18 Truths (16 page)

I shielded my eyes. He shone brighter than the sun.

“Have it your way then.”

His hands clamped around my waist, surprisingly warm. He launched us into the sky again, the reflection of his wings against the light and water blinding me for a second. After a few blinks, I looked below to everything blooming around us, and I found it suddenly easy to focus on the blessings in my life, surrounded by paradise. When we landed outside of headquarters, I was air dried and renewed, as if I’d left my worries up in the clouds.

“I have some work to get back to, but don’t be a stranger.” Riel breathed the words over my cheek. “And I want you to meditate on chapters thirteen and fourteen in the book of Corinthians. Love should run deeper than romantic feelings. God’s love never gives up, never fails, and never runs out on you. Remember that.”

I reached out for his arm and stopped him. “Riel? Are there ever any meteor showers around here? I mean, is that something you could orchestrate?”

For a moment, he just stood there, studying me. “If it would make you happy,” he said finally.

I nodded.

“Done. The shower will run from nine to ten tonight.” He spun around and walked through the door.

All day I ruminated over the love chapters Riel told me to read. The whole time I formulated my plan. I left a note on Nate’s door, inviting him to meet me outside of headquarters at eight o’clock sharp for a romantic rendezvous. I didn’t realize how much I’d expected him not to show up until I was so surprised when he did. But I felt inexpressibly happy to see him walking toward me.

He wore army green cargo shorts and a gray T-shirt that said ‘Reckless.’ His face appeared groggy, but a look of joy spread over his features when he spotted me.

He held up the invitation, waving my card in the air. “Well, this was unexpected.”

“What’s surprising is that you didn’t already have plans tonight.”

Flinching at my comment, he said, “Actually, I did. I’m probably ruining someone else’s night by being here with you.”

I took a step back, away from him. “Meaning Grace, right? Look, you didn’t have to come.” The picnic basket I held suddenly felt a thousand pounds heavier.

Closing the distance between us, he grabbed my hand. “Yes, I did. I missed you.”

I shut my eyes—it’d been so long since we touched. “Me, too.”

He leaned down and kissed my cheek. “So, where are you taking me tonight?”

“I’ll show you.”

Picturing the lake I visited with Riel earlier, I blinked hard and a moment later, we arrived on the dock. I set the picnic basket down so I could gesture the appropriate “Ta-da!” with my arms spread wide.

His gaze was on me, questioning. “What’s this?”

“Apparently, there’s a big old world right here at headquarters we haven’t explored yet.”

He beamed at me. “Cool.”

We stared at each other for a long minute, and inside I felt like we were saying all the things we wanted to say but for some reason couldn’t. My heart rate elevated when he leaned down to kiss me, sliding his hand out of his pocket and resting it on my hip. I lifted my own hands to his arms, his muscles tight and defined under my grip. I opened my eyes because this pressing need to look at him took over, and, startled to see his eyes open, I accidentally bit his bottom lip.

“Hey!”

“Sorry. Are you hurt?”

“We don’t feel pain anymore, remember? Well, at least not the physical kind.”

“Do you always kiss me with your eyes open?”

He flung an arm around my shoulder, steering us down the beach. Bending his head, breaths fluttered against my ear as he whispered, “Sometimes I just can’t stop myself from staring at your gorgeous face.”

I shoved him lightly. “Stop lying.”

Nate frowned. “If you don’t love yourself, how are you ever gonna love me?”

My conversations with Riel flashed in my mind. “I do love you. So much.”

He shook his head. “Then do me a solid, and repeat after me. I am a generous, kind, smart, loving and yes, beautiful, human being.”

Out of all those adjectives, human being seemed the most wrong. But I didn’t feel like repeating him anyway. Instead, I hurtled myself at him, my lips immediately finding his. I closed my eyes and kept them closed when I kissed him this time.

When he pulled away, I wondered how everything could feel so miserable and magical at the same time. Nate studied me for a moment, his ocean blue eyes wide open, like fire melting my heart. My lips crushed against his once more, the usual tenderness gone as my hands slid under his shirt to trace the hard skin there. I sensed the passion pressing us closer as his arms went around my neck, his hands gripping my hair, startling me. I wondered if spiritually binding meant we were allowed to…ugh, I didn’t want to think, I just wanted to do. I’d prove to myself and to him that I still loved him, no matter how much I still thought about Conner. I broke my lips away from Nate’s, then trailed kisses down his neck.

Nate moaned, then chuckled. “You don’t usually, wait, change that to never, attack me like this. What’s gotten into you?”

“Attack?” I felt discouraged by his choice of words and pulled away a little to study his face. Maybe he hadn’t been enjoying himself as much as I had.

He kissed the top of my head. “I don’t want to feel like I’m taking advantage of a bad situation.” Another kiss, on my eyelid this time. “Things have been… off with us lately. I think we should talk, don’t you?” And one last kiss on the tip of my nose.

