Hale Maree (13 page)

“
Lindbolm.” I omit the fact
that I just graduated a couple weeks ago.

“
Lindbolm? I thought you
were in college!” She laughs. “I was a Hyden girl. The guys at
Lindbolm, though...oh my God. What do they put in your water over
there? I swear all those guys had eight hands!”

“
Are we really going to talk
high school?” Landon says, reaching for another burger.

“
You’re right. I’m trapping
us in Dullvania,” Amy says, swooping in to drop a kiss that ends up
only millimeters from hitting his eyeball. “Do you ever shop at
Loot, Hale? I’m absolutely addicted to their lipstick line and
their eye shadow palettes.”

“
Great. Make-up,” Landon
groans. “That’s better.”

“
Loot’s an awesome store,” I
agree. I don’t mention that I’ve only been in the store a couple
times and couldn’t afford anything. I hope she doesn’t suggest that
we do a make-over, since all I’ve got in my collection are a couple
drug store palettes with huge holes worn through the center of each
color, an ancient tube of mascara, and a few eyeliner pencils that
I have to warm up with a cigarette lighter.

Amy’s cell rings and she turns to rifle
through her purse, on the back of her chair, to get it. She holds
it up and reads the screen with a frown.

“
Poop. That was Soph,” she
says, shooting me an awkward grimace. “I better make sure she got
home safe. Sorry. I’ll take it outside.”

“
You don’t have to do that,”
I say, but Amy’s already scooted out the sunroom door. The three of
us watch her shadow move toward the beach, her cell screen seeming
to float away on its own, like a tiny, rectangular
beacon.

“
Anybody want coffee?” Oscar
asks. But then his cell rings. He picks it up and peers at the
screen. “I’ve got to get this. I’ll be back in a sec.”

He clicks on the phone and says, “Yeah, it’s
me, what’s up?” before he goes out the front door. Landon and I are
left at the table, me shooting glances toward the front door and
him shooting them toward the back. I pick at my food, wondering if
Sophia hung up with Amy and called Oscar. Or if it is Oscar’s dad
with more bad news. Then I perk up, imagining its Sher, calling to
gush about a wedding plan, which sends an unexpected little tinge
of enjoyment down into my stomach. Sher’s enthusiasm about Oscar
makes everything feel a little less scary, and like it will all
turn out okay eventually.

Landon reaches for the bag of chips and
peels his eyes from the shadows out the sunroom window long enough
to ask, “So, you’re good with jumping into the Maree clan?”

I blink at him a few seconds, not sure what
Oscar’s told him, what he knows. I finally settle on giving Landon
a friendly smile and say, “Yeah, I’m good.”

“
He’s a good guy,” Landon
says, looking into the bottom of the chip bag. “I know you two are
moving fast, but you seem like a good person, so I hope it works
out for you. Just wanted you to know that.”

“
Uh, thanks,” I say,
shifting around on my chair. I’m so uncomfortable; I’m actually
starting to wish that Oscar would come back. But Amy comes in
first.

“
That was sad,” Amy says,
dropping her phone on the table. I don’t know if she’s talking to
me or Landon. “Poor Soph. She wanted me to talk to her the whole
way home.”

“
Long ride,” Landon says,
digging into the chip bag again.

“
She’ll be fine,” Amy says,
and this time, she shoots me a sympathetic glance. “Sorry to bum
you out with all of this, hon. It’s such a weird thing to be
comforting one best friend and listening to her complain that her
ex is a dickhead, when I’ve got a new friend sitting here who’s in
love with the same guy. Especially when I adore the guy, and he’s
friends with my boyfriend. It’s just tough, you know?”

“
It’s okay,” I mumble. I get
it, but, when she said Oscar was a dickhead, the hair on my skin
still bristled up.

Oscar walks back in a few minutes later.

“
Everything okay?” Landon
asks and Oscar nods.

“
All good,” he says. “You
guys done eating? I was thinking of taking Hale for a walk down the
beach.”

