The Almost Girl – ebook edition (6 page)

This time, I can’t control the realization that rushes through me. June knows a lot more than she’s letting on. How much
does
she know? Did she know about me?

No. I’ve been careful. Haven’t I? The self-doubt crawls in, cold and relentless. I haven’t really been myself lately, getting injured, fainting, and ending up in a hospital. Being all too careless. I could have let something unintentional slip over the past few weeks.

No
, my inner voice argues.
You are meticulous. She doesn’t know anything other than what she knew anyway. Otherwise, why would she have left you here alone if she thought you were dangerous? There’s no way.

Mollified somewhat, I run my finger along the edge of the book. Quantum mechanics isn’t exactly bedtime reading material. Hefting it up, I flip open the cover, skimming through the first quarter, and almost drop it to the floor. Instead, I sink to the bed and hold the book carefully on my lap. In a cutout hidden in its pages, in a bed of soft chamois, lies an innocuous-looking gun, barely palm-sized. I know instantly that it is loaded and it is lethal.

There’s a magazine of bullets in a slim brown box next to the gun in the book. I examine them carefully. Custom hollow-points, meant to shred the inside of a target. The blue markings on the side of the box indicate that there’s some kind of modified burst mechanism within the bullet. These have been specifically designed to annihilate whatever or whoever they come into contact with. I place the bullets back into the case and replace the book.

Before closing the cover, I stare for a long second. The gun is new. From the minimal residue and shiny oiled insides, it’s probably only been fired a few times. If June, who for all intents and purposes is a civilian, is anticipating this level of danger, then I’ve been miscalculating things all along.

She’s expecting someone. Or something.

After I’ve smoothed the bed and verified that everything is back in its place, I exit the room quickly. Across the hall is another room. This room, unlike the rooms I’ve been in, is completely sparse, with a single bed with a metal frame and a slim desk sitting under the window. It appears to be unused, but still, instinct propels my feet to cross over to the nearest closet door. Empty. I release the breath I’ve unconsciously been holding. Maybe it’s a spare room that June hasn’t gotten to yet. Still, something about its sparse efficiency strikes a familiar chord inside of me. The clock on the wall is five minutes fast, which is curious because it matches the time on my own watch. Time can be your own worst enemy. I, too, prefer to always be ahead of it. Retracing my footsteps, I close the door behind me and make my way to the next door. A decent-sized bathroom.

The third door is Caden’s room.

I know it instantly but something holds me back, my fingers hovering on the doorknob. Why am I so afraid to open it? Caden means nothing to me. A shiver sweeps through me, tingling along the undersides of my arms and up my neck, and a forgotten sense of anxiety hits me full-force. Instinctively, my fingers draw back.

Drawing a shaky breath, I check the other doors down the hallway. One leads to another bathroom, the next to a linen closet, and the third to a stairway to a shadowy attic that’s filled with old furniture. On the attic steps, I sit staring at Caden’s door as if the devil himself is on the other side. Why is my imagination suddenly running wild? Why am I afraid? There’s nothing there, nothing that can harm me.

“Get it together, Riv!” I tell myself harshly. “He’s just a kid like everyone else here, nothing more than that. Now find your keys and let’s go.” I catch a glimpse of myself in the long mirror at the end of the hallway, and I have to laugh.

“Keep talking to yourself and you know where you’ll end up,” I say to the fierce-looking girl, and watch her pitiful attempt to stare me down. I step closer. “The loony bin,” I inform her threateningly and then roll my eyes as she shakes her head and grins at me.

I wonder briefly if losing your mind is a part of the eversion sickness that afflicts about fifty percent of the people who attempt it, because not only am I talking to no one in particular, but my hair is sticking out like a prickly bush, and my light gray eyes have a slightly desperate quality to their shadowy dark-circled edges. I look like a homeless runaway.

I tug on the second-hand Grateful Dead T-shirt, some obscure music band that I’d never heard of, and hike my jeans out of the beat-up black combat boots. Not much I can do about the hair, but I try anyway, fingering the choppy locks lying on either side of the blue-and-silver braid hanging to my shoulder. Better, but not much. I may feel like a million bucks inside, but I definitely don’t look it. I shrug. Once I get back, I can work on my appearance. Right now, I have a job to do.

