She reached the crumbling edge of the cliff and saw the endless dark of the ocean below, glimmering with reflected starlight. It might not be a permanent escape, but it was something.
Then his strong arm wrapped around her waist and hauled her back, just as a piece of ground broke away beneath her foot. She heard it roll and crash down the cliff.
He pulled her backward, and they collapsed on the ground, his arms around her. Alexander was panting.
“Why did you do that?” he asked.
“Why were you so slow?” Jenny touched her fingers to his chin and traced his jawline. “I could have died.”
“Don't do that again. I don't want to wait another lifetime for you.”
“Then you'll have to be faster.” Jenny's hand found its way around to the back of his neck. She pulled herself closer to him, and then finally gave in to what her body was urging her to do—had been urging, if she was honest with herself, ever since she first saw him. She kissed him, pressing her lips hard against his lips. The tingling, electric feeling she felt whenever they touched was amplified a thousand times over.
He pulled her close against him, kissing her and grunting as they rolled in the dirt like animals in heat. His hand slipped under her dress, his fingers wrapping around her thigh. Jenny tugged at the waistband of his pants.
“Where can we go?” she whispered.
Alexander's face drew back from hers. “We shouldn't. How much wine have you had?”
“I know what I want.” Jenny's voice was slurred. She rolled onto her back, pulling him on top of her. She could hear the waves crash below them.
“You know what you want right now. Tomorrow you could change your mind.” Alexander stood up, brushing away dirt. “It shouldn't happen like this. I want you to respect me in the morning.”
Jenny sat up on her elbows. “You're kidding, right?”
He smiled in the moonlight and offered his hand to help her up. Jenny ignored it as she stood.
“Come on, Alexander,” she said. “Don't you like me?”
“That's what I'm trying to show you.” He took her hand and led her back to the party.
CHAPTER TEN
Seth sat in his room on Monday morning, looking at pictures of Jenny on his laptop. He'd taken them with his Blackberry, which had somehow gone missing during the weekend in Charleston. One of them showed her in a long, old-fashioned white dress, laid out in a patch of golden sun on one of the huge boulders in the woods behind her house. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling. Tiny, flowering weeds grew from cracks in the rock.
He had called Jenny's house Sunday evening, but nobody answered. He left a message on the raspy old answering machine.
Seth worried that Jenny had been swept up by the police in the riot, like a lot of other people, but surely they would have let her use the phone by now to call her dad. Seth called the jail anyway to check, but they didn't have a Jenny Morton.
Seth wondered where she might have gone. She obviously wasn't with her new BFF Darcy, since he'd last seen Darcy getting picked up by her parents at jail, and Darcy didn't seem to have any idea where to find Jenny. Darcy had even called her “Jenny Mittens,” as if they'd never been friends. Seth couldn't imagine where Jenny might have gone, unless she'd just gotten in her car and started driving, maybe angry at Seth and wanting to escape everything. She was somewhere on her own now, and Seth worried about her.
There was nothing left for him to do, though, so he was reduced to just looking at pictures of her and feeling anguish over what he'd done with that random girl in Charleston.
Then he heard the thunderous pounding on the front door, and the sound of boots. Seth ran to a front window and looked out.
On the driveway below, several Homeland Security vehicles had arrived, including a couple of small trucks. Men in black body armor and gas masks were rushing inside the front doors of his house. He wondered how they'd even opened the front gate—maybe they had some kind of device that could mimic the remote control signal for gates like theirs.
Seth panicked, wondering if he should run or hide. His mom was home, though, so he couldn't just disappear.
“Uh, Mom?” Seth called down the back stairs. He'd last seen his mom in the family room, drinking wine and watching some movie with Drew Barrymore. His dad was away at the bank. “Somebody's here!”
Two men in gas masks arrived at the foot of the stairs and began racing up toward Seth. “Don't move!” one of them shouted. His voice was full of electric crackles, transmitted by radio from inside his mask to a speaker mounted on the exterior.
Seth's natural reaction to armed masked men charging up his stairs was to turn and run, so he did that, but another pair of Homeland Security guys were already waiting in the upstairs hall. They were closing in on him from both sides, and he had nowhere to escape. He stopped and held up his hands.