As soon as they got up to Winding Valley Road, Melissa intercepted Kyla with a bear hug and dragged her inside like a mama carrying her cub back to her den.
“Leave her alone, Mom,” Caden grumbled as he followed behind them.
Melissa ignored him completely. “Are you hungry, darlin’?” she asked Kyla in her thick southern accent. “We’ve got plenty of food, and you’re lookin’ so skinny I’m afraid I might snap you in half!”
Hungry was something Kyla definitely wasn’t, but it was hard to say no to Melissa Howell.
Somehow she and Caden ended up on the back patio by the pool, carrying four platefuls of food without having asked for any of them. The plates spilled over with crackers and cheese and assorted nuts, and about a dozen different kinds of fruit on each one. Kyla balanced the two she held precariously, trying to keep any grapes from escaping and rolling across the flagstone.
She and Caden sat cross-legged on the ground and set the four plates of food down between them, and Kyla grimaced at the sight of it.
“You don’t have to eat it,” Caden told her, making note of her face. “But Mom’s right. You’re starting to look sick.”
She turned away from him and stared into the pool, not that she expected that to keep him from talking. Having the buffer between them of all the guys at band practice was something Kyla was missing now. A lot. She should have thought this through more before agreeing to come home with him.
She could tell that Caden was making an effort to keep things light as she barely nibbled on her food.
“Don’t overdo it now,” he teased her. Kyla wrinkled her nose at him and he said, “No, I’m serious. I think you may be pushing three, maybe four calories now. You better watch it.”
Kyla threw a grape at him and Caden’s mouth fell open in mock-indignation. “Oh, you did not just do that,” he said.
Kyla gave him a smirk and popped one of the grapes that was still on her plate into her mouth. “Yeah, what are you gonna do about it?” she challenged him.
Caden gave her a devilish smile and it was all over. Her attempts to stay closed off to him were so shot she couldn’t even try to resist it anymore. She couldn’t take Caden seriously, or herself for that matter; not when he smiled at her like that.
Provoking him further, she threw a cube of cheddar jack cheese at Caden’s head, and it immediately incited a war. Somehow (though she wasn’t quite sure how) the two of them ended up running around the pool like they had a thousand times before. Caden was armed with a stack of Ritz crackers while Kyla held the bundle of grapes she’d taken off of his plate after she’d exhausted her supply, popping them off one at a time and nailing him repeatedly on his neck or his shoulders or the back of his head.
“Is that the best you got?” he said.
Kyla scowled at him and he laughed at her indignation, turning to launch another cracker in her direction. Then just when she didn’t expect him to, Caden stopped running.
It was so sudden that Kyla couldn’t stop herself from running smack into him, and she realized a few seconds too late that he was counting on that. Dropping his last three crackers on the flagstone and grabbing her by the waist, Caden tackled her full force into the water; fully clothed, unprepared…kicking and screaming the whole way down.
. . . . .
Nathaniel was anxious. Beyond anxious, actually, which was completely out of character for him. Not that everything in his life hadn’t thrown him out of character lately; especially anything revolving around the auburn-haired girl he was currently looking for.
He and Caleb had arrived in Woodland Park not even five minutes ago and Nathaniel had already thrown the boy on watch and told him he would be back; that he had to find Kyla.
Abrupt? Yes. Necessary? He would see.
It disturbed him a little when he didn’t find Kyla at the condo, especially since the Civic was in the driveway. Nathaniel scouted the area, thinking she might be running (even though he didn’t like the idea of her running out there alone) but he didn’t find her there either. Nathaniel started to worry when he didn’t see her anywhere, but then he remembered his own words to her and cursed himself for ever saying them.
“Stay close to Caden Howell,” he had told her.
Nathaniel groaned and looked up toward the mountain. You did that one to yourself, he thought, knowing he didn’t have the right to be mad about it. Truthfully, he should be grateful that she had listened to him. At least if she was with Caden, she was safe.
“Brilliant advice,” he muttered to himself as he looked up toward the mountain. As important as Nathaniel knew her staying near Caden had been (and probably still was) it was also the last thing he wanted.
Well, second to last.
Nathaniel didn’t like what he felt in himself, so he ignored his selfishness and jealousy and flew up onto the mountain to scout out the Howell’s property.
It shouldn’t have surprised him. He knew he should be grateful that Kyla had actually listened to him, but there was a part of him that wished he would have found her alone. Frankly, the idea of her having been with her best friend the entire time he had been gone made him sick.
When Nathaniel reached the property, he circled around to the back of the house to hide himself in the trees, hoping to be able to see her inside the house. But what he found instead did more than surprise him.
At first the sight of her made his heart soar. The fact that she was there, that she was safe, that he was within physical proximity of her instead of half a world away; it was more than enough to alleviate the tension his fear had caused him the entire time he had been separated from her. But then he heard her laughing, and that feeling of reprieve was quickly replaced with a different kind of tension. A sicker kind that he liked far less, if only because of what it implied.
From his place of hiding, Nathaniel watched Caden tackle Kyla into the water. He watched her break through the surface again, screaming in indignation before she jumped on his back. He watched the glimmer come into her eyes that told him she was far less upset than she was letting on.
Caden held his breath and ducked under the water, taking her down with him since she was still clinging to his back. Kyla squealed again and smacked him, and this time it was Caden who came up to the surface laughing.
“Caden Howell!” Kyla screamed as she smacked him again. “I cannot believe you!”
He didn’t respond to that, just leapt at her without hesitating and pulled her back into the water.
This wasn’t the first time Nathaniel had contemplated murder.
After a five-minute splash war and another few rounds of them beating up on each other in the overly-chlorinated water, Kyla swam to the edge of the pool in an attempt to push herself up out of it. She didn’t get far before Caden grabbed her by the belt loops of her cutoff jean shorts and pulled her back into the water with him.
Kyla screamed again.
There had been a lot of times that Nathaniel had heard Kyla scream in the short while he had known her; a lot more than he wished were the case. But he had never heard her like this. Usually when she screamed, it sent a chill to his blood and terrified him beyond measure. This time it didn’t. She didn’t sound scared…she sounded happy. And that hit him like a club to the stomach.
Nathaniel stayed hidden in the bushes at the edge of the Howell’s property. At first he wasn’t sure he could trust what he was seeing. It didn’t seem right to him, given the current condition of, well…everything. But the more he watched them, the more he realized his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him.
A dizzy detached haze swarmed into his vision. He could hardly let air into his lungs, they were so strained, but then that dizziness turned into something much worse. All Nathaniel could think as he watched them…as he watched her, was that she didn’t even know what had happened to him. She didn’t know if he was dead or alive and she had never looked happier. At least not any time he had ever seen her.
Feeling the fire this caused him on the inside, Nathaniel realized this wasn’t good. This really, really wasn’t good.
. . . . .
The water was warm. Having soaked up the hot mountain sun the entire day before, it was set at the perfect temperature tonight. Not that being pulled into a swimming pool in your clothes could ever be deemed as “perfect,” but for all of its unexpectedness, Kyla was surprised at how perfect it really did feel. Sure, she still put up a fight about it. That was just what she did. But for the first time in as long as she could remember, she was laughing.
