I'll Be Waiting (San Juan Island Stories Book 6) (3 page)

Oh. Well. She strove for a flippant reply, for a smile, for anything that sounded cheerful and not like she’d just been smacked down for a point against herself. “Ah, ha. Good luck.”

“What about…?” He frowned at the asphalt and shook his head, then fixed on her. Intense and unfiltered, like hot coffee. “What about the event after graduation?”

“What, you mean the senior trip?”

Their class had raised so little money that, unlike classes before them who voyaged to Disneyworld or Hawaii, they were spending the night after graduation twenty-two-point-five nautical miles away in Vancouver, BC, at a kiddie amusement park with laser tag and a second-run movie. Attendance was completely optional, so most of her friends had RSVP’d to a private bonfire-kegger of a senior trip in the woods behind Brendan’s uncle’s property. But those plans evaporated with Luke’s question.

She hugged her bag. “I’m totally free. Did you want to go together?”

“You don’t think it’ll be stupid?”

“No way.” Suddenly it sounded like the most interesting event in the history of interesting events. “I can’t wait. It’s a date.”

He raised a brow. “Unless you get a boyfriend, right?”

She grinned. “I guess.”

The school year passed, and she squeaked through graduation on the barest minimum of credits after she cried in front of her adviser. After she got her diploma and took every possible photo with her friends and her team and her family, she kissed them all lovingly off to hang out with Luke.

It was worth it. The senior trip torched her fantasies. It was ten hundred thousand times better than she’d dreamed. She shrieked and giggled and laughed about ten times more than ever before. They took goofy photo-booth pictures in fake glasses Luke won at a balloon-dart game, rode the Scrambler with a Brownie scout troop, fell asleep in a hokey family-friendly movie about two kids lost in Alaska, and watched the sunrise from the ferry home. And while the other bleary-eyed grads hung out in the lobby of the admin building waiting for parents to arrive, Luke showed her the super-secret back way up to the gym roof.

They sat and stared out over quiet Friday Harbor curving gently down to the sparkling water, no longer teens in school but young adults about to enter the real world. Luke’s hands rested close to hers on the sun-warmed metal roof, and their feet almost touched between several puddles.

She grinned at his profile. “We should do this again tomorrow.”

Luke smiled. “Yeah.”

“I’ll come over.” She reached out to grab his hand but his expression sobered, Skylar stopped herself, curled her fingers into a fist and dropped it into her lap. “I mean, maybe sometime when we’re both available.”

He let out a long breath. “I’m leaving for Basic.”

Her chest fell.
Aw.
“When?”

“Today. When my parents pick me up from here.”

Seriously? She pinched her toes. “Can I write to you?”

He gave her his email address because his physical address would keep changing. “Until you get a boyfriend,” he said with a smile.

“I’ll keep writing you even then,” she promised.

A familiar Hyundai beeped in the parking lot. Skylar’s little sister got out of the passenger seat and ran into the lobby, so Skylar clenched the email address in Luke’s slanting handwriting to her heart and took a deep breath. This would be the moment everything changed.

“You know, if you’d asked me to go out with you anytime this year, I would have.”

Luke’s brows drew down and his chin jerked back. His lips flattened and curved and flattened again. “Really?”

“Really, really.”

He looped his arms around his knees and stared out at the sea. “Huh.”

Or maybe nothing would change. Skylar tucked the email address into her butterfly-stitched jeans pocket and said, “Oh well.”

“Oh well,” Luke repeated, and tapped his feet on the metal.

Skylar had to face the facts. Now sucked to start anything, after all. He was going to Fort Lewis and she was going to San Francisco, and neither of them had plans to meet up again. Their last minutes together evaporated into full daylight.

The loudspeaker crackled. “Skylar Robinson, please come to the lobby. Your ride is here. Skylar Robinson.”

Skylar slowly stood, as though lifting the entire weight of the sky. “I had fun today.”

Luke rolled to his feet and turned to her. “Let’s meet again.”

Excitement surged back into her, lighting Skylar up. “Yes. Absolutely. Where and when?”

“Right here. In five years.”

“Five years?” she laughed. “Why not, you know, when you get done with Basic?”

