money that, unlike classes before them who voyaged to Disneyworld or Hawaii, they were spending the night after graduation twenty-two-point-five nautical miles away in Vancouver, BC, at a kiddie amusement park with laser tag and a second-run movie. Attendance was completely optional, so most of her friends had RSVP’d to a private bonfire-kegger of a senior trip in the woods behind Brendan’s uncle’s property. But those plans evaporated with Luke’s question.

  She hugged her bag. “I’m totally free. Did you want to go together?”

  “You don’t think it’ll be stupid?”

  “No way.” Suddenly it sounded like the most interesting event in the history of interesting events. “I can’t wait. It’s a date.”

  He raised a brow. “Unless you get a boyfriend, right?”

  She grinned. “I guess.”

  The school year passed, and she squeaked through graduation on the barest minimum of credits after she cried in front of her adviser. After she got her diploma and took every possible photo with her friends and her team and her family, she kissed them all lovingly off to hang out with Luke.

  It was worth it. The senior trip torched her fantasies. It was ten hundred thousand times better than she’d dreamed. She shrieked and giggled and laughed about ten times more than ever before. They took goofy photo-booth pictures in fake glasses Luke won at a balloon-dart game, rode the Scrambler with a Brownie scout troop, fell asleep in a hokey family-friendly movie about two kids lost in Alaska, and watched the sunrise from the ferry home. And while the other bleary-eyed grads hung out in the lobby of the admin building waiting for parents to arrive, Luke showed her the super-secret back way up to the gym roof.

  They sat and stared out over quiet Friday Harbor curving gently down to the sparkling water, no longer teens in school but young adults about to enter the real world. Luke’s hands rested close to hers on the sun-warmed metal roof, and their feet almost touched between several puddles.

  She grinned at his profile. “We should do this again tomorrow.”

  Luke smiled. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll come over.” She reached out to grab his hand but his expression sobered, Skylar stopped herself, curled her fingers into a fist and dropped it into her lap. “I mean, maybe sometime when we’re both available.”

  He let out a long breath. “I’m leaving for Basic.”

  Her chest fell. Aw. “When?”

  “Today. When my parents pick me up from here.”

  Seriously? She pinched her toes. “Can I write to you?”

  He gave her his email address because his physical address would keep changing. “Until you get a boyfriend,” he said with a smile.

  “I’ll keep writing you even then,” she promised.

  A familiar Hyundai beeped in the parking lot. Skylar’s little sister got out of the passenger seat and ran into the lobby, so Skylar clenched the email address in Luke’s slanting handwriting to her heart and took a deep breath. This would be the moment everything changed.

  “You know, if you’d asked me to go out with you anytime this year, I would have.”

  Luke’s brows drew down and his chin jerked back. His lips flattened and curved and flattened again. “Really?”

  “Really, really.”

  He looped his arms around his knees and stared out at the sea. “Huh.”

  Or maybe nothing would change. Skylar tucked the email address into her butterfly-stitched jeans pocket and said, “Oh well.”

  “Oh well,” Luke repeated, and tapped his feet on the metal.

  Skylar had to face the facts. Now sucked to start anything, after all. He was going to Fort Lewis and she was going to San Francisco, and neither of them had plans to meet up again. Their last minutes together evaporated into full daylight.

  The loudspeaker crackled. “Skylar Robinson, please come to the lobby. Your ride is here. Skylar Robinson.”

  Skylar slowly stood, as though lifting the entire weight of the sky. “I had fun today.”

  Luke rolled to his feet and turned to her. “Let’s meet again.”

  Excitement surged back into her, lighting Skylar up. “Yes. Absolutely. Where and when?”

  “Right here. In five years.”

  “Five years?” she laughed. “Why not, you know, when you get done with Basic?”

  “I won’t be stationed here. And if we still feel like this… I mean, if it’s not serious…” He shook his head and tried again. “If we’re both here in five years, it probably is serious.”

  She stepped closer, into his shadow. “Serious like what? Like friends, or like more?”

