Chapter 12 #2
Dell shrugged. “What difference does it make? Come on. I want to sit on top of one of the towers.”
“The towers?” he all but squawked.
She turned to him with her hand sassily on her hip. “What, are you scared?”
“Yes!”
The genuine fear on his face stopped her from sassing more. “Come on, you’re already dead; you need to live a little! I’ll
be right beside you. It will be fun.” She looped her arm through his.
“You have an extremely warped idea of fun.”
“Does the bridge have an address? Or is it just ‘Golden Gate Bridge, mouth of Pacific Ocean?’ ” she joked.
“I have no idea, which makes this all the riskier. You really want to do this?”
“Yes,” she said with a smile, trying to hide her nerves. It was thrilling, but he was right, it was also terrifying.
“Okay, then. Hold on tight.”
Dell pressed herself to his side and closed her eyes, thinking hard about sitting atop the bridge. She felt the fishhook behind
her belly button, and suddenly the noise of the city vanished. A thick silence pushed in around them. If she didn’t know any
better, Dell would have thought they were in outer space.
She slowly peeled open her eyes and saw they might as well have been.
The velvet sky was a snow globe of stars around them. The water below, a navy blanket softly rolling and smudged with the
bridge’s lit-up reflection like a watercolor painting. She could see . . . everything. The Marin Headlands and the lights of Sausalito dotting the hillsides to the north, Alcatraz floating in the bay, the moon
rising like a fat pumpkin over Oakland to the east, San Francisco stretching in a hilly grid down the peninsula and spilling
out to the coast, and the Pacific, an enormous expanse pinned to the starry horizon out where her eyes couldn’t reach.
“Wow.” It was the only word she could summon.
Cole seemed to be equally as stunned. He notably had not let go of her, and was possibly standing closer than when they’d
left the ground, but he wasn’t having the panic attack Dell had expected. “I thought it would be windy up here,” he mused.
“So did I. Walking across this bridge is like going headfirst into a jet engine sometimes. I guess we are above it up here.”
“Yeah,” Cole agreed. “It’s peaceful.” The surprised note in his voice told her she wouldn’t be talking him down from anything.
“Perfect place to find some happiness, don’t you think?
” she said, and started to sit, pulling him down with her.
The top of the tower was lined with cables, surely for the bridge maintenance crew to safely walk around on it.
Dell and Cole sat squarely in the middle, neither of them brave enough to dangle their feet some five hundred feet above the road, even if they were already dead.
The massive cables swooped down before them like roller-coaster rails.
Dell could only look so far without feeling her belly drop.
They sat quietly, facing south, and taking in the view. Dell had spent most of her life in the city, but she’d never been
above it like this.
“Look, that’s my house,” she said, and reached across Cole to point. “The third one up from that corner right there.”
She felt his eyes drag over her bare arm in front of him and then follow the end of her finger. “Yeah, I think I see it.”
“And Pergo is somewhere over there.” She moved her arm two ticks to the left and pointed more toward downtown.
“Where does Jason live?” Cole asked.
“Over there,” Dell said, and moved her arm back toward her house.
“And your parents?”
“There.” She pointed at Pacific Heights, the hilly section of the city where she grew up. “Feel free to keep quizzing me;
I know this bay like the back of my hand.” She smiled at him.
“Okay,” he said with a return smile. “Berkeley.”
“There.” She pointed across the water, north of Oakland.
“Alcatraz.”
She rolled her eyes and pointed down at the rocky island right below them.
“Angel Island?”
“The big one over there,” she said, and pointed farther into the bay.
“Chinatown.”
She did another swoop with her arm and pointed toward downtown. “There.”
“Um, that about exhausts my knowledge of local geography,” he said with a shy smile. “Oh! One more: the place where they filmed
Star Wars.”
Dell smiled and turned her torso to point backward. “You must have really been a nerd if you can remember Star Wars but nothing about your life. That’s actually behind us, in Muir Woods.” Her new position brought her chest near his. She
felt his eyes on her more than where she was pointing. Instead of turning back around, she planted her arm behind her and
twisted to face him. Her knee pressed into his thigh.
Neither of them pulled back.
“Dell,” Cole said softly after a long moment of gazing at each other. “I have to tell you something.”
She raised her eyebrows in silent question, having no idea what he might confess.
“I lied to you in the freezer.”
At this, she frowned. “About what?”
