Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The road was empty, lit up bright by the full moon.
The night air was still warm, but more bearable than it was during the day.
There was a long, flat stretch ahead of them to the pine forest, flanked by the craggy skyline of the mountains.
Dylan sat up, cycled no-hands, looking around.
He looked younger than he did on the ranch, freer. Maybe even happier.
When they got to the trees and the path through the forest that led to the waterfall, they left the bikes leaning up and went the rest of the way on foot. The moon lit most of the way, only when the branches got too thick did they need to use a torch.
As they walked, Willow noticed how much stronger her leg felt, realized there was no real question now of it giving way beneath her.
“You all right with this? Your knee okay?” Dylan checked as the path got steeper.
Willow nodded, touched by the fact he’d asked, but still wary of putting too much emphasis on those moments of kindness.
She heard the waterfall before she saw it.
The ceaseless cascade filling the otherwise quiet forest the closer they got.
When they reached the bottom of the waterfall, they stopped and looked up.
The torrent of water sparkled, almost glowing in the moonlight as it plunged down into a pool of blackness.
The water was lower than Willow had seen it for years.
Dylan said, “You ever been in the cave?”
She suddenly realized why they were there. “Of course,” she replied.
The cave was right at the back of the hollow underneath the waterfall, and accessible all the time, but it was much easier to get to it when the water level dropped because you didn’t have to swim down and hold your breath as you went under the ledge.
Instead, there was an air gap, which meant you could swim through with your head above water.
Even so, Willow looked at the inky black mouth to the waterfall, hesitant of swimming in the shimmering darkness.
But Dylan was grinning, white teeth sparkling. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head, got his phone out his shorts’ pocket and chucked it on the bank, then, gesturing toward the waterfall, said, “You want to go exploring?”
There was no way Willow was going to say no. Their whole dynamic seemed to have turned into one big challenge, and she wasn’t backing down first. “Okay.” She tied her hair up and slipped off her T-shirt, too, so she was in her shorts and cropped vest.
Dylan went in first then he turned back and reached out a hand for her. When she shook her head, he said, “Just take my hand, it’s a rocky slope and it’s slippery.”
Reluctantly, she wrapped her fingers around his and immediately wished she hadn’t. The contact shot through her. She tried to ignore it, focused instead on keeping her balance over the uneven rocks. Then when it got too deep to stand, he let go of her hand and stupidly she missed his touch.
They swam toward the frothing water, spray hitting their faces the closer they got, until they both ducked under the powerful torrent, the white water pummeling down, soaking their hair and battering their skin.
Willow came out the other side breathless and laughing, swiping the hair from her eyes, hardly able to see a thing in the shadowy darkness. She couldn’t quite believe what she was doing.
Dylan was treading water beside her. Pointing to the far corner of the hollow space, above the almost deafening sound of the waterfall, he said, “The cave’s over there.”
She nodded. It was almost pitch-black the further they swam from the iridescent cascade, she could barely see in front of her face. The feel of Dylan swimming next to her a reluctant reassurance.
Then as she reached the back wall of the hollow, she saw a sliver of light shining through the space under the rocky ledge.
“You okay with this?” he checked.
Willow’s heart was racing. She was scared, exhilarated, spooked by the darkness, but mostly she was just unbelievably aware of Dylan’s presence beside her, his damp, bare skin, his wet hair, the rivulets of water running down the side of his face. “Yep.”
She saw him smile as if he could tell she was wary but refusing to admit it.
“Do you want to go first?” he asked.
She couldn’t work out which would be better.
If her dad could see her now; he’d probably self-combust. “Yeah, okay.” She took a breath, braced herself and then started to swim the short but tight distance toward the light, the ledge of rock scraping occasionally above her head, assured by the moonlight on the water in front of her and the fact Dylan was close behind.
Then she came out into the cave and couldn’t help but gasp. It was beautiful. The whole chamber was flooded with moonlight from a crack in the side of the rock wall. The water got shallower at one edge and lapped onto a pebbly beach.
The ceiling of the cave stretched up high, almost up to the top of the waterfall itself.
When she looked up, she saw it was covered with jagged stalactites, white in the moonlight, water dripping from them like a metronome into the pool.
She swam over to the beach and climbed out, her head tipped back, gazing up transfixed. “This is incredible.”
Dylan got out, too, wiped the water from his face, pushed his hair back. “You said you’d been here before.”
“I know. I lied.” She looked at him a little guiltily. “When I was younger my brothers told me it was haunted. They didn’t want me tagging along and slowing them down, so they said they’d seen ghosts in the water.”
Dylan snorted in disbelief at the idea. “And you believed them?”
She shrugged, a bit embarrassed. “I tried not to. I used to follow them, but when it came to actually swimming into the cave, I was too scared, I waited on the bank.”
Dylan laughed, the sound echoing around the cave. “Tough being the youngest.”
“Yes, it was.” Looking up at the moonlit stalactites like jaws waiting to clamp shut, Willow thought about all the times she had tried to run as fast as her brothers but got left behind, shouldered her way into the rehearsal room when they locked her out, tried to arm wrestle them, canoe faster than them, shoot more hoops than them, and always, without fail, lost.
But then at the same time, she had to remember the other things.
When Logan would carry her on his shoulders if she was tired.
When Jack would tickle her till she would plead with him to stop, then beg him to carry on.
Noah, teaching her to ride faster than her dad ever would.
Brodie, playing endless games with her, always letting her be the Scottie dog in Monopoly.
Ethan looking out for her when she started school. “I loved it, though,” she countered.
Dylan went and sat down on the rocks. “Loved?”
“Love,” she clarified too quickly, making it sound almost defensive.
He smiled, seemed to read between the lines.
