“Seriously?” she said, cocking her eyebrow comically.
“What’s with that look?” I asked absentmindedly.
“You just baffle me sometimes. Wilder is not pushing himself on you. He sent one text telling you he was in town. What if he’s got a girl already?”
“Right. I bet he does,” I breathed, remembering his essence. I moved my head from side to side as my stomach flipped in the bad way again. I decided long ago that I was in love with the idea of Wilder, not Wilder himself, and that flippity-floppity feeling always proved my point.
“Why do you feel the need to match up your exes?” Cadence asked as her pale green eyes cascaded over me. She was playing the part of the psychologist again.
“I want them to be happy,” I said with a faint smile.
“To use your own words, you don’t have to be with someone to be happy. Those boys will go off and marry some girl, have a lot of kids—but Indie, they won’t forget you. You let them be themselves, helped them figure out who they are. They know you are special. They also know you are untamable.” She rolled her eyes. “No doubt, you are all going to be best friends for life.”
There was that hint again. If she and Gavin did actually split, I knew she would start dropping hints left and right that it was too hard on her to have him around. I needed to shut that idea down right now.
“I agree. I could never send Gavin out of my life, or Mason for that matter.”
“You had no issues sending Wilder away,” she rebutted.
“Nope.”
She playfully glared at me. She wanted all the juicy details about what went down between me and Wilder, but I never told her anything. And I wasn’t about to start now.
Cadence pointed to my wrist, to the scarf. “That scarf got in your way again, didn’t it? Or was it the North Wing?”
That right there was exactly why I would never tell her anything about me and any guy.
I confided in her years ago about images that I could see and whispers I could hear in my mind. Even though I was blushing with a warm excitement at the time, she managed to jerk me down into the cold reality by saying I had a crush on a ghost, someone that had been long gone and was clearly in love with another girl. She didn’t get it. And later when the images I would see in the North Wing became clearer, I kept that to myself.
I stood up. “Nope. There is no sense in making love work. It either does or it doesn’t. Two beats, or not two beats. It’s one of the few things in life that are black and white.”
“Two beats. That is your thing, not theirs,” she said so quietly that I could swear her tone was laced with jealousy. “You dodged the one guy that could have pulled you out of this grief you are fighting, for fear of what? You can’t possibly enjoy living life looking back. Like I said, you might need time alone. You dreamed of the death of everyone you hold close; that is the end of something, which means the birth of something better is coming.”
Coded conversation. She was pushing me to put distance between myself and Gavin, and I didn’t even care to know why; I was ending this banter.
Truth be told, she had commitment issues, too, but her exes didn’t set up camp in her life. Most of the time, they never spoke to her again. Not sure whose fault that was—I never pried into her life, and for the most part she did the same for me.
I briskly walked past her.
“Where are you going?”
“Darkroom.”
“It’s late.”
“I’m wide awake.”
Our room might as well have been an apartment. It was almost two thousand square feet, and it was supposed to be a study or some such thing, but we transformed it into something of our own. After we lost our family, neither of us could find the courage to sleep in separate rooms in this massive manor that was well over forty thousand square feet. Parts of the manor were over two hundred years old; others were newer. One wing was basically brand new, built ten years back by Mrs. Rasure—on my dime, I’m sure.
My darkroom was behind a bookcase in our room, down a winding stone stairway.
Photography has always held my interest, at least since that lady Megan gave me my birth mom’s camera. My only problem was that photography, if done correctly, captures emotions, and I can’t feel emotions because if I do—I freeze everything. I ruin the images.
Though I’d found several cameras that could withstand my touch, I hated the barrier I had, I hated that I needed help to bring the images to life the old fashioned way. I just wanted to feel something, someone, and not fear destroying it. I think that’s why theater was my second strongest interest. On the stage, you could be anyone for a moment, completely check out and become someone else. And when you became that person, you understood them and inevitably saw life differently from that point on. According to the guys, I was always on stage. The consummate actress.
They’d quickly figured out that the real Indie was deep inside, that when I was around them I became the girl they dreamed about—and when they acted on that, I couldn’t bear the lie anymore; I walked away in silence. They always followed, vowing to be my friend instead. At one time, I feared they were just waiting on the second act, waiting to see if the heroine would finally tell the hero who she was.
I had a few tables in here that held everything I needed to develop film, the old-fashioned way. Strings were crisscrossed throughout the room, holding the images I was working on.
On my desk was the camera that lady Megan had given me on that fateful day. I had never tried developing the film that was in it; I couldn’t bring myself to. I was sure it held images of my birth mother, but I didn’t want her image to cloud the memories of the woman who saved my life, who gave me a home.
What was even more terrifying was that I saw nothing when I touched that camera. That didn’t make sense to me because that was truly the only possession I had that connected me to my bloodline. So, it should be the only item in my life that birthed vivid images.
I knew in my dream that it was the camera I was going back for, that I was willing to die for.
I clenched my back teeth as I thought of the ice I had to swim past in that dream, how I couldn’t get Mason to the surface. I wondered why the one time I would need to create ice, I couldn’t. Why I couldn’t just dream like a normal person.
