by Kasie West
He showed me where to park and I turned off the van.
“Now, follow my lead,” Cade whispered. “If anyone stops us, let me do the talking.”
“Is this illegal?”
“Not really.”
“That wasn’t a comforting answer.”
“Are you looking for comfort?”
I didn’t answer, but I followed him. He must’ve decided at some point that I was walking too slow because he reached back and took my hand, pulling me along. The feel of his hand made my heart skip.
We went through the front doors of the hotel. There was only one attendant at the front desk who was busy on the phone and didn’t even glance at us. We passed through multiple fancy rooms and halls until we were outside on the back end of the hotel.
Cade led me past a huge lit-up rock waterfall and up some stairs and down more paths until we came to a locked gate that said NO ADMITTANCE AFTER HOURS. There was a slot on top of the handle to slide a card in. I was guessing that it was most definitely after hours. He must’ve not realized it would be closed.
I waited for him to turn around and lead us somewhere else but he looked over his shoulder, then hopped the fence and opened the gate from the inside.
“So this is what you meant by ‘not really.’ ” I took a deep breath and walked through the gate. We followed a long cement path up a hill until we reached what I assumed was our destination—a large patio area that overlooked an enormous expanse of grass and trees and desert landscape.
“That’s the golf course,” Cade explained. “You can see it better during the day.”
I took in the view. “Do you come here often?”
“My stepdad takes me golfing sometimes. I hate to golf, but I love to come up here and sit.”
“Your stepdad’s last name is Jennings, yes? The insurance company?”
“Yes.”
“And your last name is Jennings?”
He rubbed his forehead. “Long story more about pissing off my dad than loving my stepdad so much that I took his last name.”
“Got it.” I wanted to ask him if his father had responded to his letter yet. If he’d ever asked his stepdad why he was so hard on him. But I didn’t. I leaned against the railing, looking out at the lights. It really was gorgeous up here.
There were some chairs and tables stacked along the edge of the patio and Cade got two chairs and brought them over to where I stood, setting one behind me. I sat down and he did as well.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. Why was he deciding now, when I had renewed my vow to walk away from him, when I’d reminded myself of his past with Isabel, to act more like the person in the letters?
“Why am I doing this … ” He twisted his bracelet around his wrist several times before holding up his fist. “This.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This bracelet. I wore it to make you angry and all it did was remind me of the conversation we had in my kitchen. The one where you spelled out my shortcomings so well. I realize that I deserve your disdain that I always thought was unjustified.”
Wow. I never thought I’d hear those words from Cade. “You didn’t … you don’t,” I said. “I was quick to assign you motives over the years. I’m good at that.”
He shrugged. “I deserved some of it. I always told myself I was just treating you how you treated me, but that was just an excuse. I haven’t been nice. Like at the fall festival. I knew you heard me talking to Mike about you, so I said what I did on purpose. I didn’t mean it. I was a jerk. Anyway, I guess what this bracelet made me realize is that I owe you an apology bracelet, too. I just don’t have a mom who forces me to do things like that.”
I held out my hand. “Where is it then?”
He laughed. “Metaphorically speaking.”
“I get a metaphorical apology bracelet and you get a real one? Totally unfair.” I dropped my hand with a smile.
“I know. Words aren’t quite as good as actions, are they?”
“I love words,” I said too quickly, thinking about his letters and song lyrics and books and everything else that words made possible. He raised an eyebrow. “Lucas, too,” I added.
His eyebrow came down. “What?”
“You were mean to me when I was talking to Lucas.”
“When?”
“At the football game. You dragged him away and probably told him not to bother.”
Cade shook his head several times. “No. I was trying to help. You had this frozen look on your face. I thought you were uncomfortable.”
“You were saving me?”
“I thought I was. Apparently not.”
“People don’t always need you to save them, you know.”
He looked down at his hands that he had clasped together. “But sometimes they do, right?”
When I didn’t answer he went on. “It’s okay to need help every once in a while … To ask for help.”
“I don’t need help. And I don’t need someone who helps people to make himself feel important.”
I cringed. Why did I say that? Why did I always lash out at him?
I knew why. Because I cared about him. And it was becoming obvious to me that he cared about everybody. He liked to help people, which was the real reason he was sitting in front of me right now. He thought he was helping when really he was making this so much harder for me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re probably right,” he said with a sigh. “Half the reason I try to help people is to make myself feel … ” He trailed off and I had no idea how he was going to finish that sentence.
“Feel what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. So, why were you so upset earlier?”
I swallowed hard. “I lost something important to me. And then I found out Lucas and I aren’t really compatible.” Mostly because I figured out I really like you but can’t have you.
“Compatible? You seem perfect for each other.”
“Is that an insult?” I normally wouldn’t take it as one, but coming from Cade, it felt like one.
“No. I just mean that he’s not mainstream. He’s a little different. You seem to like that.”
“I do.”
“So then what’s the problem?”
