Reclaimed

by Sarah Guillory

  Jenna wore gray cotton shorts and a gray tank top with maroon lettering. SHS Warriors. She was drenched, and I envied the rain. But despite the lightning, and the mud that was splattered on her shins, she was grinning. Watching her, I fell in love with storms.

  She was pure movement. Powerful. Graceful. Moments after she appeared, she vanished into the trees, only to reappear much closer to me.

  She didn’t see me until she was almost on top of me. Her smile disappeared as she jumped, startled, and darted away from me. I scared her. Not surprising. I sort of had that effect on people. Then she smiled at me, and my heart felt too big for my chest.

  “Ian! You scared the hell out of me!”

  Of course she thought I was Ian. Again. I was willing to bet he had no intention of telling her about me. I couldn’t blame him. I’d made a mess out of everything. And he didn’t even remember what happened to the last girlfriend of his I kissed. So the fact that I wanted to touch this beautiful girl standing in front of me threatened to ruin me. I’d always been a little self-destructive.

  Jenna’s brow furrowed, and I knew she was wondering why I hadn’t said anything. Why hadn’t I said anything?

  “Or not,” she said. “You’re Luke, aren’t you?”

  “Guilty.” In all ways possible.

  “Sorry.”

  And then we stood there, staring at one another while the rain fell through the trees. Lightning struck somewhere nearby, the resulting boom shaking the earth.

  “You’d better get home,” I told her. Better for everyone. Safer.

  Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like me telling her what to do. “You’d better get home too,” she said. She looked behind her. “Look, I live right over there. You should come in and wait out the storm. You’re a good three miles from your house.”

  I should have said no, but I didn’t want to. And I usually did what I wanted, even though it almost always got me in trouble. Ian was going to be pissed. Jenna just might cause way more damage than any storm.

  Jenna jogged ahead, and it wasn’t as easy to keep up with her as I thought it would be. I stared at the space in between her shoulders blades, pointedly keeping myself from staring at her butt. Or her legs. Both were pretty nice.

  Her gray shirt melded into the sheet of rain. We sprinted behind a row of houses. With no trees to slow its fall, the rain pounded down on us, making sure I was thoroughly drenched. More lightning, louder thunder.

  I followed Jenna into her garage and through the back door, both of us dripping water all over the tile. She handed me a towel, but I was too wet for it to do much good.

  “I’ll be right back,” she told me, and she disappeared.

  I felt really stupid just standing there. I tried to squeeze some of the wet out of my clothes, but that just made an even larger puddle on the floor. I was trying to clean it up when Jenna came back.

  “Here.” She handed me a stack of clothes. “It’s the best I could do.” She pointed to the laundry room. “Change in there and toss your clothes in the dryer.”

  “Already trying to get me out of my clothes.”

  She laughed, and I felt the world stop. Her laugh was deep and loud and so full of possibility that it made me sad. Sad because I wanted to know her better. Sad because I couldn’t.

  “Just do what I said,” she ordered.

  I did as I was told, like a good boy. If she only knew. I winced at that. I would rather she didn’t. I had lost count of the lives I’d managed to destroy. That right there should’ve made me leave this girl alone. It didn’t.

  I threw my clothes in the dryer, shoes too, which banged loudly once I turned the thing on. I put on the clothes she’d given me.

  “You’re joking, right?” I shouted through the closed door, and over the thump of the dryer, I heard her giggle.

  “Best I could do, remember?”

  She’d brought me some of her clothes. The sweatpants were about four inches too short, and the T-shirt was really tight across my chest and arms. It was going to be all stretched out when I was through with it. I looked ridiculous. Not really the way I’d played it all out in my head. It was going to be hard to come off cool when I was dressed this way.

  “This is pretty cruel,” I said as I came into the kitchen. Her face turned red as she tried not to laugh. “I mean, first you arrange for this storm so you can get me naked. Then you force me to wear girls’ clothes.”

