The Taking (16 page)

He leaned back in his chair, his smile so wide, and his dimple so deep, he looked positively full of himself. When had little Tyler grown into this guy who oozed such confidence? And how could I have ever thought of him as little? “Okay,” he allowed, but there was nothing in his tone to suggest that he believed a single word I’d said. “If you say so.”

I didn’t think it was possible, but my cheeks got even hotter. Lifting my plain-old ordinary drip coffee to my lips, I took a sip, hiding behind the cup for as long as possible.

“It
was
hard . . . seeing Austin again. Seeing how much he’s changed and knowing the things I know . . . about him and Cat.” And then I set down my cup again and confessed, “But it was worse today. I saw Cat.”

I didn’t know if this was too weird to share all this with him. Even though I felt something—whatever it was—for Tyler, I couldn’t ignore the history I’d had with Austin. Austin had walked away from our past years ago, but it didn’t stop the weight that had settled deep in the pit of my stomach, that felt heavier each and every time I thought of what we’d once had together.

Tyler was great and all, but he was just a distraction. A really adorable distraction.

At least that’s what I told myself.

“I know.” He set his phone on the table between us as if he was confessing something with it. “She called after she saw you, to see if I was out of school yet. She was crying, and I think she just wanted someone to talk to. She said almost the same things about seeing you.” He shrugged and leaned forward again. His voice was shades more thoughtful than it had been when he’d been teasing me about watching him.

It was what made me feel comfortable confiding in him—that serious way of his, that quiet maturity. “She said
you
hadn’t changed a bit. I guess that made it worse for some reason, because she said she wanted everything to be the same as before. She . . .” He paused and frowned, and I wondered if he was recalling his conversation, filtering parts of it and deciding what he should and shouldn’t tell me. Holding back. “She wishes her and Austin could undo what they did.”

My heart lurched. I wished for that too. So badly it was probably written all over my face.

I looked at Tyler, sitting across from me with his messy hair and concerned expression. He watched me without judging me, or asking anything from me I wasn’t capable of giving, or making me feel guilty for not acting a certain way or believing things I couldn’t believe. He was just here to help me figure out who I was and how I fit into this new world I’d been dropped into.

I hated that I found it harder and harder to hold on to my feelings for Austin, not to let them be eclipsed by these new and uninvited feelings Tyler had stirred in me.

“But they can’t, can they?” I admitted. Emptiness filled my chest.

He shook his head. “They’re not bad people, Kyra. It wasn’t an accident, them getting together, but it wasn’t malicious either. I was there. I was young, but I was around when it happened. Austin was a wreck after you vanished.”

Tears pricked my eyes, and I blinked to keep them at bay. Tyler’s hand reached for mine, to where I clutched the warm coffee cup as if it were the only thing in the world keeping me tethered to the ground at the moment. He stopped himself, right before he touched me, his fingers hovering so close I had only to twitch to close the gap between us.

And I wanted to. To feel his touch again. To let our fingers intertwine. To let him comfort me the way I longed to be comforted.

It wouldn’t take much, and when I saw the way he was watching our hands, too, I could see him offering me all that and more. He wanted it as badly as I did.

I cleared my throat, inching my coffee just the slightest bit closer to me and creating a chasm between us that felt unbreachable. “So what happened then? How could they have just forgotten about me? How did they end up . . . where they are . . . together?”

His hands stayed where they were. “I can’t say for sure, but if I had to guess I’d say it was all the time they spent together—searching for you, talking about you, waiting for you. You were the glue that held them together at first. You were what kept them from drifting apart. And later, when they realized—when everyone insisted—you weren’t coming back, I think they stayed together because it was . . . easy.” Regret washed over his face. “It might not have been love back then, but it is now.”

His words sliced me, not because I hadn’t known the truth. Of course I had. I’d known from the moment Cat had answered Austin’s phone that night, when I’d realized they’d gone away to college together. But hearing him say it out loud, and maybe because I knew it wasn’t any easier for him to say than it was for me to hear it, was more than I could stand right now.

