Primal Threat (12 page)

19

“
I
hope this doesn’t get worse,” said Nadine, searching Zak’s face for signs of irritation. “Because it’s all my fault. Everything that’s happening is because I told people where you were going.”

“Don’t worry about it. Seeing you makes anything worthwhile.”

“You mean that?”

“I’ve been thinking about you for weeks, Nadine.”

“I’ve been thinking about you, too.”

Nadine hoped she didn’t sound too eager. It was wonderful to see Zak again, but she knew they were walking a delicate balance. They’d been together, and now they weren’t, but even so she felt closer to him than ever. The dynamic that existed between them now that they’d split up was something she didn’t quite have a handle on, but she certainly wanted to explore it.

Nadine counted sixteen people as she looked around the group: five bicyclists, seven in the Jeep group, her three friends, and herself. Following Jennifer’s detailed instructions, they’d spent an hour driving through holiday traffic swollen with motor homes and trucks towing boat trailers. Nadine didn’t like duping the guard, and she felt even lousier when they found her brother’s camp and realized Scooter and Kasey had somehow located Zak and his friends.

Even though everyone in the Jeep camp was disappointed over the results of the races, they sat around the barbecue with the cyclists like old friends while Kasey passed out steaks and burgers. They ate and waited for the sun to finish dying and talked about coyotes after somebody heard a distant howl. Dozer began barking, and the Finnigan brothers howled with him, which only made him bark louder. The brothers laughed so long and hard Nadine thought one of them was going to have a stroke. It wasn’t until then that she realized how drunk they must be.

Nadine knew that in sitting next to Zak she was aligning herself with the bicyclists, but if she sat next to her brother, Scooter would view it as an invitation, and she didn’t want to send that message. If she sat with her girlfriends, Scooter would try to cull her out like a cowboy roping a calf, and she didn’t want to get into a struggle with him—not here, not with everyone watching. Even though she knew it was going to infuriate Scooter, the only safe place was next to Zak. And what if she made Scooter angry? He had no legitimate hold on her.

The group jabbered about everything except the races, Zak whispering details to Nadine to complement something one of
his
people had said, she adding information on a topic one of
her
people had brought up. After a while, Nadine said, “Come on. Show me your waterfall.”

“It’s up the hill.”

“Then let’s go.”

Together they walked up the steep road. As they left, Nadine caught a glimpse of Scooter staring at them with those large gray eyes she’d once thought were so beautiful—all pale with tiny black pupils in the middle, so that when he stared at you, if he didn’t move or blink, you thought you were watching a wax sculpture in a museum. Over the past month his eyes had become attributes she’d come to despise.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about them coming up here,” she said.

“The only thing that’s happened so far is we’ve pocketed a thousand bucks and are owed another thousand.”

“Yes. Well, you’ll never see that second thousand.”

Nadine accompanied Zak to an outcropping of rocks just below and to the west of the bicyclists’ encampment. From time to time they could hear the dog barking back in the Jeep camp. From the viewpoint, other than the dog and the smudges of smoke on the southwestern horizon, there were no indications anybody else lived on the planet. The distant buildings of Seattle and Bellevue had long been submerged in the haze.

She braved the first bluff and then steeled herself to follow Zak onto the farthest outcropping, to a point where they could look back at the mountain and view the steep, forested slopes. Nadine shuddered at what she believed was Zak’s recklessness as he blithely negotiated the narrow rock ledges, each with a drop of more than a hundred feet on either side. She didn’t want to look weak in Zak’s eyes, especially in light of what she’d just seen him do on his friend’s bicycle, so she followed him out onto the scariest outcropping she’d ever been on, finding it was easier to plunge ahead instead of hesitating or thinking about the possible consequences. Sometimes her mother was right. She was too much of a tomboy.

From out on the point the view extended alongside the mountain to the south as far as the small town of North Bend and beyond, with the occasional boulder larger than a house dotting the base of the mountain. At the tip of this bluff, they were as alone as two people could be.

Nadine had broken up with Zak at the beginning of August, almost three weeks earlier. During that time, she’d been busy with her tennis tournament, and Zak had gone to eastern Washington to train on the blazing-hot roads for the twenty-four-hour race he was doing in September. Breaking up with him, she now realized, had been the dumbest thing she’d ever done. Sure, he had a chip on his shoulder when it came to people with more money than him, but she would work with him and he would outgrow it. And anyway, he had never let his attitude affect the way he treated her. She missed him; in the beginning when he didn’t call for a few days, she found herself in agony. How could she tell him she’d made a mistake, that she wanted to see him every day now? How could she tell him after she’d made such a point of explaining how important it was for her to finish school without any outside distractions, after telling him how her family was making it increasingly uncomfortable for her to be with him? Zak’s constant arguments with her brother had been a nuisance, but really, when she thought about it, nothing more than that.

When they broke up, it had been so utterly different from the hours-long ordeal she’d undergone with Scooter. She could see Zak was hurt, but he hadn’t made a scene. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, though she agonized over the speech for two days before giving it, and then did it in a fairly public place so he couldn’t put on the same extravaganza Scooter had.

“I just want you to be happy, Nadine. If you’re happier without me in your life, then I’ll have to accept that. It hurts, but if that’s your decision, I’m not going to fight you over it.”

In the end—except for the pain she saw in Zak’s eyes, which nearly broke her heart—she found his calm acceptance of her decision nearly as infuriating as Scooter’s refusal to acknowledge their breakup.

Zak showed up a week later for her tennis tournament but sat apart from her family and friends, and spoke to her only briefly afterward to congratulate her on the win and tell her how happy he was for her. When her family and friends crowded in, he slipped away. Lately, Nadine had begun calling him, and it had been during one of those calls that he’d made the mistake of telling her his plans for this weekend.

