He cleared his throat. “Thought you were going to Murphy’s.”
“Changed our minds. Besides, I thought you might show up here.” She moved closer. “You’re here with Nate?”
He nodded.
“Why don’t you both come back to our place?” She curled an arm through his and pressed her breast against him. Warmth from her skin seeped through his shirtsleeve and into the crook of his elbow. It felt good, and for an instant he considered her offer. Maybe his mother was right. Joyce was easy on the eyes, and she sure wasn’t making things tough for him.
Then he took a deep breath and shook his head. “Sorry. I’m calling it an early night.”
“You sure?” She pushed her lips out in a pout.
“I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow.”
She released his arm and pouted a moment longer. “I’ll be around if you change your mind. And you have my number.” With a wiggle of her slim hips, she rejoined her sisters at the bar.
Damian watched her for a minute and then searched for his friend. In the dark ocean of faces and beer bottles, he couldn’t see anything at first. Then he spied Nate at the other end of Jimmy’s, with one of Joyce’s sisters giggling into his shoulder. Well, at least one of them would get lucky tonight. He threaded his way to Nate’s other side and mumbled a goodbye.
“You’re leaving already?” Nate said. “We just got here.”
“Long day.”
“Call me tomorrow, then.”
“Will do.”
Eva Hadley started snaking her tongue along Nate’s earlobe right about then, so Damian slid out the front door before Joyce could bury her fuchsia nails into his own skin and drag him home with her.
On his way back through town, he circled through Park Place Run, Whispering Pines’s version of a scaled-down Fifth Avenue. Nate had told him there used to be cornfields here, as far as you could see in every direction. Damian had a hard time picturing it now. Seemed a shame to lose so much countryside, but he supposed everything changed in the name of progress. Now, instead of fields, sidewalks of red brick wound into darkness, and white lights dotted miniature trees.
He slowed the car. One restaurant remained open and a few people sat at the bar. Sometimes Damian longed to be part of them, to be part of a couple just for one night. To sit at a bar and drown in a woman. To watch her cheeks darken and her skirt shift as she crossed her legs. To lose himself in her conversation as evening became midnight and then wound its way to dawn without taking a breath. He hadn’t felt that way in years. Sometimes he thought he might not ever feel that way again.
Except now there was Summer. Now there was someone he couldn’t keep his thoughts off, no matter how hard he tried. He headed for home, calculating the hours until morning and hoping she’d come to the McCready house again. This time, he wouldn’t stop with just a hand on her shoulder. No, he’d wind one arm around her waist and pull her close. See how her mouth felt against his, and see if he could make her lose her breath when he kissed her.
Damian smiled for the first time all night.
Chapter Seven
Summer sat up, no closer to sleep than she had been three hours earlier. She got up and rifled through her overnight bag. Nothing. She’d used up her last Ambien on the flight here. Not even a lousy Tylenol PM lay loose in the bottom of her bag.
She walked into the bathroom and stared at her reflection. Dark blonde hair, dark eyes, dark circles beneath them. A decent body, thanks to a semi-regular schedule at the gym, and curves that had emerged sometime around tenth grade. She pulled her hair away from her neck. If she looked closely enough, though, she could see the scar along her collarbone. It mirrored the smaller ones that crawled up the inside of her left wrist, spider-web fashion.
Or broken-glass fashion.
She dropped her hand and let her hair fall back into place. She didn’t need to look. She could trace the marks inside her mind.
Without warning, the dizziness started again. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She reached for her T-shirt, her jeans, a pair of flip-flops by the door. Car keys and purse. Deep breaths, she tried to tell herself but the oxygen seized up inside her chest and she started to wheeze.
“What’s happening to me?” Her words echoed inside the room. A panic attack? Another random memory?
She yanked the door open and stumbled into the narrow corridor. The door swung shut behind her, and a second too late, she patted her back pocket. No keycard for Room 101.
“Crap.”