She shook her head as she took a seat on one of the rocks nearby him, wondering what it was she was trying to prove. “They’re kinda a hard act to follow,” she admitted.
“I bet.” Dylan leaned forward and picked up a handful of pebbles, chucked them one by one into the water. “I can’t think of anything worse than having brothers as famous as they were.”
“It wasn’t so bad.” She tried not to look at him, at the way his mouth just curved up slightly at the corners, the tiny bump on the bridge of his nose that she hoped was a football accident, the smattering of freckles just by his temple, his wet hair pushed back from his face.
She tried not to acknowledge how close together they were, all alone in such a beautiful, otherworldly space.
She picked up a handful of stones to throw, tried to concentrate on hitting the center of the circles his left behind.
She made herself think of the first time the photographers had appeared outside the gates of Silver Sky Ranch, the flashing of cameras when her dad drove her to school, him shouting at them, threatening to plow them down with his truck.
People stopping her in the street to ask about her brothers, kids—even teachers at school—who’d never spoken to her, suddenly wanting to be her friend.
All the while, her dad was so furious that they had all left, he forbade any mention of the band in the house.
So Willow and her mom would secretly listen to the new albums and wait excitedly for the chart countdown.
She couldn’t have been prouder of their success, but she still remembered traitorously wishing sometimes that they would fail, praying they would all come home and life would return to normal.
Sometimes she would go into the store just to see their faces grinning back at her from magazine covers.
“It did have its downsides,” she admitted with a wry smile.
“Not least the music,” he drawled.
She bashed him on the leg and immediately regretted it, the heightened touch of bare skin on skin.
The cave seemed to close in around them as he looked down for a moment at where she’d hit him, then, as if trying to distract himself he bent to get another handful of pebbles.
This time he poured half of them into her hand.
“I googled you,” he said, surprising her.
“You did?” She couldn’t hide her smile.
“You’re pretty hot stuff yourself, aren’t you?”
She bit down on her grin, the idea of him sitting and looking her up sending a thrill through her. “I do okay.”
He rolled his head her way. “I think you do more than okay. I couldn’t find anyone who wrote anything bad about you.”
“Oh, they write bad stuff about me,” she replied, suddenly self-conscious under the praise.
She told him how, when she had started getting the starring roles, she was prepared for what some of her colleagues might whisper behind her back—her skin was thicker by that stage—but what she hadn’t been prepared for was how she would be received by the press, even though with hindsight it was obvious.
The band had split up by then, but her brothers had each gone on to higher success, and if the reviews didn’t feature sly mutterings of favoritism, critics would, without fail, write how the role of Odette or Juliet or Cinderella was played by Willow Carter, sister of whichever Carter brother was the most famous at the time—movie star Jack; infamous singer-songwriter Ethan; heartthrob Brodie. They never let her just be Willow.
“They’re always going on about how I only got certain parts because of who my brothers were,” she said.
“That’s not what I saw,” Dylan replied with a downturn of his mouth.
She shrugged as if it hadn’t been a hard-won battle.
As if every time some reviewer threw in a mention of one of the Carter boys, she hadn’t worked double-time, doing whatever she could to make sure her performance was so flawlessly perfect no one could accuse her of getting a free ride.
“Nowadays, maybe I’ve proved myself enough for most people to accept that I got those roles on my own merit. ”
He looked at her for a second then sat up straight, chucking the last of the stones into the inky water. “Your brothers got any idea about all that?”
She felt herself wince at the question, unable to lie under his scrutiny. She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
He nodded as if that was the answer he expected. “Well, I was impressed,” he said.
She smiled, surprised at how much just that simple recognition meant. “Thank you.”
The moonlight danced on the dust in the air. The water dripped rhythmically from the stalactites into the pool. She looked down at where his hand now rested on the black rock then up at his eyes again—a wolfish blue in the half-light.
There was a beat of silence as he seemed to contemplate for just a moment and then she watched as he leaned in toward her, her heart thudding double-time.
It took all her willpower to raise her hand to his chest and hold him at arm’s length.
“I’m not doing this again, Dylan—us pretending nothing’s going on, playing games, ignoring each other half the time. We’re not in high school anymore.”
His mouth quirked as he sat back again, and she let her hand drop. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I just brought you here to see the cave.”
“Did you now?” She tipped her head, looking at him with her brows raised calling out the lie.
He grinned innocently. She sighed.
“Dylan, I don’t want anything from you. I’m not staying here.
Come the end of summer, I’m gone. But I’m not playing any more games.
” She looked at him, really looked, held his gaze till he wasn’t smiling so easily anymore.
“You don’t have to worry that this is going to get serious, that I’m gonna be following you around all doe-eyed and infatuated.
I’m here for the fun, Dylan. Simple as that. ”
There was a pause. She couldn’t read the look on his face. The metronomic drip of water ticked along in the background. The cool air on her damp skin made her shiver.
Then his mouth split into a smile as he said, “Is that what you were at school—infatuated?”
She tipped her head back with a groan. “No! I was not infatuated.”
He laughed and it echoed around the cave.
Then there was a moment when neither spoke, neither of them moved.
Looking anywhere but at each other. The world seemed to still around her, her breath paused, waiting.
Then she saw him stand up and she tried to ignore the thumping fear of her heart as she wondered if that was it, that they’d get back in the pool and swim away.
But instead, he took a step toward her and held out his hand.
Willow felt almost dizzy with the thrill of relief, a smile spreading wide as she looked from his hand up to his face.
He didn’t look away, allowed himself a small half-smile in return as she slid her palm against his.
He wrapped his fingers around her hand and pulled her up to standing, then he lowered his head, resting his forehead against hers and said softly, “Infatuated. I like that.”
“I promise you, I was not?—”
But he didn’t let her finish.