by S. H. Kolee
"Yes," I whispered, feeling dizzy with joy. The happiness was almost too much to bear. "Yes!" I said louder, and then I yelled it. "Yes, yes, yes!!"
Tears were streaming down my face and Jackson pulled me close, kissing me fiercely, the promise of our future in his kiss. I could taste the saltiness of my tears in our kiss, making it even sweeter.
When we broke apart, I caressed his face with my hand, loving the feel of stubble against my fingers. I gave him a crooked smile, hardly able to believe that this beautiful man was mine. I blinked when I remembered the pilot's words.
"Wait a minute. Where are we going?"
Jackson quirked his mouth, his eyes dancing with merriment. "I remember someone once telling me that she would be happy spending her days fishing and her nights listening to the ocean, as long as we were together."
I thought for a moment and then realization dawned.
"We're going to Bora Bora?" I asked in excitement, my face breaking out in a smile. I squealed when Jackson nodded. "I can't believe it!"
Jackson grinned at my enthusiasm, but I bit my lip, remembering the context of my request that I had said in jest. "I said that we should leave everything behind for life on a deserted island." I looked at him uncertainly. "Is that what you want to do?"
Jackson's grin faded as he looked serious. "If that's what you want."
"But-but," I sputtered. "We have a life back in New York. You have your career and I have my job. Jackson Reynard can't drop off the face of the earth to become a beach bum!"
Jackson shrugged. "Why not? I'm happy as long as we're together."
"But you love acting! You can't give it up!"
Jackson shook his head. "That's where you're wrong. I like acting, I love you. I know life under the spotlight has been difficult for you. I know you think I make all the decisions, but this decision is up to you."
Love for Jackson rushed through me, and it was tempting to throw caution to the wind, along with all the obligations of our life, and dedicate ourselves to enjoying each other. But it seemed too reckless, too extreme.
Jackson leaned over and kissed me gently, as if he understood the debate going on inside my head. "You don't have to decide now. This can just be a vacation. But I hear Bora Bora is a great place to raise children."
My heart squeezed at Jackson's words, the thought of having children with him making me so happy that it was impossible to express it in words. Even though Jackson said we had time to decide, I couldn't stop weighing the pros and cons, not knowing what the right decision was. Jackson just stretched out on the couch, watching me with a smile.
The thought of living in paradise was tempting but I also loved our life back home. Our friends and family were there, but then again living with Jackson in Bora Bora would be an adventure. Finally, I smiled widely, knowing in my heart what was right.
"Did you decide?" Jackson asked, looking at me inquisitively. He smiled when I just nodded. "Are you going to tell me?"
"I'll tell you later," I said airily. "Right now I have to figure out what I'm going to wear in Bora Bora. I packed for L.A., not a tropical island."
Jackson pulled me close, his eyes gleaming with humor and love. "Going to make me sweat it out, huh?"
I nodded with a smug look. "It's only fair since I had to put up with your non-proposal."
Jackson grinned, not looking the slightest bit perturbed. "Soon you'll realize that it doesn't matter to me. We could live in Bora Bora, we could move to a podunk town where I bag groceries and you flip burgers, we could go anywhere. It doesn't matter. All that matters is me loving you, and you loving me."
I gazed up at Jackson, my heart brimming with happiness, as I realized I would gladly spend the rest of my life making myself worthy of this man.
"I love you, Jackson Reynard," I whispered.
"I'll hold you to that," Jackson replied with a gentle smile, kissing me softly.
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Turn the page for the first two chapters of Seeing Shadows, a paranormal romance with a twist. Add one gorgeous rocker, a resistant heroine and a dash of paranormal angst for a recipe full of intrigue and surprises.
CHAPTER ONE
It was a frigid day as I ran down the steps of Downing Hall, careful to avoid the slick icy spots that coated them. Frigid days were the norm at Maxwell University, a small private college in Rochester, New York, so I maneuvered down the steps with practiced ease, eager to return to my apartment after my last class of the day.
My breath came out in misty puffs in the cold air as I slung my backpack higher over my shoulder. My last class had been Economics, something I hated but was forced to take as part of my Business major. I considered myself fairly intelligent, but an hour and a half of Economics was enough for me to question my IQ.
Putting monetary theory and economic models behind me, I quickly crossed the quad that was the center of campus and made my way to Martin Street, where I shared an apartment with my best friend, Sarah Townsend. We had met our freshman year in the office of our RA to complain about our respective roommates. My roommate had insisted on having loud passionate sex with her boyfriend every night, although the term boyfriend was pretty loose since there seemed to be a new one every other week. Sarah’s roommate had been of the more peculiar persuasion, hoarding trash in her room until Sarah could no longer stand the stench of week old chili sitting out, a staple her roommate ate right out of the can.
The natural solution was for Sarah and I to move in together, and we had been inseparable ever since. Now in the beginning of our senior year, we were living in an actual apartment on Martin Street. Martin Street had the advantage of being right off campus and lined with apartments filled with other students. The apartment was the same one we had lived in our junior year and felt like a real home. More of a home than any other place I had lived in.