  “I didn’t force you to do anything.”

  “So you wouldn’t mind if I just went au naturel while I waited for my clothes to dry?” I asked.

  She eyed me, daring me. “Be my guest.”

  She had no idea who she was talking to. I started to take off the shirt.

  “No!” she hollered. She sounded a little afraid.

  I laughed. “You’re right. The full effect can be a bit overwhelming.”

  She filled a kettle and set it on the stove. “We don’t have any men around here,” she explained, “so it was that or one of my mom’s dresses.”

  “Then this is perfect.” I sat down in one of the large chairs over by the window. It was a really comfortable room, and Jenna looked at home here, almost as much as she had in the woods. Almost. Stacked books sat on the small table between the two chairs, all of them worn and weathered, their covers creased and torn, their pages ruffled. An old lamp warmed the room as the rain continued to splash against the windows.

  Jenna stood in the kitchen, barefoot and wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that matched mine. A winged shoe was stamped at her hip and across the front of the shirt. Her hair hung in a braid down her back and left a wet spot between her shoulder blades, and I discovered that I had never wanted to kiss someone as much as I wanted to kiss her.

  “You run cross-country?” I asked, trying to get the image of her lips out of my head.

  “Yep. I’m one of two girls on the team.” She twisted her mouth down, but her voice gave her away—she was proud of that. She took two mugs out of the cabinet, and I tried not to look at the flat planes of her stomach as her T-shirt rode up. The kettle began to scream, and I looked away.

  I picked up the book on the top of the stack and flipped through it. India.

  “I like to read about different places,” she explained, pouring the boiling water over the tea bags. “Sugar?”

  “Sure.”

  She finished with the tea and handed me the steaming mug before folding herself into the other chair.

  “So. Twins. That’s really cool.”

  “It used to be,” I admitted. Now it was just awkward.

  “Which one of you is the oldest?”

  “I am, by seven minutes.” The room wrapped itself around Jenna. “You have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Nope. Only child,” she said. “Just me, my mom, and Mops.”

  “Who’s Mops?”

  “My grandmother. She owns the secondhand store where I work.” She paused, her mouth forming a perfect “o.” Then she smiled. “That was you in there that day.”

  I had to look away; her eyes were making me nervous. They kept me from thinking straight. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t supposed to go to town.”

  “Why not?”

  Shit. “Let’s just say I got into a little trouble back home. It’s a long story.” She had no idea how long. And she wasn’t going to know, not if I could help it.

  JENNA

  At first it was weird, looking at Ian who wasn’t Ian. But after a while, I saw Luke. Even though he looked exactly like Ian, Luke was different. Darker. Funnier. His eyes had questions behind them rather than laughter, his jaw harsher than his brother’s.

  I hardly noticed the storm. Hardly noticed the banging coming from the dryer or the fact that my tea had gotten cold. I really didn’t notice anything but Luke.

  “God, can your mother even tell you two apart?” I joked. I’d been staring at Luke for the past half-hour and I was just noticing the subtle differences.

  It was obviously the wrong questio
n to ask. Luke’s eyes got very dark and there was something dangerous in his face. For a moment, I was afraid of him. For a moment, I realized I’d invited a complete stranger into the house. And that my mom wouldn’t be home for hours.

  But then he grinned, and my fears melted away in the warmth of that smile. “We used to play tricks on her all the time when we were little. But tell me about Solitude,” Luke said. He looked genuinely interested—poor thing. It wouldn’t take long.

  “Solitude sucks.”

  He smiled. “Surely there are some good things about it.”

  Not really. “Everybody is in everybody else’s business and I just want to go somewhere where no one knows me or my mom or my grandmother, where I can start fresh and do all sorts of unpredictable things I can’t do here.”

  “Like what?” he asked. I could have drowned in the blue of his eyes.