“I won’t be stationed here. And if we still feel like this… I mean, if it’s not serious…” He shook his head and tried again. “If we’re both here in five years, it probably
is
serious.”

She stepped closer, into his shadow. “Serious like what? Like friends, or like more?”

“More,” he said.

She licked her lips. “More? Like, how much more? Like, you’ll finally ask me out, or…like, what?”

“Like, you’re willing to tie your life to a military man, wherever that may lead.”

Her giggles rose and fell, because it sounded like—

“I know I’m different from most of the other guys you’ve dated, but…” He focused on her, certain as the sun. “If we’re both here, and if you still feel like this could be your future, like
I
could be your future, I’ll ask you to marry me.”

Her laughter subsided all on its own. She smoothed Luke’s thin windbreaker, feeling the newness in the seams and asked, “What if you can’t get here? Or what if you have a girlfriend?”

“What if you have a boyfriend?”

She shoved him. “Exactly! I mean,
anything
could happen. I could be married to someone else. Or, you know. Anything.”

His hands closed over hers. Warm and powerful. “If either of us isn’t here, it isn’t meant to be. So, be here by sunset in exactly five years.” He lifted her hand. “Promise?”

Oh, the softness of his lips on her knuckles lit sparklers in her chest. She heard her name over the loudspeaker again, vague and insubstantial as mist against the overpowering sunlight of her future.

“I’ll be here days before.” She squeezed his hand. “I guarantee it.”

###

Because she had promised so faithfully to meet Luke in five years, and because the five-year high school reunion was being held on a private cruise ship actually heading toward their high school, and because Luke had emailed her that his leave had been scheduled so he could join her on the cruise, missing it was a life-altering disaster that made her sick every time she thought about it. And she thought about it a lot on the long trip sandwiched between tourists as the commuter ferry chugged slowly between the islands to her destination.

Their original promise had been to meet on the roof of the high school gym. At sunset. She would keep at least that promise.

Skylar practically rolled both ankles stumbling off the state ferry into twilight, shoving through the strollers and families on the crowded sidewalks of Friday Harbor. The sun fell below the horizon, and streetlamps bloomed up and down the familiar roads as she raced onto the old school property.

She had visited her family but not the high school, and it was weird. In five years, the school had grown in on itself. Walkways narrowed and buildings shrank. How had she streamed through those tiny double-doors every day, weaving between the other students? How had she forgotten the length of the outdoor hall stretching from the cafeteria to the gym? What if it had all changed and no ladder reached the roof?

Racing around a corner, she bumped into Brendan Hayes.

He greeted her with startled recognition. “Are you headed to the gym? It’s crazy. Luke’s fiancée just announced their engagement, and they’re throwing a party.”

The ground seemed to tilt. Skylar put her hand on the building to steady herself. “Oh,” she said. “Wow.”

“Yeah, she seems pretty nice.” Brendan’s friendly smile turned to bemusement. “Hey, I didn’t see you on the boat.”

Skylar rubbed her forehead and searched for a smile. “It seems like I missed it.”

He gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “Let’s catch up. I made a few mistakes in high school and I’ve never forgotten about you. Maybe we can relive old times?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“Great. See you up there!”

So, apparently she and Luke weren’t the only ones meeting on the roof. Skylar fought back nausea, and in the isolated stillness tinny music and occasional laughter floated down, plopping on her below like so many raindrops on cracked cement. She really
had
missed the boat. Those one-line emails Luke sent her
every single night
had given her the completely wrong idea for about five full years. He’d left out a lot of key content. When Luke had asked if she remembered their promise, had he only wondered if she would make it awkward to introduce his fiancée?

A thick layer of paint crusted the ladder nailed to the gym wall, and the climb stretched higher than Jack’s beanstalk into the sky.

At the top, fifteen or twenty classmates greeted her with a familiar cry. “Skylar!”

She traded hugs with everyone.

Luke’s fiancée was a chubby woman in curve-hugging fatigues with a cute bob hairdo. She stepped up, introduced herself and held out a hand to shake. “You’re the one who made those peanut butter cookies at the recruitment weekend, right?”

Skylar laughed, hating the nice woman deep in her chest. “Wow, you remember that?”

