by S. J. West
“I’m so sorry.” Zoe looked at me. “She told me you and Jace left me to be with her, but I didn’t believe her at first. Then she kept talking about all the things she and I would do together, and I guess I just started thinking I would be staying with her forever. She seemed so nice. Was it all an act?”
“I think she did care about you,” I said, feeling a need to make sure Zoe didn’t start doubting her judgment of people. Though, I hoped Zoe learned a lesson by her experience and started listening to people with more skepticism. “And yes, she was lonely, but that doesn’t justify what she did to us.”
Zoe drew her knees up to her chin, physically withdrawing into herself, which was the last thing I wanted to see her do. I prayed the little precocious girl who asked a million questions would reappear, but knew it would take time to draw her out again.
We decided to stop that evening around supper time. We were all getting a bit antsy sitting in the van in cramped quarters for so many hours and were in desperate need of some fresh air. Ian stopped in what used to be a state park, which had a lake with a sign boasting the largest number of bass in the area.
While Kirk and Teegan watched Jace fish, Zoe, Ian, and I gathered some wood to start a fire. By the time we had a fire roaring, Jace had already caught three fish. Kirk volunteered to assume the cooking duties, and Zoe and Teegan helped. Ian found an excuse to get away from everyone, saying he needed to do a quick tune-up on the van. Blue and I sat with Jace by the lake while he continued to catch more fish as darkness settled over the day.
“How close do you think we are?” I asked Jace.
“If we don’t run into any problems, we’ll probably be there by this time tomorrow,” Jace said, casting out his line into the water with one fluid stroke of his arm.
I looked over my shoulder at Zoe. Her face was scrunched up in disgust as she watched Kirk pull the entrails out of a fish. “Do you think she’s up for the challenge of getting us across the barrier?”
“I don’t know,” Jace answered, a worried look shadowing his features. “As fast as she’s growing, it has to be taking a toll on her body. We might end up having to wait until we know for sure she can handle it.”
I nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I definitely don’t want to get caught in the middle of the barrier when her energy gives out. We wouldn’t survive very long through that type of radiation unshielded.”
“I can’t say I would mind a few more days alone with you,” Jace confessed, glancing over at me, watching for my reaction to his words.
“We’ll be together for a long time,” I told him, deciding not to overthink the situation. “You’ve already seen it.”
Jace didn’t make a reply, and I got the distinct feeling he was holding something back from me. Did it have to do with the promise he tried to make me give him? That I wouldn’t leave the Southern Kingdom no matter what? What exactly had he seen to make him want to change my future, a future where he and I were supposed to be together?
Jace stuck his fishing pole in the rocky bed between his feet.
“I found something a little while ago,” he said, reaching inside his pocket to pull something out. “Open one of your hands.”
I held out my right hand to him, palm up. Jace laid a pinkish heart-shaped rock in my hand. It still held warmth from his body. He cradled my hand in one of his and used his other hand to gently curl my fingers around the stone.
“You hold my heart, Skye. You always will. I want you to keep this, so you don’t forget that.”
My heart ached with the sweet sentiment of Jace’s words and his thoughtfulness, but my pulse began to race as I realized what else he was saying.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked him in a voice expecting an answer and not a runaround. “Why do I feel like you keep trying to say goodbye?”
“Everything will turn out the way it should,” he said. “Just always remember how much I love you.”
Frustrated, I grabbed Jace by the front of his coat with both hands and forced him to look at me. “Something bad’s going to happen, but you’re refusing to tell me what. I need for you to tell me!”
Jace put his hands over mine in an attempt to calm my rising ire. “Skye, I can’t tell you. You just need to trust me to do what’s right for all of us. Do you trust me?”
I nodded. I may have trusted him, but I didn’t trust my voice not to betray me in that moment. On impulse, I pulled Jace toward me, his face only inches from mine.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I warned him, before crushing his lips with mine, making sure he knew how much I cared for him, if not in words then through action.
I couldn’t admit to him that I was falling in love with him because I didn’t think that would be fair. What if I reached the Southern Kingdom and all the feelings I had harbored for Ash over the years bubbled to the surface and overshadowed my newfound feelings for Jace? I didn’t see the point in raising his hopes only to stomp them into the ground later on.
I pulled away, breathless from the kiss. I felt shattered from the inside out, broken open. When I looked into his eyes, I could tell he wanted me to say the words he most wanted to hear, but I knew it was the wrong time—if there would ever be a right time.
Instead, I let go of his jacket and walked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
After supper, I feigned tiredness, which wasn’t that hard to do and hid away from Jace’s questioning eyes inside the van. He wanted more from me than I was ready to give or admit to. I wasn’t sure which was truer. I needed time to figure out what I was feeling but knew I might not have the luxury to dwell on the subject before reaching the Southern Kingdom.
