Luke disappeared into the laundry room, and I laid my head back against the chair. I was more than a little bit confused. Unsettled.
“Not completely dry, but it’ll do,” he said, coming back into the kitchen. “I just left yours in there.”
“That’s fine. Let me grab my shoes.”
We sprinted out to the Bronco, but it didn’t matter—we were both soaked by the time we climbed inside.
“Cool ride,” Luke said.
It was. I’d loved that Bronco since I was eight years old. “Yeah, although she doesn’t have air, and she burns through oil really fast.”
“Those are the best kinds. They have personality. I miss my truck.”
“Where is it?” I asked. The wipers were on high, but the rain was coming down too fast for them to be much use. I drove slowly.
Luke stared out the windshield. “I got in trouble last summer and Dad made me get rid of it. He also took my phone and anything else useful he didn’t think I deserved.” When he looked at me, his eyes were hard. “The silver truck is Ian’s. Dad bought it for him because he’s the perfect twin. I’m the disappointment, so I had to buy my own.” He shrugged, then grinned at me. “I liked it better that way. I helped my uncle build cabinets all summer to buy that truck. I earned it.”
The windows fogged up, making it hard to see where I was going. We couldn’t roll them down, so it was stuffy and sticky inside the Bronco. I didn’t know what to say, so we didn’t say anything, just listened to the rain loud on the roof and the back and forth of the wipers.
The dirt road was muddy and slippery, and I had to concentrate to keep out of the ditch. I wondered how I was going to act if Ian were home.
I didn’t see his truck when we pulled up, but then again, I couldn’t really see anything at all. “Thanks for the ride,” Luke said.
“No problem.” But it was. The fact that I was hoping to see him again was a big problem.
Luke pulled the handle, but the door didn’t budge. He smiled and pushed against it with his shoulder. Nothing.
“Yeah, sometimes it gets stuck. You have to pull it up, out, and slightly to the left,” I told him.
He tried and failed. I laughed. “It’s an art, really. Here.”
I put the car in park and leaned across Luke. My arm pressed against his chest as I jimmied the handle. The door popped open, and rain poured in. Luke’s hand brushed mine as he pulled the door partway closed, blocking some of the rain. I was embarrassed at how hard my heart was pounding. Surely it was loud enough to be heard over the rain. I slid over into my seat.
“You’re going to get me in trouble,” he murmured.
Funny
, I thought as he disappeared into the rain.
I was thinking the exact same thing
.
It was late, that ambiguous place where time was suspended and yesterday kissed tomorrow before putting on today. When my phone rang, I wasn’t sure if the call was coming from Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. I groaned and groped for the phone on the nightstand, knocking my glass of water to the floor.
I swore and tumbled out of bed, stepping in the water on the floor, cussed some more, then stumbled around the room and tried to locate the wailing phone. I stubbed my toe on the corner of the bed, which woke me up quickly. When I finally found the phone in the pocket of my shorts, it had stopped ringing.
I glared at the screen. I’d missed a call from Ian. We’d texted a few times since the lake party, but we kept missing each other’s calls. Work, and my mother, took up most of my time these days. I jumped when it started ringing again.
“What?” I snapped, trying to keep my voice down so I wouldn’t wake my mom. If she’d been able to sleep through all that in the first place.
“Hey, it’s Luke.”
“You want me to hate you, don’t you?”
He chuckled softly. “I thought we could find some trouble together.”
My stomach tightened. “How about telling me what you want without delivering some over-rehearsed line.”
“You promised to take me on a picnic at the Point,” he reminded me.
“It’s the middle of the night!” What was he thinking? And sneaking out with Ian’s brother seemed like a very bad idea. “Some other time.”
“But I’m awake now.” He was pleading. It might have been cute if it wasn’t so annoying.
But now I was awake. Responsible Jenna would have said no, especially after recently kissing Ian. But then I thought of Becca, and some of my guilt turned into a desire for adventure. For once I was going to do something simply because I wanted to. And maybe partly because I shouldn’t.
“All right.” I sighed, a little too dramatically. He laughed; he knew I wanted to go.
“When can you be here?”