“No problem. It was just bad timing, I guess. It’s not a big deal. Really.”
“A big enough deal to cry over.”
I had not been crying about Lucas. My guitar, yes. My never-to-be relationship with Cade, yes. But not Lucas. “It wasn’t about that. I’ll be fine.”
“But if you like someone enough you try to work on things.”
I laughed a little. “And there is the problem. We didn’t like each other enough.”
“Because you like someone else?”
My eyes locked on his. Had I somehow given that away? I needed to change the subject before the truth came out.
“What about you?” I asked quickly. “How have you been?”
“Since?”
“I don’t know. Since Thanksgiving when a rude person kicked you out of her house.”
He smiled. “Fine. Baseball keeps me busy.”
I heard the static of a walkie-talkie and stood up quickly. “Someone’s coming,” I whispered.
Cade didn’t look like he believed me at first but then there were voices coming up the walkway, talking about checking out the disturbance. Meaning us. We were the disturbance.
I jumped up and pulled Cade to the only door on the patio. We slipped inside what I thought would be a room that would lead us away from here but turned out to be a closet filled with more chairs. We wedged ourselves inside and Cade pulled the door closed behind us, instantly engulfing us in blackness.
He must’ve shifted to the left because his foot came down on mine. I breathed air between my teeth.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “Where are you?”
I was so close to him I could feel his body heat, so I wasn’t sure why he couldn’t tell where I was. I put both hand
s up, thinking they were going to touch his back, but realized I was touching his chest instead. “Right here.”
He placed his hands over mine on his chest. “Now I won’t step on you.”
“We could just tell them we’re guests and got lost,” I suggested.
“And had to jump a fence? I’m afraid they’ll recognize me and take away my stepdad’s golf membership. They’ll know I wasn’t lost.”
“They’ll take away his membership over something lame like that?”
“Let’s just say they’re most likely looking for an excuse. He’s not the most pleasant person on the planet.”
I nodded even though Cade couldn’t see me in the darkness. Outside the door I could hear the voices. It was hard to tell what they were saying, even at full volume, so I wasn’t worried about Cade and me whispering.
“Do you get along with him?” I asked.
“My stepdad?”
“Yes.”
“No.” And that’s all he said. I assumed that meant he didn’t want to talk about it.
“Did you miss any classes this week?” I asked.
“No, why?”
“Oh.” I was not going to let that knowledge hurt my feelings. It didn’t matter. I was happy that he hadn’t written, I reminded myself.
“Why?” he asked again.
“I didn’t see you much is all.”
“Were you looking?” I could hear the smile in his voice.
“You wish.”
He laughed softly and I felt the movement of it under my hands. I closed my eyes and willed my hands to be still, not to move or explore like they were dying to.
“Sasha told me.”
That statement solved the problem of my temptation.
My breath became shallow. She told him. Why would she tell him? What was she hoping to accomplish? But of course she told him.
So that solved the mystery of why he’d stopped writing me. He had been disappointed.
“She did?” It was all I could say. My breath was gone. My face was red. I was surprised it wasn’t glowing in the darkness. I tried to drop my hands but he was still holding them against his chest. “When?”
“Tuesday after the man bracelet conversation.”
Right. That made sense. She’d seen us talking, she’d given me that nasty look, then she probably marched up and told him the truth. “Oh.” It was all I could think of to say.
“That’s why I was glad I ran into you earlier. I just wanted to clear the air.”
“You’ve cleared it. It’s nice and clear.”
“Is it? Because it still feels a bit murky to me.”
“Then we might as well just say it out loud, clearly. What exactly did Sasha tell you?”
“That you hate me.”
“Yes … Wait, what?”
“It wasn’t news to me, considering what we’d just talked about at my house, but I had hoped that we could get past it. Talk it out. Be friends.”
“No.”
“We can’t be friends.”
“No, yes, we can.” I was in shock. “I didn’t tell her that. She told me the same thing about you.”
“She did? So you don’t hate me?”
“No! I don’t hate you. I have in the past. Not anymore.” I’d said that too loud. I knew I had. It was too late to clamp my mouth shut but I did anyway. It didn’t matter. The door swung open and a man holding a flashlight pointed it directly into our eyes.
“Cade Jennings?” he said.
“The one and only,” Cade answered.
“Come with me.”
The night ended poorly. Cade went to hotel jail. Okay, just the security guard’s office where he was forced to call his parents to come pick him up. And I was allowed to go. I didn’t want to leave, but he kept telling me, “Lily, seriously, it’s fine. I’m fine. Go.” He was saving me again.
So I went, even though I probably should’ve stayed. No, I shouldn’t have stayed. I needed to go before he made me like him even more. I was sacrificing him on the altar of friendship, I told myself. Isabel was more important.