I reached for the camera, and with my touch it froze over; the entire table did. One lonely, angry tear came to the edge of my eye. I was losing control, right when I needed it.
I heard a familiar whisk of wind and turned to see Skylynn. She looked just as frazzled and confused as I did. I was starting to think she really was a figment of my imagination, a front I hid behind, and that front was crumbling like I was.
“Why are you here?” she asked in a tone that was full of bewilderment.
“This is my darkroom.”
“That is not what I mean. Why are you here? What happened?” she asked breathlessly.
I glanced back at the table. The ice was gone now, but that wasn’t odd. Usually, as soon as my touch left, the ice did, too. My gaze found hers. “I had a night terror—words with Rasure—a lot on my mind.”
“Night terror,” she said, angling her head down but letting her eyes hold my gaze. “Explain,” Skylynn said shortly, which was odd. She was usually so calm with me. I knew she had a fierce, protective temper laced with impatience, but it had never been directed at me.
“There is nothing to explain. I was in a car, a train came, and we dodged out of the way into the icy lake. I had to save my friends. I woke up in the rafters of my room after Cadence turned on a light.”
If Skylynn could have turned paler, she just did. “Listen,” she said, stepping closer. “I’m going to help you deal with this. I promise. But right now I have something else that I have to do.”
“Then why are you here?” I said as I turned away from her. She was in front of me before one beat had passed.
“I need that scarf.”
“Now? You need it now? Are you c
razy? I almost froze the entire room in front of Rasure. I basically breathed out fog. She is looking for one thing to hold against me. I can’t give it to you.”
In that beat, the scarf was in her hands. I didn’t even feel her touch my skin or see her move. I did feel something, though: emptiness. I felt hollow, lost.
“I told you I needed that!” I bellowed.
“And I told you that I did, that it was not mine to give. Listen to me. I will be back. I will protect you.”
“Knock knock,” I heard Mason say from the stairwell, beats before he appeared.
When he landed on the bottom step, I was astonished to see his chocolate eyes meet Skylynn’s, then move to me. “Am…I interrupting something?” he asked with a boyish smirk as he looked over Skylynn once more.
Skylynn sighed. “Some dream you had there, Indie,” she breathed. She glanced back at me. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” And with that, she vanished.
“Skylynn!” I yelled after her, still feeling the emptiness that surfaced when she took that scarf away. I circled in place, calling her name, demanding that she appear again.
Mason was at my side instantly, pulling me to his chest.
“So that was the elusive Skylynn,” he said as he caressed my short blonde hair.
“You really did see her,” I whispered tearfully, pulling his lean body closer to me, gripping him for dear life.
Chapter Three
Mason didn’t shiver as my touch all but froze him. Instead, he pulled me closer, finally urging me to the oversized floral couch that was along the side wall, the place where I would lie and think for hours.
Besides Cadence, he was the only one I’d let down here, the only one who understood how private this room was to me.
“I don’t understand why you saw her now and never before,” I said to him, catching his gaze as his hand moved across my back.
“Maybe she didn’t want me to see her before. I caught her off guard,” he said, smoothly leaning back and inviting me into his embrace. “I never doubted she was real…” he promised with a murmur.
I reached for the blanket on the arm of the couch and pushed it between us in a vain attempt to shield him from my freezing touch.
His eyes smiled painfully at me. “I like the cold…always have.”
I let my exhausted stare fall to the floor as I leaned away from him. “I thought you and Jewls were on again?” He wasn’t coming on to me. He hadn’t dared to do that since we were sixteen. Nevertheless, I wanted to move the conversation on to him and his life instead of mine. I didn’t want to think about the reasons he never minded the cold.
He pulled me back against him. “On, off…I can’t tell the difference. I wasn’t hitting on you, Indie. I really do like the cold. It reminds me of…well, you know what it reminds me of.”
I felt a blush spread across my pale skin.
“On again, off again Jewls knows you’re here?” I asked, trying to change the subject once again.
“Maybe. She knows Gavin and I were out tonight. Your house is usually what ‘out’ means for Gavin.”
“Apparently, not lately. And don’t play coy with me. Cadence called the two of you and told you about the night terror. You’re supposed to come down here and act like you are giving them room to talk and in the meantime dig inside my head and make sure I’m okay—and if Jewls isn’t working out, Sophia told me she had a thing for you today.”
I heard him breathe a grin, and felt his arm tighten around my waist. I wanted to tell him to hold me tighter, to do something, anything, to fill the void I was feeling now that Skylynn had stripped me of the one thing that had kept me sane all these years.
“Okay, so maybe he called her, and maybe she told him you had a run-in with the queen of evil right after climbing the ceiling like a mad woman. And maybe we were only a mile away and decided to swing by for a nightcap. They still need to talk, and I still like hiding in this darkroom.”
When I didn’t respond, he leaned me back so he could look into my eyes. “Is it Wilder? Is he pushing you?”
“No, he learned the hard way about that last fall.”
