by Natasha Deen
I nodded, the pull of my heart too strong for me to consider staying with Nell. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Maggie?”
“Yeah?”
“This”—she made a face—“is going to get worse before it gets better. A fantasy may keep you warm, but if you do it at the cost of reality, it’ll leave you out in the cold.” Her lips split into a wide grin. “Did you see what I did there? Pairing hot and cold—”
“Yeah, and it left me all wet.”
“Green. Left you green with jealousy.”
“I’m going. Tonight’s events have obviously upset what little mental stability you had.” I turned to leave.
“I’ll talk to your dad.”
I looked back. “He won’t be too worried. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a building blow up. It’s not even the fifth.” Even in the darkness, I saw her face go white.
“Be careful.”
I nodded again, pulled her into a hug that threatened to break her ribs, then sprinted to Craig’s car.
“Everything okay?” he asked as I ducked inside.
“Mm.” I buckled myself in and pointed the heating vents toward me. Dry, warm air pushed my hair off my face and thawed my fingers.
He put the car in gear and slowly pulled away from the curb.
We drove in silence for a bit, which was good for me. Close proximity to Craig made my brain melt.
His hand slid from the wheel and circled the gearshift.
I found this erotic. The light cast by the street lamps sent rippling shadows of dark and light on his skin, and I found this immensely erotic. And the fact that I was obsessing about a gearshift could only spell disaster.
But I couldn’t pull my gaze away from it. His fingers were long and lean and tapered, and the gentle way they played with the gearshift just about sent me out of my skin. Plus, every time I looked at his hand, my peripheral vision came into contact with his long legs.
His long legs covered by those sweet jeans.
And I knew what was under the denim.
He looked at me, his eyes suddenly on mine.
My guilty conscience sent my head jerking back and I smacked it on the window. “Son of a—” I rubbed my head, no longer worried about erotic fantasies.
“I’m glad we have some time together,” he said.
“Me, too.” Kind of.
“I wanted to talk to you—”
My heart did an involuntary contraction, hard and painful. “Yeah?” I squeaked the question. “About what?”
“Us.”
My insides twisted and twisted again, until fear left me wrung of hope. “Yeah?”
He turned his focus back to the road “Are we okay?”
We were fine. I was going to have a coronary. “Yeah, why?”
“Because you’re acting weird.”
My brain zeroed in on my obsession with his hands. Had I been so obvious? “When?”
“Since the water polo practice.”
My mind limped back in time, hobbled by the certainty that The Conversation—the one where he dumped me as a potential girlfriend and was so creeped out by my devotion he stopped being my friend—was two breaths away from starting. “The practice?”
“I asked you to look out for any weakness in my play—”
His quiet voice held a curiously hurt tone, like he’d let me in to something private and personal, and I’d scorned him.
“—and everything was fine. Then there was the game, and after that—” His dark eyes turned my way. “You got weird.”
Widow’s Peak, I wanted to say. It’s the fault of Widow’s Peak.
“What happened?”
I couldn’t talk, couldn’t get breath past the hold anxiety had on my lungs. Five years from now, it wouldn’t matter if he liked me or not. Five years from now, I’d be out of university and will have dated. Hopefully, I’ll have had sex, too. So, why did it feel like my life would begin or end with this moment? Why couldn’t my brain just be relaxed? Nell had love affairs go wrong all the time and she never lost a breath.
I, meanwhile, was about to go into a full-fledged panic attack.
“Maggie?”
“I—I—”
He took his foot off the accelerator. “I thought we were friends.”
Deep in the recesses of my frantic brain, I found a mental valium. Taking a breath that stumbled and hitched over my tight lungs, I said, “Yeah, I thought so, too.”
He slowed even more, stared at me. After a second, he must have remembered that he was supposed to have his focus on the road, because he stepped on the accelerator. “You lost me.”
“I asked if you wanted to go for pizza that night.”
“Yeah.” Annoyance, faint as early morning dawn. “But I couldn’t—I had to babysit my sister.”
I swallowed, grabbed my falling courage and said, “I was out driving that night. I saw your car.”
He looked over, his eyebrows pulled together.
“On Widow’s Peak.”
He started. “Widow’s Peak?” Craig rocked back in his seat. “The hill?” His head spun in my direction, and his hands followed the action. The car swerved to the side of the road. Craig stomped on the brakes, and the sedan screeched to a stop on the shoulder. For a moment, there was no sound save the rumbling of the idling engine. Craig hunched over the steering wheel, a statue etched in stone.
He muttered something but all I got were the words “hill” “life” and “twisted.” Craig took a long, deep breath and said, “Excuse me.” His fingers slid to the metal catch of the seatbelt and he released the restraint. Then he got out of the car and closed the door.
I sat, unsure. Hunching down, I peered out the back window.
He leaned with his back against the car.
In the pallid light, I saw his left fingers drumming against his right arm. I sat back, stared at the red lights of the dashboard. Then I twisted round and looked at him.