I went home and finally was able to finish the rest of the lyrics for “Left Behind.” A song I couldn’t technically record because I didn’t have my guitar. But even if I borrowed a guitar, I couldn’t use this song. It was about Cade. I wasn’t sure he’d take kindly to me winning a songwriting contest with a song that was based on his life that he kept very private. Like he’d want the world to know about his absent father when he had a hard time even writing about it anonymously.
As I sat on my bed with my notebook, I laughed at myself. At the idea that this song would win. That it would become world-known just because I entered it into a contest. The chances of that were slim to none. But even with those odds, I couldn’t do that to Cade. I liked him too much.
All Monday morning I kept my eyes out for Cade. I wanted to see him so I knew everything worked out fine with the hotel, with his stepdad. Since he was no longer writing me letters, I had to count on an actual sighting to check up on him. But I hadn’t seen him at all. In Chemistry I hoped and prayed that there would be a letter. That now that finals were over, he’d write and tell me that he was sorry he’d stopped writing, he’d been too busy studying, or too busy with school responsibilities, or something. Some really good excuse as to why he’d stopped.
But as my hand searched in vain underneath the desk for a letter it never found, my heart dropped another degree. He’d either found out that I was the letter writer and was giving me a very big hint about how he felt about that, or he was just moving on—Cade always did have a short attention span.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter.
“What do you want for lunch today?” Isabel asked.
I tugged on my zipper that was stuck at the bottom of my hoodie. “I don’t know. Something hot. I’m cold.”
“They should have a soup cart here. That would be awesome.”
“In Arizona?”
“Okay, for the month of December, they should have a soup cart here.”
“Agreed.”
I growled as my zipper refused to budge. I was blindly following Isabel wherever she was leading us, her shoes in my peripheral vision as I messed with my zipper.
“What do you think Sasha wants?”
“Huh?” I looked up to see Sasha on a course straight for us, her face a mixture of anger and sadness. I wasn’t sure what to do with that. She had a bundle of papers in her right hand and it took me a moment to place them but I knew before she reached me that they were my letters. All the letters I’d written to Cade. How had she gotten them?
“You make this impossible,” Sasha grunted. “You’re so weird.” She shoved the letters into my arms and a few fell to the floor. “I can’t be that.”
Isabel helped me pick up the scattered letters as Sasha marched away.
“What was that about?” Isabel asked in surprise.
“These are my letters.”
“How’d she get them? Did Cade give them to her?”
My stomach twisted into a knot. I had no idea.
I opened my backpack and started to shove my letters in with his that I kept there. I stopped, gathered both his and mine, and held them out for Isabel. “Will you just take these? Can we have a bonfire at your house after school?”
She gave me a sad smile. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
She opened her backpack and I dropped them all inside. I needed him out of my life once and for all.
Cade was standing by the minivan talking to my mom through the open window when I approached. I felt like I had on the same angry/sad face that Sasha had been wearing earlier.
“Hey, Lily,” Cade said when I opened the side door.
“Hey.” I got in and closed it.
He looked confused. “Well, it was nice talking to you, Mrs. Abbott. Wyatt, I’ll see you Thursday.”
“Okay!” Wyatt said.
Then Cade looked at me. “Truce expi
red?”
“Yep.” I could do this. I could go back to ignoring him again when all I really wanted to do was ask him if he got in trouble with his parents Friday night after the hotel incident. If his stepdad got kicked out of the golf club. If he was doing okay.
He backed slowly away from the car and my mom rolled up the window as she pulled away.
“I have no idea what you have against that young man, Lil,” Mom said, “but it needs to stop.”
I nodded. “It’s stopped.”
I showed up at Isabel’s house half an hour later. I’d thrown on a black T-shirt to symbolize what, I wasn’t sure. When she opened the door though, her expression was one I didn’t understand—guilt mixed with sadness mixed with something like hope.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What? Why?” My right eye started to twitch. What was she going to confess to now?
“I read them. I shouldn’t have. They were private. But I did.”
I let out a breath. “Iz, I didn’t know it was him when I was writing them.”
“I know.” She took me by the hand and led me to her room where all my letters were stacked neatly on her desk. “We can’t burn these.”
“What? But I wore black.”
She laughed. “These letters, Lil … It’s no wonder you fell for him.”
“I didn’t … ” I started to protest, but I couldn’t lie. “I know.”
“But he doesn’t know he’s been writing you?”
“No.”
“He thought that was Sasha?” She pointed at the letters.
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Then he’s an idiot. Those sound nothing like Sasha. Those letters are so you. He fell for you.”
A lump formed in my throat. “He didn’t fall for me.”
“It sure seems like he did.”
“Even if that were true, which it’s not, it doesn’t matter. I’m choosing you. I’m choosing us. I wore black.”
She smiled and pulled me into a hug. “Can I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
“I was always jealous of you and Cade.”
I pushed away from her so I could see her face. “Jealous? Of our fighting?”
“Yes. He’d get more passionate discussing something you did than anything we’d ever done or talked about. I never told you that I always kind of thought you two had a connection you both refused to admit to.”