He actually smiles when he sees me—his first reaction is to smile, what is wrong with him? I am so shocked that I drop my hand. I don’t want him to see what I would have done to this woman, don’t want him to see my hands any more than he already has.
“Fia!” He closes the few feet between us with his arms out and I tense (I don’t want to hurt him, I never wanted to hurt him), and then he wraps his long arms around me in a hug. And my head doesn’t scream wrong, wrong, wrong.
Oh, Adam. When will you stop messing everything up? And why do I keep letting you
?
FIA
Sixteen Months Ago
“HOW CAN SOMEONE WHO SPENDS SO MUCH TIME IN the sun still have such pasty skin?”
I roll my eyes at Eden. “It’s called porcelain. And sunscreen is my best friend.” I love this soft white chair. I love this huge, smooth boat. I love the ocean. I love the wind and the waves and the spray. There is nothing out here. There is nothing to do. And since there is nothing out here and nothing to do and only James or Eden or the small, deliberately anonymous crew to talk to, there is nothing to make me feel sick and wrong.
Or at least only a little bit. Because there is still the tap tap tap. It never quite goes away. And the wrong feeling, too, but now it’s a gentle hum and I can pretend like it isn’t there. Pretending is another way of lying, and I am so good at both.
“Girls,” James says, coming from the main cabin onto the deck where Eden is writing a letter to Annie and I am doing nothing, because nothing, nothing, nothing is my favorite. “Are you ready for an adventure?”
I sit up. Eden does, too, casually shifting in her bikini, stretching her legs. I wonder what she feels from him. I don’t like it. I wonder if she feels that I don’t like it from me. I decide to feel nothing, instead. “An adventure?”
“I think we’ve had enough of the open ocean and tiny islands. Time to begin the official study abroad section of your schooling. Or, really, time to club our way through Europe.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Clubbing? Really? Do I strike you as the dancing type?”
“You strike me as exactly the dancing type. You just don’t know it yet.”
Eden jumps up, stretches her arms over her head, the tiny jewel piercing her navel winking an invitation in the sunshine. “Sounds good to me. As long as this adventure includes shopping, too?” She smiles hopefully. James nods and she turns to me and does a ridiculous, exaggerated victory shimmy.
I roll my eyes and snort. She’s funny and beautiful. I wonder if we would have been friends in another world.
“See? Is that so hard?” Eden grins smugly and walks inside, and my accidental smile turns into a scowl.
“Did we have to bring her?”
James throws himself on the lounge chair next to me, putting an arm over his face to shade it from the sun. “Yes, we did.”
“Why? She’s obnoxious.”
“Because,” he says, reaching over and taking my hand from where my fingers are doing the tap tap tap on my thigh. “You tried to kill yourself, remember? So Eden had to tag along to make sure you didn’t get that bad again.”
I start to pull my hand back so I can cross my arms, but he keeps it in his, making a show of examining my fingernails. His fingers trace the inside of my wrist and something flares up inside me and, oh, I am so glad Eden is not here anymore.
James is the only person I can handle touching or looking at my hands. He knows everything they did. He doesn’t care.
“Plus I am terrible at girl talk, and without Annie I figured you’d need someone.”
This time I do yank my hand back. I hate that he brought up Annie. Because the thing about Annie is, I miss her, I do, I worry about her, but…
I also don’t.
Being away from her for the first time in years is a huge relief. And I know she’s safe because they have her and as long as they have her, they have me and for whatever reason they still want me. So Annie is safe. And she’s alone and locked in that horrible prison of a school, and I am a terrible, terrible person for leaving her there.
But I don’t have to look at her and know what I’ve done. I don’t have to listen to her voice get gentle and soft and pierce right to the core of me and remind me, always remind me, of everything I’ve lost and taken. Of everything I still have to lose.
I know that Annie loves me no matter what, that she will always love me, and it is the very hardest thing of all to deal with. I do not want to be loved.
“At least you didn’t bring a Reader. I hate them.”