I shook my head, blinking furiously, trying to tell him to stop without words because my voice was lodged deep in my throat. And he did. He fell silent as I struggled to gain some of the composure I’d lost.

That was when my gaze landed on the boy in the corner, the one sitting at the table with his back to the wall, facing us. I stopped shaking my head. Stopped moving and blinking and breathing.

It was
him
again. The boy from the gas station, and from the bookstore too.

Just like this morning at the Gas ’n’ Sip, when I’d been standing at the counter to pay, he wasn’t looking at me or anything, and he didn’t appear out of place in the quaint, brick-walled coffee shop. But he was there nonetheless, and I had the strangest sensation that it wasn’t a coincidence that he’d been at all of those places, the only three public places I’d been without my parents since I’d been back.

This time it was me reaching for Tyler. I gripped his sleeve, tugging him closer so he was forced to meet me over the top of the small table. Under any other circumstances I would have noticed the coffee smell of his breath and the way my heart fluttered from having his mouth so close to mine.

But this wasn’t that time.

“Do you know that guy?” I murmured, trying my best to keep my voice down. For the moment I’d forgotten all about Cat and Austin, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the dark-skinned boy who seemed to be everywhere I was.

Tyler sneaked a glance out of the corner of his eye to see who I was talking about, and then when he’d gotten a good look, he shook his head. “Nah. Never seen him before. Why? Do
you
know him?”

Frowning, I told him, “I keep seeing him everywhere I go. I think he might be following me.” It sounded way crazier outside of my head; I knew it the moment Tyler cringed. “Okay, maybe not
following
exactly,” I amended, trying to do some damage control before this whole thing got out of hand and Tyler ranked me right up there alongside my dad. For all I knew, insanity was hereditary. “But it’s definitely weird. He was at your friend’s bookstore the night we were there. And then I saw him again this morning at the Gas ’n’ Sip.”

“So basically you’ve seen him twice, and now you’re accusing him of stalking you?”

“This makes three.” Again, my evidence wasn’t exactly rock solid or anything. Especially since the guy hadn’t looked my way once. Considering that
I
was the one talking about him, he could probably argue that I was the one being creepy.

“You do realize that nothing’s really changed in the past five years, don’t you? Burlington’s still a small town. Getting some new shops didn’t exactly transform us into a metropolis. People run into each other all the time.”

He waited a minute for me to process what he’d said. He was right, of course. The whole point of coincidence was that it was purely accidental. Chance. Like two people being in the same place at the same time.

Or one person being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I released his sleeve and sagged forward on my elbows. “Ugh. I’m sorry. You’re right. I totally ruined our . . .” I stopped short. I’d come
this close
to saying “date,” which would’ve been a million times more embarrassing than admitting I’d been watching him from my window. Besides, it wasn’t a date. “ . . . coffee,” I said instead.

His smile, when it lit his face, was mesmerizing. “You didn’t ruin anything,” he assured me, cocking an eyebrow. “I thought it was the perfect
coffee
.”

I blushed again and tried to think of something to deflect attention away from my verbal slipup. “Metropolis, huh? Nice word.”

“You like that? I like to pull out the big guns when I’m trying to make an impression.”

My eyes lifted. “Is that what you were trying to do, impress me?”

There was a beat, a moment in which our eyes met and my heart leaped, and then his voice dropped, feathering my skin and making me shiver. “Of course I am, Kyra. I was sort of hoping you understood that.”

Flustered, I shot to my feet, probably too fast. Definitely too fast. If I hadn’t drawn attention to myself before, there was no doubt I had now with my graceless dismount from my chair. “I—I . . . uh . . .” I stammered superarticulately.

Tyler got up too. He didn’t look embarrassed or confused by my reaction. Instead he grinned as he reached for my coffee before I spilled it everywhere. “Take your time, Kyra. I’m not going anywhere,” he told me as he came around the table and pushed my chair in for me. “I’ll wait till you figure things out.”