  “I don’t know. Anything. Everything. Just last week my best friend Becca was drinking coffee at a sidewalk café in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and in the Louvre looking at paintings she didn’t appreciate.” I hated how bitter I sounded, but I’d been working and taking care of my mom and being responsible. “Hell, I’d settle for running naked through a subway station or something.”

  “That I would like to see,” he said.

  “There are some good things about Solitude.” I tried not to sound so cranky. “I love the store and the old train yard. I run in the woods all the time without ever seeing anyone.”

  Luke smiled at me.

  “Well, rarely seeing anyone,” I amended. “And the lake. Solitude Point is pretty cool.”

  “Solitude Point—sounds lonely.”

  “Yeah, everything around here is pretty lonely, but it’s a nice place to go if you want quiet. There’s this bluff, the Point, which juts out over the water. We used to jump off, before they outlawed it.”

  “I’d love to see it,” he said, and his voice sent ripples through my stomach.

  “We’ll go sometime, take a picnic or something,” I promised. I shouldn’t have. I should have been thinking about Ian. Not that he was my boyfriend. But it felt a little like cheating. But for once, I was doing something that wasn’t completely responsible. And that felt a little like freedom.

  “I should probably get going,” Luke said.

  I turned around and looked out the window. It was still pouring. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “No, really, that’s okay. I can walk. I’d rather walk.”

  “Not in this. That’s stupid.”

  He looked out the window, then back at me. “Okay. I do need to get back before my mom gets home. She doesn’t like me being out.”

  I couldn’t imagine what he’d done that was so bad. I didn’t really want to.

  Luke disappeared into the laundry room, and I laid my head back against the chair. I was more than a little bit confused. Unsettled.

  “Not completely dry, but it’ll do,” he said, coming back into the kitchen. “I just left yours in there.”

  “That’s fine. Let me grab my shoes.”

  We sprinted out to the Bronco, but it didn’t matter—we were both soaked by the time we climbed inside.

  “Cool ride,” Luke said.

  It was. I’d loved that Bronco since I was eight years old. “Yeah, although she doesn’t have air, and she burns through oil really fast.”

  “Those are the best kinds. They have personality. I miss my truck.”

  “Where is it?” I asked. The wipers were on high, but the rain was coming down too fast for them to be much use. I drove slowly.

  Luke stared out the windshield. “I got in trouble last summer and Dad made me get rid of it. He also took my phone and anything else useful he didn’t think I deserved.” When he looked at me, his eyes were hard. “The silver truck is Ian’s. Dad bought it for him because he’s the perfect twin. I’m the disappointment, so I had to buy my own.” He shrugged, then grinned at me. “I liked it better that way. I helped my uncle build cabinets all summer to buy that truck. I earned it.”

  The windows fogged up, making it hard to see where I was going. We couldn’t roll them down, so it was stuffy and sticky inside the Bronco. I didn’t know what to say, so we didn’t say anything, just listened to the rain loud on the roof and the back and forth of the wipers.

  The dirt road was muddy and slippery, and I had to concentrate to keep out of the ditch. I wondered how I was going to act if Ian were home.

  I didn’t see his truck when we pulled up, but then again, I couldn’t really see anything at all. “Thanks for the ride,” Luke said.

  “No problem.” But it was. The fact that I was hoping to see him again was a big problem.

  Luke pulled the handle, but the door didn’t budge. He smiled and pushed against it with his shoulder. Nothing.

  “Yeah, sometimes it gets stuck. You have to pull it up, out, and slightly to the left,” I told him.

  He tried and failed. I laughed. “It’s an art, really. Here.”

  I put the car in park and leaned across Luke. My arm pressed against his chest as I jimmied the handle. The door popped open, and rain poured in. Luke’s hand brushed mine as he pulled the door partway closed, blocking some of the rain. I was embarrassed at how hard my heart was pounding. Surely it was loud enough to be heard over the rain. I slid over into my seat.

  “You’re going to get me in trouble,” he murmured.