Something about it pulled her right back into the place they had left a year ago before Caden ever went to Nashville, before she even knew that he was going to; back to where there was nothing else in the world that mattered but the two of them. She was pulled back to where they were kids, to the hundreds of times they had done spontaneous, stupid things like this before. And for a brief moment, she actually felt safe.
Kyla couldn’t remember the last time she had felt safe. It had been so long. Crawling out of the pool soaking wet, Caden was laughing and she wrinkled her nose and shoved him, acting far more upset about it than she actually was.
The two of them scampered across the flagstone and made their way into his room, leaving drenched footprints on his carpet and puddles of pool water where each of them stood.
“Shower’s yours,” Caden told her.
“You’re dang right it is,” she said teasingly. Then she scampered in there quickly and locked the door behind her. Kyla trembled as she turned the hot water on and slipped out of her clothes, but then she realized she had nothing dry to change into. Holding a towel up in front of her, she cracked the door open and tossed them at Caden.
“Hey!” he said as her chlorine-drenched shorts smacked him in the face. Kyla just laughed.
They didn’t even have to communicate; he already knew she wanted him to take them in the house and dry them for her. If she hadn’t opened the door and thrown them at him, he probably would have asked her for them anyway. That was just how Caden was. And it was just a mutual understanding they had for situations like this.
Of course, throwing her clothes at him and pretending to be demanding about it was a lot more fun for her.
Kyla smiled as she stepped beneath the faucet and let the warm water pour over her, washing the chlorine out of her hair. She closed her eyes when the peace of the moment hit her, and that was when she realized what was happening. In spite of her will and every effort she had made to stop it, her heart was opening to Caden again.
Kyla opened her eyes, feeling suddenly threatened at the thought. It was something she was determined to guard herself against, and yet the very thought of losing that right now made her sick.
She didn’t know what to do.
Torn between what her every instinct told her and what was screaming at her from the inside, Kyla realized that trusting Caden again was like swimming in the dark. Even if she couldn’t see anything around her, even if it was terrifying, she knew it was worth the risk to have him there with her again; because whatever happened, she knew he wouldn’t let her drown. Just like she knew she needed him too badly to shut him out again this time.
She couldn’t shut him out. He was all she had left.
. . . . .
Nathaniel narrowed his eyes, watching through the glass sliding door as Kyla handed her soaking wet clothes to Caden from inside his bathroom.
Nathaniel felt heat rise in his face. He could have killed him.
When Caden stepped out of the bedroom and walked across the flagstone toward the main house with her pile of wet clothes in his arms, Nathaniel made sure to stay hidden. It would not be to his benefit to let the boy spot him now. His or Caden’s. Nathaniel didn’t know what he would do if Caden were to confront him directly; he only knew dismemberment was not out of the question.
Nathaniel forced his eyes closed until Caden was inside the house. If he didn’t have to look at him, he may be less tempted to murder him; or at least that was what he told himself. As soon as he heard the double French doors off the Howell’s kitchen shut behind Caden, Nathaniel slipped across the flagstone himself and into the bedroom he wasn’t sure he should slip into. He heard the water from the shower running, and for a moment it made him falter. But then he pushed aside his hesitation and knocked firmly on the bathroom door.
It probably wasn’t the wisest move he had ever made, (especially considering that he didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was going to say or do) and given the level of anger he was feeling right now, it was anyone’s guess what would actually come from it. But he couldn’t not do it. He had to see her.
“What?” Kyla called out over the sound of the running faucet.
She thought he was Caden.
Nathaniel knocked again and she shut the water off. He heard her scowl and grab a towel from off of a rack on the wall, easily envisioning the disgruntled look on her face as she wrapped it around herself.
“What, Cade?” she asked abruptly as she opened the door. But when she saw that it was Nathaniel and not her “best friend,” Kyla gasped and jumped back in surprise.
Nathaniel wasn’t sure what she was going to say. He wasn’t sure what she was going to do. But he didn’t expect her to do what she actually did.
Giving no regard to her present lack of clothing, Kyla threw her arms around his neck, all but tackling him right there in Caden’s bedroom. He could feel her shaking as she held him, her hand sliding up his neck and behind his head. Clutching at him desperately, she let out a sound that was something between shock and relief. And Nathaniel could not have been more confused.
He pulled back so he could look at her eyes, and what he saw in them completely disproved whatever assumptions he had made.
She was anything but okay without him.
. . . . .
It was one of those feelings like a dream that lingered longer than it should, the amazing kind that you didn’t want to wake from and you wanted to be real, but somewhere in the back of your mind you knew it wasn’t because nothing real was that good. That was what Kyla felt like, being close to Nathaniel again. Nothing felt real to her yet. She couldn’t make it real, but in spite of the frustrating logic that was trying to convince her something else was happening than what actually was, it permeated through her; that undeniable, unexplainable, downright frightening electricity that surged through her at his touch.
That was when she determined real or not, it didn’t matter. If a dream made her feel like this, then she would happily stay dreaming forever.
Kyla pulled Nathaniel closer to kiss him, but then her eyes darted to the sliding glass door. As soon as she saw that Caden was coming back from the house, she panicked, grabbed Nathaniel by the shirt and pulled him into the bathroom with her. She shut the door behind them and turned the water back on quickly, putting her finger up to her lips so he would know to be quiet. Not that Nathaniel wouldn’t have deduced that.
Kyla’s heart pounded as she heard the sliding door open, and as she looked up at Nathaniel where he stood in front of her. His back was up against the door she had made sure to lock, and her hand was on his chest. She looked up at Nathaniel, then down again as she listened for the sound of Caden’s footsteps as he came back into the room.
“Alright, Ky!” he called to her. “Clothes are drying.”
“Thank you!” she called back to him, keeping her hand on Nathaniel’s chest. She looked up at him as she said it, which only caused him to move closer to her.
Sliding his hand up her neck, he pulled her forehead to his and breathed onto her face. Kyla was intoxicated. She literally felt like she was high on some kind of drug she had never actually done in her life, and she questioned again if he was really here…if this was really happening. Surely she had to be hallucinating. She had never felt her pulse spike like that or her nerves so completely raw.
Nathaniel pushed her up against the wall and the noise was much too loud. At that point Kyla thought he might be closer to a cardiac arrest than she was. The look in his eyes alone told her that. She knew that look in him; she had just never seen it to this measure. She knew that he was desperate to kiss her, and yet there was an unbelievable amount of uncertainty and tension between the two of them that neither was sure they should breach. Kyla wanted it, and she could see that Nathaniel wanted it too, but they were both so afraid.
“You okay?” Caden asked her after the thud.
Kyla tried not to laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “Just dropped the shampoo.”
Nathaniel touched her face and slid his hands down her neck. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard.
“Hey Cade, could you grab me another towel?” Kyla called out to him. She tried to control it, but her voice still came dangerously close to shaking. “I accidentally got this one wet,” she told him.
Nathaniel moved his hands down her arms and she thought she might die.
“Good job,” Caden laughed sarcastically. Then they listened for him to leave.
Kyla shoved Nathaniel back out of the bathroom as soon as Caden was gone. “Get out of here!” she told him. She meant it to sound threatening, but the smile on her face and her uneasy breathing told them both that she didn’t want him to go anywhere.
Nathaniel looked like he was about driven out of his mind. She could tell that he didn’t want to leave her, not even for a moment; and seeing that made Kyla seriously debate pulling him back into the bathroom with her and finishing what he was trying to start.