Why did it feel like the kiss of death?

I nodded, letting him lead me back to the dock in silence, wondering why he was acting so mysterious all the time. What kind of boyfriend stops a heated make out session?
One who’s not into you anymore.

“Shall we?” I plopped down next to the picnic basket, then pulled off my sandals before lightly kicking the tips of my toes in the water.

He sat down next to me on the edge of the pier, but not close enough for our bodies to touch. I tried to chalk that up to meaning nothing, but knew it meant everything.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“Nothing.” Nate frowned, then looked at the basket. “What’s in there, anyway?”

Carefully, I unpacked our dinner, setting it out on cloth napkins I laid behind us. “We have some baguettes, some cheese, and some ham for the main meal. One hundred percent pure milk chocolate squares for dessert, and—”

“What are you playing at?”

I leaned back. “Huh?”

“Oh, like you don’t know chocolate is a natural aphrodisiac.”

Laughing, I felt my cheeks flush. “Whatever. I have a sunset picnic overlooking a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains, followed by a meteor shower. Do I really need chocolate to sweeten the deal?”

He smiled, his gaze scanning the lake. “Nope, you don’t.”

“But if I did need more reinforcements, I also have this.” I pulled out a bottle of wine. “I’ve never drank any. Have you?”

Nodding his head, he said, “Yup, but where’d you get that from?”

I unscrewed the cap. “Swiped it off the communion table. There’s hardly any of it left anyway.”

Nate shook his head like I just said the most insane thing ever. “Do you
want
to go to H-E-double hockey sticks?”

“Whatever. It’s not a big deal.”

“Isn’t thou shall not steal like the seventh or eighth commandment?”

I waggled my eyebrows at him. “And that’s not the only commandment I may break tonight.”

“I guess I should shut up then, if I know what’s good for me.” He grabbed the bottle and took a swig, then handed it back to me and made a sandwich. “Here you go, my lady.”

A deer sprinted across the grass in the distance as I took a bite. I couldn’t think of a more perfect setting to reaffirm our feelings for one another.

I expected Nate to fix himself a sandwich next, but instead he picked up a stray pebble on the pier and skipped the rock over the lake. Once. Twice. Three times before he blurted out, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being so distant.”

I grabbed the bottle of wine and took my first sip, wondering if I could get drunk… if alcohol could still have the same effect on our bodies here. “Yeah, but why have you been trying to put so much distance between us? I thought you were looking forward to being spirit guides together.”

He sighed, and then turned to face me. “Over the past few weeks, ever since we learned about Dr. Judy’s secret, it just seemed like there were two different sides to our relationship. I mean, I was looking forward to spending forever with you, no matter what forever entailed. But when I would hold your hand, hold
you
, look into your eyes… I didn’t see the same kind of love for me I saw before.” He paused for a moment, his face a wrestling match of competing emotions. “There’s all this heat between us that wasn’t there before, like just a minute ago and all those nights at headquarters in your room during our week of training, but it feels like a distraction, like you were letting yourself go so you wouldn’t have to think about something.”

I played with the cap on the wine bottle. “I thought you were having fun.”

“I was. But I also know when there’s something on your mind, and it hurts me when you keep things from me.”

The ugly truth slapped me in the face, daring me to tell him how I really felt about Conner. But I sat there and watched Nate’s face change right before me, expecting the worse, and I just couldn’t do that to him. So of course, I put up my best defense and took the attention away from me. “That system works both ways you know. You leave me in the dark about everything these days.”

He lifted his hands in the air, palms facing me. “Believe me, I know. I feel so much better now that I got that off my chest. You know I’m a bit weak, so with that on my chest, it was pretty hard to breathe.”

And there went his defense mechanism: sarcasm. And it was confirmation he was holding back information from me, too. I just didn’t know if his restraint had to do with Grace or something else.

We mainly just sat in silence the rest of the evening. Well, not exactly silence since he’d brought his iPod with him and proceeded to play the entire Imagine Dragons album while we watched the meteor shower. As I listened to
Radioactive
, their song about waking up to a new age, I kept thinking how this new age felt very familiar. The first date Nate and I had was watching a meteor shower at his house. That date ended badly, because losing Conner had still felt like the apocalypse, and I just couldn’t deal.

Tonight, just like that first ‘date’, I ended up crying myself to sleep alone in my room.

History loved to repeat itself.

“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction.
Fiction has to make sense.”
—Mark Twain

ll night I tossed and turned, worrying about where Conner was and what he might be doing and what I didn’t say to Nate the night before. At school, Nate still sat with Grace in our math class. I guessed since he took her on as a solo mission, and I’d be reassigned to someone else by next week, I didn’t need to bother with school anymore. I knew most people wouldn’t, but most people didn’t actually enjoy Algebra II and Biology like I did either.