The Light and Fallen (4 page)

He couldn't explain what made her stand out,
but once she passed he couldn't tear his eyes away. He watched her
until she vanished through the front doors. Then he realized he was
holding his breath. He had no reason to care about this girl more
than any of the others, but she captivated him.
Why?
he
wondered.
Who was she?

Samara squeezed her eyes shut and tried to
shake the feeling that she was bouncing around like the ball inside
a pinball machine as the crowd jostled her toward her second hour
class. Carin bounced along beside her, completely unphased by the
crush of bodies and backpacks around them, and carried on a
non-stop running commentary of things that had happened during
summer vacation.

"There's Farrah!" Carin raised her hand high
over her head and waved at a redheaded girl standing at a locker
across the hall. "She snuck into her neighbor's pool while they
were out of town and set off the burglar alarm, so her parents put
her on house arrest for like
forever
.

"And Jason!" She blew a kiss toward a cluster
of boys, and Samara saw one of them duck his head . "We went out
once, before his family went out of town, and then he never called
me back. But the beginning of the year is really busy, so here's
hoping."

She waved two crossed fingers in front of
Samara's eyes, then slammed to a sudden stop, causing an
embarrassed freshman to blunder face first into her back. "Gotta
go! See ya later!"

She disappeared through the door to the
second floor stairwell, and Samara felt like she'd been left in the
wake of a small tornado.
Definitely going to need coffee to keep
up with that,
she thought. She continued down the hallway
alone, sliding into second hour just before the tardy bell.

The rest of the morning classes slid by in a
blur; every teacher seemed to do the exact same things. She was
relieved when the lunch bell snapped her out of her reverie, and
she scooped up her books and headed into the hall. Most of the
students were heading to the right, towards the cafeteria, but she
turned in the opposite direction. She elbowed her way through the
crowd until the hall cleared and she stood outside the library.

The doors of the West Wimberley High library
were different from any of the others in the building. Instead of
generic, gray pressboard they were roughly hewn out of two enormous
slabs of dark mahogany, and their surface was carved with scenes
from novels on the school's reading list. A blast of cool air hit
her in the face when she pushed the doors open, and she breathed in
deeply, inhaling the smell of books, pencils, and the faint floral
aroma embedded in the aging carpet.

For the first time since she left West
Wimberley in May, she felt at home.

Samara walked slowly through the stacks and
settled into her favorite table, the one wedged into a corner
behind the local history section. It was covered with shallow pen
indentations and carved initials, and she ran her finger lightly
over its scuffed surface. Her favorites were carved into the bottom
left hand corner: D+M 4evr.

Where were you now?
she wondered.
Are you still together, 4evr?

The faint chatter of voices rose from other
sections of the library, but nearby shelves blocked her view; she
couldn't see anyone. She realized that for the first time today no
one's eyes were on her, and she felt her muscles slowly relax. For
the first time in the past three hours, she didn't have to wonder
what anyone was thinking.

She pulled an apple out of one of the side
pockets of her bag, polished it on her shirt, and took a big bite,
enjoying the way it gave beneath her teeth with a satisfying
crunch. A drop of juice trickled down her bottom lip and onto her
chin, but she couldn't even muster the energy to wipe it away.
Instead, she twisted on the hard chair and slid her legs beneath
her. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the
wall as she licked the juice from the edges of her lips. She was
stretching her tongue down towards her chin when she heard his
voice.

Her heart sped through a chorus of beats in
the time it took to open her eyes. "I'm sorry?"

"May I sit with you?" Lucian repeated. He
gestured to the battered chair across from her and dropped his
backpack onto the floor without waiting for an answer.

"Absolutely!"

She responded with more enthusiasm than she'd
intended and cringed inwardly. The tips of her ears burned as she
leaned forward and slid her backpack off the table, and she
discretely wiped her chin with the back of her hand.
Honestly
, she thought,
I have
got
to pull
myself together
.

Lucian slid into the chair across from her
and stared into her eyes. "Are you okay?"

"Sure."

She paused, but he didn't look away. His
beautiful eyes stayed fixed on hers. After a few seconds she tore
her gaze away and stared down at the table, forcing herself to
focus on the smooth surface of the apple in her hand. "Why do you
ask?"

"You're sitting here in the corner. All
alone. With your eyes closed."

Samara peeked back at Lucian and saw that he
was still looking at her intently.

"Not that there's anything wrong with that,"
he continued. "You're just the only person I've seen today that
sits around with their eyes closed. You seem to do it a lot."

Samara shifted beneath his stare. His obvious
scrutiny should make her uncomfortable, but somehow it didn't.
"Don't you know that's the best way to eat an apple?" she joked.
"And I don't do it a lot. I've only been here for a minute."

She raised her eyes and met his gaze,
determined not to act as completely dazzled by him as she felt. His
eyes were spellbinding. The hard edge of the table pressed against
her stomach and she pulled back, realizing that she was
unconsciously leaning forward, closing the distance between
them.

"I saw you in your car this morning," he
said. He hesitated before he spoke again. "You looked like you
would be happy to be anywhere but here."

His words crashed into her like bullets. This
beautiful, perfect boy had seen her acting like a crazy person.
That's why he wanted to talk to her. He was probably afraid she was
going to jump out a third story window. Her nerves jangled with
humiliation and every instinct told her to run, but she couldn't
look away. "Why didn't you say something before?" she whispered.
"In the office, or in the hallway?"

Lucian shrugged his shoulders. "I didn't know
what to say. I didn't know I was going to see you again, but when I
walked into the office, there you were. It didn't really seem to
fit into the introductions."

