Reborn(54)

27

NICK



I STUMBLED INTO THE APARTMENT ABOVE the garage, my fingers clenched into fists. When the door slammed shut behind me, I slumped against it and scrubbed at my face.

What the hell just happened?

The piano.

Elizabeth.

Her mouth on mine.

I needed to move. I needed to do something. I needed to get out of here.

I threw the door back open and thundered down the stairs, down the driveway. I wasn’t wearing running clothes, but I didn’t care. I could run in a snowsuit if I had to.

On the street, I turned left, heading away from town. With my legs moving beneath me, arms at my sides, shoulders loose, lungs pumping, I started to feel more like myself.

I’d hardly ever pushed a girl away. If someone offered a hookup, I almost always took it. And the fact that I’d stopped Elizabeth, even though she was clearly up for it, left me feeling detached from myself—the immoral version of myself I’d grown accustomed to. It was screwed up that I was freaking out over the fact that I’d actually done something right for once, but no one ever said I was a perfect picture of stability.

Add to this whole fucked-up situation the fact that I apparently played the piano, and I felt like I’d just body swapped with someone.

The piano.

The thought pulled me to a stop. Suddenly, as if the memory had never been gone, I knew how I’d learned to play.

Connor. The head of the Altered program. He’d made me take lessons.

“You have no discipline,” he’d said. “And you lack focus.”

“And learning how to play the piano is supposed to teach me those things?”

Although I seriously wanted to know the answer to that question, my voice had been laced with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

But instead of an explanation, all I’d gotten was a yes.

I didn’t admit to it, but I actually liked playing the piano. And I was good at it.

Now that the memory had returned, I couldn’t wait to play again. And an irritating voice in the back of my head said, You can’t wait to kiss Elizabeth again, either.

I told that voice to shut it. I couldn’t get close to Elizabeth like that. No matter what.





28

ELIZABETH



THROUGH THE PARLOR WINDOW, I WATCHED Nick take off. I thought about calling after him but decided against it. He’d pushed me away. And in truth, he was right, to some degree. He wasn’t one of the good guys, in the sense that he wasn’t a normal guy who went to high school and played basketball with his friends in the afternoon and hung out at the lake at night.

Although he hadn’t told me his entire story yet, I got the sense that whatever he’d done for the Branch wasn’t good. After all, he’d been ordered to kill me that night in the forest.

Regardless, I felt drawn to him, and there was no way I could ignore that. No matter what his past was. It’d been only ten minutes since we’d kissed, and already I couldn’t wait another second longer to see him again. It was as if he were a block of iron and I were a magnet drifting closer and closer, waiting for the inevitable moment when our magnetic fields would connect and pull us together.

Once Nick was out of sight, I slumped onto the couch, hugging one of Aggie’s homemade throw pillows to my chest, my fingers distractedly tracing the cross-stitch pattern on the front panel.

Without meaning to, I replayed the kiss in my mind, analyzing every move Nick had made, wondering if there was some hint as to his true feelings in the way he’d placed his hand on the small of my back, or in the way he’d drawn his tongue across my lips.

A thrill of butterflies took flight in my stomach, and an unbidden smile spread across my face. I covered my mouth with a hand, as if to stop my grin from spreading too wide, wide enough to escape.

Sometime later—I’d lost track of how many times I relived the kiss—I heard my name muttered from a room down the hall and remembered, vaguely, that Dr. Sedwick was here.

I tossed the pillow to the couch and stood up, straining to hear more. The conversation was only a ghost of a sound, whispered too quietly for me to make out anything important.

On bare feet, I made my way to the hallway and crept along the far side to avoid the squeaky, well-trodden boards in the center. When I reached the hall bathroom, I slipped inside and pressed myself in the corner near the open door.

It was much easier to hear from my new vantage point.

“We’ve lost track of him,” Dr. Sedwick said. “And that makes me nervous.”

“He must know this town isn’t his anymore,” Aggie said.

Dr. Sedwick sighed. “I don’t like this, Agatha. I don’t like it at all.”

“Neither do I, but what else would you have us do?”

There was a moment of silence before Dr. Sedwick went on, avoiding answering the question. It had sounded rhetorical anyway.