Everneath. Part 24

"Could you please check?" I let go of the door and hugged my arms into my chest, rubbing them. "Please?"

"Wait here," she said, and she closed the door.

I thought about turning around and walking away. There was a party going on and it was obvious I wasn't welcome. But what would I be going home to? The pain in my chest would only get worse. Even now it was sc.r.a.ping at my lungs, threatening to tear apart my insides.

I turned around and clutched my stomach.

"Nik?" Cole's voice came from behind me.

I composed my face and turned toward him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, and then he looked closer at my face. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, I just..." My voice caught, and I knew another word would bring on the tears.

He watched me as I tried to calm myself.

"I just needed ... someone."

He glanced over his shoulder at the party and then faced me again. "Where's Jules?"

"Never mind. I've obviously interrupted something." I turned around to leave, but he grabbed my arm.

"Wait." He sighed. "Tell me what's going on."

I looked at the wooden slats.

He was quiet for a moment, and I started picking at the sleeve of my T-s.h.i.+rt.

"You're hurting," he finally said. I nodded without looking up. "And you want me to take the pain away."

I raised my head. "I can't breathe, it hurts so much. Can you do that thing that you did on the river? Whatever it was?"

"It's dangerous, Nik."

"I don't care."

"You won't be able to stop me, and eventually you won't feel anything anymore."

"I'm tired of feeling."

He was quiet for a moment. He raised a hand to my cheek. "You have so much raw emotion in you. You're young. Everything is so fresh."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you don't know what you're doing." He looked away from me, out toward the night sky, and it seemed like he wasn't talking to me anymore. He wasn't talking to anybody. "It was an experiment. It wasn't supposed to work."

"What are you talking about?"

He put his elbows on the balcony and dropped his head down. He was quiet for a long moment. The only sounds came from his deep breaths in and out. Something big seemed to be happening for him. Finally, he spoke. "You should go home."

I sniffed. Home. Where my mother was gone. Where I couldn't look at my father. Where Jack could find me and tell me in person that he'd found someone else. "I can't go home."

I don't know if it was something in my voice, but he finally looked at me. "Nik, you're killing me."

I sensed he was close to caving in. I put my hand on his arm and he let me turn him toward me. "Please."

He grimaced. "I can't say no to you. And that's going to be a problem."

"But you'll help me?"

"I'll take the pain away," he corrected. "If you want me to. But once I do, there's no going back. Do you understand?"

I nodded. He took my hand and pulled me into his apartment. The place was filled with the strangest a.s.sortment of people I'd ever seen.

Meredith, who'd been oddly cold, watched me and called out to Cole, "Feeding off naivete now?"

"Go find Max, Meredith. He'll take care of you," Cole said.

"You're not going to find the answer with her."

"The other way isn't working either."

She shrugged, then we snaked through the crowd as Cole led me down a hallway to one of the bedrooms and shut the door behind us.

When he turned to face me, I could already feel the thinnest layer of pressure slipping away, and that overwhelming feeling of paranoia and rage and insecurity-the three strangers that had taken residence inside me-whooshed out of me like a deflating balloon, and instantly I realized I should've stayed and heard Jack out. I knew him. I'd memorized the architecture of his soul, and right then I knew he'd never do anything to hurt me.

"I have to go back." I tried to move, but my muscles wouldn't obey my mind.

"There's no going back," Cole said.

I'd come here because Cole had the bizarre ability to take away pain, but now that I was thinking more clearly, I wondered if he also had the ability to force other emotions on me. Cole had been there every time I'd felt most insecure about Jack. The day he was leaving for football camp. The night of Cole's concert at the Dead Goat Saloon, when I couldn't stop thinking about Lacey.

"Did you do this?" I asked him.

"Do what?"

"Make this whole thing happen?"

"I can't force people to do something they don't want to do." He looked down for a moment. "You just tasted a little bit of my own doubts about Jack."

He looked back up, and started draining my pain away at an alarming rate, and I felt woozy and lightheaded. "I have to go back. I have to talk to Jack..."

"Relax, Nik. Soon you won't even remember his name."

TWENTY-TWO.

NOW.

Home, at night. One month left.

My dreams of the Tunnels became more frequent, and more intense. One night, I dreamed Jack and I were at opposite ends of a hallway at school. I walked toward him, reaching out, but my feet became heavier and heavier with each step. The floor transformed into tar, and before I could call out to Jack, it engulfed me in darkness.

I woke up with a start. Why had I ever missed being able to dream?

My clock said it was just after two in the morning. I was about to turn back over when I heard a noise. I froze, listening. A soft voice was coming from outside my room, so I got out of bed and followed the sound out to the hallway and toward my father's room.