“Meet me down on Skyline Drive,” he whispered to her.
Kyla looked up at him and answered him with her eyes, and in a flash Nathaniel was gone. She jumped back in the shower quickly and rinsed off as best she could in the short amount of time she had (making sure to at least run shampoo through her hair so it wouldn’t smell like chlorine.) She held the towel she had supposedly “dropped” under the faucet for a few seconds and then threw it on the ground and listened to the sliding glass door slide open again.
Deductive reasoning didn’t even need to tell her it was Caden. She could instantly feel the difference between his spirit and Nathaniel’s.
As soon as Caden came back into the room, he draped the new towel over the door handle for her and Kyla grabbed it in a hurry.
“I’m gonna go check on your clothes,” he told her.
“Thank you!” she called out to him as she dried her hair with the towel. Her heart was pounding hard in anxiousness and fear, and she knew she had to make it stop.
You have to get this under control or he’s gonna know something’s up, she told herself. Like that was going make a difference. Nathaniel Blake had basically just come back from the dead; did she really think she was going to be able to force herself to calm down?
Whether or not it was plausible, Kyla knew she needed to figure it out when Caden brought her newly dried clothes back from the house.
Chill the frick out! she screamed at herself as she put her clothes back on. The worst thing she could do right now would be to give Nathaniel away.
“Shower’s all yours,” Kyla said as she stepped out of Caden’s bathroom.
He smirked at her and shut the door behind him, and as soon as she heard the faucet turn back on, Kyla ducked out of his room and scampered down the road. It wasn’t easy in flip-flops, but Kyla didn’t let that stop her. She would have run the thing barefoot if she had to; whatever would get her to Nathaniel.
By the time she got to the end of Winding Valley and approached Skyline Drive, Kyla’s heart crashed to a halt about as quickly as her feet. Nathaniel was standing in the middle of the street staring at her, and the sight of him was almost too much for her to take. She wasn’t sure if she had expected him not to be; somehow the thought of her hallucinating the whole thing wasn’t that unbelievable. In a lot of ways it made more sense to her than what had actually just happened. But whether or not Kyla thought she would see him was irrelevant. He was there, and she couldn’t write it off to hallucination anymore.
That was when it hit her, everything that had happened. She wasn’t sure what it was about seeing him standing there looking at her like that, but it brought a weight of reality with it that Kyla almost wished it wouldn’t have. Suddenly, she became uncertain and afraid. Instead of running to him and throwing her arms around his neck like she wanted to, she stepped toward him carefully in disbelief, not trusting her eyes. A thousand emotions tore through her as she came closer and closer to him. She was ecstatic and relieved and terrified all at once, hardly able to convince herself he was actually there.
Kyla touched his arm and looked up into his face. There was no word she could think of to describe the intensity she saw in him and felt in herself in that moment, but as Nathaniel stared down into her, letting her let everything sink in, Kyla thought he looked different. She couldn’t figure out how, but there was something to his eyes, a depth that wasn’t there before…which said a lot since he had the deepest eyes she had ever seen.
Looking at them now, she couldn’t help but question if something was wrong.
. . . . .
Nathaniel felt completely detached from himself, being this near to Kyla again. Whatever he felt for her before had increased so much it frightened him.
As they stood on the road and she kept touching his arm to see if he was real, she asked him, “What happened?”
He was afraid of that question, and dodged it immediately with a half-truth. “Things were intense,” he told her. “I did my best to get back here as fast as I could, but there were a few…delays.”
Nathaniel decided it would be best not to tell her how he had determined in London not to return to her. There really wasn’t anything good that could come from divulging that fact, and saying something like that would only hurt her…probably as much as the thought of betraying her like that and breaking his promise to her hurt him.
How could he have done that? How could he have made that choice, given everything that had happened? Was he really that afraid?
Kyla wouldn’t stop touching him, but she also wouldn’t move any closer. Somehow she looked like she was at war with herself. “I thought something happened to you,” she admitted in a shaken voice. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life.”
“Funny. You didn’t look too upset to me,” Nathaniel mumbled. Immediately when the words escaped his lips, he regretted letting them.
Kyla gave him a look and took a step back. “What are you talking about?” she asked defensively.
Nathaniel answered her bluntly. “I saw you in the pool with Caden,” he said. His voice was emotionless as he spoke, but he was hardly lacking emotion.
“You were watching me?” Kyla asked him.
“I don’t think that is really the point,” Nathaniel said.
She folded her arms across her chest, looking agitated and extremely uncomfortable. “Just how often do you make a habit of that?” she asked him accusingly. “Because I’m starting to think it’s a lot more than you’re letting me believe.”
Nathaniel didn’t like the question. He also didn’t like the answer to it, and he wasn’t about to give it to her. So instead of giving her what she wanted, he threw back at her, “Don’t act like I’m the only one guilty of stalking here.”
“Maybe,” Kyla told him. “But you’re at a slight advantage since I don’t have superpowers.”
Nathaniel narrowed his eyes and Kyla looked up the road. “I need to get back to Caden,” she said.
A tightness immediately came into his chest when she said it, and he knew he wasn’t keeping the evidence of it off his face. He wanted to tell her to forget the stupid boy and stay with him, but he knew how well that wouldn’t go over. Still, even through his anger, Kyla seemed to see what was behind the look in his eyes.
“He can’t notice I’m missing,” she said as if she were trying to justify her decision. “We can’t have him asking any more questions than he already is.”
Nathaniel furrowed his brow. “What questions is he asking?”
Kyla gave him a loaded look and said she would tell him later.
“Go,” he told her. Saying the word felt like swallowing poison.
He could tell she was frustrated, that she wanted to stay with him, but Kyla turned and ran back to Caden instead, leaving Nathaniel feeling tortured by her absence. He was about driven insane, having to leave her.
He hated that she was with Caden. He hated how safe she was with him. Even thinking about it, the jealousy in him that he had been fighting since he first heard of the boy started to resurface. But Nathaniel shoved it away, knowing what it would cost him to give into that. He remembered the black feather on the mountain, and that was something he could never let happen again.
If he were to go there, Donovan would have exactly what he wanted, and there wouldn’t be a thing Nathaniel could do to stop him.
. . . . .
Kyla ran back to Caden’s room as fast as she could, but apparently she wasn’t fast enough. He was already out of the shower by the time she got there, dressed and sitting on his bed with his guitar.
“Hey,” he greeted her with a smile. Luckily, he didn’t seem too concerned with where she had been.
“Hey,” Kyla said back, trying to cover up how hard she was really breathing. She sat on the bed next to Caden and worked extremely hard at not giving herself away. She tried to act nonchalant, but all she could think about was Nathaniel, and the thought of him did more than make her look nervous. She just wanted to get out of there so she could go back to him, but she knew if she was too abrupt, Caden would be onto her.
Doing her best to cover up the fact that her heart was pounding and her hands were shaking, Kyla flopped onto Caden’s bed on her stomach and looked up at where he was sitting, shaking her head at the sight of him with an acoustic guitar. “I don’t know if I will ever get used to that,” she said.
His smile was still in place as he strummed on it. “I don’t know why it’s so weird for you,” he said. “I mean, I started this way.”
“Yeah, but you were eleven then,” Kyla argued. “And it was what, a year and a half before you switched over to electric?”