“I’m here now.”
I rushed to the window and looked out, trying to see anything in the dark. The moon peered down, but it wasn’t much help. There might have been a darker shadow underneath the tree, but I couldn’t be sure. “Prove it.”
A flashlight came on. Luke held it underneath his chin like kids do when they’re telling ghost stories. I grinned.
“Give me five minutes.”
I managed to make it out the back door without waking Mom. Only the morning would reveal whether this had been worth it or not. Luke stood underneath the tree, his grin devilish. I didn’t know if my racing pulse had more to do with him or the possibility of getting busted.
“I’m not so sure about this,” I said.
“Which is exactly why you should do it,” he argued. “You’ll never get another chance. You’ll never get a do-over, because you’ll never be at this exact same moment again.”
Well, when he put it
that
way. “So who’s driving?” I asked.
“Me.” He took off across the yard. “I parked down the street.”
We didn’t say anything as we walked to the truck. The air tasted different, and it felt like the entire neighborhood was stuffed with cotton. Nothing moved except us.
I climbed in the truck, careful not to slam the door too loudly or think too much about what I was doing. There were two large bags in the backseat. “What’s that?” I asked as Luke slid into the driver’s seat.
“The picnic, of course.”
“How did you know I’d come?”
It was too dark in the truck to read the look he gave me. But I felt his eyes on mine. “Girls have a hard time telling me no.”
“I’m sure I won’t find it too difficult.”
He grinned. “You already did.”
The engine roared as Luke started the truck, saving me from having to come up with some appropriate retort. I was sure we’d just woken up the entire neighborhood, but everything stayed dark as we pulled away from the curb and down the deserted street. It felt like we were the only two people left on an abandoned planet. We rolled through the center of town. The streets were dark, the streetlights like tiny fairies suspended in the night. Even the lawn in front of the courthouse looked charming, the flowers bursts of color in the headlights, fading to gray as we passed. It was as if the whole world had pulled out its magnificence just for us—like we were seeing the secret splendor that only appeared when everyone was sleeping. We were silent, and I held my breath, afraid to shatter the spell.
Each road grew smaller and wilder as we drove into the country, the layers of civilization peeling away until we eased down a tiny dirt road through the center of the woods, finally taking an even smaller one to the cove. We pulled out of the trees and into a tiny clearing. The moon turned the lake silver, and the Point protruded like a bony finger. Luke parked and turned off the engine; the hush of night rushed in. “Wait here,” he said.
The dark was different out here, like maybe how dark was supposed to be before man tamed it. The moon kept my secret, giving me just enough light to see Luke’s outline but not enough to let him see the conflict that must have been on my face.
Luke took my hand and helped me out of the truck. It was the first time we’d consciously touched, and I couldn’t ignore the way his skin melted into mine. A blanket lay underneath a pine tree growing close to the water. Luke had set a small lantern in the center of the blanket, and I folded down next to a pizza box from Repete’s. I laughed and opened the box. Cold shrimp pizza. My favorite.
“You’re not allergic?” I asked.
“Nope. Just Ian.”
“Weird,” I said, grabbing a slice and putting it on the paper plate Luke had set out. “I thought twins were exactly alike.” But I knew better. Luke was nothing like Ian. And I hadn’t yet figured out how I felt about that.
“Hardly.” His voice was low and rough, his jaw a sharp line.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Honest mistake.” He loaded his plate with pizza. “We are identical, literally split in half. But allergies aren’t in our DNA, so he got them and I didn’t.”
The water slapped softly against the shore, a gentle percussion backed up by the hum of insects. The night made us whisper. The pizza sat uneaten. I forgot food when I was talking to Luke. I forgot to envy Becca and resent my mom. I forgot escape, because when Luke spoke, there was nowhere else to go. I made him describe all the places he’d lived. I felt small when he talked about the Rockies and indescribably young when he talked about one of the castles he remembered visiting in Germany. After a while, some of Luke’s black arrogance fell away and I saw the boy underneath.
We took off our shoes and stuck our feet in the warm water. Solitude Point’s jagged edge jutted out to our left and seemed to cut the sky in half. We lay on our backs and looked up at the stars. Luke and I weren’t touching, but I could feel the heat rolling off his skin.