“
I want to go,” Amy says,
but Oscar gives Landon a wry smile and Landon reaches for Amy’s
hand.

“
I think they want to be
alone,” he says, and then, with an eyebrow wiggle to her,
“so
we
can be
alone too.”

“
You are just the sexiest
man I’ve ever met,” Amy says, reaching over to squeeze Landon’s
cheeks. She does a hair flip to look at us, strands falling
perfectly over one, seductively drooped eye. “Okay, you two, get
out so I can be alone with my man.”

Oscar pulls my chair back and takes my hand.
We walk through the kitchen, stopping to retrieve a battery-powered
lantern from a cupboard.

“
Just leave the light on out
front, so we can find our way back when you’re—when you’re good
with us coming back in,” Oscar says to Landon with a
wink.

CHAPTER
NINE

WHEN IT’S DARK OUTSIDE IN THE COUNTRY, it’s
black. Walking away from the house, there are no streetlights and
no other houses around to light our way. The sound of the water on
one side and the glow of the lantern on the sand in front of us is
disorienting, and I still feel like I’m going to fall on my
face.

“
To get to the bigger beach,
we’ve got to go down this path,” Oscar says, taking my hand. I’m
grateful for his touch and that he holds back the branches that
would probably poke out my eyes otherwise, as we pick our way down
the path. But a rustle in the tall grass along the side scares me
even closer to him. I squeeze his hand, and his laugh
rumbles.

“
Nothing’s gonna get you out
here, Hale,” he says. “Everything’s way more afraid of you than the
other way around.”

But another rustle from the dark grass
presses me to his side. I’m so close that his chuckle vibrates
against me. The ground is uneven beneath my feet, and Oscar catches
me a few times, hauling me up like a toddler, when I stumble. We go
along for an agonizingly long time before we finally break through
to the edge of long beach.

There is only a long strip of sand that
rises up to a dark tree line on one side, or smoothes out to the
black water on the other side. We plod along the beach until we’re
a ways away from the path. Oscar switches off the lantern.

“
Want to sit and talk?” he
says. Even when the lantern was on, there wasn’t enough light to
see further than five feet. I’d be lost in seconds. But with the
lantern off, it’s so dark that I can’t even make out Oscar unless
I’m staring off to one side of him.

“
I guess.” I sit, the sand
surprisingly cold beneath me. Oscar drops down next to me, digging
in his heels and resting his elbows on his bent knees. When my eyes
get used to the dark, I can see his profile, but can’t make out his
features at all.

“
Who called you?” I
ask.

“
That’s what you’ve been
thinking?”

“
Yes. And that this sand is
colder than I thought it’d be.”

Oscar scoots a little closer and, I hate to
admit it, but I’m grateful for the warmth of his body too. He leans
back, propping an arm behind me and we’re suddenly even closer,
even though he’s not really touching me at all.

“
Are you going to tell me
who called?” I ask.

“
Of course,” he says. “My
father called first. He said there haven’t been any new
developments. He said the news stations aren’t re-broadcasting the
story over and over—I guess Rick Tatum was just a regular guy, so
it’s not big news. The hardest part is going to be living with it.
Even though the whole thing was kind of self-defense, and the guy
dying was an accident, we’ve all got to live knowing that we are
the only ones who know what happened.”

He doesn’t have to explain it to me. The
dark cloud has been there for me too, ever since I found out what
happened. Even without the marriage deal that our fathers made,
knowing that the four of us are the only ones who know about a
man’s death leaves me with the dark feeling too. It’s like I can
get my mind off it, but there’s still a smudge on every moment, a
smoke ring that hovers around the edges.

“
My father mentioned that
your dad is kicking some ass with the new business. He’s already
got a few dozen clients, and he’s been working
non-stop.”

“
Good,” I say. I don’t want
to think about my dad a whole lot. All I come back to is how he
handed me over to Oscar that last night, kicking me out with my
bags, and busting the bottles on the wall to make me leave. The
bits of glass that cut me have become nothing more than tiny scars
in my skin, another bit of smoke that I hope will eventually
disappear. “Who else called?”