Caden rolled his eyes.
“Hey, I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” she said. “I’m just saying it’s gonna take me a while to get used to.”
That made Caden curious. Looking into her eyes to read her, he almost let himself get vulnerable with her; but then Kyla ruined it by asking a question she knew she shouldn’t have.
“What was it like there?” she asked him hesitantly. “I mean, what was your life like?”
Caden’s smile faded in the way that she knew he was caught off guard, yet trying not to let her read his reaction to the question. Kyla narrowed in on the look and tried to read it. It was clear that there was something he was hiding…something he didn’t want her to know about it. The fact that he had avoided communication with her for so long (and at just about whatever cost) didn’t do much to speak against this theory. It was like he hadn’t wanted her to be a part of his life at all when he was out there, which was why Kyla had never gotten brave enough to directly ask him that question before. Part of her was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to handle the answer.
Why she thought she could handle it now was beyond her. Chances were, she couldn’t, and her asking it at all had been a stupid idea.
“It was okay,” Caden lied. He stopped playing his guitar and put it back on its stand, and he wasn’t smiling anymore.
The fact that Caden was lying was clear, but she didn’t know from which angle he was taking it, if it had been better than okay and he was just afraid to let her know it, or if it had been a whole lot worse. Kyla wished she could read him better, the way she used to be able to, but since she couldn’t, she had to fish around for more answers the old-fashioned way.
“Anybody out there you miss?” she asked him. Her voice was more tensed than it had been with the first question. She wished she could have controlled that better. Actually, she wished she could stop asking questions she didn’t want to hear the answer to altogether, but at this point, she had to know and she didn’t care whether or not she tortured herself with it. Kyla had already gone past the point of no return in her mind; if she didn’t get a straight answer from him now, her imagination was going to take her to every wrong one, and she wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it until she knew.
“You never told me about anyone you knew out there,” she said.
Now Caden looked so uncomfortable he was practically twitching. Kyla could tell he regretted having already set down his guitar since he desperately needed something in his hands to keep himself from looking and feeling so uncomfortable right now.
He gave her a copout answer. “The people out there are way nicer than in Colorado,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “It’s kind of strange.”
Kyla nodded and kept her lips pressed together, wondering why he was so determined to avoid the question. Then she realized how she had been doing the same thing to him, only a lot more directly than he was. Every time he tried to find out what was going on in her life, she stalemated him, and now here she was acting like a blatant hypocrite, pushing him to a place he was obviously not wanting to go. That should have stopped her, but it didn’t.
“Caden, is there something you want to tell me?” she asked him.
He swallowed hard, looking desperate for a way out, and seeing that look made Kyla nervous. There was something going on, just like she’d suspected all along. But just before Caden could say something in response, Melissa Howell threw open the glass sliding door of his bedroom and barged in unannounced.
“I brought you some blueberry lemon pound cake and tea,” she told them, carrying an elaborate tray of perfectly arranged cake slices and lemon wedges and chilled tea glasses with bright blue straws in them.
Where Caden normally would have been irritated with such an interruption from his mother, he seemed grateful for it now. “Thanks, Mom,” he told her. “Looks amazing.”
Kyla smiled tensely at Melissa, thinking her timing couldn’t possibly have been worse. But then, maybe it was for the best. With Caden this uncomfortable, he was probably eager to let her leave, which would bring Kyla that much closer to seeing Nathaniel.
The thought of him made her heart flutter, and suddenly she forgot entirely about her suspicions of what had been going on with Caden in Nashville. Somehow that was the last thing she was concerned with anymore.
“I should probably get home,” Kyla told them both. Then she explained in Caden’s direction, “I never told Matthew where I was going when you kidnapped me earlier.”
Melissa looked disappointed and Kyla quickly added, “Think you could wrap some of this up for me so I can take it home to Matthew?”
Melissa’s smile returned and she shuffled out of the room happily, telling her on her way, “I most certainly can!”
Caden grabbed one of the pieces of cake off the plate before his mom took it away. Stuffing it in his mouth made a convenient excuse for him to not have to get back to Kyla’s question right away, but even though she knew exactly what he was doing, she decided not to call him on it.
“You go get that cake from Mom,” he told her with his mouth full. “I’ll be in the Jeep.”
Kyla laughed at him a little and said “okay” as he left his bedroom. As Caden walked away from her, she bit her lip, her heart sinking again as she asked herself why he was dodging her on this. As anxious as she was to get back to Nathaniel, that question was still prodding at her that seemed to create a chasm between her and her best friend. Whatever had happened in Nashville, it still had her so troubled. And she didn’t know why.
Kyla went back into the house and retrieved the brown cake box wrapped in twine with six perfectly packaged slices wrapped in wax paper inside of it. Melissa was ridiculous about things like that. She pretty much made it her goal in life to put Martha Stewart to shame.
“Thank you,” Kyla said as she took the box from her.
Melissa gave her a kiss on the cheek and scooted her out the door. “Come back and see me soon!” she insisted.
Kyla felt nervous at the thought of that, but she forced another smile for Melissa and tried to cover it up. Climbing into Caden’s Jeep, she set the cake box in the backseat, buckled her seatbelt and told herself to breathe.
This was not going to be an easy ride home.
. . . . .
Thinking on the real answer to Kyla’s question, Caden had an acidic taste in his mouth. He remembered how miserable he had been in Nashville, how he had no real friends out there and was constantly alone; and the few friends he ever made through church or mutual friends of his family ended up being fake, two-faced liars who stabbed him in the back and did everything they could to cut down what he knew he was supposed to do. All they had done was make him doubt what he’d heard and make him feel crazy, and reinforced that he could never trust anyone with the deep things of his heart. He couldn’t even trust Kyla with this, because she was too wrapped up in it.
Everything about it was for her, and if she knew that, it would bring them to a point he was determined to avoid; the point he had been avoiding for years. If she knew what she really was to him, it could end everything he had with her, and that was something Caden simply couldn’t risk.
When the distinct feeling of anxiety struck him that Caden knew hadn’t come from him, he glanced at Kyla and noticed the way she was looking out the window. She was trying to be discreet about it, but what he saw in her eyes matched perfectly with the anxiousness he felt in her spirit. And the fact that she wasn’t pressing him about Nashville like he had expected her to was also a little telling.
It was more than uncharacteristic of her; it was suspicious. She seemed far more eager to get home than she should have. There was nothing about her home that Kyla was ever anxious to return to, but right now there was clearly something she wanted to get back to…or someone.
That last thought made Caden nervous. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
Kyla made herself look away from the window. “I’m fine,” she said.
Caden didn’t buy that for a second. It was obvious in just looking at her that something was going on beyond her discomforting thoughts about him in Nashville, but he didn’t push it. He just let it go and kept driving, having to force himself at several points not to ask her again.
Kyla looked twice as anxious when they pulled up Ponderosa, like she was looking for someone, which backed up Caden’s speculation and made him all the more nervous. He was hesitant to let her go because something just felt wrong to him in his spirit; but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
Caden was frustrated, and he knew for his sanity he couldn’t let himself think too deeply on why Kyla looked the way she did or what she was so strung up about. He wasn’t sure he could handle that right now. With all he wanted to say to her, (but knew that he couldn’t) he let her leave with a generic, “I’ll see you later.”