The reason I was rushing home was because we were having friends over for dinner, and I knew Sarah would be panicking in the kitchen. Her culinary talents were limited to microwaving popcorn and making scrambled eggs.
I ran up the steps of our two-story building, our apartment being on the second level. Grant Matthews and Marcus Stolby lived in the apartment on the first floor and we had befriended them the instant we had moved in a year ago. They were also seniors and both were easygoing, as well as easy on the eyes. It didn’t hurt that they were also in a popular band. Sarah had an enormous crush on Grant, a stocky blonde with blue eyes and a ready smile. His on-again, off-again girlfriend Cara from his hometown got in the way of any romance between the two of them, but that didn’t stop Sarah from flirting like crazy.
Marcus was the shyer of the two, although I could never understand how someone who looked like Marcus could be shy. At six two, with dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, I knew tons of girls at school that were swooning over him but Marcus always ducked his head and lowered his eyes when they draped themselves over him.
I knew the real reason Marcus rebuffed their advances was because of Jenny McAllister, one of our friends coming over for dinner tonight. Jenny was a ball of energy with her bouncy personality and quick laugh. Even though she was only five one, she seemed larger than life because of her vivaciousness and startling beauty, her translucent skin offsetting the deepness of her green eyes and curly red hair. Very few guys were immune to her, including Marcus. Unfortunately, Marcus was one in a long line of admirers and, because of his shyness, he never seemed to be able to break through to the front of the pack.
I unlocked our front door and was immediately greeted with smoke.
“Sarah?” I called out. “What the heck is going on?”
Sarah stuck her head out from the kitchen, her brown bangs plastered to her forehead with sweat.
“Caitlin! Help!” she yelped. “I just burned the garlic bread and I dropped the cheese on
the floor!”
I laughed as I slipped off my coat, dropping my backpack onto the couch. I made my way to the kitchen, stopping to open the living room window along the way.
“You should’ve waited until I got home,” I admonished as I shook my head at the black log on the baking sheet sitting on the stove. I could only imagine that had been the garlic bread. “You being alone in the kitchen never turns out well.”
Sarah blew a puff of air up to her forehead to cool off her sweaty bangs and held up her hands in surrender. “I was nervous you wouldn’t get home in time and I wanted everything to be ready before everyone got here.
I smirked because I knew “everyone” meant Grant. The guys from downstairs were joining us for dinner, in addition to Jenny. This must mean that Grant was off-again with Cara, since Sarah only got in a tizzy over Grant when she knew there was a possibility. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t think it was wise to start a discussion about the merits of pursuing a guy in love with someone else. I simply grabbed a potholder and picked up the baking sheet, sliding the cinder block into the trashcan.
“Well, don’t worry,” I reassured Sarah. “We have plenty of time. It’s only five-thirty and we told them seven o'clock. Why don’t you make the salad and I’ll handle everything else.”
Sarah sighed. “Okay, I guess I can handle chopping vegetables.”
“Oh, and I guess I should pick this up,” I said wryly as I bent over to pick up the ball of mozzarella cheese that was on the floor.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Sarah replied, smiling sheepishly. “Salad duty, it is.”
Sarah and I spent the next hour and a half in easy company, chatting about our day and classes. Sarah was the first person in my life that I felt completely at ease with. I had spent most of my life with my guard up, uneasy with letting people in. A lifetime of my father telling me I wasn’t good enough had made me wary of trusting people. I didn't believe he constantly criticized me because he didn't love me. Sometimes I thought that would have hurt less. Then I could just shrug my father off as an asshole and not care what he thought. It hurt too much that he minimized me because he really thought less of me. I believed that my father loved me on some level and was disappointed I wasn’t more. More driven. More ambitious. More like him.
My father had started from nothing and built Kile Realty, an impressive real estate company, from the ground up. George Kile had become a name to be reckoned with in the realty industry. We had lived with the trappings of luxury until I was twelve. Then his business had shattered with the recession and now he was back to working for someone else and counting on commissions that hadn’t happened yet to make ends meet. Sometimes I thought he resented the fact that I was just starting out in life and had opportunities like college, which he had never been given. My mother had passed away when I was five by the hands of a drunk driver and I was an only child, so I had been the only family member to witness his fall from grace. Sometimes I think he resented that too.
It’s not that I wasn’t driven. I was at Maxwell University mostly on a scholarship and I kept a high GPA close to a 4.0. But making money wasn’t my burning desire in life. Life could be so hard to endure sometimes and often you just had to hunker down and try to get through it. Especially with the visions.
Ever since I could remember, I had visions that often woke me up in the middle of the night, panicked and terrified by what I had seen. I used to believe they were simply nightmares until I entered high school. Because then I started to see the people in my dreams in real life.
First, it had been the janitor my first day of high school. I had seen him the night before thrashing in a river, some force dragging him below until he was floating facedown in the water. Then it had been the new girl my second month of high school, who I had seen falling from a building, her screams reverberating in my ears long after I had woken up. It started a long chain of strangers' faces I would see in my visions that I would eventually meet in real life.
