Strange.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, glancing across the aisle to find the other passengers still dead to the world. “No one’s watching.”
“The stewardess could be by any minute,” she whispers, her tugs at my wrist growing more insistent. “Come on, Danny. I need to get zipped up.”
“Let me help.” I slip my fingers from between her legs and reach for her zipper only for her to bat my hand away with a sharp slap.
“Sorry,” she says with a breathy laugh that makes me think the slap startled her as much as it did me. “I’m just afraid we’re going to get caught. I’ll run to the restroom for some tissues for you. Be right back.”
Before I can tell her to stay, that I have napkins left over from dinner shoved into the seat pocket in front of me, she’s slipped out into the aisle and is hauling ass toward the bathrooms at the back of coach. She’s the one who started this, and I know she enjoyed it as much I did, but it feels like she’s running away from me.
No matter how physically close we were a moment ago, that emotional distance is still there, and I don’t know how to make it go away. Even when she gets back and asks in a sexy whisper if this means we’ve joined the mile high club, it’s hard to play along. I say the right words, insisting we deserve all bragging rights, but there’s nothing lighthearted about the way I’m feeling. I’ve known Sam too long and too well to be fooled by her attempts to muscle through the strained moment before she bolted for the bathroom.
Something is wrong. Something’s been wrong since January and if it’s not her and me, or that last night before she left the island in December, then it has to be something else.
Something or someone has rattled Sam so badly that she’s let our relationship—the one thing she promised she would fight to protect, no matter how busy our lives, or how great the physical distance between us—suffer.
And I’m going to find out what or who that is.
And then I’m going to kick their fucking ass.
No one hurts Sam and gets away with it. No one.
Chapter Three
Danny
Seven Years Earlier
* * *
“And both were young,
and one was beautiful.”
-Lord Byron
* * *
It’s raining on the approach to Maui, and the captain warns us to keep our seatbelts fastened and all our belongings safely stowed. It’s only my third time on an airplane, and as we lurch toward the runway, the plane stuttering up and down like an EKG monitor, I’m certain I’m going to die.
I’m going to die, and I’ll never get to tell Sam that I love her.
That I will always love her, for the rest of my life.
I’m only thirteen years old, and no one believes I’m really in love, but I’m not some dumb little kid. I’ve been helping my big sister, Caitlin, raise my younger brothers and baby niece since I was nine. I was making breakfast for my family when most kids were still getting their pancakes cut up by their mom or dad and giving Caitlin grocery money from my odd jobs around the neighborhood while my friends at school bitched about not having enough allowance to buy video games.
I know what it feels like to shoulder big responsibility, but until Sam, I never wanted any of it. I helped out and pitched in, but deep down, all I wanted was to grow up, get out, and never have lives depending on me—even a little bit—ever again.
And then I met Sam.
Sam, with her wild, curly brown hair, a living thing that follows her head around like a crazy pet. Sam, with her sharp blue eyes that make my stomach flip every time she looks at me. Sam, who rocks a skateboard like it’s her job, never cries when she shreds her skin on a fall, and didn’t make fun of me a single time when she was teaching me how to surf, even when I wiped out for the ten thousandth time.
Sam, who let me kiss her for the first time right before we left for my dad’s funeral.
It’s all I’ve been able to think about for ten days. I guess I should be torn up about my dad, but it still doesn’t seem real, and I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about the fact that I basically have no parents, not even shitty parents, and that Caitlin, with all the crazy stuff going on in her life, is the only thing standing between me and a foster home. I’d rather think about the way Sam’s lips felt so warm and soft against mine, the way she tasted like sunscreen and salt water, but more than that, too. She tasted like freedom and secrets, like a promise someone finally kept instead of running off and letting me down.