“Luke opened up a delicious-smelling box and shared them, and the entire unit was, like, you haven’t left home yet! You two were famous before he even hit Basic.”

The woman grinned, and Skylar was stabbed with several kinds of envy. She clutched her messenger bag and said, “So, you work with Luke then?”

“We trained together and kept in touch. Calls in the same region, hanging out when we were stationed in the same base. Email, of course.”

“Yeah, he’s great at email….”

“Well, not really,” Luke’s fiancée said. “About average for a guy. A paragraph here and there.”

This woman got paragraphs. Could Skylar just leave right now without even seeing Luke?

She backed toward the ladder. She’d been waiting for five years for this night, getting to really know Luke a sentence at a time. The loss of him now reverberated over and over like a gong in her chest. She had missed him. She had missed him. She had missed him.

“I only ever got single sentences,” Skylar said.

“Only one sentence every couple of months?” The woman shook her head. “I would have given up.”

She didn’t bother to tell the woman it had been every day. That didn’t matter now. “Apparently I should have.”

“Ha ha.” The woman’s voice started to wobble. She cleared her throat, glanced over her shoulder, and seemed to struggle to hold on to her smile. The expression trembled, flattened out and then returned, like an image on water, and she was smiling again when she said, “I actually really hate you.”

Skylar’s chest heaved, a laugh surprised out of her. “What?”

“Skylar. You’re late.”

Luke’s serious voice tickled her eardrums, jolted her system like a warm finger sliding up her spine. Skylar swayed and turned to face him, mouth reacting before her mind could catch up. “You look great.”

His eyes made familiar crescents to match his beautiful smile. “Thanks.”

He did look great. Better than his last pictures taken in front of his new Black Hawk. The same dark brown eyes focused on her like only she existed on the roof; his hair, a flat Ice Man sheared cleanly up the sides made her want to dig in her fingers; and the adult muscle tone in that hard body perfectly filled his creased, off-duty jeans and starched, THIS WE’LL DEFEND T-shirt.

Skylar’s mouth went dry, and the crowd faded away and her chest ached. Ached for the boy she hadn’t made hers and again for the man that she had already lost.

“Sorry I missed you earlier. I made some wrong assumptions about…well, a lot of things, I guess.” The words stuck in her throat and she blinked back tears. “Congratulations.”

His gaze flicked over her shoulder, and Skylar’s followed…into the now empty space where his fiancée had been standing moments before.

“She brought it up on the boat,” he said. “Nothing’s settled.” His voice sounded flat.

“She seems really nice.” Skylar hugged her bag tight to her chest. “My boyfriend planned this big, suspicious dinner with all of our friends and family, but I put him off until after. But, he’s a really great guy, too, and so I’m sure we’ll both be super happy.”

Luke’s eyebrows lowered.

She didn’t mean to make him feel bad. Just because he hadn’t told her he had a fiancée or even a girlfriend—

Her chest hitched.
Losing it.
She was definitely losing it.

She pressed her cold hands against her collarbone. Her eyes burned. Oh God. She dashed away the moisture and turned, ready to run for the ladder, or possibly she could just throw herself off the edge. “See you at the ten-year reunion, maybe.”

His hand shot out and closed over her wrist, and he pulled her away from everyone into a dark corner of the roof. “Skylar.”

Her chest trembled. She squeezed her eyes shut and spun away. “Yeah?”

He tugged her backward, turning her around to face him. When she couldn’t look up at him he took her bag off her shoulder and set it gently on the ground. He cupped his hands around her bent elbows and drew her into his warmth. “You’re here.”

She took a shaky breath and covered her face so he wouldn’t see. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so late. I thought I could still catch you.”

He gently peeled her hands away from her face. “I love you.”

Her chest dropped and lifted and dropped like there were turbulent air currents in her body. “But you…and her…”

“She showed up at the boat. I didn’t bring her. I couldn’t get her off the topic. She just kept talking.” He pressed his lips to her palm, and warm commitment streaked up Skylar’s arm like a secret language, whispering his gentlest reassurance. “I’d always told her you were the one. She knows now. You didn’t arrive at the boat, and I suppose to her that seemed like it might alter the situation. She started telling everyone what she wanted to believe. It didn’t seem right to contradict her in front of everyone.”