The Unexpected Everything (31 page)

“Carl?” Clark said, incredulous. I shot him a look, and he threw up his hands. “Okay. Fine. But it's Karl, with a
K
.”

“What difference does that even make?”

“It makes a huge difference,” Clark said, with enough authority that I decided to take his word for it. “Okay, and
Karl . . .” There was a long pause, and I bit my lip to stop myself from jumping in, making myself listen to the slap of my flip-flops against my heels, the cicadas in the grass all around us, the occasional crunch of leaves beneath our feet. I was practically willing him to say something, to jump in with the story, to try. “And Karl . . .” He took a shaky breath, then went on, all in a rush, “Karl was a wanted man. He was on the run.”

I smiled but tried to tone it down as we rounded a bend in the road. “Because he'd stolen something,” I said, “something . . . valuable. With lots of value.”

Clark laughed, and it was like I could practically feel him relax next to me. “But he didn't know that he'd been spotted stealing the valuable thing with lots of value. Unbeknownst to him, an assassin named—”

“Marjorie,” I supplied, and Clark stopped dead in his tracks.

“The assassin can't be named
Marjorie
. It's bad enough we've got a Karl.”

“What's wrong with Marjorie?”

“Assassins aren't named Marjorie.”

“Really good assassins probably are. Because nobody would think they were assassins.”

Clark inclined his head toward me. “Well played,” he said. “So. Okay. Karl and
Marjorie
—”

“Marjorie the super-assassin—”

“Are in the woods, on a moonlit night,” he said, the words coming more quickly now. “Karl thinks he's gotten away with it.”

“But he hasn't.”

“Not even close. Because he's about to meet Marjorie. And she's going to change his life.” I took a breath to continue the
story when Clark's hand brushed against mine, and all the words left my head.

I wasn't sure if it was an accident, so I kept my hand stretched down by my side, within easy reach, and what felt like a lifetime later, Clark's hand brushed mine again, sending a spark through me that I felt all the way in my toes. He kept his hand touching mine, and then, moving a millimeter at a time, curved his fingers around so that they were resting against my palm, just brushing it, so lightly. Then he moved up, over the curve of my thumb, and ran his index finger over the inside of my wrist in a slow circle. I could feel my pulse fluttering beneath his fingertips, and I had to remind myself that I knew how to breathe, that I'd been doing it my whole life. And then our palms were touching, perfectly lined up, though I could feel how much bigger his hand was than mine, feel his fingertips curving over the tops of mine, despite what Bri had always called my “weird large tree-frog hands.” We stayed that way for just a moment, and then, like we'd talked about it before, like we'd mutually picked the time, our fingers interlocked and we were holding hands.

We walked that way, not speaking, our joined hands swinging gently between us, every nerve in my body suddenly awake. I was concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, because otherwise, all my thoughts would have been focused on the fact that Clark and I were holding hands, that somehow, on this walk, something between us had changed.

“So then what happens?” I asked, when I saw we were approaching the guardhouse again.

Clark looked over at me. “What happens with what?”

“With Marjorie. And Karl,” I said, as he slowed and turned to me, still not letting go of my hand.

“I don't know,” he said, stopping and looking down at me. “I guess we'll have to wait and find out.”

I nodded and looked up at him and knew this was the moment—if I let this happen, whatever this was, whatever it might be, would start. I could feel my heart pound as Clark dropped my hand and moved it toward my waist, brushing the hem of my tank top between his fingers.

Normally, I kissed first. I didn't like the moment before, the wondering if a guy was going to get up the courage to kiss you while you were just standing there, waiting and hoping. I liked to take matters into my own hands, squash that moment and get right into the make-out session. But now . . .

Now, being in this moment, on the cusp of something happening, made me wonder why I'd been rushing through it all these years. Or maybe I hadn't. Maybe I'd just been waiting for this moment, right now.

Clark looked down at me, brushing his hand over my forehead, smoothing back my hair like he'd done before, and I knew this was my last chance to change my mind. And as much as a part of me wanted this, there was another part that knew this would be different from my three-week boyfriends. That it already was.

But I didn't turn away or walk in the other direction or stop the moment from happening. Moving so slowly, he tilted his head down toward me. I stretched up to him, and we stayed like that for just a second, not kissing, not yet, just hovering in the moment before, only a breath apart.

And then he leaned forward, or I did, and then his lips were on mine.

We lingered there, our lips brushing gently. And then he raised his hand and cupped it under my chin, drawing me closer toward him, and we started kissing for real.

And my arms were around his neck and then his were around my waist and he was pulling me closer, lifting me off my feet, and when he set me back down, my knees were wobbly, like the ground had gotten less solid in the interim.

It was a kiss that made me feel like I'd never been properly kissed before, and as we paused to take a breath—a minute later? an hour?—he leaned his forehead against mine. I looked up at him, and a thought passed through my brain before I could stop or analyze it.
It's you—of course it is. There you are.

And as I touched his cheek and his hand tightened on my waist, I leaned forward to kiss him again, knowing as I did that something was ending while something else had already begun.

T
amsin cursed under her breath as she watched the owl sitting on the branch regard her with what she was almost certain was disdain. This was supposed to be the one area where she was showing any kind of natural inclination, and she had been failing miserably all morning.

“You're distracted,” the Elder said from the tree stump where he had sat, motionless, for almost an hour now.

“Maybe,” Tamsin acknowledged as she watched the owl ruffle its feathers in a distinctly haughty way.

“Does it have something to do with Sir Charley Ward?” the Elder asked, his voice innocent.

“How did you . . . ?” Tamsin started, then gave up, realizing what a foolish question it had been. She had been aware the Elder knew everything, but until that moment she had thought it was restricted to things like the names of all the plants in the kingdom. She hadn't realized it also included knowledge of her first kiss.

