Embrace (17 page)

It bugged me that Isaac talked to her. He shouldn’t stand there smiling. With the way Paige kept showing up, he had to know she liked him. I seethed in my anger, and the taste of copper stuck to my tongue. I needed to get out of there, away from both of them.

As soon as I had that thought, Isaac’s gaze met mine. Maybe he could read minds after all. Now that he knew I was there, I couldn’t run the other way. I inhaled deeply, letting the air out of my lungs in a slow ten-count in an effort to control my emotions. Isaac would taste my anger. Paige might too. I forced myself to walk past a bored-looking Emma and join them.

Isaac greeted me with one of his crooked smiles that always made me feel special. Paige frowned. I felt better.

“Hi,” I said, but not before I gave Paige the evil glare.

Isaac regarded me quizzically.

Paige quickly composed herself. I think her tone was supposed to be sweet, but it had an acid bite to it. “I was just asking Isaac if he was going to the festival.”

“Didn’t trust me to ask him?” I replied.

Isaac grabbed my backpack and said, “I’ll talk to Madison about the festival.”

“Sounds good.” Paige’s sugary tone didn’t match her scowl.

I smiled, knowing I’d won this little battle. She joined Emma, and they left school.

Isaac bent down and gently brushed his lips to mine. “How was your day?”

With a greeting like that, I couldn’t stay upset.

“Long,” I admitted.

“I saw Kaylee.” He held the door open. “She and Josh just left. She’s holding up pretty well.”

“It’s nice to have her back.” I stepped through the first set of doors leading to the parking lot. The blue eyes that bore into me stopped me dead in my tracks.
Not this
, I thought. Not now.

“Kevin,” I whispered.

Isaac stopped next to me. I wanted to disappear.

Kevin clenched his teeth. “You never called. I stopped by your house this morning, but your dad said you’d already left for school.” Kevin moved his cold stare from me to Isaac.

The bitter taste of orange peels filled my mouth. I looked at Isaac, wondering if it was his jealousy I tasted, even though he had nothing to be jealous of. Kevin was just here to visit old friends.

Okay, not even I believed that, but it was the only thing that kept my legs from giving out.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call. It’s just been crazy these past few days.”

Isaac took a step away from me. “I’ll wait for you by the Jeep.”

I wanted to grab Isaac before he could walk away, and I wanted to drop to my knees and beg Kevin to forgive me. Unable to do either, I studied a scuffmark on the floor and nodded. I counted to three, trying to keep the tears building in my eyes from spilling over. When I finally looked up, Kevin’s deep blue eyes blazed down at me.

“Kevin, I’m sorry. I should have told you about Isaac when I saw you yesterday, but with everything going on with Kaylee and you surprising me, I didn’t know how. I just met him a couple weeks ago. Honest.”

I would have preferred that Kevin yell at me. Instead, he let the silence between us grow until I wanted to scream. I couldn’t take it.

“Please. Kevin.” I reached for him, but he took a step back just like Isaac had. “Say something.”

“I didn’t expect you to never date again.” He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “But I didn’t know how much it would bother me to see you with someone else.”

Kevin’s understanding didn’t make me feel any better.

Not being a couple didn’t mean we’d stopped caring about each other. We’d ended things on good terms. Kept in touch. I couldn’t blame him for thinking that one day we’d get back together. If I were to be honest with myself, I’d have admitted that I had been thinking the same thing—until I’d met Isaac.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he went on. “There’s no one at home I can talk to about this. I thought you might understand.”

“You can talk to me about anything.” I rested my hand on the sleeve of his jacket. He didn’t swat it away; that was good. He looked so lost. “What is it? Did something happen back home? Are your mom and dad okay? Did you get in trouble at school? You didn’t get a girl pregnant, did you?”

“God, no!” Kevin closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair. “My parents are fine. Dad likes his new job, and Mom’s made a couple friends at the health club.”

“Then what is it?” I knew it had to be catastrophic. Anything smaller and he would have just called.

Kevin opened his eyes. “It may have been a mistake coming here. Don’t worry about me. Really. Life’s great. I even made the basketball team.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah.” Kevin turned away from me.

“Kevin, what is it?” I grabbed his arm. “Please. Don’t leave like this. What did you want to talk about?”

He looked over his shoulder at me. “It was nothing. You have someone waiting for you.” And he left.

I stood between the glass doors for a few minutes. People streamed past me on their way to life outside of school.

I should have gotten an award for sabotaging my own happiness. I had pushed Kevin away, something I would never intentionally do, and I may have given Isaac enough reason to rethink our relationship. Sure, we were in a coven together, but that didn’t mean he still had to date me. I forced down the lump of guilt and confusion that had formed in my throat and headed outside to where Isaac had parked that morning—if he’d waited for me. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d left.

I found him leaning on the back bumper. Without a word, he pushed off the Jeep, walked to the passenger door, and opened it. Just as silently, I got in.

He didn’t head to his house; instead, we were speeding down Washington Street. A mix of songs from his iPod filled the otherwise silent car. Isaac had one hand on the steering wheel and the other clasped around the stick shift as he accelerated to pass a car. I had to say something. I knew that. But where to start and how to get my mouth to form the words was a problem.

“He’s just a friend,” I mumbled. I didn’t even know if he heard me over the music.

We were approaching a curve when a semi-truck traveling in the opposite direction crossed over the double yellow lines. Isaac swerved, missing the front bumper of the truck just before an ear-piercing
BOOM
cut through the sound of screeching tires. Burning rubber threatened to choke me as the Jeep careened sideways. I screamed and braced my hands on the roof, pushing my powers out of me, willing the soft top above our heads and the metal around us to hold as the Jeep spun out of control. Isaac’s powers pulsed around me.

