Touching the Surface (19 page)

I pushed my way past the silent crowd and out the fire exit door, into the rain. I walked slowly with my head up high until I hit the cover of the tree line where no one could see me crumple from the effort. Hunched over in brokenhearted pain, I climbed, heading for the mountain.

•  •  •

Ding-ding.
Delve over. Thank goodness—I’d seen enough. And it was plenty to convince me that I didn’t need to see any more. It felt like an eternity, but my fist finally connected with Trevor’s face. How dare he make me the prize in his competition with Oliver? A kiss was supposed to mean something.

The satisfaction of landing the punch quickly dissolved into a shock of pain that radiated up my arm.

“What the hell was that for?” Trevor growled at me while walking in circles and holding his jaw in his hand.

“Oh, just heal yourself and shut up!” I shouted. All the pent-up emotion from the back-to-back Delves was releasing itself. My hand hurt. My pride hurt. My heart even hurt. I wasn’t going to cry, so I turned my back to him instead.

“Unbelievable!” he bellowed. “Aren’t I the one who just got decked? Remind me not to try to kiss you again.” He stalked over to the edge of the cliff, where he knew I would be unwilling to follow.

“You didn’t really want to kiss me anyway,” I shot back over my shoulder.

“How do you know what I wanted to do?”

“You said you only wanted what Oliver had and I know I haven’t been going around kissing Oliver.” My hand was feeling better so I pointed a finger at him for emphasis.

“That’s not what I said. I made a very simple observation
about Oliver always getting the things that I want the most.” His gaze ate a hole right through me.

I walked toward him like a magnet. I couldn’t help myself.

“Just because I fell in love with you in my last life doesn’t mean that I want to fall in love with you in the afterlife, Trevor Lowry.” I stuck out my lower lip but it trembled.

“I didn’t say anything about falling in love. I said I wanted to kiss you.” Before to be your Passenger reallyhibI I could fashion a reply, his lips softly brushed against the side of my neck just below my ear and disappeared again as quickly as they’d come. I didn’t give a hoot at that moment what the reason for that butterfly kiss had been. All I knew was that it had turned me inside out. I stepped up on tiptoe, with the intent of returning that soft little shiver of a kiss to its owner. I wanted to see if I could crack some of his icy control, but the minute my lips touched his I could barely remember my own name. I wrapped my arms tightly around his neck, needing them there to hold me up. Trevor had become my heartbeat. I felt his fingers clasp the back of my head and I tried to pull him closer.

Breathing raggedly, Trevor wrenched himself away, and suddenly I was lifted off my feet and deposited an arm’s length away.

“God, Elliot, what are you trying to do?”

I blushed and ducked behind my hair. Plenty of it to hide
behind, it was all over the place from Trevor’s fingers.

“Look at me,” Trevor said.

I lifted my head. Unable to read his face, I immediately lowered my gaze to see what the billboard on his chest was saying, but it was dark also.

“Lower, Elliot.”

My eyes dropped down and I gasped out loud. Trevor’s feet were about an inch from the edge of the overhang.

“I almost killed you.”

“I’m already dead,” Trevor said, his sarcasm amped up a notch. “Just unwilling to take the plunge.”

Overrun by emotion, I sat down on the ground right where I’d been standing and began to sob.

It only took a minute for him to sit next to me and scoop me into his lap. He must have known I couldn’t have stopped crying if I wanted to. He just held me until I was exhausted.

“Your shirt’s all wet,” I said, leaning back to see the damage I’d done. Trevor’s shirt had a new slogan on it:
BOLDLY GOING NOWHERE.

I could feel myself reverting from warm and open Elliot, to the more familiar prickly defensive one.

“What are you saying?” I snipped, touching my finger to my lips. I’d thought the kiss had been pretty good.

“You’re so easy to read,” Trevor said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, first it means that you always jump to the worst conclusions, like thinking that I stopped because I didn’t like kissing you.”

I hated being easy to read.

“You said first. What’s the rest?” I demanded.

He pointed to his shirt. “ ‘Boldly going nowhere’ is what will happen if we don’t finish this. I know you well enough to know you’re not going to want to Delve any further. Can’t you feel how close we are?”

That
was the second thing? What about . . . 
Secondly, Turner, you jumped to the conclusion that I was saying our relationship was going nowhere. The reality is that I am falling in love with you.
 . . . Apparently, I had a vivid imagination to go with my chickenshit personality. The truth of it was like a scab being ripped off. The ripping didn’t hurt, but the throbbing afterward seemed to go on forever. The worst part was to be your PassengerguhibI that I didn’t think I could help being in love with him anymore. Maybe if we hadn’t Delved I would’ve been able to focus on his crabby, mean side. But after falling in love with him in the past, I couldn’t help but see the softer side of his soul.

“Elliot? Am I right? Or are you going to surprise me and tell me you’re willing to Delve further?”