Find my stupid keys.

With a hiss of exasperation, I stride to Caden’s door and shove it open. The room is painted in rich intertwining hues of blue creating the illusion of being submerged underwater. A large bed occupies most of the space, leaving room for little else, but I expect that’s the point. It’s an undersea sanctuary of sorts, and one that is only truly appreciated lying down. Complete immersion. It’s beautiful and serene, not at all what I’d expected.

As I am crossing over to Caden’s desk, my brain registers other details, like the shelves in the window alcove above it, covered in trophies. The majority of them are for fencing, but some, again not surprisingly, are for archery. A small sound escapes my lips, half gasp, half cry of some sort, and a knot immediately forms in my belly. With the bow, Cale had been an expert marksman. It shouldn’t be so strange that they have so much in common, given what they are, but the similarities are still overwhelming.

A tiny amateurish landscape painting above the bed catches my eye, and I lean against the mattress for a closer look. It is all I can do not to fall backwards as my weight dips into the bed in a very unnatural way, as if I am on some kind of strange floating device. Instead, I spring backward to compensate and bang my still-healing ankle into the desk chair next to the bed.

“Mother of…” I mutter, launching the offending chair across the room, as a cloud of pain threatens to suffocate me. “Ouch!”

“I’d hate to know what that poor chair did to deserve such treatment.”

I blink the stars in my vision away. Caden is leaning nonchalantly against the door, his mouth twisted in a grin, and shaking his head in mock consternation.

“Hey,” I blurt out. “Sorry, June told me to look for my keys up here. She couldn’t find them where you said in the kitchen. I hope you don’t mind.” The words blend together in a rush, and I’m not entirely sure why they sound a trifle defensive. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard him come in. “She told me to come up.”

“Yeah, I forgot that I’d moved them. They’re in my desk drawer. In the back.”

“What?” Why would he have put my keys in there? I know I’m frowning.

A shrug as he walks toward me. “I thought you were going to do something stupid like try to ride right after the accident, so I hid them.”

“I wasn’t–”

“Sure,” Caden says, his grin widening, and reaches around me. I feel my entire body freeze as his arms graze against mine, and suddenly I am holding my breath. Every second feels elongated as the smell of the sweat on his skin from his fencing meet seeps into my nostrils. He smells so much like Cale that my knees buckle… but that’s impossible. There’s no conceivable way that they should even smell alike. Is there? My confusion must be apparent because Cale – I mean Caden – grasps my arms.

“Riven? What’s wrong? You’re staring at me like I’m a ghost.”

“I need to sit,” I rasp, ignoring the keychain he’s holding in one hand. “Not on your bed,” I say hastily. “Something’s wrong with it. It’s… broken or something. Soggy.”

Caden’s laugh rings through the room. “It’s just a waterbed. They’re supposed to be soggy.”

“A
water
what?” The thought is inconceivable to me… a bed with
water
in it. When I think of the scarcity and the high cost of water where I come from, the thought of the overindulgence of Caden’s bed makes me physically sick. I shake my head to cover my discomfort. “I don’t get it. Why don’t you have a real bed?”

“It is a real bed. Don’t you know what a waterbed is?” I shake my head, still mute. “They’re pretty common. I like the feel of it, and it’s good for my back. Something about it is calming, and when I lie on it, in the silence, I really feel like I’m in the middle of the ocean. Come on, try it.”

“No.”

But I have to admit that I am intrigued. The whole notion of the sea and the ocean is as foreign to me as my entire existence probably is to Caden. He reads my hesitation – and my curiosity – easily.

“Here,” he says, and turns my shoulders so that my back is facing the bed. “Don’t jerk down; just sit gently. Good. Now lie back.”

I comply until the top of the bed is literally cupping my entire body. “It feels so weird,” I say.

“One sec, check this out.”