Cole looked down at his hands and bit his lip. A wave of nerves pulsed off him. Whatever he was going to say was a big deal,
Dell could tell. He lifted his gaze to meet hers again. “When I said I felt a pull from something familiar here but couldn’t
say what, that was a lie. It’s you. You are familiar to me, Dell.”
She blinked at him, trying to process.
“From the moment I saw you from your front door this morning, I’ve felt like I know you.
There’s some spark of recognition there, but I can’t place it, and I obviously can’t remember anything from before.
But is it . . . possible?” He looked at her with bald hope in his dark eyes. “Do we know each other?”
Dell studied him back, shocked and hopeful and suddenly thrumming with nerves. “Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but—”
“I don’t think anything could be crazier than the present situation,” he interrupted.
“Agreed, but still.” She brought her arm around so her hands were in her lap and turned to fully face him. “I’ve been having
these . . . visions. Of you. And me. And they feel like memories, but I know they’ve never happened before.”
His eyes grew in interest. “What kind of visions?”
She nervously bit her lip, worried he was going to think she was nuts, but plowed on anyway. “They are of us, in a cabin or
something, and then outside in the snow. I don’t really know; they are quick and not a lot of detail. But we are happy, and
it’s like we’re . . . together.”
“Together?”
“Yes. Together,” she emphasized with a nod.
Cole gazed at nothing over her shoulder. “Hmm,” he hummed in thought, but it was more like a little growl. Then his eyes lit.
“Is this why you asked me if I liked snow earlier?”
“Yeah,” she said with a soft laugh, surprised he remembered. “It all feels so real, but I’d remember if it was. Especially
because in every one of them, it’s like we’re about to—” She cut off in embarrassment. Her face warmed.
“We’re about to what?” Cole asked with an eagerness in his eyes she couldn’t deny.
“Kiss,” she confessed. “It’s like we’re about to kiss.”
“Oh,” he said, his voice a soft, yearning rumble. “And we haven’t? In your visions?”
Dell shook her head. “No. It always ends before we get to it.”
Was it her, or did he just move closer?
Cole bit his bottom lip again. He’d definitely moved closer. His thigh pressed into her shin where her leg was bent in front
of her. She could feel his breath on her face. “Maybe we should?”
“Maybe we should what?” Dell said, lost in his proximity and the honey-warm tone of his voice.
“Kiss,” he said. “To see if it helps jog any memories. For either of us.”
“Good idea,” she breathed without giving it any more thought. She was halfway gone before he even touched her.
Cole reached out and curled his fingers around the nape of her neck to slowly pull her mouth to his. Dell almost gasped at
the jolt she felt when their lips touched. In everything that had gone wrong, kissing him felt supremely right.
Dell leaned into it, nearly climbing into his lap and shivering at the soft moan he made. It sounded like relief and trust
and longing—she could describe it only because she was feeling the same things.
Cole wrapped his other arm around her, pulling her closer like he needed more. Dell swung her legs up to hook over his thigh
and threw her arms around him. She’d never felt a kiss like this before. Searching and searing and also somehow familiar.
She opened her mouth when she felt his tongue tracing her bottom lip.
Cole Lewis could kiss like he held an advanced degree in it.
Her fingers found their way to his tousled hair.
He softly moaned again when she tugged on it, and she thought she might come undone at the sound.
He kept one hand on the nape of her neck and swooped the other down to squeeze her thigh.
His hot palm landed below the hem of her nightgown, and she wanted him to reach higher.
To keep going right up to the center of her and find the place that would take her apart completely.
Dell inhaled him as he deepened the kiss, giving herself over to him. She was trying to search for a spark of memory, but
his lips and tongue and the soft, warm sounds rumbling from his chest had her brain full of fuzz. That minty freshness she’d
been smelling since she met him became stronger. It curled into her nose like it was emanating from his skin, and she wished
she could bottle it up and keep it. It was fresh air and pine and—
Dell suddenly pulled back with a gasp. “Oh my God,” she said.
Cole was flushed and dazed and blinking at her in confusion. “What? What is it?”
She stared at his handsome face, the angles and curves of it. The swell of his kissed lips. The kink in his hair from where
she’d tugged on it. Pieces were snapping together in her clouded mind.
“It’s snow,” she said.
Cole’s brow lifted. He looked around as if to check if the weather had changed. “Snow? Dell, what are you—?”
She cut him off by grabbing his face and kissing him again. Deeply. She inhaled through her nose and closed her eyes, searching