After all, that was all they ever did anymore. Just as there was no longer and trust between them, there wasn’t any truth either.
“Leave her alone, Mom,” Caden grumbled as he followed behind them.
Melissa ignored him completely. “Are you hungry, darlin’?” she asked Kyla in her thick southern accent. “We’ve got plenty of food, and you’re lookin’ so skinny I’m afraid I might snap you in half!”
Hungry was something Kyla definitely wasn’t, but it was hard to say no to Melissa Howell.
Somehow she and Caden ended up on the back patio by the pool, carrying four platefuls of food without having asked for any of them. The plates spilled over with crackers and cheese and assorted nuts, and about a dozen different kinds of fruit on each one. Kyla balanced the two she held precariously, trying to keep any grapes from escaping and rolling across the flagstone.
She and Caden sat cross-legged on the ground and set the four plates of food down between them, and Kyla grimaced at the sight of it.
“You don’t have to eat it,” Caden told her, making note of her face. “But Mom’s right. You’re starting to look sick.”
She turned away from him and stared into the pool, not that she expected that to keep him from talking. Having the buffer between them of all the guys at band practice was something Kyla was missing now. A lot. She should have thought this through more before agreeing to come home with him.
She could tell that Caden was making an effort to keep things light as she barely nibbled on her food.
“Don’t overdo it now,” he teased her. Kyla wrinkled her nose at him and he said, “No, I’m serious. I think you may be pushing three, maybe four calories now. You better watch it.”
Kyla threw a grape at him and Caden’s mouth fell open in mock-indignation. “Oh, you did not just do that,” he said.
Kyla gave him a smirk and popped one of the grapes that was still on her plate into her mouth. “Yeah, what are you gonna do about it?” she challenged him.
Caden gave her a devilish smile and it was all over. Her attempts to stay closed off to him were so shot she couldn’t even try to resist it anymore. She couldn’t take Caden seriously, or herself for that matter; not when he smiled at her like that.
Provoking him further, she threw a cube of cheddar jack cheese at Caden’s head, and it immediately incited a war. Somehow (though she wasn’t quite sure how) the two of them ended up running around the pool like they had a thousand times before. Caden was armed with a stack of Ritz crackers while Kyla held the bundle of grapes she’d taken off of his plate after she’d exhausted her supply, popping them off one at a time and nailing him repeatedly on his neck or his shoulders or the back of his head.
“Is that the best you got?” he said.
Kyla scowled at him and he laughed at her indignation, turning to launch another cracker in her direction. Then just when she didn’t expect him to, Caden stopped running.
It was so sudden that Kyla couldn’t stop herself from running smack into him, and she realized a few seconds too late that he was counting on that. Dropping his last three crackers on the flagstone and grabbing her by the waist, Caden tackled her full force into the water; fully clothed, unprepared…kicking and screaming the whole way down.
. . . . .
Nathaniel was anxious. Beyond anxious, actually, which was completely out of character for him. Not that everything in his life hadn’t thrown him out of character lately; especially anything revolving around the auburn-haired girl he was currently looking for.
He and Caleb had arrived in Woodland Park not even five minutes ago and Nathaniel had already thrown the boy on watch and told him he would be back; that he had to find Kyla.
Abrupt? Yes. Necessary? He would see.
It disturbed him a little when he didn’t find Kyla at the condo, especially since the Civic was in the driveway. Nathaniel scouted the area, thinking she might be running (even though he didn’t like the idea of her running out there alone) but he didn’t find her there either. Nathaniel started to worry when he didn’t see her anywhere, but then he remembered his own words to her and cursed himself for ever saying them.
“Stay close to Caden Howell,” he had told her.
Nathaniel groaned and looked up toward the mountain. You did that one to yourself, he thought, knowing he didn’t have the right to be mad about it. Truthfully, he should be grateful that she had listened to him. At least if she was with Caden, she was safe.
“Brilliant advice,” he muttered to himself as he looked up toward the mountain. As important as Nathaniel knew her staying near Caden had been (and probably still was) it was also the last thing he wanted.
Well, second to last.
Nathaniel didn’t like what he felt in himself, so he ignored his selfishness and jealousy and flew up onto the mountain to scout out the Howell’s property.
It shouldn’t have surprised him. He knew he should be grateful that Kyla had actually listened to him, but there was a part of him that wished he would have found her alone. Frankly, the idea of her having been with her best friend the entire time he had been gone made him sick.
When Nathaniel reached the property, he circled around to the back of the house to hide himself in the trees, hoping to be able to see her inside the house. But what he found instead did more than surprise him.
At first the sight of her made his heart soar. The fact that she was there, that she was safe, that he was within physical proximity of her instead of half a world away; it was more than enough to alleviate the tension his fear had caused him the entire time he had been separated from her. But then he heard her laughing, and that feeling of reprieve was quickly replaced with a different kind of tension. A sicker kind that he liked far less, if only because of what it implied.
From his place of hiding, Nathaniel watched Caden tackle Kyla into the water. He watched her break through the surface again, screaming in indignation before she jumped on his back. He watched the glimmer come into her eyes that told him she was far less upset than she was letting on.
Caden held his breath and ducked under the water, taking her down with him since she was still clinging to his back. Kyla squealed again and smacked him, and this time it was Caden who came up to the surface laughing.
“Caden Howell!” Kyla screamed as she smacked him again. “I cannot believe you!”
He didn’t respond to that, just leapt at her without hesitating and pulled her back into the water.
This wasn’t the first time Nathaniel had contemplated murder.
After a five-minute splash war and another few rounds of them beating up on each other in the overly-chlorinated water, Kyla swam to the edge of the pool in an attempt to push herself up out of it. She didn’t get far before Caden grabbed her by the belt loops of her cutoff jean shorts and pulled her back into the water with him.
Kyla screamed again.
There had been a lot of times that Nathaniel had heard Kyla scream in the short while he had known her; a lot more than he wished were the case. But he had never heard her like this. Usually when she screamed, it sent a chill to his blood and terrified him beyond measure. This time it didn’t. She didn’t sound scared…she sounded happy. And that hit him like a club to the stomach.
Nathaniel stayed hidden in the bushes at the edge of the Howell’s property. At first he wasn’t sure he could trust what he was seeing. It didn’t seem right to him, given the current condition of, well…everything. But the more he watched them, the more he realized his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him.
A dizzy detached haze swarmed into his vision. He could hardly let air into his lungs, they were so strained, but then that dizziness turned into something much worse. All Nathaniel could think as he watched them…as he watched her, was that she didn’t even know what had happened to him. She didn’t know if he was dead or alive and she had never looked happier. At least not any time he had ever seen her.
Feeling the fire this caused him on the inside, Nathaniel realized this wasn’t good. This really, really wasn’t good.
. . . . .
The water was warm. Having soaked up the hot mountain sun the entire day before, it was set at the perfect temperature tonight. Not that being pulled into a swimming pool in your clothes could ever be deemed as “perfect,” but for all of its unexpectedness, Kyla was surprised at how perfect it really did feel. Sure, she still put up a fight about it. That was just what she did. But for the first time in as long as she could remember, she was laughing.
Something about it pulled her right back into the place they had left a year ago before Caden ever went to Nashville, before she even knew that he was going to; back to where there was nothing else in the world that mattered but the two of them. She was pulled back to where they were kids, to the hundreds of times they had done spontaneous, stupid things like this before. And for a brief moment, she actually felt safe.
