Seeker (Riders #2)(59)

"Why was that so funny?" I ask.

"I don't know. 'Cause death's super possible here?" My legs ache as I stand to head back. "Daryn-wait. Stay a little longer?"

I sit back on the gravel shore. "Okay."

He regards me with a frank expression. Then he moves over and puts his arm around me. "Good?"

My body-pushed beyond exhaustion-melts against his chest. "Better than good. You make a great chair."

"I make a better bed. I'm serious," he says, when I start laughing. "My neighbor's cat sleeps on me all the time at home."

"You seem more the dog type."

"Well, I'm the horse type now. But I do love dogs. I'm going to get one soon. From an animal shelter or something. I've been thinking about it."

"That's awesome-you should. My parents just adopted a dog and they're definitely not dog people." He must hear the crack in my voice because his arms tighten around me. I close my eyes and feel his heartbeat drumming against my back. "Your heart's beating fast. Are you worried about it happening again?"

"Define 'it,'" he says.

"Falling through the ground. Going through another living nightmare." 

"I don't want that to happen. But I'm not worried. There's nothing I can do to stop it. No point stressing." His lips press against the top of my head. "You really want to know what I'm worried about?"

"Yes."

"That I did something dumb earlier. Toward you."

"Which dumb thing are we talking about?"

"You've got a real wicked streak, Martin."

I laugh. "Sorry. What was it? Tell me."

"You think I censored what I was telling Jode and Marcus to protect you. About what we saw  …  your mom. I was censoring, because it felt like your thing to share, not mine. I didn't mean disrespect. I just wanted to give you the choice."

Anxiety curls inside my chest. "I don't want to talk about this."

I start to stand, until he says, "I had a feeling you'd do this. It's like you're always ready to bolt."

I am always ready to bolt-I can't deny it. But now I can't leave or I'll only prove him right. I try to relax again. To find the comfort in his arms again. But now my heart is racing, too. "I probably deserve that reputation."

"Why do you do it?"

"Run?" Such a simple and yet terrifying question. "I don't know."

He doesn't say anything, but I feel his disappointment. Tell him, Daryn. I promised him I would. And as hard as it'll be to say, I want him to know. I clear my throat. "I told you about my mother, remember? When we were in Rome?"

"You told me she has depression."

"That's right. Sometimes, growing up-" He answered so readily and with such focus. Like he wants to ace the test on my background. It gets to me for a second, how much he cares. I have to start over. "Sometimes as I was growing up it got really bad. She'd be in her bedroom for weeks crying. It was really hard. Really hard. I hated seeing her that sad and I hated not being able to fix it. Sometimes there was no fixing it. It felt exactly like being in your truck, Gideon. Exactly.

"Time was the only thing that would get her through and give her back to us. Before we learned that, we tried everything. Dad took her to see every specialist in the country. Mom tried every kind of medication, every kind of therapy. Some things helped but like I said, there were times nothing worked.

"After a while, Dad just got worn down by it, I guess. Being so helpless. Seeing her in such bad shape. I don't think he could stand to be around her, so he started to spend more time at work. Days. Nights. Weekends. It got to be that we hardly saw him. With Mom sick, my sister Josie stepped in and ran the house. She made dinner, did the laundry, got straight As. Josie took care of us. Josie became my mom.

"I tried to stay out of the way. I thought that was the best thing I could do. I was around just enough so they wouldn't worry. I ran track and did well in school. But I was dying inside, watching my family fall apart.

"Then I started having visions. Once that happened, the focus switched to me. A daughter having paranoid delusions? That's intense. That'll steal the spotlight. I could see right away how much it scared my dad. Since he'd been through the psychiatric evaluations before with my mom, he knew all the best doctors, the best facilities. So you could say he fast-tracked me and sent me right to that institution I told you about-the one I broke out of.

"Except I knew all along that I wasn't schizophrenic. I was seeing the future. The visions were a blessing. But my parents were never going to believe me, considering our family history of mental illness. And by sticking around, I was only drawing from the resources that should've been going to my mom."