She looked at me. I shrugged. “Go for it.”
But when the other girls started stripping down to their bikinis, Jane abruptly bowed out, sliding off the edge of the stage. I knew immediately what was wrong.
“It’s not that bad,” I lied.
She knew. “You’re lying.”
“I don’t even notice it.”
“Everyone else would.”
“You’re still beautiful.” I ran my fingers along the ridges of her awful scar.
“Lying again.”
“No, I’m not. Honestly. Be proud of this thing. We stitched you up. No doctors, no nothing. You, me, and Mattey. And now we’re here, dancing. Exactly what you said you wanted to do.”
I caught her and spun her around, and she gave in with a reluctant smile.
The music picked up. And she started to really dance all up on me. Her hips ground into mine. It was like she was lighting me on fire. Where did she learn to dance like this? My head flashed real quick to frickin’ Raff. Again. The guy who almost got her killed. I thought about when she lived with him, hitting the clubs, dancing with him, doing everything . . . with him. Her life I still knew so little about. No, I didn’t want to go there. Knock it off. I grabbed Jane’s face and kissed her hard, kissed her until that was the only thing.
JANE
Breakfast was the sun coming up over the bridge. Lunch, searing blue skies on an outdoor deck, stealing fries off each other’s plates, sitting on the same side of the table with my legs draped over his. And after we got too tired to dance anymore, the late afternoon became bodysurfing, and Cade’s wide smile, his hair sticking straight up from the salt and me running my hands through it.
“It’s like we’re kids who ran around so much we have to suddenly lie down and sleep right where we are,” Cade said as we collapsed onto our backs in the sun-warmed sand.
“Do you ever miss being little?” he wondered.
“Never.”
“You didn’t even think about it for a second. Really?”
“Really.”
“There’s nothing?”
“There’s nothing about being a kid that was like being a kid for me. I’m more of a kid right now than then. When I think of things like ice cream and sandcastles, I’ll think of today.”
“It was really that bad?” Cade asked.
“It was that empty.”
“What’s something you remember liking to do?”
“I don’t know. Sitting on the carpets in whatever crappy housing project we were living in, fake painting.”
“Fake painting? What’s that?”
“I would trace stains on the rug or walls with my fingers, pretending it was paper and I was a painter.”
“That’s kind of sad.”
“That’s kind of what I mean.”
As we rested there, with our eyes closed and fingers woven together, I could feel the wind picking up off the water.
“It’s going to rain,” I said.
“No it’s not.”
“Look. See that line of gray out there? That’s the rain. I give us five minutes, max.”
“I’m too tired to move,” Cade mumbled contentedly. “What else? Tell me something else you liked.”
“Sleeping on my mom’s folded-up winter coat.”
“Why would you sleep on a coat?”
“Because she was on the only bed.”
“What’s to like about sleeping on a coat?”
“I liked the way the fuzzy hood felt on my face and how it blocked out the sound if I wrapped it around my head so I wouldn’t have to listen to her fight with whatever guy she was with at the time.”
“Jeez. What’s your happiest memory?”
“Leaving with Raff.” The answer popped out. Cade looked away, and I instantly wanted to swallow the words back up, but it was too late.
“I meant as a little kid,” he said flatly.
“I know. Sorry. It’s just . . . that the happiest part of my life then was when it ended.”
He nodded with an upside-down sort of smile that I didn’t believe.
“I have happier memories than that now,” I tried to turn the corner.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like every day with you. I don’t need . . . all this. The beach is great, but the best times I’ve ever had—ever—are sitting there talking to you back home, in the barn.”
“You don’t have to say that.”
“I’m not saying it because I have to.”
I matched Cade’s glare, mirroring his ridiculous furrowed expression up close, until he couldn’t help but let it go and laugh.
“Fine,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “You really shouldn’t be jealous of someone’s dead boyfriend.”
“Aw, come on, Jane, that’s not fair.”
“I know.”
Cade scratched the side of his nose. “I have nothin’ to say to that.”
“I know.”
“You play dirty,” he said.
“I’m not playing.” But I was, a little. “The only way for me to talk about something like this is to be a little irreverent about death in general.”
A rumble of thunder made us both sit up, and then the rain reached us, icy drops pummeling us.
“Told you!” I yelled as we raced back to the truck.
“You’re so sunburned,” Cade pointed out once we climbed in. “We should go get you some aloe. And find a place to stay.”
“We can sleep on the beach once the rain passes.”
“I was thinking somewhere nice,” Cade said.
“Oh, you mean like your truck,” I joked.
But Cade was pulling into a big resort called Pearl. It looked like it was out of a magazine. He had to be using it to make a U-turn. But no, he threw the truck in park.
“Cade . . .”
