When You Come Back to Me (Lost Boys 2)

She nodded. “Thank you, River.”

I muttered a goodbye and left them both staring after me. I hated how I was worrying them, but it faded fast. I had nothing left to give.

I pushed out the front door, no clue what I was doing or where I was going. My pulse was clanging a heavy beat, and my hand ached where I’d punched Kyle. I flexed my stiff fingers, but they wanted to ball into a fist again. The urge to run away came back—to just run and run until I collapsed and then sleep for a million years.

I wandered to my truck with the vague idea to go back to my apartment. I’d left my driver door open, Thai food splattered all over the driveway and Holden was getting out of a black sedan…

I stopped short, staring at the mirage that had to be three years old—the black car with James in the driver seat, and Holden…

He wore jeans, boots, a stylish, tight-fitting shirt—black with one white stripe down the left side—and a lightweight jacket that was appropriate for the weather. No scarf, no sweater, no heavy coat. Christ, he looked beautiful. Another two years had filled his clothes out even more with lean muscle, broader shoulders. But his skin—still pale—was glowing with health.

“Are you really here?”

“I’m here,” he said, coming toward me, studying my face, his gaze sharpening. “Who did that to you?”

“Doesn’t matter. What’s happening?” I asked warily, not trusting myself. But Holden was almost in front of me now, a few feet away. I could see the green of his eyes and the small mole high on his left cheek.

“I came to see you.” He swallowed hard. “Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. I’m really fucking not okay.” I scraped my hands through my hair. “Some asshole just hit my sister, so I fought him, and the police were here and now you’re here…”

“I’m here,” he said again, moving closer.

I took a step back. “I don’t…I can’t…”

“River.” Holden’s voice was low and still. Calm. “What do you need?”

It was breaking. Brick by brick, the dam was coming down. My breath was coming in heaving gasps.

“I have to get out of here. I don’t know where to go…”

“I do. Come with me.”

Feeling as if I were in a dream, I followed him, and then I was in the sedan, James nodding at me from the front seat. He drove us down to the Cliffs; I recognized the parking lot with the utility shed.

“Wait here, please,” Holden told James.

“Yes, sir.”

Gracefully, he slid out of the seat with a tranquility I’d never seen in him before. Or maybe I was just too wound up and on the verge of exploding and Holden seemed calm by comparison.

He led me down a path on the beach, over rocks and in between large boulders. The way was not easy; at one point water lapped at my boots and the ground seemed too rocky where the cliffs had spilled down into the ocean.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Someplace I should’ve taken you a long time ago.”

The path finally grew easier; the ocean receded to a safe distance. We rounded a final boulder, larger than the rest. There was a shack built against the heavy slate rock, sand-worn and weather-beaten, the door hanging off one hinge.

“No one has been here in years, but this is where we hung out,” Holden said, the sun beginning to set behind him, turning his silvery hair gold. “The Lost Boys. This is where I belonged. Then Miller started bringing Violet, and Ronan brought Shiloh. I wanted to bring you,” he said, his voice thick. “But we were a secret.”

“Why are you bringing me here now?”

“Because this is a place where you can be yourself. You can be whoever you are and there is no judgement. There’s just you and the ocean.” He moved closer to me, his hand slipping into mine. “Let it go,” he whispered, his words torn by the wind. “This is where you do it. This is where you let it all go.”

I nodded, understanding flooding me. I staggered away from him, past a dip in the sand where there’d been a fire pit. Pieces of wood, white and gray, lay mostly buried by sand—skeletons of old bonfires. I walked down to the shore to the ocean that was waiting, offering to take anything I had to give. Grief—the howling pain of it—welled up in my chest, black and rotten from having never seen the light of day.

My breath hitched and a sound rumbled up my throat, and I let it out. I screamed out three years’ worth. Behind my closed eyes, the agony of losing my kind, funny, beautiful mother stared at me full in the face and I had no choice but to stare back.