Blue snuggled up against my back, like he had since he was a puppy. His warmth and my own true tiredness soon put me into an uneasy slumber. A little while later I faintly heard the others reenter the van and knew without completely waking up they were finding their own places to rest for the night. I let myself fall back to sleep in the comfort of knowing my friends were close by.
“Skye.”
At the calling of my name, my eyes flew open. I turned my head and saw Jace’s face hovering inches above mine in the darkness.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
He bent down and whispered in my ear, his hot breath tickling as he said, “Nothing’s wrong, I just want to show you something while it’s still dark outside.”
Not wanting to lose the heat from my blanket, I sat up and wrapped it around my shoulders, holding it in place with one hand while slipping my other hand into the one Jace held out to me.
After we stepped out of the van, Jace quietly closed the sliding door to keep the others in its bubble of combined warmth, even Blue decided to stay in his warm spot instead of joining us. It was proof of his trust in Jace. Blue almost always followed me wherever I went to keep me safe, but he seemed to have faith Jace would do the job.
At night, the world was almost pitch black. The only light was from what little moonlight was able to seep through the cloud cover. The lake’s surface shimmered with gathered moonlight. At the edge of the lake, Jace let go of my hand and knelt down to pick up a few rocks from the shoreline.
“Watch,” he said, stretching his arm out to the side with a flat stone in his hand and tossing the rock into the water.
As the rock skipped along the surface of the lake, small blue-green incandescent circles quickly appeared and faded. I couldn’t help but smile.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“I’m not sure what’s causing it, but I thought it was cool.” Jace skipped another stone along the surface, causing the blue-green circles to appear once again.
“I’ve read that some algae are bioluminescent. It’s a defense mechanism against predators.”
Jace chuckled. “Do you remember everything you read?”
“Yes. If I see it in print, I can usually remember it.”
Jace held out a rock to me.
“Want to give it a try?”
; I took the smooth stone in my hand and held my hand out to my side like Jace had, but when I threw the rock toward the water it didn’t skip along the surface. It sank.
“Here, let me help you.” Jace walked behind me.
“Spread your feet apart,” he instructed, placing one of his hands on my left hip while lifting my right arm up to the side. “And bend your knees. Good.” He placed the flat stone in my right hand with my index finger along the smooth cold edge and my thumb and middle finger holding the top and bottom. “The most important thing is to make the stone spin in the air, so you need to flick your wrist when you throw.”
Jace stepped back from me to give me room. I tried to imagine the rock as a Frisbee and let it fly. I got two skips along the surface.
“I did it!”
Jace found me another rock and another. Eventually, we made it into a game to see who could get the most skips out of their rocks.
Every time Jace would win a toss, he would throw his arms in the air and announce, “Winner!” He would then bow to a nonexistent crowd, thanking them for their silent applause, which made me giggle. It was a silly side of him I had not seen before. We’d been through so many life and death situations since meeting this was the first time we were able to relax and just enjoy one another’s company.
I’m not sure how long we stood out there playing against one another, laughing all the while and taunting each other unmercifully, but it was the most fun I’d had in a long time.
After a while, my arm got tired, and I begged for some rest.
We sat on the fallen log Jace had fished from the lake the afternoon before. I tried to drape the blanket still on my shoulders around the both of us, but it was too small to cover us sitting side by side. I swung my legs over Jace’s thighs, practically sitting in his lap, as he put his arms around me, conveniently giving my head a place to rest on his shoulder. We sat there quietly in our cocoon of warmth.
“Thank you for showing me what you found,” I said. “It’s something I’ll probably never see again in my life.”
Jace tightened his arms around me. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
I snuggled in closer to him reveling in his warmth and how natural it felt to be like this with him.
“Tell me something nice about my future,” I requested.
Jace was silent for a while, making me wonder if it was that hard to find something good in my future.
“I’ve seen you run through a field of wheat playing chase with a couple of kids. The sun was shining on your face and you had to cover your eyes to shade them.”
I leaned my head off his shoulder to look into his eyes.
“We’ll be able to see the sun again one day? How soon?”
“Not too far in the future, a few years at most. You don’t look much different in the vision.”
“But how? What happens to make the sun come back?”
Jace shook his head. “I don’t know. Most of what I see in your future are only quick flashes, not complete stories. What age you are in the visions is the only way I can tell when they will happen.”
“They don’t sound all that helpful, seems like it would be more confusing than anything for you.”
“I don’t mind. It gives me hope.”
“Hope for what?”
“Hope that you’ll fall in love with me one day.”
