“Why are you looking at me like that?” Bray asks, staring up at me with her long hair spread behind her against the grass.
I study the shape of her lips, the softness of them, and I imagine what they must taste like. Because it’s been so long since I tasted them, when we shared our very first French kiss ever. I feel her fingers curling gently around the fabric of my shirt as her arms are bent upward, tucked between our bodies.
“Because I love you,” I say and she blushes.
“You love me?”
I nod.
“I love you and I want us to be together forever,” I say and study her lips again, forcing myself not to kiss her yet.
Her fingers move from my shirt and come up to my cheeks. She traces a finger along my cheekbone and then over my eyebrows and down the bridge of my nose.
“I love you too, Elias,” she whispers and her thumb rests on my bottom lip. “And I want to be with you forever.”
My mouth closes around hers and I kiss her deeply. I feel her heart beating against mine.
And then I wake up from the daydream and look out the windshield of my car. Rian is standing on the sidewalk looking in at me, a piece of paper clutched in her right hand. Immediately, I know something’s wrong, and my heart sinks like a hot stone straight down into the balls of my feet.
Chapter Thirty
Elias
I get out of the car. “What’s wrong?” I’m terrified of the answer.
She’s been crying. She reaches up and wipes her nose with the back of her free hand. I hear her sniffle lightly.
“Rian, w-what is it?” I keep glancing at the paper dangling from her fingertips, knowing it’s the bearer of tragic news, and I want to burn it.
The uneasiness in Rian’s voice scares me further. “Brayelle’s been home for two days,” she says.
Maybe I didn’t hear her right. I feel my head move from side to side, as if to shake her words out of my mind and start anew. I put up my hand. “What did you say?”
Rian swallows hard and clutches the paper in her hand more firmly. I’m getting so impatient I feel like grabbing her by the arms and shaking the words out of her.
“She didn’t want me to tell you, but she got out on schedule and came home with me.”
My voice rises almost to a full shout. “Rian! Just say what you came here to say!” I step up closer when really what I want to do is leave her. I don’t want to look at her, but she’s the only way I’m going to get any of the answers that I’m desperately seeking right now.
“I don’t know where she is!” Tears begin to stream down her cheeks. “She’s been acting really strange since she came home. Talking to me with this sincere look in her eyes. I-I felt like she was forgiving me for everything. She wasn’t mad. Sh-She didn’t even want to talk about the past.” Her tears begin to choke her. “She hugged me. She’s hasn’t hugged me since we were in sixth grade.”
My heart is beating so fast I feel it in my fingers and in my toes. My head is on fire, hot from the fear and anger and adrenaline racing through my veins.
Bray has been back for two days. She didn’t want me to know.
No.
Oh God no…
She planned this all along. She made me believe she was getting out late so I couldn’t stop her.
Finally, I grab Rian’s upper arms tightly in my hands and I shake her. “Where is she?!”
“I told you! I don’t know! The last time I saw her was a couple of hours ago!” Tears barrel from her eyes. “She left this on her bed.”
Rian places the crumpled piece of paper into my hand.
I look down at it and I’m terrified to read it, everything in my heart and soul telling me that it’ll kill me if I look into its secrets, like opening Pandora’s box. The light weight of the paper in my hand somehow burns my fingers, right down into the bones.
I open the paper and read the text scribbled in Bray’s handwriting:
I miss the Georgia night sky and the warm summer breeze on my face. I miss running across the prickly grass with my bare feet. I miss the stars and the laughter and the heat. I miss our innocence. I miss the fireflies. I want things to end where they began, the two of us floating around in a jar together, lighting the way for each other through a confined space that could only feel infinite. Because nothing else mattered then. Nothing on the outside could ever touch us, hurt us, or threaten us. Because innocence is bliss. And I want mine back. I just want it back….
The last thing I see are Rian’s teary eyes staring back at me. I let the paper fall from my fingers and I take off running toward Mr. Parson’s land. I leap over the chain-link fence behind Donna Sanders’s house and land on my feet. And I just keep running, past the neighborhood and the church and the old factory at the end of the street. I run faster than I’ve ever run in my life. By car it would take two minutes longer to reach the pasture than running straight through the woods. I can hardly breathe I press on so hard. My heart pounds against my rib cage, trying to burst through it. My calves are as hard as stone, my shoes hitting the ground so fast and so hard that I feel every shock sensation rush into the tips of my toes and up the back of my calf muscles.
I don’t stop running.
Leaping over a small wooden fence, I run past an old shed, and the darkness of the deep woods swallows me whole. I keep on the path, jumping over the same rocks I’ve jumped over since I was a kid. Small low-lying limbs snap me in the face as I run past, not stopping long enough to push them out of my way. The song of the crickets and the frogs and the cicadas rises louder in my ears as if they’re singing to me, urging me on, telling me to hurry.
Tears burn the backs of my eyes and down into my throat. I part my lips and breathe in sharply, forcing the tears back and letting anger and fear and determination push me forward. Because I know that the tears will only slow me down; they’ll rock me to my core and bring me to my knees.
I trip and fall over debris in the forest bed, feeling my ankle twist painfully beneath me. But I pick myself up and keep running. I can feel the solitude of the pasture out ahead. I can faintly smell the stagnant water that always lingers around the bank of the pond. I’m so close. So close. I push myself even harder, veering left and off the path toward the edge of the field. I can see it through a break in the trees. I can see the light of the moon spilling out over the clearing until finally I burst through the last bit of trees and find myself on the outskirts. The water in the pond glistens in the distance. I keep on running toward it, my heart tearing to shreds the closer I get. And then when I finally get there, I stop dead in my tracks as if inches from running into a brick wall.