Tattered shreds of breath, transparent and white, spiralled down.
I figured I’d survived a raging ghost and an exploding house, I was pretty sure I could live through the confusing antics of a teenage boy. I climbed out and followed the line of the car to the trunk. “Craig?”
He twisted his head. “Widow’s Peak.” He half said, half laughed the words.
There was no humour in the laugh, only the forced air of someone trying not to be angry.
Craig turned, rested his arm on the roof of the car. “The hill.”
“You lost me.”
“My parents. My—” Words seemed to fail him because he leaned forward and muttered, “My parents.”
Logic said this was a weird thing to go all twisted over, but I spend my days talking to the dead. I probably wasn’t the best judge of “weird.” Instead of saying anything, I put my hand on his shoulder.
His gaze lifted from the ground to me. The night air turned his skin silver and his cheek shone like burnished marble. Craig turned his focus back to the ground, and the sharp lines of his profile—the straight nose, the hard sweep of his jaw—were swallowed by the darkness. He sighed low and tired.
“I’m sorry—I—”
“Don’t be.” His voice was more than low. It was quiet and empty, as though the world had left him alone to fight the demons that hid in lonely valleys. He chuckled, his breath streamed in a wind tunnel that funnelled toward the wheel. “My parents were the ones having sex in my car.” He straightened. “It wasn’t me you saw that night. It was them.”
Okay, so it would be gross to have your parents having sex in your car, but I didn’t understand his reaction. “Um—”
“No wonder you were acting weird.”
“I just didn’t—”
“I was really babysitting my sister,” he said.
�
��I believe you.”
“I’m not seeing anyone.”
I tried not to grin like a moron, tried to keep my mind focused on the subject at hand, but I couldn’t help the happy lift in my voice when I said, “Oh.”
He dropped his hands from the car and, crunching the gravel under his feet, stepped toward me.
I moved to him—seemed the friendly thing to do. The air was shifting around us, but I didn’t need ESP or a Hollywood orchestra playing violins to know—hope—where this was headed.
He took another step.
I was too transfixed in the heady elasticity of the moment, in the sweet caramel energy between us, to do anything but stand still. So close, he was so close.
“Maggie?”
He was a breath away from me. Literally. I had to go cross-eyed to stay focused on his face, and his nose was almost touching mine. “Yeah?”
And then he was kissing me. His lips were cold but his breath was warm and his tongue hot. It swayed into my mouth, supple and easy, doing a slow samba and hypnotizing me into its rhythm.
The air crackled and a jolt of electricity ran through me. It was high voltage and hit like a thousand-watt light shoved into a forty-watt outlet. Sparks and coloured fire, but, strangely, no pain. My body pulsed as the wave of energy rode me like a Hawaiian surf and left my muscles buzzing.
Craig broke away to look at my face.
As soon as contact was interrupted, my body snapped back to normal.
“Whoa. You always kiss like that?”
I blushed and decided on a partial truth. “Uh, you’re the first guy I’ve ever kissed.”
His breath warmed my skin. “No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
He laughed, gentle and easy, and every part of me melted into the sound. Craig cupped my face, his fingers curled around my neck, and his thumb caressed my cheek. Smiling he said, “Let see if it was just a one-time thing.”
It was either hormones or love, but I was all for another go.
His smiled widened into a grin. “I promise to take it slow.”
Electricity zapped my body again. “Okay.” It came out as a breathy sigh.
He tilted his head, leaned close, and pressed his lips to mine.
I closed my eyes.
He smiled against my mouth and kissed me again.
I softly moaned.
His tongue traced the outline of my lips. Then he slid it into my mouth.
I welcomed him, silently telling myself to play it cool, but all of me wanting to devour him bit by bit. I loved the feel of his tongue on mine. Our breaths tangled and he pulled me close.
He turned and leaned against the side of the car…I think. I was too busy glorying in the thick waves of his hair, inhaling the sweet scent of him, and memorizing the feel of his long legs against mine to really pay attention to anything.
After what seemed like a too-fast kiss, he pulled away.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere comfortable.”
I must have started or flinched because he laughed.
“I don’t mean that kind of comfortable. We haven’t even been on a date, yet, and I’m not that kind of guy.”
Relief made my breath whoosh. “I guess I’ll have to buy you a lobster dinner, first?”
He put his hand in the small of my back and guided me to the passenger seat. “Don’t they come from the same family as cockroaches?”
“Gross.”
“Yeah, you’re not getting anything out of me if you feed me mutant insects.” He kissed my cheek. “Let’s get you home.”
Chapter Seventeen
When I walked through the front door of the house, I heard the shrill ring of the phone. “I gotta get that,” I told Craig, kicking off my shoes but not bothering with my coat. “Just toss your stuff in the closet and meet me in the kitchen.”
“No worries.”
I rushed up the steps. Using my socks like ice skates, I slid into the kitchen, twisted around the corner, and grabbed the phone. “Hello?”