“Which led to him vacating town,” he said, raising his brow to emphasize his point. “I was really rooting for the guy.” His grin spread across his deceivingly innocent face, meaning he wasn’t at all rooting for him. He always said Wilder didn’t sit well with him, but he could never tell me why. Mason kept Wilder close anyway, surely trying to figure out what it was about him that he didn’t trust.
“Yeah. He told me you gave him tips—starting with the Halloween mask,” I muttered as I thought of the day that happened.
When I’d broken it off with both Mason and Gavin, stopped it before it became too serious, they both asked me why, and I told them it was because I couldn’t feel the beats, that I wanted to feel two rapid beats in one. I wanted to feel that burn of life on the inside of me, the one I felt when Skylynn gave me my scarf, the one I felt in the North Wing. I told them that I wanted them to feel that for someone.
To be funny, when Wilder started to ask about me, when he was trying to find a way to introduce himself to me for the first time, Gavin and Mason told him to wear a mask, catch me off guard.
Of course, they were hiding outside my window, the one Wilder was perched on outside my bedroom. When the laughter stopped and I found my breath again, they asked me how many beats right as Wilder pulled his mask off. When my gaze met his, I wanted nothing more than to feel those beats. I didn’t, but like a fool I did try.
I was afraid Wilder was back in town to force me to try again. I didn’t want it to get ugly between us. I’d had enough permanent goodbyes in my life, and I had vowed not to add to that list if I could help it. I knew it would only take one word from me to cause Mason and Gavin to ask him to leave again. No doubt, Gavin shared Mason’s lack of trust when it came to Wilder. That hurt me, too. Wilder didn’t deserve to be an outsider, and that is exactly what I made him out to be.
“I heard he met someone. Not sure how solid that is,” Mason said under his breath as his hands danced across my back, reminding me of how awesome his touch had always felt. It was never forceful, and it seemed to hum to the music that was in him, the music he loved to play.
Without warning, my breath turned to fog. He leaned me back once more, pulling my chin up so my eyes were inches from his, which made my heart race.
“What?” I said in a foggy gasp.
“I just wanted to watch them change,” he whispered as his fingertips delicately traced my jawline.
My eyes were like Cadence’s, a pale green, but when my curse surfaced they turned deep blue, the color of ice.
“One day, someone is going to push past this cold, and when they do you will see that it was nothing more than a wall keeping you from being happy.”
“I am happy. I have the pleasure of calling the four most amazing people I have ever met my best friends.”
“And three of them are your exes,” he said with a smirk.
“That makes me a bad person, doesn’t it? Keeping all of you in my life?”
“‘Keeping? Good luck kicking us out.”
He held out my arm so it would catch the dim light of the room. Along my shoulder and a few spots down my arm were bruises.
“What did you do?” he said with a gasp, sitting me up so he could see my other arm.
“I don’t know. Maybe climbing the bookcase,” I muttered.
“You may walk into things or stumble now and again, but you never bruise. Not like this.”
That was an inside joke. Every dare he gave me in the great outdoors, I matched and usually not gracefully. But I would never show a mark on my body. He would joke that that was a good thing, that someone might take him as a violent boyfriend if we came out of the woods with all the bruises I should have had.
“It was a wicked dream. I’ve never fought that hard for anything,” I said under my breath. “God, I’m so selfish. I couldn’t lose you and stay sane.�
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“No one is going anywhere,” he promised.
“That is what my mom said the last time I had a night terror. She was wrong. I wish she was right, but she was wrong. I’m terrified. Rasure is going to do something to me—she is going to make sure I’m utterly alone.”
“I’m not scared of her. Neither is Gavin. You’re fine. We’re not going anywhere.”
“How fair is that to you? The both of you? You have your own lives to live. I shouldn’t be so dependent on you.”
He reached for my head and moved it from side to side.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to see if you bumped your head during that climb.”
I elbowed him. Even though he was teasing me, there was truth behind his words. I’d always told them I was independent, that I didn’t need anyone, and now I was saying the opposite. I was facing one of my many demons and being honest with myself.
He laid me down along the couch and tucked himself against me. His eyes tenderly smiled at me. “We were each other’s first,” he whispered as his hand clenched my side. “I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that in distant, random daydreams, the thought of us being each other’s last has not crossed my mind, but I’m not a fool either. I know what we had was fleeting, and in its wake I found one of the best friends I could ask for. I don’t mind the cold, Indie, and if you ever just need to be held, you call me. You’re not going to lose me. Tell your nightmare to go to hell.”
I held my breath, then said, “I’m the reason you and Jewls are having so many problems.”
He adjusted the blanket, pushing it between us and around me at the same time. “I want a girl who is sure of herself, who knows no boundaries. If Jewls is too insecure to accept our friendship, then it’s just not meant to be.”
“Like you would be okay with her cuddling on a couch with some guy.”
“Some guy, no. A best friend that only sees her that way, yes. It was just a fling, one that I don’t have the energy to keep up with.”
Dangerous Lovers Page 31