I felt the open innocence of Jace’s words infuse my heart with want to accept the love he offered me so unconditionally. To let myself wholly fall for the man in front of me didn’t seem as farfetched as I once thought. There was a time I never would have guessed I could have feelings of love for anyone but Ash. Perhaps that was because we were best friends and had spent the better part of our lives together. We knew each other so well we didn’t have to give voice to our thoughts for the other one to know exactly what we were thinking. But, in his way, Jace knew me. Or at least he knew me through the visions he had of my future. He had seen my flaws, even before they happened; yet, he still professed to love me and yearned for me to love him back. All I had to do was accept him. All I had to do was open my heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The next day we traveled like the devil himself was chasing us. We all knew Freddy would have figured out our deception by now. The only question was, how far would he go to get us back? Especially me. If my blood could actually cure the Cain virus, I had suddenly become one of the most important people in the world, at least to Harvesters stricken by the disease. What price would those in Alliance pay to be made whole again? If they were willing to pay just for a chance to have me in their beds, what would they give to not be trapped in Alliance anymore and regain their immortality? Even the Queen would find me of value, a thought which scared me more than any other. I tried not to think about what we were running from but looked ahead to what we were running to: a new chance at life and freedom in the Southern Kingdom.
Jace was leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind the morning after our night together that he loved me. He was the hero in romance novels exemplified in real life. He held my hand while we rode in the van like it was the most precious thing in the world to him; he would lean over and tuck wayward strands of hair behind my ear and tenderly trace the edge of my face with the tips of his fingers, like a blind man engraving a permanent picture of me in his mind; he made sure I had plenty to eat and kept me warm underneath the blanket we shared. But he never once tried to push the boundaries he apparently set himself in our physical contact. He was the perfect gentleman when sometimes I wished he wasn’t.
I found myself wanting him to pull my body in close to his and kiss me until my lungs begged for another breath. Remembering the first kiss we shared after I was able to heal myself made my blood boil for a entirely different reason. I caught myself time and again staring at the perfection of his lips and wishing he would just kiss me already. He had to want to, but something was holding him back. I could only assume he wasn’t sure how deeply my feelings ran for him and with each passing second we were getting closer and closer to Ash. But I didn’t care. My body felt like it would burst into flames if I didn’t get him alone soon.
Ian rarely stopped the van, but when nature called he was forced to pull over. I knew if I wanted a chance to be alone with Jace before reaching the Southern Kingdom it was now or never. As soon as those who needed to relieve themselves had picked their patch of woods, I tugged Jace to a secluded spot far from curious eyes and ears. He didn’t ask why I wanted him to come with me. He didn’t ask because I felt pretty sure he already knew the answer.
It was one of the few times I actually felt like a girl my age should. What was more natural than a girl and a guy finding a secluded spot and making out? If the world wasn’t upside down, Jace and I would probably be lying on a couch in a house I shared with my parents and pretend to watch a movie. Jace made me feel like the normal, everyday girl I desperately wanted to be.
Once I felt like we were far enough away from the others, I stopped and turned to face him. I suddenly felt shy and didn’t know exactly how to go about asking for what I wanted, but when I looked into Jace’s eyes I realized I didn’t have to.
He pulled me to him, burying his hands in my hair as I tilted my head to look up at him. He hesitated while his eyes traveled from my eyes to my lips and back up again. Not being able to stand the wait, I wrapped my arms around his neck and stood on the tips of my toes, melting my lips against his. A small moan escaped my throat, which only seemed to embolden Jace to deepen the kiss. I pressed my body against his, refusing to let him move even an inch away from me. The silky smooth texture of his tongue against mine made me feel like I was floating with only his kiss tethering me to reality.
I felt his hands leave my hair and find their way underneath the back of my shirt. The first touch of his flesh against mine made me feel like I’d just been handed a live wire igniting every nerve in my body. Even the cold air seeping underneath my shirt couldn’t temper the fire building inside me.<
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“Jace…” I whimpered, feeling like I would die inside if he stopped touching me.
I felt him pull away from me, my body already missing the warmth of his hands and lips.
He was breathing hard and the look of desire in his eyes matched my own. I took a step toward him, only for him to take one step back from me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“We need to stop or…” he didn’t finish, like he was scared to say the next words.
I took another step forward. Jace stayed where he was this time.
“I want you.”
Jace closed his eyes and shook his head. “God, I wish you really meant that.”
“What have I done that makes you think I don’t?”
Jace opened his eyes. “What about Ash?”
The mention of Ash’s name was like having cold water splashed in my face.
“This has nothing to do with him.”
“I can’t let you go any further until you know which one of us you really want to be with. And don’t think for one second that I don’t want to just throw you down on the ground right this second and show you how much I love you because I do, desperately. But I couldn’t live with myself if you ever came to regret making love with me.”
My brain understood what Jace was saying and doing, but my body wanted him to stop thinking so much. I knew his concern for the aftereffects of what we almost had done were justifiable, but why did he have to be so damn rational?
“Skye! Jace! You lovebirds almost done in there? We gotta get a move on!”
Ian’s voice echoed against the trees surrounding us, shattering the moment.
Jace looked agitatedly in the direction of the road. He turned back to me and held his hand out.
“We should get back,” he said.
“I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anyone,” I told him, needing to make sure he understood I wasn’t taking the moment lightly before we rejoined the others. “The next time I offer myself to you, don’t think so much. I’m a big girl. I can decide what I want to do with my body and who I want to share it with.”