My mouth was suddenly too dry to speak even if I had been able to form a coherent thought. I let him lead me out then, between the maze of tables and chairs. We passed the boy in the corner who hadn’t even looked up when I’d jumped out of my seat. My chest was tight and tingly, and I couldn’t decide if it was elation over Tyler’s not-so-veiled revelation about liking me or if I was experiencing the first symptoms of a heart attack.

When we reached the door, I stopped and turned back, curiosity about the other boy finally getting the best of me.

Only this time he
was
looking right at me.

6:44.

I wasn’t a neat freak, not the way my dad had been before . . . well, before everything had changed. But since I was pretty much limiting most of my time at home to my fake bedroom, I decided not to let it be a total pigpen. I was just throwing out the plastic bag filled with my garbage from the Gas ’n’ Sip when I noticed something written on the receipt.

I fished it out of the bag and smoothed it flat so I could read what it said.

Kyra, call me
. And was signed by someone named Simon.

I threw the receipt on the floor, seriously creeped out by the idea that someone had somehow managed to slip a note into my bag—
on my receipt
, no less—without me noticing. Someone who knew my name.

I thought of Agent Truman, who clearly had boundary issues, and wondered if this was his way of forcing me to talk to him.

And then I thought of the other guy, from the bookstore, the coffee shop, and—what do you know?—the Gas ’n’ Sip. Why would he be following me and leaving me cryptic messages? Why not just come up to me and say, “Hey, we should talk”?

I’d be a lot more likely to have a conversation with him if that had been the case. Now, after reading his “call me” message, I was pretty sure I never would.

I collapsed on my bed and glared up at my ceiling as I tried to imagine what was so important that he’d slipped a secret message in with my junk food.

My mind poured over a hundred different scenarios, ranging from completely innocent—like he was into me—to downright menacing—like he wanted to wear me like a skin suit. But no matter how hard I tried, there was no clear explanation.

And then there was that other thing I couldn’t stop thinking about no matter how hard I tried. The thing where Tyler had all but confessed he was interested in me. Even though it was way less mysterious, it was no less overwhelming. And even when I tried to push him out of my head, he found his way back. His green eyes, his new deeper voice, the way he teased me, his disarming smile. I couldn’t stop thinking about
him
.

He hadn’t said much the entire ride home, but what went unsaid was palpable. Like a heartbeat pulsing between us so loudly it continued to reverberate inside my head long after we’d parted ways at the curb.

It hadn’t helped that after he’d cut the engine, he’d leaned across me to unlatch my door, as if I were suddenly incapable of letting myself out. He’d taken his sweet time about it, too, lingering over me; and I knew full well what he was doing. It would have been impossible not to know. The way he smiled teasingly, boldly, as if daring me not to react to his nearness.

With that smug grin he wore, I wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction of a response even if my underwear had caught fire right then and there. Secretly, however, everything inside me strained to be closer to him, to stop pretending there was a chance I might still be Austin’s girl and to undo my seat belt so there was nothing separating us.

A part of me longed to know the feel of his lips and his skin and his heart beating against mine.

I wanted to touch my fingertip to his dimple.

Just once.

I hated how easily he kept wriggling his way back into my thoughts.

My phone buzzed, and again I moved to hit
IGNORE.
Already I’d disregarded a call from my dad. I knew I wouldn’t really avoid him forever; I wasn’t capable of that kind of cold-hearted detachment. No matter how far off the deep end he’d jumped, he was still my dad. I couldn’t stop myself from loving him.

I needed more time before I’d be ready to jump aboard his crazy train again.

When I checked my phone, though, it was a new number, one I hadn’t programmed and definitely didn’t recognize.

Gooseflesh prickled my arms when I saw the out-of-state area code—area code 310. It wasn’t the number from the back of the receipt, but I was sure I’d seen it before.

Jumping off my bed, I scrambled for the top drawer of my dresser and began digging through the stacks of straight-out-of-the-package underwear and socks.

“Kyra?” My mom’s knocking on the other side of my bedroom door distracted me, and I stopped what I was doing long enough to shout back, “I’m not hungry. Go ahead and eat without me.”