Kyla couldn’t remember the last time she had felt safe. It had been so long. Crawling out of the pool soaking wet, Caden was laughing and she wrinkled her nose and shoved him, acting far more upset about it than she actually was.
The two of them scampered across the flagstone and made their way into his room, leaving drenched footprints on his carpet and puddles of pool water where each of them stood.
“Shower’s yours,” Caden told her.
“You’re dang right it is,” she said teasingly. Then she scampered in there quickly and locked the door behind her. Kyla trembled as she turned the hot water on and slipped out of her clothes, but then she realized she had nothing dry to change into. Holding a towel up in front of her, she cracked the door open and tossed them at Caden.
“Hey!” he said as her chlorine-drenched shorts smacked him in the face. Kyla just laughed.
They didn’t even have to communicate; he already knew she wanted him to take them in the house and dry them for her. If she hadn’t opened the door and thrown them at him, he probably would have asked her for them anyway. That was just how Caden was. And it was just a mutual understanding they had for situations like this.
Of course, throwing her clothes at him and pretending to be demanding about it was a lot more fun for her.
Kyla smiled as she stepped beneath the faucet and let the warm water pour over her, washing the chlorine out of her hair. She closed her eyes when the peace of the moment hit her, and that was when she realized what was happening. In spite of her will and every effort she had made to stop it, her heart was opening to Caden again.
Kyla opened her eyes, feeling suddenly threatened at the thought. It was something she was determined to guard herself against, and yet the very thought of losing that right now made her sick.
She didn’t know what to do.
Torn between what her every instinct told her and what was screaming at her from the inside, Kyla realized that trusting Caden again was like swimming in the dark. Even if she couldn’t see anything around her, even if it was terrifying, she knew it was worth the risk to have him there with her again; because whatever happened, she knew he wouldn’t let her drown. Just like she knew she needed him too badly to shut him out again this time.
She couldn’t shut him out. He was all she had left.
. . . . .
Nathaniel narrowed his eyes, watching through the glass sliding door as Kyla handed her soaking wet clothes to Caden from inside his bathroom.
Nathaniel felt heat rise in his face. He could have killed him.
When Caden stepped out of the bedroom and walked across the flagstone toward the main house with her pile of wet clothes in his arms, Nathaniel made sure to stay hidden. It would not be to his benefit to let the boy spot him now. His or Caden’s. Nathaniel didn’t know what he would do if Caden were to confront him directly; he only knew dismemberment was not out of the question.
Nathaniel forced his eyes closed until Caden was inside the house. If he didn’t have to look at him, he may be less tempted to murder him; or at least that was what he told himself. As soon as he heard the double French doors off the Howell’s kitchen shut behind Caden, Nathaniel slipped across the flagstone himself and into the bedroom he wasn’t sure he should slip into. He heard the water from the shower running, and for a moment it made him falter. But then he pushed aside his hesitation and knocked firmly on the bathroom door.
It probably wasn’t the wisest move he had ever made, (especially considering that he didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was going to say or do) and given the level of anger he was feeling right now, it was anyone’s guess what would actually come from it. But he couldn’t not do it. He had to see her.
“What?” Kyla called out over the sound of the running faucet.
She thought he was Caden.
Nathaniel knocked again and she shut the water off. He heard her scowl and grab a towel from off of a rack on the wall, easily envisioning the disgruntled look on her face as she wrapped it around herself.
“What, Cade?” she asked abruptly as she opened the door. But when she saw that it was Nathaniel and not her “best friend,” Kyla gasped and jumped back in surprise.
Nathaniel wasn’t sure what she was going to say. He wasn’t sure what she was going to do. But he didn’t expect her to do what she actually did.
Giving no regard to her present lack of clothing, Kyla threw her arms around his neck, all but tackling him right there in Caden’s bedroom. He could feel her shaking as she held him, her hand sliding up his neck and behind his head. Clutching at him desperately, she let out a sound that was something between shock and relief. And Nathaniel could not have been more confused.
He pulled back so he could look at her eyes, and what he saw in them completely disproved whatever assumptions he had made.
She was anything but okay without him.
. . . . .
It was one of those feelings like a dream that lingered longer than it should, the amazing kind that you didn’t want to wake from and you wanted to be real, but somewhere in the back of your mind you knew it wasn’t because nothing real was that good. That was what Kyla felt like, being close to Nathaniel again. Nothing felt real to her yet. She couldn’t make it real, but in spite of the frustrating logic that was trying to convince her something else was happening than what actually was, it permeated through her; that undeniable, unexplainable, downright frightening electricity that surged through her at his touch.
That was when she determined real or not, it didn’t matter. If a dream made her feel like this, then she would happily stay dreaming forever.
Kyla pulled Nathaniel closer to kiss him, but then her eyes darted to the sliding glass door. As soon as she saw that Caden was coming back from the house, she panicked, grabbed Nathaniel by the shirt and pulled him into the bathroom with her. She shut the door behind them and turned the water back on quickly, putting her finger up to her lips so he would know to be quiet. Not that Nathaniel wouldn’t have deduced that.
Kyla’s heart pounded as she heard the sliding door open, and as she looked up at Nathaniel where he stood in front of her. His back was up against the door she had made sure to lock, and her hand was on his chest. She looked up at Nathaniel, then down again as she listened for the sound of Caden’s footsteps as he came back into the room.
“Alright, Ky!” he called to her. “Clothes are drying.”
“Thank you!” she called back to him, keeping her hand on Nathaniel’s chest. She looked up at him as she said it, which only caused him to move closer to her.
Sliding his hand up her neck, he pulled her forehead to his and breathed onto her face. Kyla was intoxicated. She literally felt like she was high on some kind of drug she had never actually done in her life, and she questioned again if he was really here…if this was really happening. Surely she had to be hallucinating. She had never felt her pulse spike like that or her nerves so completely raw.
Nathaniel pushed her up against the wall and the noise was much too loud. At that point Kyla thought he might be closer to a cardiac arrest than she was. The look in his eyes alone told her that. She knew that look in him; she had just never seen it to this measure. She knew that he was desperate to kiss her, and yet there was an unbelievable amount of uncertainty and tension between the two of them that neither was sure they should breach. Kyla wanted it, and she could see that Nathaniel wanted it too, but they were both so afraid.
“You okay?” Caden asked her after the thud.
Kyla tried not to laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “Just dropped the shampoo.”
Nathaniel touched her face and slid his hands down her neck. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard.
“Hey Cade, could you grab me another towel?” Kyla called out to him. She tried to control it, but her voice still came dangerously close to shaking. “I accidentally got this one wet,” she told him.
Nathaniel moved his hands down her arms and she thought she might die.
“Good job,” Caden laughed sarcastically. Then they listened for him to leave.
Kyla shoved Nathaniel back out of the bathroom as soon as Caden was gone. “Get out of here!” she told him. She meant it to sound threatening, but the smile on her face and her uneasy breathing told them both that she didn’t want him to go anywhere.
Nathaniel looked like he was about driven out of his mind. She could tell that he didn’t want to leave her, not even for a moment; and seeing that made Kyla seriously debate pulling him back into the bathroom with her and finishing what he was trying to start.
“Meet me down on Skyline Drive,” he whispered to her.
