I don’t reply.
One week is nothing when I’m staring down three months of my
fucked up family pretending like everything’s OK.
I turn back to the
rain-soaked view outside the window, lifting my beloved camera to
peer through the viewfinder lens. It’s a manual Pentax SLR, a
bulky old antique that my grandpa gave to me, years ago, back before
he died. Everyone uses their cellphones now, snapping digital
pictures to post online and pass around, but I like the weight of the
old camera in my hand, and the hours I have to spend in the darkroom,
gently coaxing each photograph into life.
I carefully twist
the focus, bringing the view clearer. The sea foams, restless beyond
the strip of brush-land and sand dividing the highway from the shore.
I press my finger on the shutter and click, praying I make it through
the summer without losing my mind.
“You’ll
be coming here with your own kids soon,” Mom adds brightly. “A
tradition. You know, I came here with your grandparents, every summer
since I was—”
A loud bang sounds,
drowning out her voice. The car swerves wildly, suddenly out of
control. My chest slams against my seatbelt painfully, and my camera
slips from my hands. I grab for it, desperate, as we careen across
the wet highway.
“Mom!”
I yell, terrified. I see a flash of red through the window—the
truck behind us in our lane. It heads straight for us, then swerves
past at the last second.
“It’s
OK!” Mom’s knuckles are white, gripping the steering
wheel as she wrestles to regain control. “Just hold on!”
I cling on to the
sides of my seat, thrown to the side as the car keeps spinning. We’re
weightless, drifting in the road. Then, at last, I feel the tires get
traction again. The car slows, until, finally, we come to a stop
along the side of the highway.
I gasp for breath,
my heart pounding. The red truck we nearly hit has gone off the road
further up the highway, front wheels buried up to the bumper in mud
and sand.
My mom is still
gripping the wheel, staring straight ahead, her face chalk-white.
“Are you OK?” I ask in a quiet voice. She doesn’t
reply.
“Mom?” I
ask again, reaching out to touch her arm. She flinches back.
“What? Oh,
yes, honey, I’m fine.” She swallows. “The tire went
out, I think. I don’t know what happened. A lucky miss.”
Mom gives me a trembling smile, but I feel a tide of anger rise up.
“Lucky?”
I exclaim, furious. “We shouldn’t even be here! None of
us wanted to come this summer, and now we nearly just died. And for
what?!”
Suddenly, it’s
like a mack truck is crushing down on my chest. I can’t
breathe, I can’t even think straight. I fumble at my seatbelt
with shaking hands and then fling the car door open, stumbling out
onto the road.
“Juliet?”
she calls after me, but I don’t stop. I don’t care that
it’s raining, wet and cold against my thin T-shirt and cutoff
shorts, I just need to get out. I need to breathe.
I stride away from
the car, gasping for air.
None of this was my
idea. We haven’t been back to the beach house in years, not
since I was a kid. We haven’t been much of a family in years
either, but mom got it in her head that we had to spend one last
summer there together—before I went off to college and Carina
graduated—and we could all finally stop acting like we were
anything more than distant strangers living under the same roof,
trying like hell to pretend to the world that everything was OK.
Not that we don’t
have practice. After all, pretending is what my family does best. Dad
pretends he’s not a washed up academic with one failed book to
his name and a taste for vodka martinis at four p.m. My sister
pretends she cares about more than landing herself a rich lawyer
husband with a country club membership and a six-figure bonus. My mom
pretends she doesn’t regret throwing her life away on a
charming British writer, or notice his late nights “advising”
students at the office, and the disdain in his voice whenever he does
remember to stumble home.
And me? I pretend it
doesn’t hurt me to keep pretending. That it doesn’t eat
away at me to see how much she still loves him, meek and cowering for
the slightest bit of his attention. That I don’t get these
awful panic attacks every time I think about leaving her behind when
I head off to college this fall.
That’s why I
agreed to this joke of a happy family vacation, to try to numb this
sense I’m abandoning her. She wants one last summer to pretend?
I’ll give it to her. But look where all that pretending has
gotten us now: nearly winding up dead in a car wreck before her
precious summer even begins.
“Hey!”
I hear a guy’s
voice behind me, but I’m so desperate, I don’t slow down.
My heart is pounding now, so fast I feel like it’s going to
burst out of my chest. I know I just need to calm down and wait for
the panic to pass, but when I’m caught up in the whirlwind, I
can’t see straight long enough to try.
“Hey, wait
up!” the voice comes, louder, and then there’s a heavy
hand on my arm, pulling me around.
“What?”
I gasp, violently yanking back. “What the fuck do you…”
My protest dies on my lips as I stare up into the face of the most
beautiful guy I’ve ever seen.
