Held A New Adult Romance(37)

He raises a hand to smooth back his hair as he talks, and I see that his uniform is darker under the arm. A five-hour drive in that tight khaki get-up. There must be something for him here.

My heart is in my mouth as I walk through the bedroom door. I don't know what I expected to see in there, but there's a new bed and the wall behind it has been painted in a deeper shade of blue than I remember. I expect it's been replastered, but I don't look behind the new painting - a still life of rustic pottery against a backdrop of olive groves.

It looks like another room to the one I remember. Sane. Peaceful. Like somewhere you'd want to fall asleep. The sheets are perfectly white and the floor clean. I think I see a spot at first, but it's just a knot in the wood grain.

"Amber? You okay?"

He calls just as I'm opening the closet. As soon as I see it the breath vanishes from my lungs - a little strip of official yellow, curled on the floor of the wardrobe. I crumple it up, stuff it deep in the pocket of my jeans, where hopefully the seam will eventually wear it away to nothing. "Yeah," I manage to say, in a voice that sounds like somebody else's. "Yeah - I'm just trying to find you something to wear."

Luckily my Dad left some sweats here, and an old hotel bathrobe.

"Are you okay?" Jaime asks, and I feel like I could shake to pieces. I must look wild and white faced, but all I can think of is the slight span of his chest, the even slighter one of his hips and how much I want him to touch me. Justin really did a number on me - I'm so fucked in the head that fear and sex have all got snarled up together in there.

"Fine," I lie. "Just hungry."

"Me too."

"You want to order? Menu's next to the phone. Don't call my Dad."

"I'm touched that you'd trust me," he says, with a wry arch of his eyebrow. "Don't you want to pick out your favorites?"

I shake my head. "Whatever you get will be fine. I need a cigarette."

"What about price limit?" he starts to say, but I'm halfway out of the door, jonesing for my fix.

The sun is almost gone, leaving a blood red strip of itself where the ocean meets the sky. The fading light catches the caps of waves but the ocean itself is nearly black, the deep pinks and rich blues of late sunset giving way to the blue-black of night. The stars are just beginning to light up. Is it wrong that I still find it beautiful, in spite of everything that happened here?

I don't even realize he's beside me until he speaks.

"You can see why they came here, can't you?" he says.

"Who?"

"The settlers. The pioneers. The Spanish. You know how those Conquistadors would go to the ends of the earth if they thought there was gold to be dug."

"They probably thought it was the edge of the world," I say.

He leans on the porch railing and studies me thoughtfully. "You sure you're okay?"

"No."

"Your Dad...?"

"Is blowing up my phone. Oh yeah. You can be sure of that."

"Amber, I think you should answer him."

I shake my head. "Not right now. Please not now. I need to think. I know everyone is worried about me but I'm worried about me. I can't keeping worrying about what other people think when I don't even know what I think, if that makes any sense at all?"

Jaime wrinkles his nose. "It...really doesn't."

I join him at the railing. It's too dark to see the cove properly, but I know the view by heart. I know the shape of each rock and the height of each cliff. I light up and exhale - luckily he's standing upwind of me and my terrible habit. "Did you ever fall in love with someone so...completely that you forgot who you were?" I ask.

He doesn't shake his head but I know the answer already. "Like you can't breathe without them," I elaborate. "Like you're two halves of a whole and that nothing makes sense unless you're together?"

"Oh," he says. "That." Like it was nothing. "Yeah."

"Really?"

He nods. "We met and it was like...boom." He holds his hands a short distance apart and brings them together, the fingers interlacing. "Romeo and Juliet."

"Really?" I say, skeptical. He doesn't look like someone who's had someone sink their teeth into his heart and take a bite out of it. He looks...normal. Sane.

"Really. I couldn't be without her. Even when I was asleep I missed her - dreamed about her."

"Did she feel the same?"

"God, yeah. It was crazy. Stupid. We ran away together. Everything."

"You're kidding?" Maybe he does know after all.

"Nope. Her parents wanted her to go to college, be a doctor. We wanted to get married. She was smart - full ride scholarship. She'd have been nuts to turn her back on that, but she was. Nuts - that is. We both were."