I tried to convince myself that I had somehow seen these people before without realizing it and was subliminally entering them into my dreams. But I knew I was fooling myself. And I didn’t understand the images of death. I wasn’t foreseeing their future. The janitor worked at my school until my sophomore year when he moved and started working in another district. The new girl in school was no longer the new girl by the time she moved away to Florida her junior year.
I didn’t know why I was cursed with these visions and my father had no patience for my screams in the middle of the night, the tired eyes and lack of attention in the morning. I could never share with him what was bothering me, so he just took it as another sign that I wasn’t concentrating on life and trying to become a success.
Because of my father and these visions, I burrowed myself behind a wall where people couldn’t be disappointed by me. I could never shake the feeling that I was living on borrowed time before everything blew up in my face. As a result, I could never let anyone get too close. I was too scared to tell anyone what I was seeing because if I couldn’t tell my own father, who could I tell?
But during our freshman year in college, the visions got to the point where I was terrified to close my eyes at night, not wanting to see the grisly deaths in my sleep. It had been easy to hide it from my first sex-crazed roommate, whose attentions were elsewhere directed at night. But I couldn’t hide it from Sarah.
When my whimpers began to wake her in the middle of the night, I figured she would just think I was a freak. But the first night, when I had woken up in terror and trembling, Sarah had simply laid down on my bed next to me. She hadn't asked me what the dream had been about. She had just started talking about a diner in her hometown that made the best grilled cheese. As she had chattered on about the perfect ratio of bread to cheese, I had slowly calmed down and started focusing on her words. About how it was imperative to butter both sides of the bread to make sure it griddled properly. Soothed by her words, I had slowly fallen back asleep.
She never mentioned it the next day. And the nights when I would wake up, shuddering and whimpering, she would lay down next to me and talk about something inane and unimportant, soothing me back to sleep. Finally, when I started to feel more comfortable around her, I asked her why she did what she did. It turned out her younger sister used to have night terrors and this was how she helped her go back to sleep. Sarah assumed I was having night terrors. Until one day during our writing class which we shared second semester.
It was the first day of class and I froze when the professor walked in. I had seen him the night before, screaming in pain as a fire enveloped him. I had gasped and ran out of the classroom, tears streaming down my face. I was usually able to better control my reactions when seeing the people in my visions in real life, but his death had been particularly gruesome.
Sarah had followed me out of the classroom and everything I was holding in burst out. She had stayed quiet as the words rushed out of me, the visions of death, meeting my visions in real life. As I finished and looked up at her, expecting to find disbelief or revulsion, she had given me a small smile.
“I don’t really understand it. And it sounds a little scary.” Sarah paused and took a deep breath. “Actually, it sounds a lot scary. But there’s a lot we don’t know about this world. About how our minds work. I’m so sorry that you have to go through this. But that doesn’t change you - the Caitlin I know. You’re still the funny girl who watches infomercials and cooks a mean pot of spaghetti sauce.”
With those words, I understood that I had finally found someone who I could trust. And slowly my trust in Sarah grew as she kept her word and didn’t look at me like a freak when I would shudder when I met someone new, knowing what I was experiencing. And miraculously, the visions grew less and less frequent until they were a rare occurrence by the end of my sophomore year. And junior year had been a brilliant respite, with no visions at all. I hadn't questioned why they stopped, I was just grateful they had.
I hadn’t to
ld Sarah that I had started experiencing visions again this past summer while I was interning for a financial firm back in my hometown of Philadelphia. She had been so relieved and happy for me when the weight of the visions had been lifted off my shoulders. I didn’t want to disappoint her by telling her they had come back. Besides, there had only been a few visions, and I had only had one since school started. I was hoping it would stay that way.
My almost complete honesty and Sarah's acceptance was why I could be so comfortable with her. She was the one person who really knew me. And so we finished making dinner in comfortable ease, Sarah putting the salad together while I simmered my Bolognese sauce, along with baking a new batch of garlic bread.
“Oh, crap!” Sarah exclaimed, glancing down at her watch. “It’s almost seven o'clock! I need to change!”
I glanced over at her and smiled. Sarah was wearing jeans and a red sweater that complemented her athletic figure and pixie haircut.
“What are you changing into, a ball gown? You look fine, Sarah! This isn’t dinner at the White House. It’s friends schlepping over for a Friday night celebratory dinner for making it through the week.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Sarah. “My motto is always dress to impress, no matter what the occasion. Besides, Grant is bringing his cousin with him tonight. He transferred from Yale and he's staying with Marcus and Grant while he figures out his housing. If Grant is any indication, his cousin is going to be a hottie.” She wiggled her eyebrows for emphasis.
I laughed as I wiped my hands on a dishcloth. “I fear for the safety of Grant’s cousin’s heart. Or chastity.” I pressed my lips together and cocked my head. “I wonder why he transferred here from Yale. I mean, we’re not exactly in the Ivy League tier.”
Maxwell University was a small prestigious college known for its arts and music school but it was nowhere near the leagues of Yale. I had decided to attend Maxwell University because of the scholarship that covered most of my school cost. The rest I paid with loans and a part time job at a local cafe.