His eyes are the
first thing I notice. They’re dark blue, mesmerizing, the color
of skies after sunset. It’s always been my favorite time, that
moment when the last light of day has faded away, and the first stars
come out. Now I’m looking right up into them, endless midnight
constellations. Ringed with thick, dark lashes, they burn into me,
intense. Full of secrets, full of scars.
“Where are you
going?” the guy demands, still gripping painfully onto my arm.
“You can’t just walk away from this!”
I pull away, still
dazed. He’s older than me, but not by much, his early twenties
maybe: tall and broad-shouldered, skin tanned a deep bronze by the
sun. His arms are taut beneath the black T-shirt he’s wearing,
damp and clinging to his muscular torso. His body is slim but
compact, almost radiating with tightly-coiled power in his black
jeans and beat-up workman’s boots. Rain drips from his dark
hair, curling too-long around his collar, and on his right bicep, I
can see the dark ink of a tattoo snaking up beneath his shirt.
He takes my breath
away.
The world shifts
back into focus, and I find that I can breathe OK again. Just like
that, my panic begins to ease.
“Are you
listening?” he demands, face set and angry. Then the anger
fades, replaced with concern. “Wait, are you hurt? Did you hit
your head?”
He reaches for my
face, fingers grazing against my forehead with surprising gentleness.
I look into those deep blue eyes again and feel a shock ripple
through me. Electric.
I lurch away,
startled. “I’m fine,” I manage, my heart rate
finally slowing. What the hell am I doing? I scold myself. Drooling
over some guy on the side of the highway? Don’t I have more
important things to worry about—like the fact I was
this
close to dying just a few minutes ago?
Now that he knows
I’m not injured, the guy’s angry expression returns.
“Then you’re lucky I don’t kill you myself right
now,” he tells me, grim. “What the hell was that back
there? Don’t you know you shouldn’t drive fast in a
storm?”
I catch my breath,
my frustrations all boiling over at once. “First of all, I
wasn’t driving,” I yell back. “And second, it was
an accident! Our tire blew, it happens. How is any of this my fault?”
I challenge him, folding my arms.
His eyes follow the
motion of my arms, and I’m suddenly painfully aware of my thin
T-shirt, now wet through and clinging against my chest. I shiver,
seeing a new hunger in his eyes as his gaze trails down my body,
lingering on my bare legs. I feel my skin prickle, and my breath
catch, not with discomfort, but something new, some kind of
heightened awareness. I feel a heat pool, low in my stomach.
The guy drags his
gaze back up to meet mine, and then he looks at me with what I swear
is a smirk curling at the edges of his perfect mouth. “How are
you the mad one right now?” he asks. “I’m the one
with my truck totally fucked back there.”
I look past him. His
truck is nose-deep in a sandbank, back wheels spinning. “Yeah,
well we’ve got a flat tire and no spare.”
He smirks for real
this time. “What kind of idiot doesn’t keep a spare?
We’re miles out from anywhere.”
“Maybe the
kind of person who drives in the city, where we have little things
like cellphone signal and tow trucks!”
The smirk fades.
“You’re summer people,” he says, like it’s a
crime.
“Let me
guess,” I shoot back. “You’re a townie with a chip
on your shoulder. Well, maybe you should save the issues until we
both get out of here.”
He opens his mouth
in surprise then stops. He looks around at the wet empty highway, and
finally, it sinks in that I may have a point.
“Fine,”
he says, grudgingly. “I’ll call for Norm to come get us.”
“I thought
there wasn’t signal out here?” I frown, pulling out my
phone from my pocket again, just to check.
“I’ve
got a CB radio in the truck.” He heads back towards the red
pickup. “Stay there!”
“Where else
would I go?” I sigh, watching him walk away. I trace the back
of his body with my eyes, absorbing the grace in his gait. Then he
turns, catching me. I blush, hoping frantically that he can’t
see my pink cheeks in the rain.
“You didn’t
tell me your name,” he calls.
“You didn’t
ask!” I yell back.
He grins and waits,
until finally I surrender.
“Juliet,”
I tell him, and wait for the snarky quip, but instead, he just cocks
an eyebrow at me.
“I’m
Emerson,” he calls. Then he smiles, a flash of something true
and reckless, so darkly beautiful I feel my heart stop all over
again. This is what they write stories about, I realize, as if from
far away. All those books and movies and poems I’ve read, this
is what they all were preparing me for, the day when a strange man
smiles at me, and makes me forget who I am.
His eyes meet mine,
and I swear my blood sings, hot in my veins despite the cold, damp
rain trickling down my back.
“Welcome
to Beachwood Bay.”
Emerson and Juliet’s story is only just beginning.
UNBROKEN
is
available now
!
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