Kiss and Tell(35)

“Electricity went out!” Sahara called back. “I go look at backup generator.”

Tenley felt her way carefully up to her bedroom. She pushed aside the curtains, letting in the dim afternoon light. Outside, the snow was thickening, and across the street, a power line was down. Tenley circled impatiently as she waited for the generator to turn on. But when Sahara stuck her head into her room a few minutes later, the house was still dark. “Something wrong with generator,” she informed Tenley. “It not turning on.” She handed Tenley a battery-powered flashlight. “Keep this with you.”

Tenley took the flashlight. She was suddenly very glad not to be home alone. “Thanks, Sahara,” she said softly.

Sahara gave her a surprised nod. “I be downstairs if you need me.”

The house felt different without electricity. There was no whirring of computers, no humming of appliances. The silence was so heavy it seemed to take on a sound of its own. At least Tim would be over soon. They might not be able to watch movies without electricity, but she could think of other ways to pass the time.…

She flopped back on her bed, embracing the cool darkness. Just yesterday, the dark had felt like a threat. But there were no more shadows now, no more beasts lurking in the corners. There never had been. There had only been Sam, and he was gone. She smiled into the darkness. Life was back to normal at last.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


Tuesday, 3:45 PM


Echo Bay was going dark. One by one, lights flickered off along the bay, like reverse fireworks. Pop, blackness, pop, blackness. It gave the shoreline a backward feeling: dark houses against a light sky, a whole world inverted. The streets were slick with snow, keeping the traffic at a crawl. It was leaving Emerson with way too much time to think about what she was planning to do.

Yesterday, after they’d put the craziness of Sunday behind them, she’d spent a long time talking with her parents. It had been a good talk, and Emerson had climbed into bed that night feeling different—as if she’d pushed a button to start over. And she had, in a way. Sam was gone. She was mending her relationship with her parents. Even Marta was back in her life. It was exactly what she’d wished for. Except she couldn’t feel a thing. Because where her heart once was, there was now a gaping hole. And the worst part was, she’d dug it herself.

Thoughts of Josh had occupied her brain for two days straight now. She’d finally texted him that morning, but she’d never heard back. And why should she? She was the one who’d pushed him away in the first place.

Now she drummed her fingers impatiently against the steering wheel as the long line of cars inched forward. There was one night she always went back to in her head whenever she thought of Josh. It was in the beginning of their New York summer, not long after they started dating. They’d gone to this hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant, close enough to Little Italy to feel authentic, far enough away to be cheap. They’d sat there for hours nursing gnocchi (her) and spaghetti (him), talking about things that weren’t important enough to remember. Except Josh kept interrupting her, and that she remembered.

She’d be midsentence, whatever she was saying long since gone to fuzz in her memory, and Josh would suddenly cut in with a “five!” Or an “eight!” Or a “twenty-six!” which was as high as he’d gotten before the restaurant pointedly cleared their table. It had started with some inane joke she’d made at the beginning of the night—you just like dating a model, don’t you?—which had set him off on a mission to prove just how much more he liked about her.

He’d begun enumerating, listing reasons whenever they popped into his mind. The reasons weren’t boring, either, because Josh didn’t do boring. They were things like: “Number five: The way you say your r’s! It’s almost as if you’re about to roll them, like you’re Spanish. But then you stop just short of it, and it leaves them with this nice, smooth sound. I like that you are an artist of r’s.” Or: “Number eighteen: Your cheese inclinations. It cracks me up that you hate all nice cheeses—you actually spit out that Brie!—but you love things like Cheez-Its and string cheese and spray cheese, which is basically the penny of cheeses.” It went on like that for the whole meal. The waiter kept overhearing and giving them strange looks, and it was completely embarrassing—and one of the best nights of her life.

At last, traffic cleared and she pulled up to Josh’s rental house. The lights were out—the whole street was dark—but she caught a flicker of movement behind the curtain. He was home. She was surprisingly calm as she climbed the steps to his front door. She’d learned her lesson with the darer. You could try running. You could try hiding. But sometimes all that was left was to fight.