  Funny, I thought as he disappeared into the rain. I was thinking the exact same thing.

  FOURTEEN

  JENNA

  It was late, that ambiguous place where time was suspended and yesterday kissed tomorrow before putting on today. When my phone rang, I wasn’t sure if the call was coming from Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. I groaned and groped for the phone on the nightstand, knocking my glass of water to the floor.

  I swore and tumbled out of bed, stepping in the water on the floor, cussed some more, then stumbled around the room and tried to locate the wailing phone. I stubbed my toe on the corner of the bed, which woke me up quickly. When I finally found the phone in the pocket of my shorts, it had stopped ringing.

  I glared at the screen. I’d missed a call from Ian. We’d texted a few times since the lake party, but we kept missing each other’s calls. Work, and my mother, took up most of my time these days. I jumped when it started ringing again.

  “What?” I snapped, trying to keep my voice down so I wouldn’t wake my mom. If she’d been able to sleep through all that in the first place.

  “Hey, it’s Luke.”

  “You want me to hate you, don’t you?”

  He chuckled softly. “I thought we could find some trouble together.”

  My stomach tightened. “How about telling me what you want without delivering some over-rehearsed line.”

  “You promised to take me on a picnic at the Point,” he reminded me.

  “It’s the middle of the night!” What was he thinking? And sneaking out with Ian’s brother seemed like a very bad idea. “Some other time.”

  “But I’m awake now.” He was pleading. It might have been cute if it wasn’t so annoying.

  But now I was awake. Responsible Jenna would have said no, especially after recently kissing Ian. But then I thought of Becca, and some of my guilt turned into a desire for adventure. For once I was going to do something simply because I wanted to. And maybe partly because I shouldn’t.

  “All right.” I sighed, a little too dramatically. He laughed; he knew I wanted to go.

  “When can you be here?”

  “I’m here now.”

  I rushed to the window and looked out, trying to see anything in the dark. The moon peered down, but it wasn’t much help. There might have been a darker shadow underneath the tree, but I couldn’t be sure. “Prove it.”

  A flashlight came on. Luke held it underneath his chin like kids do when they’re telling ghost stories. I grinned.

  “Give me five minutes.”

  I managed to make it out the
back door without waking Mom. Only the morning would reveal whether this had been worth it or not. Luke stood underneath the tree, his grin devilish. I didn’t know if my racing pulse had more to do with him or the possibility of getting busted.

  “I’m not so sure about this,” I said.

  “Which is exactly why you should do it,” he argued. “You’ll never get another chance. You’ll never get a do-over, because you’ll never be at this exact same moment again.”

  Well, when he put it that way. “So who’s driving?” I asked.

  “Me.” He took off across the yard. “I parked down the street.”

  We didn’t say anything as we walked to the truck. The air tasted different, and it felt like the entire neighborhood was stuffed with cotton. Nothing moved except us.

  I climbed in the truck, careful not to slam the door too loudly or think too much about what I was doing. There were two large bags in the backseat. “What’s that?” I asked as Luke slid into the driver’s seat.

  “The picnic, of course.”

  “How did you know I’d come?”

  It was too dark in the truck to read the look he gave me. But I felt his eyes on mine. “Girls have a hard time telling me no.”

  “I’m sure I won’t find it too difficult.”

  He grinned. “You already did.”

  The engine roared as Luke started the truck, saving me from having to come up with some appropriate retort. I was sure we’d just woken up the entire neighborhood, but everything stayed dark as we pulled away from the curb and down the deserted street. It felt like we were the only two people left on an abandoned planet. We rolled through the center of town. The streets were dark, the streetlights like tiny fairies suspended in the night. Even the lawn in front of the courthouse looked charming, the flowers bursts of color in the headlights, fading to gray as we passed. It was as if the whole world had pulled out its magnificence just for us—like we were seeing the secret splendor that only appeared when everyone was sleeping. We were silent, and I held my breath, afraid to shatter the spell.