It didn’t matter now. Her pulse jumped as she stumbled down the hall; she could feel it inside her wrists and at the base of her throat. Perspiration dotted her upper lip and the corners of her mouth, and she tasted salt. At the far end of the hall, she reached for the exit door just in time, just as a voice echoed inside her head.
“Summer? Where are you? My leg hurts. I’m scared. I can’t see you. Or Gabe. Where are you guys?”
Sweet mountain air flooded her lungs.
She’d forgotten how good it tasted, or that air could even taste at all. A complex combination of pine trees and starlight and wet, steamy pavement fell onto her tongue. I’m okay. I’m okay. She stopped and looked up. There they were, the dark shadows that hugged Whispering Pines. They hadn’t changed at all. The mountains still stood, half-gorgeous, half-ominous, and looked down on her in silence. She remained there for a long moment and just breathed.
Oh, Donny. She laid one hand against her chest and willed her heart to slow. She hadn’t dreamt of her little brother in years. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard his voice inside her head. And yet just a moment ago, he’d sounded as though he sat right behind her. Tears filled her eyes and she pressed the heels of her palms to her face to stop them from coming.
I miss you. I’m sorry. I wish I could have saved you.
Summer climbed into her car and fumbled with the headlights. She took a long breath and blew her nose on a napkin. She couldn’t think about it. She couldn’t get lost in memories that weren’t even memories at all, but just pieces that didn’t fit together inside her head. She pulled out of the motel parking lot, took the first left and followed Perkins Lane around the back side of town. Maybe a drive would calm her. Or distract her.
Whispering Pines was deserted, with not a single car or person anywhere she could see. She kept going and passed a familiar collection of one-story homes and double-wide trailers set back from the road. Most had a basketball hoop hanging from the garage door and pots of flowers on the front step. Not much had changed. Maybe nothing here had changed, except for her.
At the corner of Melody Lane, a short half-mile from Whispering Pines Lake, she stopped. From here, she couldn’t make out the modest ranch with the sagging roof. She couldn’t see the pine trees that grew together and closed in the windows. But she knew her childhood home sat only a few hundred feet away. The yard she’d played in. The stream she’d waded through. The path that led through the trees and over the hill to Rachael’s house. Her father had sold it shortly after the accident and moved into a condo, and she didn’t know who lived in it now. Still, every part of her remembered it.
“We’ll drop Donny off first.” Gabe’s hand, warm on her bare thigh, moved upward.
“What?” Donny’s mop-top head, his hair too long and his lips still smeared with chocolate ice cream, bobbed in the back seat. “What didja say, Gabe?”
“Nothing.” Summer turned up the radio. Warm June wind lifted the hair from her neck as the car darted along the empty roads outside Whispering Pines. She felt full, sated with the night and the happiness of high school graduation and the thrill of the guy in the seat beside her. She wanted to spend all night with Gabe. All of tomorrow too, and every day of summer until he had to leave for college.
She hadn’t known she could feel like this, like a helium balloon filled up to bursting. She adored him. She wanted to be alone with him. But they had to take Donny home first, or her father would—
The other car came
out of nowhere. Blinding lights. Grinding brakes. A snapping motion that blew the airbag and bloodied her face. Tree limbs scratching at her arms and face. And the screaming, high-pitched and panicked in the stillness.
“Summer? Summer?”
His voice came from somewhere over her shoulder, and she would have tried to see where Donny was, except she couldn’t move her arms and she couldn’t find her legs and all she could hear was her little brother looking for her in the dark.
Three miles from this spot, ten years ago, Summer’s world had shattered. Her brother—gone. The life she’d known—fractured. She’d spent a decade trying to piece herself together again, between college and various jobs and boyfriends that tried but never really took the place of Gabe. She’d seen a therapist. She’d taken up yoga. She’d done her best to put the past behind her.
