He blamed me. Of course he did. I blamed myself.
There was no way he was happy to see me. Which meant that when he looked at me, he saw someone else.
“Are you actually happy to see me, Dylan?” The words were hard to force out of my dry throat. I felt like I should cry, but I was suddenly just too tired. “Or are you seeing her?”
He stared at me as if I’d struck him. I stared back.
Seeing Dylan was a reminder. I wasn’t the same as I’d once been. I wasn’t going to go fade into a corner.
I just wasn’t that girl anymore.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” His voice was suddenly raw, and in that moment I could see my own grief over Ella, reflected back at me.
He took another step toward me. I wanted to fling myself into his arms, to give in to the need that had haunted my every step while I was away.
Instead I did what good Kaylee would have done. I pushed away from the siren call of his embrace, and I ran.
Chapter Three
“Jesus, Mom.” The next morning I rubbed a hand over bleary eyes as I shoved aside the plastic bags from the grocery store in search of the coffee pot. My mom was still in bed, but I felt the need to chastise her anyway. Never mind that she was still sleeping and couldn’t hear me.
I found the coffeepot in a corner of the counter, and dust an inch thick sat on top of it. My heart sank as I took the pieces apart to wash them in the sink.
My mom had once been one of those people who, like me, couldn’t function until after their second or third cup of hot caffeine. It spoke of how sick she’d become that she didn’t bother using her percolator anymore.
Lips pursed and the coffee pot cleaned, I reassembled it and filled it with the paper filter and grounds that I’d gotten at the store that morning. While the coffee brewed and I inhaled the comforting aroma, I unpacked the groceries that I’d just purchased.
Eggs, milk, canned soup. Bread, bacon and apples. Though in my head I could hear Ella sneering at me, I knew that I’d chosen what I had in an attempt to get some nutrition into my sickly looking mom.
She might eat it, she might not. But at least I’d have tried.
As for myself, once I was done wiping dust out of the cupboards, I poured myself a giant mug of coffee, contemplated adding milk, and decided that I was feeling too lazy. My roommate Serena had always given me a hard time for my habit of taking my coffee however I could get it, but it worked for me. I ripped open the giant bag of nacho chips I’d bought and pulled myself up to sit on the counter.
Screw nutrition for myself. I was stressed.
After five minutes the salt and the caffeine began to work their magic. I topped it off with a long, twisted piece of black licorice, which most people despised but that I loved, then sighed deeply, raking fingers through the snarled hair of a sleepless night.
It was too quiet here. Fish Lake was surrounded by mountains, by verdant branches and leaves. The sounds at night were of coyotes and crickets, rather than the urban hustle I’d become used to in Connecticut.
Yes, that was why I hadn’t been able to sleep. I was going to tell myself that until I believed it.
I looked out the window at the giant apple tree that dominated our yard. In a few months it would be full of fruit that would fall and rot with no one to take care of it, but right now held nothing but promise.
It reminded me of how it felt to be pressed against the rough bark by sure hands. Of how the hollow in the trunk cradled my head just perfectly when my mouth was being devoured by someone who made my pulse race.
Roughly I pushed those thoughts away. It wasn’t going to do me any good to think of Dylan. He wasn’t ever going to be able to look at me again without thinking of Ella. And I wasn’t ever going to be able to look at him and be sure that he was seeing me and not my twin.
Full of my junk food breakfast, I sipped at my coffee, savoring the jolt to my senses. I guessed that my mom wouldn’t be up for hours still—I’d looked in on her this morning when I’d finally given up the struggle to sleep. She’d been curled on her side, her hands tucked beneath her cheek, her breathing shallow but steady.
Seeing my mother look so fragile made an invisible fist around my heart squeeze. I was already weighed down by guilt, and seeing the woman who had given me life grasping so tenuously at reality was hard.
Should I have stayed, instead of running away three years ago?
I supposed the better question was, could I have?
Had we ever actually been happy? It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered this in the last few years, but for once I tentatively let the notion come out of hiding to be poked at and examined.
It didn’t seem like so long ago that my mom, my dad, my sister and I had all lived under this roof, and now it was down to just my mom—my dad lived a few towns over, with his girlfriend of the moment, who likely wasn’t much older than I was. Cliche, but true.
Yes, it didn’t seem like so long ago... and yet it seemed like an entirely different lifetime.
When Ella and I had been in our early teens, our dad had gotten a promotion and had started to make a lot more money. Had started to work late. Until then my mom had enjoyed drinking, but hadn’t depended on alcohol to get her through the day.
And as our parents’ marriage had become more and more dysfunctional, Ella and I had starting gravitating towards the opposite poles to which we would stubbornly cling throughout our teens. She became a party girl, the daughter who would sneak out the window and climb down the apple tree to drink and experiment with drugs. She’d made a new set of friends—and Dylan had been part of that group.
They’d been inseparable, two badasses who did whatever they wanted. Just friends, or so they’d claimed, but the kind whose friendship had little room for anyone else. And while I became the good daughter, the glue that held our family together at the seams, I secretly longed to be Ella, just so that I could be around the guy who fascinated me like no one ever had.
