Chapter 64
KATIE
I’m not sure what Tristan is playing at, but these outfits are the exact outfits we wore on the first day we met. Tristan’s bathing suit shorts are as eye-wateringly pink as I remember. His shirt is slightly more faded. My black-on-black ensemble is the one I wore nearly every day when I started.
Matters become clearer as we traipse across the grass to the northeast corner of the property where the security cameras always seem to have trouble.
Must be the salt air or something, but I’ve fixed them once every six months since the first day I started.
There’s a ladder there and a toolbox at the top, and my heart is in my throat. My fingers spasm around his.
“Up you go.”
He helps me up onto the ladder, steadying it with his hands, before he lets go. My fingers trace the contours of the dusty toolbox.
“Same toolbox?” I ask huskily.
He nods. “Focus, Bailey. The security camera needs fixing.”
I see that it’s hanging from a wire, just the way it was on that first day. Suddenly, it’s three years ago and I feel that same pit in my stomach, that same emptiness in my heart. I’m a girl who has just lost everything, except her guns and her clothes, and is desperate to make a fresh start.
Suddenly, I’m crying.
The breeze lifts my hair and I tip my face up to the trees. The birds are quiet in the thick afternoon heat, not like they were that morning. I tipped my face up exactly like I am now, marveling at the beauty of Crownhaven. The stillness. I wanted so badly for it to become my home.
And just like back then, a scrape of a shoe on the path alerts me to his presence. I freeze, then turn. He’s below me in a few quick steps, steadying the ladder with one broad hand.
My breath empties from my lungs, like it did that day three years ago. My gaze goes immediately to the hole in his shirt. It’s bigger now, revealing a tantalizingly smooth circle of tan skin.
Back then, he was looking at me curiously, like I was a new, interesting species that had appeared on his doorstep.
When I finally meet his eyes, they’re simmering with something I can’t name. Tristan is ten steps ahead, again, weaving a web to ensnare me, and I want it so much that it makes me choke on my own breath.
“Say it,” I whisper.
“Hello. You’re new, aren’t you? What are you doing?”
I can taste my tears now.
“Katie,” he prompts.
I take a shaky inhale. “Installing a camera. What are you doing?”
His hand tightens on the ladder. “Saving your life.”
I can’t breathe. I know all the next words by heart.
His nosy questions about my age, his insistence that we be friends.
I know my feelings by heart too—the breathlessness of realizing how attractive he was, the tug in my stomach at how attracted I was to him, like he’d been conjured specifically from every fantasy I’d ever had.
The awful, crumpling realization that we could never be more. My determination to forget how I felt.
“Do you like chess?”
“That’s not the next line.”
His smile tips over. I see in his eyes that he’s pleased that I know the next line.
“Go with it.” He’s fighting a smile.
“I love chess,” I say, my voice trembling.
“Want to teach me?”
This conversation is from a month after we met. “You want to learn?”
“I want to spend time with you.”
I shake my head furiously. “That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”
His gaze simmers. “That’s what I should have said. Ask me whether we can be friends, Katie.”
My throat seizes. I can’t. My eyes are wide and wild. I feel like an animal, trapped on this ladder, forced to admit all the feelings I hid from both of us, forced to repeat every conversation that I wished had ended differently.
“Ask,” he says.
How much do I trust Tristan?
Back then, he said, “Of course. You’re one of the guys,” and it sank barbed hooks into my heart.
I lick my lips. “Can we really be friends? Is that too weird?”
“No.”
My stomach plummets.
“We can start as friends, but I want so much more than that with you.” Tristan’s hands wrap firmly around my waist, and he hoists me off the ladder. He’s so strong, so self-assured. It feels like he can hold all my fears and all my insecurities and stand between them and me, maybe forever.
“Katie, sweetheart.” He kisses me and I lunge for him, sinking hands into his hair, trying to crush him with the force of my emotions. He laughs into my mouth and crushes me to him.
“This is how it should have been,” he says.
“No,” I tell him fiercely. “It turned out exactly the way I wanted.”