But being back in Whispering Pines was stirring her up in ways she’d never dreamed possible. She tried to recall what had happened when the cops arrived that night. She couldn’t. She only remembered the blinding beam of a flashlight moving over the car. Sirens. Gabe’s hand in hers. Donny’s voice far away.
And a lot of questions she couldn’t answer.
Chapter Eight
Summer pulled onto the Hunters’ front lawn, wondering again why she’d agreed to come to their lake party. She didn’t really have time. She had less than a week before she left Whispering Pines, and if she could work a small miracle, she’d be gone even earlier.
“Summer!” Rachael Hunter waved from the front porch of the ivy-covered house.
She climbed from her car and looked toward the oaks that hid the water. We used to climb those trees. We sat in the branches and spied on Nate and his friends until the sun went down. Of course she’d come to this party. How could she not? How many days had she spent at this farmhouse as a child, basking in the warmth of Rachael and her family? And why hadn’t she come back at least once in all the years since to visit her most loyal childhood friend? Because I couldn’t cope. Not even with seeing Rachael. Suddenly she felt much older than twenty-eight. She palmed the car keys and locked the car doors before she remembered she was in the middle of farmland, not downtown San Francisco.
“I can’t believe you’re really here!” Rachael met her halfway and flung her arms around her best friend.
“Me either.”
Rachael gave her a long look up and down. “You look good. Too thin, but good. How long are you staying?”
“A few more days.”
“That’s it?”
“I have a ton of work at the museum.”
“C’mon, you haven’t been back since high school. Can’t you take some more time off? I mean, no offense or anything, but you run a museum. It’s full of things that have been around for a hundred years or more. Your exhibits aren’t going anywhere.”
“That’s not really the point.” Summer hated when people spoke about her job, about the way she’d chosen to spend her life, as if centuries long gone were less significant than what happened in the here and now. Without understanding the past, she always explained to the doubters, people had no business living in the present. Everything linked together in a beautiful, complicated chain.
“I’m sorry. I just mean that nothing’s going to grow legs and walk away if you stay another week or two in Whispering Pines,” Rachael said. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too.”
Rachael blew platinum blonde strands of hair from her eyes and handed over a plastic cup. “Well, I’m glad you’re here now, anyway.”
Summer took one sip and gagged. “What is this?”
“Some punch Nate made. Why? Is it bad?”
“It’s awful.”
“Thanks a lot.” A deep male voice spoke behind her.
She turned and stared. A tall guy in his mid-twenties, with white-blond hair identical to Rachael’s, grinned at her. “Wow,” she said. “Someone’s grown up.”
He chuckled. “Hey, Summer. Welcome back.” The playful light in his eyes dimmed. “Hey, I’m really sorry about your dad.”
She continued to stare at Rachael’s little brother. “You’re so...tall. When did that happen?” When she left Whispering Pines, Nate Hunter had been a short, cocky ninth-grader with acne and a bad haircut. Now he stood on the porch step below her, a man who’d grown about six inches and filled out.
He laughed. “I sprouted up in college.”
“You look good.”
Rachael stole her brother’s baseball cap and mashed it down on her head. “Please. He’s marginally acceptable right now. Tall doesn’t mean he’s grown a brain, that’s for sure.”
“Screw you, sis.” Nate grabbed for the hat but Rachael dashed inside the screen door and vanished. He shrugged. “Some things never change, huh?”
Summer laughed. “I guess not.”
He gave her a funny look. “You’re not staying long, are you?”
“In Whispering Pines?” She shook her head. How did she answer his question? She wanted to ask how he could stay here after everything that had happened, but she supposed Donny’s classmates had survived better than his eighteen-year-old sister, and their father who didn’t want her around as a reminder.
He loped down the porch steps. “Coming to the lake?”
“Later.” She waved and watched him disappear behind the trees, still amazed at the boy who had shed his awkward teenage skin for the shell of an adult. He wears it well. Still, he probably hadn’t had much choice. When you lost your best friend at thirteen, the years that followed probably hardened you up a bit. Calloused you. Made you old before you really wanted to be.