Setting my now empty coffee mug on the counter with a sharp clack, I slid off the counter, shaking the memories away like a wet dog trying to dry itself.
With the clarity of hindsight, I could now see that maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t been as good as I’d once believed myself to be. After all, my desire for Dylan McKay hadn’t been good at all.
“I need to get out of here.” The house was deafening in its silence. There was too much room in the empty space for my thoughts to fill.
The problem was, I had no idea where to go.
***
The waters of Fish Lake were still cold right now, in the early days of summer. I shivered as I looked down at the stretch of pebbles and sand on which I’d played for countless hours when I was kid.
The early morning breeze was warm, but I shivered regardless as I stripped off the tank top and shorts that I’d pulled on over my bathing suit. Leaving them strewn carelessly on the sand, I made my way to the edge of the water, rocks digging into the feet and making my gait unsteady. I knew that not all of the good bumps that prickled over my pale skin were because of a chill.
I’d had to work very hard to not let myself be taken under by an irrational fear of water after Ella... well.
I’d fought through the worst of it, refusing to succumb when I knew exactly where the sudden terror had come from. But I still had to push through a thin barrier that rose, every time I confronted a body of it—a pool, a pond, a lake.
I ground my teeth together as I stepped forward, letting the ripples of water lap at my toes, then my ankles. Sucking in a mouthful of air, I ran forward into the lake until the water was deep enough to submerge myself in. The cold was shocking, cleansing me of the cloying fear and reminding me of who I was.
I was Kaylee. I was the one who had survived.
Diving forward, I began to swim. Though I hated exercise, and poked fun at my friend Serena every time she taught a yoga class or went for a run, swimming was something that I made myself do once every few weeks. I t
old myself that it was because I needed to work off the the booze, the late night instant noodles, the ice cream that I downed every time that Joel and I broke up.
In the deepest, darkest corners of myself, I knew that I made myself do it so that I didn’t wind up like Ella. I refused to succumb to the water the way she had.
I swam until my lungs burned and my muscles trembled with fatigue. Laughing breathlessly when I surfaced, I slicked the excess water out of my curls and, shading my eyes against the sun that was still rising high, treaded water as I scanned the shore.
I was still alone. Mostly alone, I hastily amended as I caught sight of someone jogging with a massive dog at the far end of the sand.
A male someone, my brain automatically noted. A tall male someone, with muscles that made saliva pool in my mouth.
The sun glinted off of hair the color of honey, and the saliva suddenly dried up.
Shit. It was Dylan.
I started towards the shore then stopped, dunking myself back into the water. My movements caught his eye, and he squinted out at me, his steps slowing, then stopping as he recognized me.
Pinching my lips together, I forced myself to move forward. I couldn’t hide from him out here.
“Kaylee.” As I’d been expecting, there was no readily apparent emotion on his face as he watched me walk hesitantly out of the lake. His stare was fastened to me as I emerged, though, and I felt my skin begin to heat underneath his gaze.
I knew that most people who saw me swimming here would have expected me to wear a sensible one piece. The trouble with that, however, was that I no longer owned one. And as Dylan kept that inscrutable stare on me, I became incredibly aware of the fact that I was naked except for my miniscule red bikini.
The silence stretched between us, and I felt that heat pool again in my belly, made all the more uncomfortable because I had no idea what he was thinking.
“You’re jogging,” I finally offered. If I had been talking to anyone else, this would have sounded like the most obvious thing in the world.
But I was talking to Dylan the badass, the guy who fixed up cars with his friend Jax, who drank domestic beer and who maybe, maybe lifted weights, if he did anything to sculpt the ridiculously cut body that he’d always had.
“I jog every day.” His voice gave nothing away. I watched as he combed his long fingers through those sweat dampened spikes of hair, and felt my pulse ratchet up a notch.
“Isn’t that kind of counterproductive? Jogging, but smoking?” I’d rarely seen Dylan without a cigarette since he was fifteen... though he didn’t seem to have one on him now.
“Gave it up.” He nodded at me, picked up a stick, and threw it for the massive dog that was dancing around, eyeing the water with distaste.
I swallowed hard when I saw the muscles of his arms ripple with the movement. Bad Kaylee. I needed to work harder to get over this... whatever the hell this was.
There was entirely too much baggage standing between us. An entire person’s worth, to be precise.
“You gave it up?” I parroted. A gust of wind blew over the water, hitting my wet, bare skin, and I shivered with the chill.
“Didn’t you bring a towel?” There, finally—there was some emotion. Of course, it was in the form of a glare as he looked around the beach and found nothing but my discarded shorts and top.
I’d forgotten to bring one. It wasn’t nearly the big deal he was making it sound like with his tone.
Before I could even answer his question, he fisted the hem of his t-shirt in his hands and lifted it up and over his head.
My mouth fell open when a torso that was harder and more defined than anything I could ever have imagined came into view. I’d run my fingers over that skin once, my touch tentative, but I’d never seen it bare in front of my eyes.
The fact that Ella likely had caused a seed of jealously buried deep inside of me to sprout and begin to unfurl. God, I was the world’s worst person. I was jealous of my dead sister, the sister to whom this gorgeous creature had belonged in the first place.