I barely notice when Caden pulls the shades over his windows and presses a switch on a light in one corner of the room, so taken I am with the gently sloshing motion of the waterbed. But in the next moment, I’m transported to another world as white bands of light radiate against the blue mosaic of the walls, and the deep sound of marine life thrums into my ears from a box on the bedside table. I can’t even speak, far less breathe, when I feel Caden lie on his back next to me, the movement from his weight sending a slow, rolling wave into my right side.

“This is…”

But I can’t find the right words for the magnitude of the feelings inside of me. I have never ever seen a real ocean other than in pictures, and this is as close to that as I have ever gotten, even if it is just an illusion of light and sense.

“Incredible, right?”

“Amazing,” I whisper in a childlike voice. “Does the ocean really look like this?”

“In the right spot, if the sun is shining down through the water, this comes pretty close. I think I’ve loved the ocean ever since I can remember,” Caden says in a quiet voice. “I don’t remember much about when I was really little, but I do remember my mom taking me to this seaside village when I was eight years old, and she couldn’t get me out of the water, even when it was so dark that I couldn’t see two feet in front of me. Back then, I had to have my bedroom painted blue, too.” Caden laughs, a sound halfway between humor and pain.

“Your mom? Is she here?”

Caden turns to face me, a shadow crossing his features, and shakes his head slowly. “No. She died.”

“How?”

“When I was seven. Seizure, they said.” His mouth twists. “Some kind of brain or nervous system infection, but the doctors weren’t really sure.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. It’s OK. I miss her but it was a long time ago.”

I turn back to stare at the ceiling, the light and sound doing nothing to dissipate the sudden weight in my chest, but I remain silent. There’s nothing I can say – death is a natural part of life for me, but knowing that Caden’s mother had died from eversion sickness leaves me cold. I couldn’t imagine how painful it would have been, or how hard it would have been for Caden to watch his mother die.

Cale’s
mother.

A shiver runs through me, and warm fingers slide against my wrist. The shiver deepens. The waterbed shifts, rolling me upward as Caden turns on his side to face me. I can feel him staring at me, but I keep my eyes glued to the ceiling. His fingers skim downward to cover my closed fist in his hand.

I can’t move. My entire body is rigid at the light touch.

“Who are you really, Riven?” he whispers, his right hand shadowing the blue swirls for a second before lifting to move the braid out of my face. He holds it for a second, studying it before releasing it. My breath catches. The sheer force of him imprisons me, as his fingers trail down my face, turning my chin toward his. “You seem so tough on the outside, but you’re not. Not really.”

My eyes meet his. They are warm but unreadable. His thumb stirs against my temple.

“You don’t know anything about me.” The words are sticky on my tongue, clumsy. For some reason, I feel inexplicably awkward.

“I know you’re not like other girls, but I know you aren’t as hard as you pretend to be,” Caden says, propping himself up on one shoulder and cupping the right side of my face in his palm. Caden’s eyes are liquid like the imaginary water wonderland surrounding us, his irises mirroring shades of hazy blue. They are mesmerizing. His head bends toward mine, and all the breath steals out of me.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he murmurs. “You’re so different.” His words slice through me like ice shards as I pull away. What the hell am I doing? I
am
different… more different than he knows. I jerk sideways and upwards, causing the bed to undulate violently, and wrench my hand out of his.

He’s a mark, for heaven’s sake. A
mark
!

“What’s wrong? You OK?” Caden asks quickly. An embarrassed look flits across his face for a second, but it’s gone as quickly as it came. He hasn’t done anything wrong, and I hadn’t done anything to dissuade him. I’d been idiotic to ignore the obvious signals – the bed, the lights, his gentle touch – but my senses had been muddled by the magic of the ambient lights and sounds.

For the hundredth time since I’ve been here, I curse myself, but the truth is, I’m far better at fighting than I am at flirting… or clearly, even recognizing it. I glare at him.

“I’m fine,” I say, snapping the words through my teeth, struggling to compose myself as self-disgust rages through me – I’d been stupid to let myself go like that. But my self-loathing still boils over. It’s poisoning my throat, the inside of my eyes, and I want to scream. My fingers curl into fists, but my voice when I speak is calm. It is inflectionless, emotionless.