“Maggie! Can’t you answer your phone?”
“Dad?”
“Yeah. Dad. The guy who pays the bills and freaks out when his daughter’s almost blown to smithereens.”
“Whoa. Chill. Why didn’t you call my cell if you couldn’t reach me at home—didn’t Nell phone you?”
“Maggie.” He drew out my name with the exaggerated singsong tone he used when he was trying not to go ballistic. “Nell did phone me. She was thorough, detailed, but you can understand how, as a parent—your dad—I’d want the update from you.”
Yeah. I glanced over as Craig strode down the hallway. Now was probably not the time to admit teenage hormones had gotten the better of me.
“I tried phoning your cell but the battery’s dead.”
I blinked, surprised. “Are you sure?”
He didn’t say anything.
I could almost hear the “yeah, dumb-dumb, I’m sure” humming down the line. Digging into my pocket, I pulled out my cell. Yup. Dead.
“What was the agreement about the phone?”
“Dad, I swear I charge it every night—you know that. It’s always beside yours on the counter. You know it was plugged in.”
In his sigh, anger retreated to neutral territory and the horn sounded the end of the battle. “Maybe the battery’s going. We should check up on that.”
I nodded, then said, “Yeah. Sure” when I realized he couldn’t see my head movement.
“Nell said a friend of yours was bringing you home?”
The sudden memory of Craig’s kiss kicked me in the solar plexus. “Mm,” I grunted because I didn’t have the breath to speak.
“Who is it?”
“Uh. Craig.”
Silence.
In my mind’s eye, I saw our armies freeze, our respective generals twitching at the scent of another battle in the air.
“Why’re you saying his name like that?”
“Like what?”
“Maggie.” The soldier blew his horn.
“Uh—”
“You like this guy, don’t you?”
My eyes slid to Craig.
He frowned, blinked. In a split second, he caught the gist of the conversation because he suddenly became interested in the nubs of fabric on his black socks.
“You do like him.”
I winced and turned away from Craig. “Yeah.”
Dad sighed, long and heavy. “Of all the—”
My back straightened, ready to brawl it out.
“Does he like you, too? Capital ‘L’ like?”
“Yeah.”
Another sigh. “The mother in me is thrilled you’ve finally found someone. The father in me wants to shove a shotgun in his crotch and threaten him with severe harm if he does anything to hurt or take advantage of you.”
“Let’s stay in your feminine side.”
“I feel very conflicted about all this.”
I glanced behind me. “I’ll hide the shell casings.”
Craig’s head jerked back, and he stared at me, wide-eyed.
Dad sighed again.
“Careful. You’re starting to sound like one of those indecent phone perverts.”
“Does he know? About…you?”
The light feeling in my heart, buoyed at the moment Craig kissed me and floating since our lips touched, plummeted to the ground. “No.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
“On all levels.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks and the tips of my ears. I turned my head away from Craig and whispered, “We’re not there, yet.”
“This makes me feel less conflicted.”
“Good.”
“I’d still hide the shotgun shells if I were you.”
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I didn’t push, just waited to see if the bugler would put down his horn or sound the beginning of an unnecessary battle.
“Where’s Serge?”
I kept my voice low. “With everything that happened, I don’t think he’ll be around for a couple of days. He exploded pretty badly.”
“He’s the reason behind the fire?”
I sighed. “Yeah.” I could almost see him rubbing his forehead. “I should go—Craig’s here…and stuff.”
“Yeah, right. Stuff.”
I waited.
“Maggie, I trust you.”
“I know.”
“On all levels.”
“I know.”
“Fix the phone tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“And Maggie?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
I smiled. “Me, too.” I hung up.
Craig stood and ran the palms of his hands on his thighs.
Man, I loved those thighs.
“Everything okay?” He nodded toward the phone.
“Yeah. Everything’s great.”
He grinned.
I melted. “Uh, do you want something to drink?”
“Maggie.”
The hoarse, guttural voice that groaned my name would have made the hair on the back of my neck prickle, and the sight of Serge, burned and flambéed, would have made me shriek had I not experienced the funhouse of horrors when I was five and Dad took me to a pioneer settlement in North Dakota.
Still, Serge’s appearance wasn’t likely to make any Top Ten Sexiest Bachelors lists, here or in the otherworld where—I assumed from the imaginative manner death can take—the standard was far lower.
“Maggie.”
I ignored him, partly because I didn’t want to explain to Craig why I was talking to air, partly because I was pissed at Serge. I figured since he’d tried to blow me up, I deserved to be a little peeved.
Craig moved to me. “It’s Serge, isn’t it?”
Now that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. Prickle, tickle, and stand straight.
“What?”
He stepped closer and reached his arm out.
I moved, dazed, into his embrace. “What?”
“Serge. You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”
Sudden relief that my gift stayed buried it the moist darkness of secret earth jousted with the piercing disappointment that I was still alone with this talent and in this life. “Um—” I pressed my forehead against his shoulder. “Yeah.”