Then Dylan handed me the slightly damp shirt, and I lost the capacity for rational thought.
“I haven’t been jogging very long. It shouldn’t be too sweaty.” Stooping, he picked up the stick that the dog had returned to him and threw it again. The movement picked up the light and cast every rippled of those abs into sharp relief.
His belly was completely flat, the jut of his hipbones concave.
My mouth watered, and my fingers itched to touch.
“My job doesn’t allow us to smoke.”
It took a minute before I realized that he was continuing the thread of our conversation from minutes earlier, before he’d stripped. But as he spoke his eyes flickered down to my breasts, to where nipples that were taut with the cold were clearly visible through the thin fabric.
They became taut for another reason entirely as I hurried to slide my arms into the t-shirt. It was baggy, hitting me mid thigh, but the warmth was more than welcome.
And the scent it released... I wanted to bury my nose in the folds and inhale. It was that scent I’d picked up the night before, the one that was so uniquely him, that was burned into my mind forever.
I wrapped my arms around myself, ostensibly to warm myself further, but really to push that scent right into my skin.
“Does Jax have a new rule about smoking?” I frowned as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Last I knew, Dylan worked for his friend Jax at Automovation, the shop Jax had inherited from his dad. The kind of guys who were employed there wouldn’t be real impressed if they weren’t allowed to drink beer and smoke when closing time neared.
“I don’t work for Jax anymore.” Dylan’s eyebrows rose slightly as he spoke, and I saw that he wasn’t going to volunteer any more information. Though I was dying to know what he was doing now, I didn’t intend to be the one to break down and ask.
“And you have a dog.” I watched as he hunkered down to rub the belly of the dog who, clearly exhausted, had returned from the last trip fetching the stick to flop on its back at Dylan’s face.
“This is Poose.” He scratched the dog along the rump, and the dog looked up at him like she would do anything for him. Anything at all.
I knew exactly how that dog felt.
“Poose?” I asked, slightly amused. “Where did you find that name?”
“She’s a rescue dog. It’s the name she came with.” He looked up at me, and I saw that there was a softness around his eyes that hadn’t been there years ago. “I tried changing it, but she won’t respond to anything else.”
I liked that softness. It made me want him all the more.
The silence stretched out between us. I looked down at the ground, at the smooth expanse of wet sand, mosaics of pebbles splashed out here and there.
When I looked back up, I found him watching me with a hint of a smirk on his lips, like he knew exactly where my thoughts had wandered. It took a lot to tease that smile out, but when it appeared, it caused my stomach to do funny little flip-flops.
“What?” I said, finally breaking down our verbal staring match.
Those lips quirked up a bit more. “You’re not a Gemini.”
My brow furrowed. What the hell was he talking about?
Then it hit me, and a felt a flush spread over my skin, melting the chill bumps.
“You saw that, huh?” I tried to use wryness to cover the embarrassment. There was no point in trying to hide the tattoo now that he’d seen it, though my fingers itched to rub the skin where the ink was etched.
“I did,” he said. Was I imagining it, or had the timbre of his voice become husky?
I looked up through my eyelashes. No, I wasn’t imagining the heat in his look.
Acting on that heat would be the stupidest idea ever.
“So why the symbol for Gemini? You’re an Aquarius.” He spoke like a man who knew he was right.
I would have been stunned at the fact that he knew my birthday...
except that I had shared the day with Ella. The turn in the conversation had thrown cold water over the attraction that had begun to simmer in my belly.
“Gemini is the sign of twins.” I’d gotten the tattoo in the horrible months after Ella’s death, when I’d felt like I was drowning, like all sense of my own identity had been buried along with my twin.
I’d wanted something that would forever mark the fact that the one person I was had once been two. And the very act of getting a tattoo was something that Ella would have done.
Ella, not me.
“You smell like licorice,” he said abruptly, and I looked at him, startled.
“I just ate some.” I could still taste it on my lips, sweet yet somehow bitter at the same time.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever known who likes it.” His stare traced over my lips and, as if pulled with his line of sight, my tongue reached over to trace the same path.
It was so strange, being around someone who knew me well enough to know what kind of candy I liked... someone who was nevertheless like a stranger.
“No school for you?” I asked, not caring that it was obvious that I was changing the subject.
“Nope.” He pinned me with those amazing eyes, the sunlight highlighting the golden threads hidden amongst the dark lashes. “School was never really my thing.”
I nodded. I’d already known that, though I’d never understood it. He had always struggled with his grades, but I’d never known if it was because he’d been too busy partying, or because he’d had trouble, but I had assumed it was the former.
He was bright. But I also knew he wouldn’t welcome any questions on the subject, so I didn’t push.
“What about you?” he asked. The words were casual, but I sensed that he wanted to know. “What are you doing?”
Once he would have known, because he’d spent so much time at our house.
No more.
“I haven’t declared yet,” I mumbled. I saw the surprise on his face, and repressed a surge of irritation. Yes, once upon a time I’d been studious, and had my future planned out to the last detail. But that wasn’t who I was anymore.
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