His lips find my ear. He whispers, rough and low.
“Well… Almost nothing.”
I feel a sudden rush of cold air as Emerson steps back away from me. I open my eyes to find him staring at me. His face is harshly set, a cruel smirk of triumph on his lips.
Triumph!
I gasp, humiliation crashing through me. This is all a game to him, trying to prove some point. And I fell for it! My cheeks burn, desire falling away as quickly as it came. Instead, it’s replaced with fury.
“You ass**le!” I yell, shoving him away from me.
Emerson laughs, hard and metallic, like it’s all a big joke.
Inside, I’m cringing. I can’t imagine how I must have looked to him just now, panting after the smallest touch. Like a desperate little girl, I realize, shameful. Like a total miserable loser.
“You f**king jerk!” I scream again, trying to block out the humiliation with anger. “Get away from me!”
Emerson backs off, hands raised in surrender. His expression is mocking, and in the dark, he suddenly looks like a stranger: so harsh and remote.
I fumble my keys into the Camaro lock. “Just leave me alone,” I yell again, my whole body shaking. The door finally opens, and I slide into the seat. I slam the door and yank the keys in the ignition, sparking the engine to life. I speed away, tires squealing, but as I roar out of the parking lot, I can’t resist one last look back in the rearview mirror.
Emerson is nowhere to be seen. He didn’t stay to watch me go.
I force my eyes onto the road again, but I can’t keep the tears back any longer. They spill down my cheeks, hot and anguished. Pain floods my chest, a wretched ache.
That isn’t the man I fell in love with.
The realization is a fresh blow. The man who taunted me, so cruel, he’s not the Emerson I used to know. Emerson lived on the edge, sure, but he was always playful, so full of sharp energy and restless determination. The man back there was darker, bitter, battle-scarred. He looked at me with a grim determination, getting a perverse satisfaction from my humiliation the old Emerson would never have dreamed.
What happened to turn him into this person? Unease bubble to the surface of my mind, whispers I can’t hold back.
What if it’s all my fault?
CHAPTER THREE
I can’t sleep.
All through the night, I lay awake in the single guest bedroom, clutching the covers to my body and replaying the humiliating scene from the parking lot. Over and over, I see the mocking expression in his eyes, feel the rough stubble of his cheek scratch against mine…
Feel the ache of my body calling out to him.
No!
I leap out of bed, and pull on my sweater. I flip every light on as I head downstairs, as if the brightness can chase away my shadows, and attack the packing again with a vengeance—channeling all my pent up into the task ahead of me.
Don’t think about him, Juliet, I tell myself sternly. Don’t think about what he’s become.
I find an old FM radio on one of the shelves in the living room and plug it in, playing music loudly to drown out my wayward thoughts. At first, I tune it to my favorite country station, but every song seems to be about lost love and regret, so I flip the dial to a pop channel instead: blasting upbeat dance songs so loud I’m sure the neighbors can hear even half a mile away.
I pack and tape and trash until I’m too exhausted to think. I can’t bring myself to look through all the photograph albums and mementos—the last thing I need is to dredge up even more history—so I just piled them in a box and move on. My muscles ache and my head hurts, but I don’t trust myself to stop, not for a minute. Not for even a second, to let the memory of Emerson’s eyes creep into my mind, so shadowed and dark.
There was a time I couldn’t imagine him looking at me with such bitterness. Four years ago, we spent that summer in a tangle of breathless kisses, laying out on the beach under the hot blaze of sun, talking and laughing, just drinking each other in until the soft trace of his fingertips on my palm became too much to take and we would scramble, laughing, to find some privacy. Looking back, I can’t believe we were so shameless: sneaking off to the sand-dunes, the flatbed of his truck, the deserted woodlands on the outskirts of town... Anyplace we could steal a moment together, dizzy with passion, our tongues and fingertips discovering foreign lands; our bodies sliding together in a glorious sweat.
Closing my eyes to sink into the memory, I can almost taste him, salty on my tongue.
Then I snap out of it. What are you doing? I scold myself. What happened to not thinking about him?
All my happy memories of us together are just that: the past. I was young. I was stupid. I thought our love would last forever.
I was wrong.
Finally, night fades into dawn outside the window. I look around the room. The bookshelves are almost done, all the bric-a-brac divided up between donation boxes, and the few family heirlooms safely wrapped away.
I go fix a cup of coffee over the stove in the kitchen. I think with longing of the new coffee-shop in town, but there’s no way I’m going back there again, not if it means risking another run-in with Emerson. I settle for bitter instant grounds in a chipped mug, and take my brew and my textbooks out onto the back porch to watch the sun rise.
I sit in the peeling old rocker and breathe in the salty morning air. The beach is a still, silent stretch of golden sands under a pale sky, wave lapping gently at the shore. You can’t tell where our property ends and the beach begins: the wild grasses creep up to the edge of the wooden porch, and then make way for the dunes rolling down to the ocean. Dad always used to yell at us for tracking sand into the house, but there’s no keeping it at bay. It would find a way everywhere, the same day we arrived: in the soles of shoes, between the pages of books, trailing up the stairs.