Wicked Games (24 page)

She held her breath and waited.

She was afraid to move—if she moved, she’d lose her advantage. Lilah would know she was awake. There’d be no way for her to surprise her when she attacked.

She could feel the body heat emanating from Lilah, four, three, two feet from the bed now.

She could feel Lilah leaning forward, stretching out her arms, her fingers spread like talons ready to tear her apart.

This was happening. This was really happening.

She could feel Lilah’s hot breath on her face.

The crazed rage of her expression.

The cold death in her eyes.

Jules, you whore. Did you really think you could live happily ever after?

The arms rose above her.

They descended. Here they came. Propelling toward her. Claws sharp as spears.

She screamed from somewhere deep in her bowels. She kicked at the air and she lunged at Lilah.

And she was awake again and there was nobody there.

The ticking of the grandfather clock.

The creak of the windows in the wind.

A slamming door downstairs, maybe in the kitchen, maybe the same door that had slammed that first day they were here. It led to the cellar. She knew that now; she’d checked, finally, in secret, yesterday. A dank, dirt-floored cavern. An easy place to hide, if you didn’t want to be seen. She still wasn’t convinced doors could slam on their own.

She couldn’t take it anymore. She ran from the room, ran to Carter, who was sitting up in bed in the room next door, awoken by her scream.

She crawled into bed with him, and he held her tight. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her. “It was just a dream.”

He willed himself to believe it, too.

She nuzzled her face in his shoulder and clung to him. She couldn’t get close enough.

For the next hour the two of them lay awake, listening to each other’s breathing, waiting, ready to defend themselves if need be. Even after Jules had fallen back to sleep, Carter could feel the anxious tension moving through every inch of her body.

That morning, Carter
woke up at ten thirty to find that Jules was clinging to him in her sleep. He understood how bad her night had been, and he could see by the way the dreams twitched behind her eyes that she wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon.

Carter felt horrible. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d called Jules
Lilah
. That was bad, and he hated himself for having done it, but what was worse was that he couldn’t figure out why or how the word had come out of his mouth. It was a dick move. He had to admit it. The kind of thing his father would do and then laugh about later.

And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Jules
put up a good front—she was really trying—but he knew the concussion was having its effect on her. And the pressure she was putting on herself to shake it off, to forge ahead, be better, be stronger, was just going to make it all that much worse.

She saw Lilah everywhere.

But Lilah wasn’t here. He refused to believe in that possibility. And it was on him to show Jules a path toward forgetting her.

He slid out from under her and tiptoed downstairs, throwing on some shorts and a T-shirt. Then he slipped out of the house and race-walked to Amelia’s, the Frenchy brunch place around the corner from the house. If he wanted to impress her, if he wanted to bring her joy, it was better not to inflict his own burned attempts at pancakes on her.

He bought her a Belgian waffle with the works—Nutella, bananas, strawberries, whipped cream—and back at the house, he slid it out of its tin to-go container and onto a plate from his father’s china set.

He broke into his father’s fancy wine-chilling cabinet and found a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne. It must have cost at least five hundred dollars, but he didn’t care. His father probably wouldn’t even notice it was gone, and if he did, so what—Jules deserved the best.

As he was arranging everything on the TV tray, he heard Jules call out to him from the bedroom. “Carter?”
He could hear her moan as she stretched. “What time is it?”

“I’ll be up in a second,” he shouted. He sped his pace. Coffee. Orange Juice. Two champagne flutes.

Balancing all the food and drink on the tray, he wobbled up the stairs and edged the door to the bedroom open with his foot.

There she was, beautiful, her hair a rumpled mess, sitting up in the bed with the sheet draped over her chest.

“Hey there,” he said, holding the tray up in front of him. “I got you a little sum-sum.”

A smile. Her face just glowed this morning. “For me?” she drawled playfully, pulling her best southern belle. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, but I did.”

He almost dropped the tray right then to leap into the bed. Who needed breakfast when Jules was waiting there so lusciously? There’d be time for that later. He set the tray down on the bed and popped the cork on the champagne and poured two glasses.