“Wait here one sec.” He left me in the running truck and dashed into the front lobby. A couple of minutes later a valet came out. He gave the rusty, banged-up truck and the two of us a scathing once-over. I didn’t blame him. There was no way we looked like we could afford this place. And we couldn’t. Unless . . .
“Cade, are you out of your mind? We don’t have the money for this.”
“Sure we do.”
Cade leaned against a pillar by the big double doors and pulled me against him. Rain streamed down his face and off his chin. It beaded on his lips. His eyes were serious.
“Let’s go up to our room. There’s something I need to tell you.”
CADE
I told her because she deserved to know. I told her because I finally dared to. I told her because I was crazy about her and never wanted to have a secret from her ever again. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a little part of saying it right there, when I did, was because I wanted to show her I was better than him, than Raff. It probably doesn’t make sense to anyone else. I mean, Jane said it best: You shouldn’t be jealous of someone’s dead boyfriend. But I needed her to see me as the good guy. I didn’t want to be another person who lied to her, stole from her. I wanted to be her favorite memory.
“I found the money.”
“Ah! I knew it!” Jane screamed and jumped up and down, clapping her hands. “That’s amazing! Where was it?”
“The storm drain—”
“But we looked there so many times.”
“I know. All the rain got me to thinking, though. After big storms Mattey and I used to race boats there when we were kids. We’d follow the boats all the way to the drain and watch them get sucked under the road. That’s when I realized we never thought to look on the other side of the highway, right? So after practice . . .”
The smile fell off her face. She cut me off.
“Wait . . . after practice?” Her eyes looked so hurt I w
ished I could kick the shit out of myself. “Why . . . why didn’t you tell me right away? Cade . . . I was leaving. Were you going to let me leave without it?”
“No! Of course I wasn’t. But then you almost left without telling me.”
“And that’s on me,” Jane said. “But this . . . I mean, Cade, you were mad at me about the passport . . . and all the while you . . . you didn’t tell me about this?”
I sank down to sit on the bed facing the wall. “I’d never seen that much money before in my life.”
I could hear Jane breathing behind me, waiting for what I had to say.
“I was going to tell you right away. But then I saw you with Diego. I worried that maybe you were still mixed up with the cartels somehow . . .”
“So you would keep the money?”
“I thought . . . when you told me about him, I would tell you about the money.”
Jane let out an angry huff. “But you didn’t.”
“I was going to! So many times. After Savannah’s party. Then after the game. But first my dad went ballistic, and then Gunner’s mom got hurt.” My voice dropped to a whisper as I tried to keep it steady. “I’m telling you now, Jane. I’m sorry I didn’t before. But for God’s sake, who cares? You have two hundred thousand dollars to do what you want with. You wanna leave, fine, take it and go.”
Jane didn’t say a thing for what felt like a really long time.
“Do you mean that? You’d want me to just take all the money and leave?”
“Do you really have to ask?” I said, staring at the wall. And that’s when I realized what this was really all about. I hadn’t even been honest with myself.
“It’s less about not trusting you . . . than being selfish,” I tried to explain.
“You wanted the money.”
“No. I wanted you,” I blurted out.
“I don’t understand.”
It was time to lay it all on the line.
“The truth is, I held off telling you about it because the money meant you could leave sooner. And . . . you’re . . . pretty much the only person I have.”
I felt the mattress sink down as Jane climbed onto the bed behind me. She hesitated but then crawled over and wrapped her arms around me and then her legs. She rested her head against my back.
“Same,” she softly said.
I relaxed into the coil of her body. I could feel the stress of the lies dissolving. This was us. This was the version we wanted. But it wasn’t the only version. And we both knew it.
“What if we never go back?” Jane asked. “What if we just . . . leave . . . from here?”
“What about football? Hunter? My life . . .” I trailed off.
“Right . . . your life.”
“I mean, trust me, I’d love to never see Tanner again . . . but I also . . .”
“Need to see the football thing through. Everything you’ve worked for. I know,” she said.
Jane had to leave. I had to stay. This weekend was all we had. We would go back and spill everything to the sheriff for their investigation. They’d send Jane somewhere far away. They’d have to. At least she’d be safe. There was no running off together. And there was no going home, the home we felt or made or knew . . . because every secret was catching up to us and making our world smaller and smaller. We could barely fit.
JANE
“No more secrets,” Cade said.
“No more lying,” I answered.
We lay side by side, looking up at the fan flicking moonlight across the ceiling.
“Promise,” he said.
“Are you promising or asking me to?”
“Both.”
“Promise you’ll let me know you’re okay,” Cade said, “from wherever they hide you.”
“Promise you’ll come find me when you graduate?”
“What, are we negotiating here? A promise for a promise?”
“Is that so bad?” I asked.
