The Last Wish of Sasha Cade

I shake my head. “Not really. We broke up yet again and now he’s been calling a lot but I’m just ignoring him.”

She squeezes my arm. “Good girl,” she says with a wink. “Sasha never liked him, so I didn’t either.”

I snort. “Yeah, she told me.” A few thousand times.

“You’ll find someone better,” Mrs. Cade assures me.

A sudden

image of Elijah appears in my mind and I nearly choke on my own spit as I try to shove the thought away.

“I hope so,” I say, opening my car door. My heart is now going all jackhammer inside my chest. “Thanks for dinner. I’ll see you soon.”

Before I go to bed, Elijah replies to my email. I sit up in bed, my hands shaking as I read the message on my phone.

Hey,

I could do Friday morning at 6? The rest of the week is kinda tight for me, and I might not get back online before Friday, so if you can meet me, I’ll see you there. If not, no worries.

Goodnight,

Elijah

He’s already offline, so I can’t talk to him. I reply anyway to let him know I’ll be there.

Friday is three mornings away. Three whole nights of lying in this bed, staring at the ceiling and wishing time could go by faster. Two more days of suffering through school, pretending to give a single shit about what my teachers are talking about in class.

In three more mornings, I’ll finally get to hang out with Elijah again, and I might be more excited about that than learning what makes this historical church so important to Sasha.

And that scares me.

Chapter Fifteen

Thinking ahead, I tell my parents I have a chemistry study session before school. I know it’s a pretty risky lie and one that I can’t believe they buy, since school has been the last thing on my radar lately.

Still, they bought it. I’m out the door at five forty-five on Friday morning, following the GPS on my phone to get to Mount Horeb Baptist Church.

This is the first one of Sasha’s adventures that doesn’t have a backstory that I already know, and curiosity has been clawing at me since I first got her email. Peyton Colony is a small town in the Texas hill country, forty miles southwest of Austin. We have a population of five thousand people and a ton of historical sites along our main highway. None of them have been of any significance in my life, since they’re all just landmark signs with some kind of story on them about how so-and-so from the Confederate army did such-and-such a couple hundred years ago.

But Mount Horeb is more than just a big metal sign on the side of the road. The church is located on the outskirts of our tiny town, nothing but cow pastures and empty land sloping all around it. I steer onto a gravel road that’s not on the GPS and drive slowly, my car jolting over the bumpy and unused gravel road toward the small white chapel that’s tucked away at the bottom of a hill. I guess you can spend every day of your life in the same little town and still not know everything about it.

I don’t see Elijah’s motorcycle anywhere, so I park and climb out of my car, surveying the area myself.

The church is ancient and abandoned, a white building with a shabby wooden roof and two steeples on either side of an ornate wooden door. The windows are pointed at the top, with dark-blue-tinted glass. Overgrown weeds crawl up the steps that lead to the door.

The rumble of a motorcycle makes my heart leap. I’m about to see him again, and a giddy grin jumps to my face. I hold my hand up to block the harsh white beam of Elijah’s headlight.

He rolls up next to my car, cuts the motor and pulls off his helmet. We’re here before the sunrise, but only barely. His skin is darker in the predawn morning, the blues of his eyes seeming to glow in the residual moonlight.

“Morning,” Elijah says, knocking the kickstand with his foot. He eases off the bike and leans it until the stand catches the gravel road.

“Good morning.” My words come out in a breath, and I almost shake myself like a freaking cartoon character. Get it together, Raquel. Yeah, he’s hot. And yeah, a muscular guy climbing off a motorcycle in the shadowy clutches of dawn is sexy as hell. But get over it.

“I think there’s a note on the door,” I say, turning to face the church instead of the guy.

It dawns on me now, in front of a church of all places, where the term heartthrob comes from.

“Looks like it,” Elijah says, falling into step with me. His hand brushes my arm in a hello and our eyes meet for just a second — then he dashes up the two stairs to the church’s front door and pulls off the envelope that’s taped there.