“I don’t know why we broke up,” she said, staring at the sunset.

“You said you didn’t want to be with me anymore.”

“I don’t know how on earth I came to that conclusion.”

“I know how, and I don’t blame you one bit. I was irritating. I
am
irritating. You’re from a wealthy family, and I have this attitude that rich people aren’t part of the world the rest of us inhabit, that they’re not tuned in to reality. I know some wealthy people probably fit into my stereotype, but most probably don’t. I’ve been trying to cure myself, but I guess it isn’t happening fast enough. You were right to dump me. I wish it hadn’t happened, but objectively I think you did the right thing…for you.”

“Are you seeing anyone else now? I know we’ve never talked about it, but I would think you might be.”

“There’s nobody else. How could there be?”

It was exactly what she’d wanted to hear. Nadine sat on a flat rock, where she felt less likely to entertain the feeling of going over the cliff. “I’ve missed you. I made a mistake, and I’ve been regretting it ever since. And now I just want you to say you love me and you’ve missed me, and it’s been pure torture not to see me every day.”

“Well,” said Zak, sighing. “If I wanted somebody to say something like that, I’d probably say it to them first. So…I guess I’ll have to follow my own advice. I love you and I’ve missed you and it’s been pure torture not seeing you every day.” He sat beside her and picked up her hand. “I really do love you.”

The sunset was beginning to damp down like a fire with a blanket thrown over it, and the colors from the horizon reflected in his brown eyes.

He kissed her. Or maybe she kissed him. She wasn’t really sure who made the first move or if there was a first move. They kissed until she was dizzy from the combination of kissing and the altitude and the encroaching darkness. “So we’re on again?” she asked. “We’re a couple? Please say we are.”

“What about your family?”

“You know my family is important to me, but I can’t let them dictate who I’m seeing.”

Zak would probably never get along with Kasey, but there was a slim chance that if he hung around long enough her father would come to accept him. After all, they were both men with strong ideals, men who’d thought through a clear and distinct vision of the world, even if those visions clashed. They’d both started off dirt poor and worked their way into something else. Nadine knew she could make this relationship work the second time.

“What the hell are you doing with my girl?” Scooter shouted.

Scooter was on the edge of the mountain with his hands on his hips. It was dark enough that Zak recognized him from his voice, a little high-pitched and narrow, even more so when he was peeved or attempting to be threatening. They’d been on the bluff awhile, had lost track of time, both aware from nearby voices that the cyclists had returned to their own camp. The sky had blued out and then gone charcoal black; stars were beginning to wink through the inky night.

Zak stared through the gloom at the pudgy young man in cargo-pocket shorts and voluminous white T-shirt. Scooter chugged from a brown bottle and tossed it casually onto the rocks a hundred feet below, where it exploded with a faint tinkling melody.

“Why don’t you go back and litter your own camp,” Zak said.

“Fuck you, fire boy.”

“Scooter, what are you doing?” said Nadine.

“What are
you
doing? We were getting worried about you. And then I find you making out with this asshole.”

“We weren’t making out,” Nadine said. “We were talking.”

“He’s got his dirty hands all over you. Get out of there, for God’s sake. Or I’ll tell your father what you’ve been doing.”

“That’s rich. How about I tell him all the things you made me do.”

“You better not, bitch.”

“Don’t threaten her,” Zak said.

“Quiet, Zak,” Nadine whispered. “Stay out of this. You’ll only make it worse. Come on. Help me off these rocks.”

Zak walked her along the narrow ledge and held her hand tightly as she made the last small leap to the main part of the mountain. He could tell by the way she gripped him that she was a lot more anxious about the height than she had let on.

“You driving home tonight?” Zak asked Nadine.

“That was the plan,” said Scooter. “But because of you they’ll be driving in the dark. If they get lost out here, it’s going to be your fault.”

“We’re not going to get lost,” said Nadine.

“I’ll have Stephens draw a map,” said Zak.

“And we’ve got cell phones. We can always call back and ask for directions.”

“None of our cells are working,” Scooter said.

Nadine clutched Zak’s hand as they walked up the narrow pathway to their camp, where they got directions from Stephens. On the way out, they passed the shadowy figures of Muldaur, Giancarlo, and Morse, the latter illuminated by a small camp light. A spray of stars was beginning to emerge overhead in far greater numbers than Zak ever saw in the city.

The three of them traipsed down the hill silently to the bonfire, where the flames were as high as Zak’s waist. Minutes later, just as the white Expedition with its four occupants was about to launch down the hill, Scooter yelled at Nadine through the open window. “His father admitted he was hanging out with you only to see what the moneyed class was all about. Said he didn’t have any intention of ever being serious.”

Zak was shocked and mortified by Scooter’s revelation. He
had
said that. He’d said it to his father and to nobody else, but he’d said it before he played tennis with Nadine the first time. His attitude had changed as soon as he got to know her, and he’d totally forgotten having made the cruel and stupid remark. The fact that his father had sold him out in casual conversation was overshadowed only by the disgrace of hearing his own thoughtless words repeated.

Sitting in the front passenger’s seat, Nadine peered at Zak’s face in the darkness. “Is that true?”

And then, before he could say anything, the SUV rolled down the hill, Nadine staring out the window at Zak until they rounded the corner and the Expedition became a distant glow on the hillside.

As they all turned to go their separate ways, Jennifer gave Zak a look that told him Scooter had just made a perhaps successful effort to scuttle Zak’s chances with Nadine. To make it worse, Scooter was grinning ear-to-ear. It was the closest Zak ever came to coldcocking someone.