Josh answered the door wearing flannel pants and an old Mets hoodie. His half Mohawk was rumpled and there was a crease on his cheek. “Emerson? What are you doing here?”

She strode past him into the house. A quilt hung off the couch and there was an imprint in the pillow, suggesting he’d been lying there recently. The lights were out, but Josh had set up a framework of candles around the room, and they made the whole place glow. “One. I love how rumpled you get when you sleep, because it makes me want to crawl into bed next to you. Two. I love how you say you’re not a dog person but a walrus person, as if that’s even a thing.”

She hadn’t planned ahead. She hadn’t needed to. She couldn’t name a single state capital and she’d probably fail a test on the presidents, but this she knew.

She turned around. Josh had closed the door and was now leaning against it, watching her intently. “Three. I love your eyes, how they’re always changing from brown to green and back, as if they’re trying to match your mood. Four. I love the way you speak. Other people just talk, but with you, it’s more like you’re writing out loud. Five. I love your toes, even though they are long enough to be fingers, which, technically, is disgusting. Six. I love that when I think of you, I think of that night and you yelling out numbers in the Italian restaurant, loud enough to make half the place glare at us.”

“All twenty-six times,” Josh said softly.

She took a step toward him. Her arms felt awkward hanging at her side when they wanted to be reaching out for him. “You remember.”

“Number fourteen,” he recited. “I like how you love the smell of parking garages but hate the smell of Starbucks.”

“Number seven,” she shot back. “I love that you make things happen. You didn’t just want to write a book, you actually wrote a book.”

“I finished, you know. Last night.” Josh ran a hand through his half Mohawk, making it stick out at all angles.

“You did?” Emerson knew he’d been struggling with the ending of his book for a while now. It was why he’d come to Echo Bay in the first place, to work through it. Josh went to the kitchen and grabbed a stack of paper off the counter. It was bound together by a thick rubber band. He looked almost shy as he passed it to her. Almost Lost, the top page read. By Joshua Wright. “Josh—” she began.

“Em—” he said at the same time.

She shook her head. “Me first.” She ran her finger along the edge of the pages. Her skin was clammy all of a sudden. “Here it is, Josh: I really messed up.” She looked up again, meeting his eyes. They looked golden in the low, flickering candlelight. “I messed up in New York, and I can give you a dozen psychoanalytical reasons why—I didn’t believe I was good enough for you; I was terrified you’d end things, so I self-sabotaged it instead; my confidence was at an all-time low living with all those models—the list goes on, but none of that matters. What matters is that I did it, and I lied to you, and every time I think about how much I hurt you, I feel like I’m breaking in half.”

Tears sprang to her eyes, but she didn’t look away. Josh’s face was twisted in a familiar look of concentration. He was listening. The rest came out in a long rush. “I don’t think I can ever tell you how sorry I am. All I know is I can’t lose you. Things don’t feel right without you. I don’t feel right without you. I know I don’t deserve you after what I did. I probably never deserved you. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m in love with you, Josh. Forget twenty-six reasons; I could give you a thousand reasons why.”

She cut off abruptly. She’d said it. She could feel her pulse thrumming in her neck as she waited for his reply.

There was a long pause. Emotions flitted across Josh’s face, too quick for her to decipher. “Let’s sit,” he said finally. The couch was a small two-seater, and his knee brushed against hers as they sat down. It was nothing, a throwaway movement, but, still, it made hope swell inside her. “You really did mess up, Em,” Josh said with a sigh.

“I know.” Her eyes couldn’t contain the tears anymore. They slid silently down her cheeks as she looked over at him. “I’d do anything to change it. But I can’t. All I can do is tell you that it changed me. I’ll never be that girl again. I’ll never make that kind of mistake again. What you saw at the Bones wasn’t that, I swear. It was a stupid dare, that’s all. You have to believe me.”