He reached toward her entreatingly, his hands
turned palm up on the table. "I didn't want to upset you. You
already seemed a little…" He hesitated, choosing each word
carefully. "Fraught."

Samara's body moved before she had time to
think; she threw her chair back from the table so hard it wobbled
onto two legs. "You're right," she snapped. "I guess I am a little
fraught."

She reached for her backpack and jerked
herself out of the chair. "Just so you know," she added, "I'm not a
total spaz. I know it must seem like it, based today, but I'm not.
It was just a long summer." She turned away as a knot sealed her
throat, and her eyes burned with humiliated, angry tears.

Lucian stared at her in confusion. He wasn't
sure why he had come over in the first place, but he had. He'd sat
across from her and told the truth, and now she was upset.

He thought of ways to comfort her, but he was
afraid that anything he said would make the situation worse. A
flash of frustration surged through him. A glimpse of the future
would make this so much easier.

He had been heading toward the cafeteria when
Samara passed him in the hallway. She was going in the opposite
direction as everyone else, and he was seized with a sudden,
irrepressible whim to follow her. He hadn't really meant to talk to
her, but when he'd seen her curled up alone in the corner the urge
was irresistible. He'd been warned that human emotions were strong,
and he was starting to understand how true that was.

As soon as he took the first step toward her,
he'd known it was a mistake, but that hadn't stopped him. For the
first time he'd been out of control. Between the training and his
thousands of years watching over the Timeline he knew more about
humans than any of the Host, but knowledge couldn't save him from
himself.

"Wait," he said. "I'm sorry." His hand
twitched toward her, then stilled at his side.

Samara turned towards him, and he could see
tears glittering in the corners of her eyes. The way she was
looking at him made him feel painfully human. He surrendered the
last remaining shreds of his good judgment and decided to be
completely honest.

"I wasn't trying to make you uncomfortable,"
he said.

She didn't respond, and he yearned to know
what she was thinking.

"I was just trying to tell you-," he
continued, "-very badly, that you are the most intriguing,
beautiful person I've ever met. I didn't mean to suggest anything
more than that."

Samara listened to Lucian in disbelief. The
words coming out of his mouth were too sweet to be real. She
glanced around furtively to see if anyone was waiting to jump out
and yell "Gotcha!"

"It was totally out of place for me to say
anything," he continued. "Can we start over? Forget everything that
just happened?"

She was sure she wasn't going to forget the
sound of Lucian's low, gentle voice saying that she was beautiful,
but she nodded automatically. It seemed like the only thing to do.
Her emotions were so mixed up that she wasn't sure whether she was
thrilled, disbelieving, or sad. All she was sure of was that she
was using most of her mental energy to keep from shifting towards
him.

"Okay," she said. "Let's start over. If you
walked up to me under normal circumstances I would say something
like, 'How's your first day going?'"

Lucian's eyes were still riveted on her face,
and the intensity of his gaze made her thoughts muddled. "And you
would say…?" she prompted.

A burst of laughter followed by loud shushing
echoed through the stacks, and Lucian's eyes darted toward the
sound. "It's a little overwhelming." he said. "And more crowded
than I expected." He gave her an embarrassed smile. "I'm really not
sure how to put it into words. Everything is just
more
."

Samara nodded. "I know exactly what you
mean."

The bell rang and she could hear books
slamming and chairs dragging across the floor. She realized that
she'd been holding the apple, forgotten, in her hand. Only one bite
was missing, and she rubbed her thumb slowly over its smooth skin.
She hadn't eaten since breakfast, but her stomach was too full of
butterflies to be hungry.

"I guess it's time to go," she said. She
aimed the apple into a trash can several feet away and it hit the
bottom with a metallic thunk. "Where are you headed?"

Lucian pulled his schedule out of his pocket
and scanned down the small lines of type. "It looks like I have
P.E. right now. In Gymnasium A, wherever that is."

"Follow me." Samara walked in front of him,
and together they stepped out into the bright hallway. "It looks
like we have P.E. together."

P.E. was Samara's least favorite class. Coach
Cottlebum was a large, heavyset woman with a hint of a beard.
Samara assumed that at some point in her life she had loved both
sports and children, but something had changed. Now, she seemed to
hate them both. She was able to take activities that were
potentially fun, like badminton, and turn them into grueling
ordeals that would fit right into any boot camp training
program.

After three years with Coach Cottlebum,
Samara knew the day would bring one of only two options. The first,
and most desirable, was that Coach Cottlebum would ignore them
completely and read a romance novel. No one would dress out, and
everyone would talk and do their nails. The second possibility was
that Coach Cottlebum would actually notice them. When that
happened, she took their intrusion into her gym as a person affront
and made them do wind sprints or crab crawls until someone threw
up.

Samara was relieved to see Coach Cottlebum
reading. The first section of bleachers was already filled with
girls, some waving flirtatiously at the boys on the other side of
the gym. She slipped into the second row and dropped her backpack
beside Carin and a spiky haired blonde named Bethanny Tarver.

Bethanny was watching Carin make exaggerated
kissy faces towards Jason Stanton. He had turned his back on the
girls' side of the gym and appeared to be having an intent
conversation with a skinny boy sitting behind him. It was obvious,
at least to Samara, that he was ignoring Carin just as
industriously as she was trying to get his attention.

"Better tone it down girl," Bethanny said.
She leaned forward and rested her chin on Carin's shoulder. "Coach
Dobbs will think you're into him." She jerked her chin in the
direction of the boys' coach who had his chest puffed out and was
smiling broadly in their direction.

"No!" Carin gasped. She gave a little squeal
and bounced around to face them. "I just can't help myself. Jason
is so hot! I've been trying to talk to him all day, but we keep
missing each other."