“It hurts,” I whispered, wrapping my arms around myself.
I had no intention of ever Delving again. Maybe I could run away. I didn’t know what was beyond the beyond, but maybe I could hide from it. I got a sudden chill picturing the Obmil like a giant snow globe, a beautiful place with no escape.

“There’s nowhere else to go,” Trevor said. I hated how he seemed to get inside my head.

“I can’t find out the rest,” I said. I felt the knot of terror in my gut and realized that subconsciously I’d been worrying about this long before I’d even understood it. “I can’t watch myself commit suicide. I don’t want to go back there anymore.” I was bottomless in my capacity to fail.

“You don’t know for sure that’s what happens.” His fingers running through his hair gave away his uncertainty.

“It’s pretty damn likely, don’t you think?”

Trevor admitted nothing, but his T-shirt went blank.

“So what if you did commit suicide? What would be the worst thing that could happen?”

I could barely speak. “I believe that maybe the stories are true. I think that taking your own life is unforgivable. The taboo around it is so strong and there must be a reason for that. I’ll be sent to . . .”

My voice broke and I was unable to finish. Trevor’s face was stone. It seemed so cruel, to struggle through my issues and to come out on the other side, only to figure out that I’d
screwed up royally from the start and now I was going to pay the price.

“We have no proof that there even is a hell,” he said.

“You also can’t prove that there isn’t one,” I countered.

His face softened ever so slightly, yet it caused a painful tightening in my chest. What if I was doomed one way or another, but Trevor needed
me
in order to find his way out of the Obmil? And what if Oliver was depending on me to finish what I’d started so he could have his own life back? I loved them both. Could I really let them down like that?

“Have you been carrying this around with you the whole time?” Trevor asked, pulling me away from my thoughts.

“No, not originally.” I thought back to those early Delves. “It was a likely outcome in the beginning. How do you survive after doing what I did to Oliver? But I was so distracted at first that I just didn’t think it through. Then, when I remembered meeting you and saw what you meant to Elliot, I became hopeful. But things have been going downhill rapidly since we went back to school. Cari was sort of the tipping point. I think she just pushed me over the edge.”

“Hate her,” Trevor said.

Was it wrong that I wanted to hug him for that?

“What do you think it’s like? Hell, I mean. I can’t get past the image of heat and flames. Or the absence of fluffy white
clouds in a perfect blue sky. to be your PassengerJulia hibI ” I could feel myself choking up again.

“You’re not going to hell, Elliot,” Trevor said. His teeth were clenched tightly together. Under his breath he mloors, but in

25

falling
or
flying?

This kiss was an electric shock, but something wasn’t right. We hadn’t Delved. I raggedly pulled away, confused. We were still standing in the same spot. I wriggled myself out of his arms, spun around in disbelief.

“Am I boring you?” asked Trevor.

“No. I just thought we were going to Delve. We didn’t go anywhere.” Couldn’t
anything
about this place be predictable?

“You trying to get rid of me?”

“Nah,” I said, still trying to figure out how it was that we could drop into the past without a moment’s notice when I was unprepared and now that I was determined to meet my fate—nothing. Nada.

Trevor glanced down. “Unbelievable. Is that the best you could come up with?” he asked.

“What? Best of what?”

“Your T-shirt. Very romantic. Is that your evor asked slo

26

remembering
blue

The drop, which should have taken mere seconds, seemed endless, as if we were hanging between earth and sky. We were momentarily suspended between the best and the worst of us. It occurred to me that as scary as this was, falling together was better than falling apart.

I saw shades of blue beneath me and I angled our bodies to enter the water in a dive. There would be no last-minute change of direction for us. I could feel Trevor’s breath warm in my ear as he whispered the single word
remember . . .

•  •  •

I barely noticed the trail or the rain. The only thing that drummed through my head was the need to escape. The calm that had bucked me up moments ago had been replaced by blind panic and rage. I moved along the slippery rocks
without a hand to hold, imploding with the realization that I would never be allowed to love Trevor.

I knew that if I stayed in this life, with these people, I would have no hope.

More gut-wrenching sobs racked my body as I stumbled and slid back down five feet of loose rock, scraping my knees and cutting the palms of my hands.

It seemed wrong to welcome the distraction of physical pain, but it also kept me froms playful expr

27

frozen
in
place

I could still feel Trevor attached to me when my head broke the water. I instinctively wrapped myself tightly around him as we bobbed in the middle of the lake. No sooner was I curled up against him, than I started to worry that my weight would make it impossible for him to tread water. It was deep here, maybe even bottomless. I tried to break away from him, but his arm was like an iron band around my waist.

“The dead don’t die, Elliot. When are you going to remember that?” There was a bite to his words.

“Oh.” The reality of our unreality sank back in. I was still feeling relief that I hadn’t killed myself in a momentous leap, but there’d been consequences for my choices. I’d put myself on the edge, in a place where to be your PassengerlvhiI bit my lipI had very little control. How far
can you push chance before it isn’t chance anymore? I swept the thought aside, opting to leave my subconscious out of the thought process. I hadn’t jumped. That was all I needed to know.