Kyla looked up at him and answered him with her eyes, and in a flash Nathaniel was gone. She jumped back in the shower quickly and rinsed off as best she could in the short amount of time she had (making sure to at least run shampoo through her hair so it wouldn’t smell like chlorine.) She held the towel she had supposedly “dropped” under the faucet for a few seconds and then threw it on the ground and listened to the sliding glass door slide open again.
Deductive reasoning didn’t even need to tell her it was Caden. She could instantly feel the difference between his spirit and Nathaniel’s.
As soon as Caden came back into the room, he draped the new towel over the door handle for her and Kyla grabbed it in a hurry.
“I’m gonna go check on your clothes,” he told her.
“Thank you!” she called out to him as she dried her hair with the towel. Her heart was pounding hard in anxiousness and fear, and she knew she had to make it stop.
You have to get this under control or he’s gonna know something’s up, she told herself. Like that was going make a difference. Nathaniel Blake had basically just come back from the dead; did she really think she was going to be able to force herself to calm down?
Whether or not it was plausible, Kyla knew she needed to figure it out when Caden brought her newly dried clothes back from the house.
Chill the frick out! she screamed at herself as she put her clothes back on. The worst thing she could do right now would be to give Nathaniel away.
“Shower’s all yours,” Kyla said as she stepped out of Caden’s bathroom.
He smirked at her and shut the door behind him, and as soon as she heard the faucet turn back on, Kyla ducked out of his room and scampered down the road. It wasn’t easy in flip-flops, but Kyla didn’t let that stop her. She would have run the thing barefoot if she had to; whatever would get her to Nathaniel.
By the time she got to the end of Winding Valley and approached Skyline Drive, Kyla’s heart crashed to a halt about as quickly as her feet. Nathaniel was standing in the middle of the street staring at her, and the sight of him was almost too much for her to take. She wasn’t sure if she had expected him not to be; somehow the thought of her hallucinating the whole thing wasn’t that unbelievable. In a lot of ways it made more sense to her than what had actually just happened. But whether or not Kyla thought she would see him was irrelevant. He was there, and she couldn’t write it off to hallucination anymore.
That was when it hit her, everything that had happened. She wasn’t sure what it was about seeing him standing there looking at her like that, but it brought a weight of reality with it that Kyla almost wished it wouldn’t have. Suddenly, she became uncertain and afraid. Instead of running to him and throwing her arms around his neck like she wanted to, she stepped toward him carefully in disbelief, not trusting her eyes. A thousand emotions tore through her as she came closer and closer to him. She was ecstatic and relieved and terrified all at once, hardly able to convince herself he was actually there.
Kyla touched his arm and looked up into his face. There was no word she could think of to describe the intensity she saw in him and felt in herself in that moment, but as Nathaniel stared down into her, letting her let everything sink in, Kyla thought he looked different. She couldn’t figure out how, but there was something to his eyes, a depth that wasn’t there before…which said a lot since he had the deepest eyes she had ever seen.
Looking at them now, she couldn’t help but question if something was wrong.
. . . . .
Nathaniel felt completely detached from himself, being this near to Kyla again. Whatever he felt for her before had increased so much it frightened him.
As they stood on the road and she kept touching his arm to see if he was real, she asked him, “What happened?”
He was afraid of that question, and dodged it immediately with a half-truth. “Things were intense,” he told her. “I did my best to get back here as fast as I could, but there were a few…delays.”
Nathaniel decided it would be best not to tell her how he had determined in London not to return to her. There really wasn’t anything good that could come from divulging that fact, and saying something like that would only hurt her…probably as much as the thought of betraying her like that and breaking his promise to her hurt him.
How could he have done that? How could he have made that choice, given everything that had happened? Was he really that afraid?
Kyla wouldn’t stop touching him, but she also wouldn’t move any closer. Somehow she looked like she was at war with herself. “I thought something happened to you,” she admitted in a shaken voice. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life.”
“Funny. You didn’t look too upset to me,” Nathaniel mumbled. Immediately when the words escaped his lips, he regretted letting them.
Kyla gave him a look and took a step back. “What are you talking about?” she asked defensively.
Nathaniel answered her bluntly. “I saw you in the pool with Caden,” he said. His voice was emotionless as he spoke, but he was hardly lacking emotion.
“You were watching me?” Kyla asked him.
“I don’t think that is really the point,” Nathaniel said.
She folded her arms across her chest, looking agitated and extremely uncomfortable. “Just how often do you make a habit of that?” she asked him accusingly. “Because I’m starting to think it’s a lot more than you’re letting me believe.”
Nathaniel didn’t like the question. He also didn’t like the answer to it, and he wasn’t about to give it to her. So instead of giving her what she wanted, he threw back at her, “Don’t act like I’m the only one guilty of stalking here.”
“Maybe,” Kyla told him. “But you’re at a slight advantage since I don’t have superpowers.”
Nathaniel narrowed his eyes and Kyla looked up the road. “I need to get back to Caden,” she said.
A tightness immediately came into his chest when she said it, and he knew he wasn’t keeping the evidence of it off his face. He wanted to tell her to forget the stupid boy and stay with him, but he knew how well that wouldn’t go over. Still, even through his anger, Kyla seemed to see what was behind the look in his eyes.
“He can’t notice I’m missing,” she said as if she were trying to justify her decision. “We can’t have him asking any more questions than he already is.”
Nathaniel furrowed his brow. “What questions is he asking?”
Kyla gave him a loaded look and said she would tell him later.
“Go,” he told her. Saying the word felt like swallowing poison.
He could tell she was frustrated, that she wanted to stay with him, but Kyla turned and ran back to Caden instead, leaving Nathaniel feeling tortured by her absence. He was about driven insane, having to leave her.
He hated that she was with Caden. He hated how safe she was with him. Even thinking about it, the jealousy in him that he had been fighting since he first heard of the boy started to resurface. But Nathaniel shoved it away, knowing what it would cost him to give into that. He remembered the black feather on the mountain, and that was something he could never let happen again.
If he were to go there, Donovan would have exactly what he wanted, and there wouldn’t be a thing Nathaniel could do to stop him.
. . . . .
Kyla ran back to Caden’s room as fast as she could, but apparently she wasn’t fast enough. He was already out of the shower by the time she got there, dressed and sitting on his bed with his guitar.
“Hey,” he greeted her with a smile. Luckily, he didn’t seem too concerned with where she had been.
“Hey,” Kyla said back, trying to cover up how hard she was really breathing. She sat on the bed next to Caden and worked extremely hard at not giving herself away. She tried to act nonchalant, but all she could think about was Nathaniel, and the thought of him did more than make her look nervous. She just wanted to get out of there so she could go back to him, but she knew if she was too abrupt, Caden would be onto her.
Doing her best to cover up the fact that her heart was pounding and her hands were shaking, Kyla flopped onto Caden’s bed on her stomach and looked up at where he was sitting, shaking her head at the sight of him with an acoustic guitar. “I don’t know if I will ever get used to that,” she said.
His smile was still in place as he strummed on it. “I don’t know why it’s so weird for you,” he said. “I mean, I started this way.”
“Yeah, but you were eleven then,” Kyla argued. “And it was what, a year and a half before you switched over to electric?”
Caden rolled his eyes.