“To morning,” said Carter. “And feeling better.”

They toasted.

“You
are
feeling better, right? You look better.”

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I think so. We’ll see.”

But the house creaked again, like it always did, and the glow of morning comfort on her face faded. The wary tension of the night before returned.

She picked at her waffle, pushed it around on her plate, politely not eating, and Carter worried that she’d begun to fixate on Lilah again. How to ask her about this, though, without exacerbating things? Better to say nothing. Change the subject. Let her find her own peace.

“I’m thinking today we should take a vacation from our vacation. What do you think? The boat. The water. The two of us, out in the bay by ourselves. Yeah?”

She shot him a look like he’d just read her mind. “Hell yeah,” she said.

They toasted again. To sailing. To rich fathers with boats they could borrow.

They threw their
bags into the trunk of the BMW, stocked up on groceries—LUNA bars and bags of pretzels and chips, peanut butter, jelly, a loaf of sliced bread, a Toblerone to go with the second bottle of champagne they’d snatched from Carter’s dad’s stock, and then they raced off across the Savannah River and onward to the Wilmington Island Yacht Club, where Carter’s dad’s sailboat was docked.

Carter checked in at the office and signed the boat out. Then they loaded up and trudged across the sun-bleached parking lot, through the maze of promenades to dock number 15-L.

In their excitement, they didn’t notice the little green Mazda with Idaho plates parked in a far corner by the utility vehicles and chain-link fence.

The boat was twenty-five feet long, a beast of a vessel. Carter checked the jib. He checked the mainsail and made sure the boom was secure. Then he untied the ropes and started the engine.

One, two, three, go.

They navigated their way through the no-wake zone and out into the river.

Carter raised the sails and adjusted the ropes in the riggings. He knew just what he was doing. He positioned himself on the deck, and manned all the sails at once as they tacked up the river toward Wassaw Bay.

Jules was surprised by how fast Carter had gotten the boat to go. She hadn’t realized that a boat this big could really book. Kneeling toward the front so she could gaze over the edge, she watched the wedge of the stern cut smoothly through the small, nearly imperceptible waves. The sunlight glistened in diamonds on the surface.

Once they were out in the open water, Carter shouted, “Hey, you ready for the fun part?”

Jules rolled over and stretched her legs out in front of her, leaning back to catch the sun on her face. “This isn’t the fun part?” she said.

“It gets even better. I need you to come over here and
sit next to me.” He patted the hull, showing her where to sit, then tugged the rope sharply to hold the mast tight against the wind.

Once Jules had situated herself next to him, he said, “Hold on tight to the bar.”

She did.

As he tied one of the lesser ropes to the boat, he said, “You have to make sure you keep your head low.”

She hunched. He grinned at her.

“Here we go,” he said.

Carter let the rope slide through his fingers and the sail swung in with a
whoosh
. It pivoted over them, coming so close that Jules could feel the air move across the top of her head. The sail continued on, flying out wide to the point at which the rope Carter had secured went taut and stopped it. Fluttering once, it caught the wind again, and without losing any of its speed, the boat tilted impossibly to the starboard side.

They leaned all their weight against the hull, stretched back until it was almost like they were standing up. The boat took a sharp ninety-degree turn and as it did, a wall of water went up behind them, a spray that arched over the edge of the hull and soaked them.

A thrilling experience. Jules yelped like she was on a roller coaster, and then she laughed and laughed. “Wow,” she said.

Carter nodded. She could see how much he loved this all over his face. He adjusted the ropes one more time and snapped them into their safety latches.

They glided forth toward the ocean, far away from everything.

“You feel better?” he asked Jules.

“Yeah,” she said.

“There’s nothing like a sailboat to take your worries away.”

The water glistened with sunlight. The fish jumped and spun. The cormorants skimmed the surface. The seagulls soared overhead.

A school of dolphins came leaping and dancing across the open sea. They seemed to be waving. They seemed to be smiling. For almost an hour they swam along with the boat.