It all happened quickly. We slid through the smoke from the tires. The sound of the semi truck’s brakes locking up drowned out our music. The truck struck the rear driver’s side of our Jeep and passed through us as if it were a hologram. I saw the worn black treads in its tire and the chrome hubcap, then the rusted rim, brake drum, and caliper in a weird sort of 3D way as we continued through the shocks and suspension bar, through belts and fans and other moving parts of the engine that I never, ever in my life wanted to see like that again.

Once through the truck, we passed through the guardrail in the same weird way. The Jeep tilted sideways. Isaac’s powers pushed out harder around us, coagulating the air in the Jeep and providing a barrier that held me to my seat. The Jeep rolled. I screamed again.

Then we were still, the Jeep right side up. I had to tell myself to lower my arms. We were safe. Isaac turned down the radio.

From where we sat at the base of the embankment, I could see the semi had stopped half a mile up the road, intact. The driver leaned out the window and scanned the area we’d just been in, no doubt looking for the battered remains of our Jeep that wasn’t there. He didn’t look past the guardrail to where we were. Why would he? The guardrail remained solid. Undamaged. He closed his door when the car we’d passed earlier drove by and continued on its journey.

I looked at Isaac, not bothering to close my mouth. For the second time in less than two days, I should have been dead. Our bodies should have been mangled in a wreck of metal and rubber.

Isaac wiped sweat from his forehead and looked above then around us. Everything inside the Jeep was the same as it had been a couple of minutes ago. Our backpacks were still in the backseat. The windshield was unbroken. The metal around us was whole.

“Nice use of your powers,” he said.

I wished I could say I knew exactly what I’d done a moment before we sailed through the truck, but the truth was instinct took over. Fear of becoming road kill had me praying I could turn a soft-top Jeep into a tank. While I know I hadn’t physically turned the Wrangler into anything, I had made it more durable than it would have been on its own, and Isaac had layered his powers on top of mine, preventing us from being flung around the front seats like ragdolls. Between me pushing out my powers out to will the Jeep to hold together and Isaac pushing out his to keep us from becoming a statistic, we’d managed to save ourselves.

“Ditto,” I managed to reply.

We got out on shaky legs. The body of the Jeep was exactly as it had been when we’d left school, other than the dent in the driver’s side rear quarter panel. The front driver’s side tire was also blown. Isaac bent down and placed his hand on it. I caught a taste of his powers as the rubber melted back together and the tire inflated. Something fell from the wheel well, and Isaac picked it up. He then walked to the back of the Jeep and rested his hand on the dent, willing his powers into the metal, which pushed outward with a groan and a crunch.

“Good as new,” he said.

I ran my hand over the smooth surface. He could make a killing if he opened a body shop.

“Josh’s tires
were
flat,” I said in awe.

Isaac’s lips tugged upward into a modest half smile. That night at The Grill, I knew I had seen both tires on the Mustang as flat as deflated balloons. No wonder Kaylee hadn’t been able to tell they were driving on the small spare—they wouldn’t have been. Josh and Isaac would have fixed the flat tires on the Mustang the same way Isaac had just fixed the Jeep’s.

Isaac held out his hand, revealing a small hex bag.

“I thought binding Mark was supposed to keep him from being able to make those things.”

“It should.” Blue flames erupted in Isaac’s hand, suspending the hex bag inches above his palm and turning it to ash. “He could have made it before we cast the spell.”

I got back in the Jeep, mumbling, “You should have let me smack him while I had the chance.”

Isaac drove off-road until we found a place to get back on Washington Street. The uncomfortable silence returned.

A few minutes later, he pulled into the fifteen-minute parking at Annisquam Lighthouse. This was it, my chance to let Isaac know Kevin and I were just friends. I rested my hand on Isaac’s arm before he could get out.

“I—” A lot of words were supposed to follow that, but they caught in my throat.

Isaac removed his arm from under my hand. “We can talk on the tower.”

“Are you going to push me off?” I joked.

Isaac snorted and shook his head. “Come on.”

The seagulls above seemed to snicker at me with their calls, as if to say I’d f-ed up royally. Even the
swoosh
of the waves crashing into the rocks sounded like it was mocking me.

Though the smell of the sea filled my lungs, the calm serenity of being on the balcony of the lighthouse was almost suffocating. Isaac took a seat overlooking the harbor. The height didn’t bother me as much as before. Maybe that was because, no matter how guilty I felt at that moment, I trusted Isaac to keep me safe. I sat a couple of feet from him, leaning my forehead on the spindles of the black iron railing, and watched the waves swarm the rocks below. I had to make Isaac understand.

“Kevin and I are just friends,” I said without looking at him. “I mean, we used to date, but he moved away.”

Smooth. I might as well have said that the only reason Kevin and I had broken up was because we now lived in separate states. Which was true, but that didn’t mean we would get back together now that he was back in town. Nor did it mean we’d be hooking up for a quick fling. I had to get my thoughts in order.

I could feel Isaac’s eyes on me. It was weird, but I could always feel it when he watched me. Like an invisible line somehow connected us. I rambled on, letting my emotions tumble out.

“I won’t lie to you. Kevin and I used to be close, and I still care about him, but it’s different now. It has been for a long time. I didn’t know he was coming. He surprised me. Some surprise, huh?” I forced a smile and continued to watch the waves. “With everything going on with Kaylee, I haven’t had time to talk to him. And now—” I swallowed. “I won’t blame you if you hate me.”

If Isaac was waiting for a chance to jump in and tell me he didn’t care who I’d dated before we’d met, that pause was it. The sun blazed down, making me feel like I was under a spotlight. A yellowthroat bird landed on the railing and glared, its black eyes judging me. There was nothing else I could say. If Isaac decided we should be friends and not a couple, I’d have to accept that.