The Taking (The Taking 1)

And I wanted to. To feel his touch again. To let our fingers intertwine. To let him comfort me the way I longed to be comforted.

It wouldn’t take much, and when I saw the way he was watching our hands, too, I could see him offering me all that and more. He wanted it as badly as I did.

I cleared my throat, inching my coffee just the slightest bit closer to me and creating a chasm between us that felt unbreachable. “So what happened then? How could they have just forgotten about me? How did they end up . . . where they are . . . together?”

His hands stayed where they were. “I can’t say for sure, but if I had to guess I’d say it was all the time they spent together—searching for you, talking about you, waiting for you. You were the glue that held them together at first. You were what kept them from drifting apart. And later, when they realized—when everyone insisted—you weren’t coming back, I think they stayed together because it was . . . easy.” Regret washed over his face. “It might not have been love back then, but it is now.”

His words sliced me, not because I hadn’t known the truth. Of course I had. I’d known from the moment Cat had answered Austin’s phone that night, when I’d realized they’d gone away to college together. But hearing him say it out loud, and maybe because I knew it wasn’t any easier for him to say than it was for me to hear it, was more than I could stand right now.

I shook my head, blinking furiously, trying to tell him to stop without words because my voice was lodged deep in my throat. And he did. He fell silent as I struggled to gain some of the composure I’d lost.

That was when my gaze landed on the boy in the corner, the one sitting at the table with his back to the wall, facing us. I stopped shaking my head. Stopped moving and blinking and breathing.

It was him again. The boy from the gas station, and from the bookstore too.

Just like this morning at the Gas ’n’ Sip, when I’d been standing at the counter to pay, he wasn’t looking at me or anything, and he didn’t appear out of place in the quaint, brick-walled coffee shop. But he was there nonetheless, and I had the strangest sensation that it wasn’t a coincidence that he’d been at all of those places, the only three public places I’d been without my parents since I’d been back.

This time it was me reaching for Tyler. I gripped his sleeve, tugging him closer so he was forced to meet me over the top of the small table. Under any other circumstances I would have noticed the coffee smell of his breath and the way my heart fluttered from having his mouth so close to mine.

But this wasn’t that time.

“Do you know that guy?” I murmured, trying my best to keep my voice down. For the moment I’d forgotten all about Cat and Austin, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the dark-skinned boy who seemed to be everywhere I was.

Tyler sneaked a glance out of the corner of his eye to see who I was talking about, and then when he’d gotten a good look, he shook his head. “Nah. Never seen him before. Why? Do you know him?”

Frowning, I told him, “I keep seeing him everywhere I go. I think he might be following me.” It sounded way crazier outside of my head; I knew it the moment Tyler cringed. “Okay, maybe not following exactly,” I amended, trying to do some damage control before this whole thing got out of hand and Tyler ranked me right up there alongside my dad. For all I knew, insanity was hereditary. “But it’s definitely weird. He was at your friend’s bookstore the night we were there. And then I saw him again this morning at the Gas ’n’ Sip.”

“So basically you’ve seen him twice, and now you’re accusing him of stalking you?”

“This makes three.” Again, my evidence wasn’t exactly rock solid or anything. Especially since the guy hadn’t looked my way once. Considering that I was the one talking about him, he could probably argue that I was the one being creepy.

“You do realize that nothing’s really changed in the past five years, don’t you? Burlington’s still a small town. Getting some new shops didn’t exactly transform us into a metropolis. People run into each other all the time.”

He waited a minute for me to process what he’d said. He was right, of course. The whole point of coincidence was that it was purely accidental. Chance. Like two people being in the same place at the same time.

Or one person being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I released his sleeve and sagged forward on my elbows. “Ugh. I’m sorry. You’re right. I totally ruined our . . .” I stopped short. I’d come this close to saying “date,” which would’ve been a million times more embarrassing than admitting I’d been watching him from my window. Besides, it wasn’t a date. “. . . coffee,” I said instead.

His smile, when it lit his face, was mesmerizing. “You didn’t ruin anything,” he assured me, cocking an eyebrow. “I thought it was the perfect coffee.”

I blushed again and tried to think of something to deflect attention away from my verbal slipup. “Metropolis, huh? Nice word.”

“You like that? I like to pull out the big guns when I’m trying to make an impression.”

My eyes lifted. “Is that what you were trying to do, impress me?”

There was a beat, a moment in which our eyes met and my heart leaped, and then his voice dropped, feathering my skin and making me shiver. “Of course I am, Kyra. I was sort of hoping you understood that.”