“What do you miss most about home?” I asked him.
“Which one?”
“Any of them,” I said. “All of them.”
I turned my head to look at him. He was looking up, his profile dark and angular in the shadows.
“I knew exactly who I was back there,” he whispered. “Here, I could be anyone.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” I asked. That was one of the reasons I wanted to leave here. Go somewhere where no one knew me, so I could be exactly whoever I wanted to be, instead of trying to play the part I was given back before I was even born.
“Not always.” He rolled his head toward me, our faces almost touching in the dark. “Sometimes when you lose yourself, you never find your way back.”
It got harder and harder to breathe with him looking at me like that. He was so sad.
He sat up abruptly. “Let’s go for a swim.” I could tell it took some effort for him to make his voice light.
“I don’t have my suit,” I said.
His laugh was loud in the quiet night. “No suits necessary.” He stood up and pulled off his shirt in one swift movement.
I blushed and was glad it was dark. “Already trying to get me out of my clothes,” I said.
He laughed again. “You coming or not?”
And before I had a chance to change my mind, I waded in, clothes and all. “I’m not that easy.”
The water was warm, although the farther we swam, the more cold pockets we found. I tried not to think about what was swimming underneath me in the dark.
“I’m feeling a little reckless,” I admitted. There was something about being here with Luke that made me want to see what it would be like to make choices based on this moment, rather than future ones.
“Oh really?” His voice taunted me in the dark. “Because I have all sorts of ideas.”
“Don’t get too excited,” I explained, jerking my head toward the cliff. “I’m talking about jumping off the Point.”
“You’ve jumped before?” he asked.
“It’s been awhile,” I told him. “It’s illegal now.” For good reason. But tonight I wasn’t going to think about then. I was only going to think about now.
“I take it you don’t break the law,” Luke said, treading water until I caught up.
I kicked harder and swam past him. “I take it you do.”
He chuckled. “Only the stupid ones.”
We pulled through the black water, everything quiet but our splashes and the sound of our breathing. Tiny goose bumps appeared on my arms as I put my feet down and waded onto shore.
“How do we get up there?” Luke asked, staring up at the towering cliff.
“We climb.”
I gripped the sharp rock and positioned my feet, pushing up with my legs, then balancing and placing my hands. It wasn’t an easy climb, especially in the dark, and I didn’t look down. Luke was halfway up when I reached the top, and I waited for him.
He was out of breath. “How far down is it?”
“Twenty or thirty feet. I’m not sure exactly.”
I peered over the cliff, my toes grabbing the edge. I couldn’t see the water. The rock was solid and safe, but I couldn’t wait to leap into the unknown. It could end badly, or it could be glorious. All I knew was that I wanted a chance to fly.
Life held so much possibility—failure or wild success, poverty or wealth, love or heartache. And with the varying shades in between each of those, I had no idea what would happen. There would be pain, and eventually death, but oh God, the possibility. If I stayed put, I was fairly certain how my life would turn out. But out there, there was no way of knowing. Absolutely none. And that was the rush—the chance that absolutely anything could happen. Here, nothing ever would. Not really.
I leaned out, letting my body pull me forward into nothing. At the very last moment, I pulled my hands above my head and pushed away from the cliff, diving headfirst into the dark.
It was several glorious, completely uncontrollable seconds before I hit the water. I let myself dive farther and farther toward the bottom, then curved toward the surface in a huge arc, kicking hard with my legs. Just when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to hold my breath any longer, I broke the surface and pulled in a deep breath.
“Jenna? You okay?” Luke’s voice floated somewhere above me.
“I’m great! Your turn,” I shouted back, sending my voice out toward his.
Luke ran and leapt from the edge, throwing himself off the cliff in a sudden burst of momentum. He hit the water hard, spray flying back up almost to the cliff’s edge. He came up grinning.
“You made that look too easy,” he said.
We swam back toward the cliff. Luke reached the Point first and wrapped his hand around my wrist, pulling me through the water and into his chest. I stopped breathing.