His door was closed, but I could hear his voice inside, talking to someone. I tiptoed closer and leaned my ear against the door.

"... you would know. It's just not working. Do I try to be harder on her, and risk losing her again? Or do I go soft? Treat her like an adult ... and risk losing her again."

He was quiet for a moment. Who on earth would he be talking to at two a.m.? About me?

"You would know what to do..." he said. "You always did. You could talk to her about everything and she would actually talk to you, too."

I held my breath.

"Anyway, I wanted to catch you up on everything... I miss you."

Then he was quiet. There was no beep of the phone disconnecting. No slamming of the receiver.

My dad wasn't on the phone. He was talking to my mom, searching for guidance about me. He really did believe she was above us, watching and listening.

I crept back to my room. I wished I believed my mom were out there somewhere, and that I could talk to her like my dad did. I wished I could talk to my dad like I had talked to my mom, but we never had that kind of relations.h.i.+p. Not because of anything either of us was doing. Sometimes the closeness isn't there.

It didn't mean I loved him any less. Or he, me.

I had been so horrible to him when I'd left with Cole. If I couldn't get out of the Tunnels, at least this time I would leave him in a good place, without any doubt that I loved him.

The days were slipping through my fingers. I knew I needed to tell Jack the truth about me leaving again, if only to take away that little bit of power Cole held.

But it had to be the right time.

After Cole realized Jack knew who he really was, he started showing up in more and more places, shadowing us in the halls of the school, always in the parking lot when I was pulling out. The band played concerts almost every night, and they were hard to avoid. Even when Cole wasn't around, traces of him followed me everywhere. He was angry I'd confided in Jack. It was obvious. But I still didn't know why.

True to his word, Jack arranged his schedule so he could volunteer at the soup kitchen. When he showed up, Christopher put him to work in the serving line. He wore a plastic glove and grabbed handfuls of lettuce for the salad.

"You're here," I said.

"Where else would I be?"

I smiled. Except for a little small talk, we worked side by side in silence. I was aware of how close he stood by me, his arm almost touching mine. Occasionally I glanced at him in the side of my vision. I studied the length of his eyelashes, the curve of his lips, and I would forget to ladle the soup. I think he was just as aware of me, too. When I wasn't looking at him, I felt him looking at me.

We went on like this until Mary showed up at my serving station. She nodded at me and stared at Jack.

"Mary, this is Jack." I ladled a bowl of steaming vegetable soup. "He's a new volunteer."

She didn't take the bowl, so I leaned over the counter to put it on her tray for her. Jack smiled at her and held out a fistful of lettuce. "Salad?"

Mary shook her head, still looking at Jack quizzically. "Did you forgive her?"

I looked at her with a start.

Jack dropped his salad back in the bucket. "What?"

"Did you forgive Nikki?"

"Umm, Mary, I don't think you-" I started, but Jack interrupted me.

"No, it's okay. What do you mean, Mary?" He spoke slowly. "Did I forgive Nikki for what?"

Mary frowned and reached under the separation gla.s.s and touched Jack's gloved hand. "Did you forgive her for leaving you?"

Jack's lower lip sank, and his eyebrows lifted. He looked like he was about to speak, but no words came out of his open mouth.

Mary leaned even closer and whispered, "I have a theory. A theory about anchors."

"Oh," Jack finally said, his forehead now creased with confusion. "Anchors."

The people in line behind Mary s.h.i.+fted impatiently.

"Um, Mary, you're holding up the line," I said. Mary looked at me as I continued. "Why don't you go grab a table, and I'll eat with you."

The tension slipped from her face. "Okay. But hurry. My tee time's at one."

She started down the line again. Jack's hand still rested in the lettuce, so I nudged him with my elbow, and he seemed to restart. "Don't worry about her," I said. "She gets confused easily."

"That wasn't confusion." Jack kept his eyes on my face as he served the salad. "It was like she knew me. Knew us. Did you talk to her about us?"

"Of course not. She also knows about anchors, apparently. And she's late for her tee time. None of it makes sense."

We didn't talk much for the rest of the lunch rush. When enough people had cleared out, I said to Jack, "Do you want to help me clean up?"

Jack looked at me and smiled as if nothing sounded better. "Yep."

"Okay, so the brooms are this way." I pointed toward the closet near the bathrooms.

Jack nodded and followed me to the broom closet. He grabbed a mop and bucket. I slammed the closet door behind me, but the cuff of my s.h.i.+rt caught on the doork.n.o.b and yanked the sleeve. "Whoops." I unhooked the snag and pulled my s.h.i.+rt back into place. "Once a klutz..." I held my broom with one hand, the dustpan with the other. "We'll start in the corner over there and work our way back. Okay?"

But Jack just looked at me, puzzled.