“Hey, I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” she said. “I’m just saying it’s gonna take me a while to get used to.”
That made Caden curious. Looking into her eyes to read her, he almost let himself get vulnerable with her; but then Kyla ruined it by asking a question she knew she shouldn’t have.
“What was it like there?” she asked him hesitantly. “I mean, what was your life like?”
Caden’s smile faded in the way that she knew he was caught off guard, yet trying not to let her read his reaction to the question. Kyla narrowed in on the look and tried to read it. It was clear that there was something he was hiding…something he didn’t want her to know about it. The fact that he had avoided communication with her for so long (and at just about whatever cost) didn’t do much to speak against this theory. It was like he hadn’t wanted her to be a part of his life at all when he was out there, which was why Kyla had never gotten brave enough to directly ask him that question before. Part of her was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to handle the answer.
Why she thought she could handle it now was beyond her. Chances were, she couldn’t, and her asking it at all had been a stupid idea.
“It was okay,” Caden lied. He stopped playing his guitar and put it back on its stand, and he wasn’t smiling anymore.
The fact that Caden was lying was clear, but she didn’t know from which angle he was taking it, if it had been better than okay and he was just afraid to let her know it, or if it had been a whole lot worse. Kyla wished she could read him better, the way she used to be able to, but since she couldn’t, she had to fish around for more answers the old-fashioned way.
“Anybody out there you miss?” she asked him. Her voice was more tensed than it had been with the first question. She wished she could have controlled that better. Actually, she wished she could stop asking questions she didn’t want to hear the answer to altogether, but at this point, she had to know and she didn’t care whether or not she tortured herself with it. Kyla had already gone past the point of no return in her mind; if she didn’t get a straight answer from him now, her imagination was going to take her to every wrong one, and she wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it until she knew.
“You never told me about anyone you knew out there,” she said.
Now Caden looked so uncomfortable he was practically twitching. Kyla could tell he regretted having already set down his guitar since he desperately needed something in his hands to keep himself from looking and feeling so uncomfortable right now.
He gave her a copout answer. “The people out there are way nicer than in Colorado,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “It’s kind of strange.”
Kyla nodded and kept her lips pressed together, wondering why he was so determined to avoid the question. Then she realized how she had been doing the same thing to him, only a lot more directly than he was. Every time he tried to find out what was going on in her life, she stalemated him, and now here she was acting like a blatant hypocrite, pushing him to a place he was obviously not wanting to go. That should have stopped her, but it didn’t.
“Caden, is there something you want to tell me?” she asked him.
He swallowed hard, looking desperate for a way out, and seeing that look made Kyla nervous. There was something going on, just like she’d suspected all along. But just before Caden could say something in response, Melissa Howell threw open the glass sliding door of his bedroom and barged in unannounced.
“I brought you some blueberry lemon pound cake and tea,” she told them, carrying an elaborate tray of perfectly arranged cake slices and lemon wedges and chilled tea glasses with bright blue straws in them.
Where Caden normally would have been irritated with such an interruption from his mother, he seemed grateful for it now. “Thanks, Mom,” he told her. “Looks amazing.”
Kyla smiled tensely at Melissa, thinking her timing couldn’t possibly have been worse. But then, maybe it was for the best. With Caden this uncomfortable, he was probably eager to let her leave, which would bring Kyla that much closer to seeing Nathaniel.
The thought of him made her heart flutter, and suddenly she forgot entirely about her suspicions of what had been going on with Caden in Nashville. Somehow that was the last thing she was concerned with anymore.
“I should probably get home,” Kyla told them both. Then she explained in Caden’s direction, “I never told Matthew where I was going when you kidnapped me earlier.”
Melissa looked disappointed and Kyla quickly added, “Think you could wrap some of this up for me so I can take it home to Matthew?”
Melissa’s smile returned and she shuffled out of the room happily, telling her on her way, “I most certainly can!”
Caden grabbed one of the pieces of cake off the plate before his mom took it away. Stuffing it in his mouth made a convenient excuse for him to not have to get back to Kyla’s question right away, but even though she knew exactly what he was doing, she decided not to call him on it.
“You go get that cake from Mom,” he told her with his mouth full. “I’ll be in the Jeep.”
Kyla laughed at him a little and said “okay” as he left his bedroom. As Caden walked away from her, she bit her lip, her heart sinking again as she asked herself why he was dodging her on this. As anxious as she was to get back to Nathaniel, that question was still prodding at her that seemed to create a chasm between her and her best friend. Whatever had happened in Nashville, it still had her so troubled. And she didn’t know why.
Kyla went back into the house and retrieved the brown cake box wrapped in twine with six perfectly packaged slices wrapped in wax paper inside of it. Melissa was ridiculous about things like that. She pretty much made it her goal in life to put Martha Stewart to shame.
“Thank you,” Kyla said as she took the box from her.
Melissa gave her a kiss on the cheek and scooted her out the door. “Come back and see me soon!” she insisted.
Kyla felt nervous at the thought of that, but she forced another smile for Melissa and tried to cover it up. Climbing into Caden’s Jeep, she set the cake box in the backseat, buckled her seatbelt and told herself to breathe.
This was not going to be an easy ride home.
. . . . .
Thinking on the real answer to Kyla’s question, Caden had an acidic taste in his mouth. He remembered how miserable he had been in Nashville, how he had no real friends out there and was constantly alone; and the few friends he ever made through church or mutual friends of his family ended up being fake, two-faced liars who stabbed him in the back and did everything they could to cut down what he knew he was supposed to do. All they had done was make him doubt what he’d heard and make him feel crazy, and reinforced that he could never trust anyone with the deep things of his heart. He couldn’t even trust Kyla with this, because she was too wrapped up in it.
Everything about it was for her, and if she knew that, it would bring them to a point he was determined to avoid; the point he had been avoiding for years. If she knew what she really was to him, it could end everything he had with her, and that was something Caden simply couldn’t risk.
When the distinct feeling of anxiety struck him that Caden knew hadn’t come from him, he glanced at Kyla and noticed the way she was looking out the window. She was trying to be discreet about it, but what he saw in her eyes matched perfectly with the anxiousness he felt in her spirit. And the fact that she wasn’t pressing him about Nashville like he had expected her to was also a little telling.
It was more than uncharacteristic of her; it was suspicious. She seemed far more eager to get home than she should have. There was nothing about her home that Kyla was ever anxious to return to, but right now there was clearly something she wanted to get back to…or someone.
That last thought made Caden nervous. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
Kyla made herself look away from the window. “I’m fine,” she said.
Caden didn’t buy that for a second. It was obvious in just looking at her that something was going on beyond her discomforting thoughts about him in Nashville, but he didn’t push it. He just let it go and kept driving, having to force himself at several points not to ask her again.
Kyla looked twice as anxious when they pulled up Ponderosa, like she was looking for someone, which backed up Caden’s speculation and made him all the more nervous. He was hesitant to let her go because something just felt wrong to him in his spirit; but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
Caden was frustrated, and he knew for his sanity he couldn’t let himself think too deeply on why Kyla looked the way she did or what she was so strung up about. He wasn’t sure he could handle that right now. With all he wanted to say to her, (but knew that he couldn’t) he let her leave with a generic, “I’ll see you later.”
After all, that was all they ever did anymore. Just as there was no longer and trust between them, there wasn’t any truth either.
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