  “More,” he said.

  She licked her lips. “More? Like, how much more? Like, you’ll finally ask me out, or…like, what?”

  “Like, you’re willing to tie your life to a military man, wherever that may lead.”

  Her giggles rose and fell, because it sounded like—

  “I know I’m different from most of the other guys you’ve dated, but…” He focused on her, certain as the sun. “If we’re both here, and if you still feel like this could be your future, like I could be your future, I’ll ask you to marry me.”

  Her laughter subsided all on its own. She smoothed Luke’s thin windbreaker, feeling the newness in the seams and asked, “What if you can’t get here? Or what if you have a girlfriend?”

  “What if you have a boyfriend?”

  She shoved him. “Exactly! I mean, anything could happen. I could be married to someone else. Or, you know. Anything.”

  His hands closed over hers. Warm and powerful. “If either of us isn’t here, it isn’t meant to be. So, be here by sunset in exactly five years.” He lifted her hand. “Promise?”

  Oh, the softness of his lips on her knuckles lit sparklers in her chest. She heard her name over the loudspeaker again, vague and insubstantial as mist against the overpowering sunlight of her future.

  “I’ll be here days before.” She squeezed his hand. “I guarantee it.”

  ###

  Because she had promised so faithfully to meet Luke in five years, and because the five-year high school reunion was being held on a private cruise ship actually heading toward their high school, and because Luke had emailed her that his leave had been scheduled so he could join her on the cruise, missing it was a life-altering disaster that made her sick every time she thought about it. And she thought about it a lot on the long trip sandwiched between tourists as the commuter ferry chugged slowly between the islands to her destination.

  Their original promise had been to meet on the roof of the high school gym. At sunset. She would keep at least that promise.

  Skylar practically rolled both ankles stumbling off the state ferry into twilight, shoving through the strollers and families on the crowded sidewalks of Friday
Harbor. The sun fell below the horizon, and streetlamps bloomed up and down the familiar roads as she raced onto the old school property.

  She had visited her family but not the high school, and it was weird. In five years, the school had grown in on itself. Walkways narrowed and buildings shrank. How had she streamed through those tiny double-doors every day, weaving between the other students? How had she forgotten the length of the outdoor hall stretching from the cafeteria to the gym? What if it had all changed and no ladder reached the roof?

  Racing around a corner, she bumped into Brendan Hayes.

  He greeted her with startled recognition. “Are you headed to the gym? It’s crazy. Luke’s fiancée just announced their engagement, and they’re throwing a party.”

  The ground seemed to tilt. Skylar put her hand on the building to steady herself. “Oh,” she said. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, she seems pretty nice.” Brendan’s friendly smile turned to bemusement. “Hey, I didn’t see you on the boat.”

  Skylar rubbed her forehead and searched for a smile. “It seems like I missed it.”

  He gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “Let’s catch up. I made a few mistakes in high school and I’ve never forgotten about you. Maybe we can relive old times?”

  “Uh…yeah.”

  “Great. See you up there!”

  So, apparently she and Luke weren’t the only ones meeting on the roof. Skylar fought back nausea, and in the isolated stillness tinny music and occasional laughter floated down, plopping on her below like so many raindrops on cracked cement. She really had missed the boat. Those one-line emails Luke sent her every single night had given her the completely wrong idea for about five full years. He’d left out a lot of key content. When Luke had asked if she remembered their promise, had he only wondered if she would make it awkward to introduce his fiancée?

  A thick layer of paint crusted the ladder nailed to the gym wall, and the climb stretched higher than Jack’s beanstalk into the sky.

  At the top, fifteen or twenty classmates greeted her with a familiar cry. “Skylar!”

  She traded hugs with everyone.

  Luke’s fiancée was a chubby woman in curve-hugging fatigues with a cute bob hairdo. She stepped up, introduced herself and held out a hand to shake. “You’re the one who made those peanut butter cookies at the recruitment weekend, right?”