I could see a flicker of a smile cross Cade’s face. The bed was so soft, the sheets so smooth. If I looked at him for too long I would get lost in his eyes and then his lips, his arms, chest, warm skin, and that would be it. I would forget that this was temporary.
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said.
“Me neither.”
“Being awake here with you right now is like the dream. And when I go to sleep, the nightmares . . . that’s reality.”
“What are they about?” Cade asked. “The dreams you always wake up from crying?”
I stopped myself from answering.
“No more secrets,” Cade reminded me. “Why do you always say I won’t tell?”
“Because I saw stuff I never should have.” I could still see it all so clearly. “I dream about that small-town pharmacy where Raff killed God knows who . . . and the pool back at our condo where I found him dead . . . every. Single. Night.”
Cade sucked a big breath of air in and out. “Everything you’ve been through . . . you’re stronger than anyone.”
“Even when it looks like I’m being strong, inside I’m falling apart. Strong can break too,” I said into my pillow. “Like concrete. It’s supposed to be so strong, right? But you drill into it wrong and fissures go out every which way . . . and even the sturdiest-looking branches snap under too much weight. . . . There are so many different ways to break.”
“Glass shatters,” Cade said.
“Ceramic cracks,” I answered.
“A door is kicked down.”
“Bones fracture.”
“Legs get blown off.”
We both got quiet, thinking of everything that had happened.
I felt like all of those things: shattered and cracked, beaten and empty. And somehow Cade gluing me back together made me all the more aware of the seams and scars. I was so used to being made of sad, disconnected parts that to be whole felt wrong somehow. Happy was for other people. People who deserved it. Not someone who ran away and left her boyfriend staked to a deck chair. Not someone who sucked innocent people into her mess. The blood was chasing me. It was a wildfire consuming a forest, a city, all of America.
“I wonder if the college recruiters will come back,” Cade said. “After the bomb . . .”
“They will,” I said. And I believed it. I had to. I had to believe that good things would still come to good people. I had to believe that Cade would get everything he ever wanted.
I sat up and looked down at him, tangled in the white sheets . . . this boy who picked me up from the mud, hid me in a barn, ran with me from a hitman, put a roof over my head. This superhero who literally had saved my life was still only human. Cade hadn’t told me about the money right away because he was just like me, trying to find his way to a better version of life. He was stumbling into his own holes, as he pushed away from Tanner, a railway town with no locomotion, no engine to make anything turn, move.
I felt what I said next in my heartbeat.
“You’re taking half, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Half the money. You’re keeping it.”
“Jane . . .”
“Just in case you somehow don’t get a scholarship.”
“It’s not my money.”
“It’s not mine either. It was Raff’s.”
I tucked my head under Cade’s chin, letting my lips brush his collarbone. I didn’t want to think about Raff. Life was Cade now, this perfect body curled against me. I traced my fingers along his arm, the muscles along the front and back of it from football. I needed to memorize this moment: half a year’s events—or a lifetime’s—rolled inside a two-day trip, separately beating hearts compressed too suddenly in a gasp of honesty. I thought about paper burning, so pretty as the edges glow orange and then fold in on each other, like a flower blooming in reverse . . . so pretty that you forget it�
�s disappearing.
Raff’s name hung between us.
When Cade finally rolled over, he took my face in his hands. “It’s strange for me to think . . . you were in love with someone. I never felt like that before.”
“Before what?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on,” I sighed. It was hard for me to explain Raff to Cade. “I told you, we weren’t in love.”
“You moved to a different country with him.”
“Why wouldn’t I? We were each other’s best chance. But . . .” I wasn’t sure I should continue out loud. “I feel terrible saying it.”
“You can say anything to me.”
“Of course I wish he were still alive. I will never, ever forget what happened to him. But . . . I’m glad I’m not with him anymore. We . . . we were like prisoners who escaped jail together. We ran away, and that kind of bonded us together.”
“Why did you stay with him then?”
“He was the only thing I knew. But we would never be better than the lives we left. It’s not like you and me.”
“You and me how?” Cade asked.
“You know . . . you and me.”
“I don’t know.” Cade had to be playing dumb on purpose.
“You want me to say it?” I challenged.
“Say what?” Cade faked innocence.
“What you wouldn’t say a minute ago. You know what.”
“No, what?” Even in the dark I knew that Cade was all-out grinning his big teasing grin now.
“I don’t care, I’ll say it,” I announced. “I’m not scared.”
Cade abruptly pulled me against him and kissed me. “Neither am I.”
“I love you,” we said at the exact same time.
CADE
I woke up to Jane outlined by sunlight, her hair sweeping down over my face, her hands planted on my chest, a leg on either side of me.
“Today, we get whatever we want,” she announced.
Hide with Me Page 19