“
Sophia,” he sighs. “Amy
probably got my number off Land’s phone, and now Sophia’s got
it.”

I don’t want to talk around the edges of
what’s going on anymore. I cut right to it.

“
Do you still love her,
Oscar?”

He ducks his head down for a moment, between
his elbows, and then he says, “Yeah, but not like you think.”

“
What do I
think?”

“
I’m guessing you mean do I
love her, like
love
her. I don’t. Not like that,” he says. “But she was someone I
cared about before, so I don’t like to see her upset now. At the
same time, I can’t change the way I feel about you, just to suit
her.”

His phone rings in his pocket. He fishes it
out and holds it up. It’s Sophia. He flicks on the phone and says
hello. Just like Sher, Sophia’s a loud cell phone talker and I can
hear every word.

“
Oscar? What you’re doing
sucks. It really, really sucks. You go missing, and I have to track
you down just to find out that you’ve been cheating on me? You
should’ve respected me a little more and just handled this like an
adult. I don’t know where you get off giving me that bullshit story
about
me
being the
one who was cheating on
you
! And how long have you even been
with that girl? You can’t be in love with her! You
can’t!”

“
Sophia,” Oscar says calmly.
“I’m sorry it happened like this with us. I didn’t mean for it to
happen, but...”

“
Damn it!” she explodes.
“Don’t you dare tell me again how it’s you and not me! It
is
me, or you’d be
with
me
right
now!”

“
I wish I...”

“
Don’t keep saying you wish
it didn’t happen like this! It did happen!”

“
I don’t know what you want
me to say, Sophia.”

“
I want you to say that you
made a mistake!”

“
But I didn’t,” Oscar says,
“and I don’t know what else I can say about it. I didn’t mean to
hurt you, but...”

“
But you did.”

“
I suppose so,” he says.
“But I didn’t mean to.”

Sophia hangs up on him. Oscar touches the
buttons that turn off the phone, before he slips it in his
pocket.

“
Sorry,” he tells me. “I
don’t know what I can do for her.”

“
You broke her
heart.”

“
That’s what she tells me,”
he says, “but she doesn’t believe that I didn’t expect this to
happen either.”

“
Did you tell her about Rick
Tatum?”

“
No, but I wasn’t referring
to that. I was talking about meeting you.”

“
Oh,” I say. I’m glad it’s
dark out, glad that he can’t read my expression or my blushing. I
try to change the subject. “You haven’t told anyone about what
happened? Not even Landon?”

“
No,” he says. “But Landon
does know that I plan to marry you. He knows our fathers are
working together and that, the moment I met you, it was over with
Sophia.”

“
What’d he say to that? That
you’re crazy, right?”

“
Not at all. I think you’re
forgetting that Sophia and I were only together a few months. Land
knew that things weren’t perfect with us. When I told him about
you, he told me to do what makes me happy. That’s Land.”

“
He told me that at the
kitchen table too, when you were outside on the phone with your
dad.”

“
When Land says something,
he means it.”

“
What about Amy? Does she
mean it?” I ask. “She went from hating me to wanting to be my best
friend. She’s kind of scary.”

“
Not really,” he says, as
though he means to say she is. “I think of her as more determined
than scary. When she gets something in her head, she’s determined
that that’s the way it should be, but when she changes her mind,
she changes it completely. Does that make sense?”

“
Kind of,” I say. “She still
freaks me out though.”

“
Don’t let her. You’re with
me and that’s that. Amy will figure it out, if she hasn’t already,”
he says. “What about you? Have you figured it out?”

“
That I have to go through
with this? Yeah, I figured that out,” I say.

“
That’s all you’ve got?” The
disappointment in his voice is darker than the shadow of his face.
His head scoops down toward mine. “Hale, don’t you have any
feelings for me?”