Summer climbed the porch steps and let herself into the house. Inside the foyer sat the same red rooster doorstop. The same fruit-patterned wallpaper peeled in the corners of the kitchen. If she tried hard enough, she could almost smell the chicken casserole Mrs. Hunter cooked on Friday nights and the snickerdoodles she made for special occasions. Summer leaned against the breakfast bar. Suddenly she was ten years old again, sleeping over at her best friend’s house, playing hide-and-seek in the woods, and sharing a tub of ice cream with Rachael long after her parents went to bed.
“Where is everyone?”
Rachael sat at the dining room table munching on chips. “Mom dragged Dad to a quilt show over in Silver Valley. Everyone else is down at the lake.”
“Oh.” Summer exchanged Nate’s lethal punch for a diet soda.
“So what’s it look like? From the inside, I mean.” Rachael asked.
“What?”
“The McCready house. Your house.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s a mess.” She thought of the crumbling front steps, the broken windows, the cemetery gate visible from the second story.
Rachael straightened her brother’s cap and propped her chin in one hand. “Remember when we used to go by there after school and dare each other to look in the windows?”
“Sure.” Two skinny, knobby-kneed girls darted into Summer’s memory.
“We never did, right?”
“Nope. We always chickened out.”
“And now you own the place. You finally get to look in the windows. Get over your fears.”
“I guess.” Summer’s face flushed.
“You okay? You look weird.”
“I’m just tired. Still jet lagged, I think.” She didn’t want to admit that the past was starting to pop into the present every time she turned another corner.
Rachael glanced out the window. “Oh, the guys are coming back in on the boat. Come on. I want to introduce you to someone.”
“Someone as in a guy?”
“Maybe.” Rachael held up a palm. “Before you say anything else, just let me introduce you. You’ll like him. He’s cute.”
“Rach, I’m only here for a few more days.”
“So you can’t have any fun in the meantime? Come on.” Rachael tugged on her arm, and this time Summer didn’t protest.
They walked outside and do
wn the steep lawn that led to the road and the lake on the other side of it. The roar of a boat engine grew as it coasted into the dock. In the boat, three bare-chested men held beers and laughed. Nate waited for them on the dock and reached out to help them moor it.
It’s beautiful here. Always was. Still is. The water didn’t look like this in San Francisco. Beside the dock, the lawn met the lake in a crooked dirt line. No beach, just some frizzled grass that merged with sandy pebbles and disappeared. From there, Whispering Pines Lake took over, spreading one mile wide and three miles long, gorgeous and blue under the sun. The Hunters had their own dock, as did everyone who owned lakefront property. Two teams of laughing men and women played water volleyball nearby, and bikini-clad women sunned themselves on a raft.
Summer shaded her eyes. How was it possible that this place still smelled exactly the same, like wind and water and suntan lotion? Put her anywhere in the world and pipe in this scent, and she’d be a teenager again, watching the sun beat down on Whispering Pines Lake.
Rachael hopped from one bare foot to the other on the hot wooden dock. “You guys ready to do some skiing?”
Two of the men in the boat glanced over. Sure, one mouthed. He opened a fresh can of beer and lifted it in Summer’s direction. Hi there.
Hi, she mouthed back. He was good-looking, a little portly but with muscular arms and a buzz cut that showed off his dimples. The second guy reached out a hand to help her in, and she took it. He looked familiar, and she guessed they’d probably gone to school together, maybe a few years apart. As he shoved some towels off a damp seat for her, she tried to place the bright brown eyes and baritone laugh. George Hoskin’s little brother?
But then the third occupant of the boat turned around, and her thoughts scattered. The same wavy hair glinted in the sun. The same blue eyes lit up when he saw her. Damian Knight raised one hand in greeting, and Summer waved in return. Her legs turned to jello and she reached for the side of the motorboat to steady herself.
Second Chance Summer Page 5