“Be careful there,” the Elder cautioned.

“It's fine,” Tamsin said, turning back to the bird. She would prefer not to discuss Charley with anyone, but especially not someone old enough to be her grandfather.

“It's always a risk,” the Elder said, but more quietly now, like perhaps he was no longer speaking to her. “Wherever there is great emotion. Because there is power in that. And few people handle power well.”

“It was only a kiss,” Tamsin said, focusing back on the owl.

“Oh,” the Elder said, shaking this head, “that is where you are mistaken. Believing that such a thing—
just a kiss
—has ever, for even a second, existed in this world.”

—C. B. McCallister,
A Murder of Crows.
Hightower & Jax, New York.

Almost without my noticing it, the summer started to find its rhythm. I had dogs to walk, I had my friends to hang out with, and my dad and I were finding a little more to say to each other day by day. But mostly, I had Clark.

“So Karl and Marjorie duck into a roadside tavern,” he said to me as we walked three hyperactive terriers, all straining desperately at their leashes, like the trees up ahead of us were just so much better.

“But they're going under false names,” I reminded him, and Clark nodded.

“Of course. They can't let their real identities be known, not with the bounty on their heads.”

“And it's raining.”

“Naturally,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing it. “It's a proverbial dark and stormy night.”

I looked over at him and smiled. “And then what happens?”

It had been two weeks since Clark and I kissed, and things were going well. I had been grounded for the first eight days—dropped down from ten, with some careful negotiation on my part—so he'd started coming with me when I walked Bertie.
We'd hold hands while we walked, stopping to kiss multiple times, or as much as we could with Bert yanking on the leash. Clark would sometimes come with me on other walks, which I always appreciated, since a full day of walking dogs by myself led to me talking way too much to animals who were never going to answer me back.

But even though we hadn't been able to go on another real date that first week, we'd ended up talking on the phone nearly every night, conversations that happened while he took Bertie for his nightly walk and I sat up on the roof and looked out at the stars. I'd never had conversations like that with a boyfriend before, conversations that were easy and free-flowing, hours passing in what felt like seconds.

I was still getting my head around how Clark seemed happy to talk about almost
anything
, including sharing how he felt about things. The only thing he really hadn't told me much about was his father. Whenever we got close to the subject, I could sense Clark's walls—which were so rarely present—start to go up, and I changed the subject quickly.

But I'd begun to fill in the picture of Clark Bruce McCallister in a way I never had with any of my other boyfriends. I knew now that his favorite color was green, that when he was little, he'd wanted to be a wildfire firefighter (“they fight fires
from helicopters
, how cool is that?”), that he talked to his older sister, Kara, on the phone every Sunday, that he still refused to watch
Jaws
because it had given him nightmares for weeks as a kid, that he hated cinnamon, and that he had found a spot, just below my earlobe, that drove me crazy when he kissed it. I didn't know these types of things about any other guy, including Topher, and none of them
would have known them about me. It was different with Clark. And one way I knew this, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the fact that we were getting close to the three-week mark and I had no interest in seeing it end. It was pretty much the opposite, as a matter of fact—it was feeling like something was just getting started.

•  •  •

“And we're doing groups this year,” Palmer said enthusiastically, as she pushed up the brim of her sun hat. “Chosen randomly. Which means, since there will be two of you, the challenges are going to be that much harder.”

We had been at the beach since nine, and by my count, Palmer had been talking about the summer scavenger hunt for at least forty-five minutes. She'd sent a group text at eight a.m., saying that it was the perfect beach day, she'd already staked out a spot, and we should join her and bring her an iced coffee. Somewhat miraculously, everyone else's schedules had aligned—and I'd shifted some walks around to make mine work as well. We'd spread out on the patch of sand Palmer had been zealously guarding and now had a stretch of blankets and towels and snacks and magazines.

“Sounds good,” Toby said, her eyes fixed on the water in front of her. “Absolutely.”

“What are you looking at?” I asked, pushing my sunglasses up and trying to see what was in her sight line.

“What do you think?” Bri asked, shooting me a look. In the two weeks since Wyatt had come back to town, Toby's crush seemed to be getting stronger by the day. She had calmed down enough that she was no longer acting strange around him, but she'd taken to spending much too much time on her hair every
day and trying to devise increasingly complicated ways that they could be alone together. She was sending us long emoji missives about her feelings, and I don't know if she was getting better at it or if I was just getting used to it, but I'd been able to accurately decipher a message yesterday that detailed her current emotional state, using mostly just dolphins, the weird gourd fruit, and clapping hands. She was so single-minded about this—about him—that I wasn't sure anymore if her crush was really about Wyatt, the guy who had, by my count at the diner the night before, said only fourteen words. There was a piece of me that wondered—though I would never suggest this to her—if maybe she was just used to the
idea
that she was in love with Wyatt without stopping to see if it was still true and if he was really what she wanted.

“I'm just making sure nobody drowns,” Toby said, her eyes not straying from the water even when Palmer started to tickle her bare feet.

I looked out to the water and smiled. Clark, Tom, and Wyatt were all on stand-up paddleboards, but not a single one of them was paddling along placidly, like in the pictures hung up in the tiny building where you could rent kayaks, paddleboards, and boats. Instead, Clark and Tom were using their oars as jousting spears, trying to knock each other into the water. And Wyatt was paddling, but sitting down, with one leg over either side, like he'd really wanted a kayak and was doing his best to approximate one.

“Who
rented
those to them?” Bri asked, sounding baffled.

My phone beeped with a text, and I pushed my sunglasses up to get a better look at the screen, then fumbled the phone when I saw who it was from.