They were happy. Carter and Jules, happier than they’d ever been in their lives. Simply and completely. Jules sitting between Carter’s legs, wrapped up in his arms, the two of them gazing out at the calm, endless sea.

And as the sun began to descend to the west and the sky began to glow, they pulled in the sails. They let loose the anchor. There it went—
rumble, rumble
—down to the ocean floor.

They sat on the stern all alone, arm in arm, and
watched the sunset like for the first time.

Any nervousness and fear lingering in their hearts had been left behind them, far off on the shore. They were a long way from the past now, a long way from Dream Point.

While they were
belowdecks, changing into their swimsuits, the skylight on the prow of the boat rolled open. A stowaway climbed the ladder out of the storage compartment at the front of the boat.

First the hands became visible. Then the muscular swimmer’s arms. The wavy, dishwater-brown hair. The deep-red lifeguard’s swimsuit with the ghostly white cross on it. The whole of her.

Lilah.

She stood there like a fury, the wind whipping her hair. She’d been waiting. She’d been planning. She knew this was her time. She wore a diver’s belt around her waist, an eight-inch knife clipped to her hip. She
looked to the sky and she could see the future there, written in the bloodred streaks of the vanished sun.

She stretched and flapped out her muscles. Then she dove off the boat into the water. The sea was her home.

Her moment was coming soon.

Back on deck,
Carter and Jules were giddy. They sat on the edge of the boat, braced behind the safety railing with their legs hanging over, bouncing against the hull. They watched the fish jump in the fading dusk light and chattered away. The game was What’s the Weirdest Thing You’ve Ever Eaten?

“Alligator,” said Jules.

“Doesn’t count! If they sell it on the promenade in Dream Point, it can’t be that weird.”

“Okay . . . blood sausage. That counts. It’s too revolting not to count.”

“Rattlesnake,” said Carter. “Tastes like chicken.”

“Cow stomach.”

“You’ve eaten cow stomach?” said Carter.

“My mom dated this Cuban guy for a few months, and one time when I was sick he brought me this soup that he claimed would make me better. Mondongo soup. It was made with—he called it tripe, but it was cow stomach.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t know. The intestines were cut into these strips, like spaghetti, bit they were hairy. It made me gag. Your turn.”

“Moose.”

“Wow. Moose.”

“Yeah. My father went on some crazy hunting trip in Canada. Like a rich-guy trip where the guide takes you around and catches the animals for you, and then you shoot them and feel proud of yourself. He brought me back some moose jerky. He claimed it came from a moose he actually shot, but . . . ”

“What does moose taste like?”

“Teriyaki sauce.”

Jules shot him a look that was so adoring—teasing and flirty and admiring all at once—that the both of them started laughing and couldn’t stop. They felt silly, sloppy drunk, and they hadn’t even opened the champagne yet. Just being together—that was enough.

“Look at that moon,” said Jules, lacing her arm around Carter’s waist.

“Yeah.” It wasn’t quite full, but it was close. There were no clouds in the sky that night, and the outline of the moon was crisp, its craters in high relief, like it had been shot in HD. It reminded Carter of the moon on the night they’d first met. He pulled her close and kissed her, and for a moment the two of them swooned close, attracted by each other’s body heat.

“Should we swim?” Carter said.

Jules unlaced her legs from the railing and stood up. She did a slow dance, spinning on her tiptoes, her arms stretched gracefully above her head. Then the boat rocked slightly and she lost her balance. She toppled over and giggled again.

As they stood by the opening in the guard railing, psyching themselves up to dive, she asked Carter, “You think there are sharks in there?”

“I’ve never seen one in all my time coming out here. I think we’re too far north.”

“Jellyfish?”

“No, but I ate jellyfish once.”

“Okay, here goes nothing.”

Jules dove off the boat as gracefully as she danced. Carter watched as she slid under the water in one smooth arc. Now that his thoughts had floated back to that first night with her, he was lost there, overwhelmed with the memory of the electric shock of that first touch of her skin, the fizz he’d felt in his heart just standing in her presence.