I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about Erik. I don’t know what makes sense anymore, what I want. I kiss Cole stronger, deeper, and he responds in kind, wrapping his arms around my back. He pushes against me, until I’m pressed into the railing with the weight of both of us. I’ve never felt so hungry, so alive, so desperate to find whatever it is that I’ve been afraid to look for.
Again, it’s Cole who pulls away, steps back just enough that I’d have to move my feet to kiss him again. He shudders the tiniest bit before taking a deep breath and looking at me, desire swirling in his eyes even as he tries to rein it in.
Eventually my heartbeat steadies, and I stop gasping, find myself again, and look away from him, blinking hard to bring the cedar decking back into focus.
“I—” I don’t know what I was going to say. But as I stand there, searching for the words, something changes. I blink several times, trying to figure out what it is. It’s like I was doused with cold water.
I turn around, and that’s when I realize: The sun sank on the horizon. There’s no sliver of light left, just bright orange clouds, streaked with purple. Something familiar wrenches through me, and I abruptly take a large step away from Cole.
The distance is equally devastating.
“I have to go,” I say, refusing to get close to him again.
Cole doesn’t meet my eyes. He just stares at the ocean, darkly intense. For one long, lingering moment, it’s like I could tell him everything. I want to trust him with every secret; he’s the only who’s never judged me.
But he would, if he knew the truth. That soft, sweet look he gives me would never surface again if he knew what really happened to Steven.
My own dad disappeared once he knew. Why wouldn’t Cole do the same?
He swallows slowly, the faint curve of his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I wish you would let me in. I just want to know you.” He steps forward, tips my chin up. “I want you to let the wall down. Just for me.”
I look down, try to hide the sadness swelling inside me. But he tips my chin a little further, so that I can’t evade his look.
“You can trust me,” he says.
“I know,” I whisper, sadness and fear coursing through me. I’m going to lose him before I really had him. I know that now. Being with him clearly isn’t enough to stop the pull of the ocean. And I can never tell him the truth, which means this will never last. For the first time, I begin to wonder if Erik has a point.
“I really like you. You know that, right?” he says.
I force myself to meet his gaze, but it only lasts a moment before I tear my eyes away, because I can’t take what I see in his look. I’ve hurt him. It’s already starting.
I stumble away from him, what’s left of my heart solidifying like a block of ice in my chest. It sinks into my stomach, then my knees, more like a rock than a heart. I never should have done this. Let him in. Led him to believe we’d become something. It was cruel. Stupid. Dangerous.
I can’t lie to him forever.
I make my way back to the door. The very door where I stood that night with Steven when I asked him to go swimming. Maybe this is my punishment for that moment. “I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not sure it’s loud enough for him to hear. “I know I’m confusing you. I’m . . . God, I don’t know. But I’m sorry.”
Then I twist around and rush through the door and stumble down the steps, the same steps I took that night I held Steven’s hand in mine.
But tonight there’s a difference.
Tonight, I know what could happen, and I know why I’m leaving.
I’m leaving to save him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It’s as if he knew he should come to the lake. I don’t know how or why, but he’s standing under my tree. Erik. How did he beat me here? Did he race up here, slamming the gas pedal down as hard as I did?
He’s standing there in the shadows, silent, and I walk up and shove him.
Hard.
Despite the fact that Erik outweighs me by at least seventy or eighty pounds, he flies backward and lies on the muddy shore of the lake. I stalk forward, not stopping until I’m standing over him, one foot planted on each side of his hips. “Why do you have to be right?”
I spit the words, so angry I almost choke on them.
But then I see his expression, realize none of this is his fault. He’s hurting as much as I am. He shrugs, still lying in the mud as he turns his face away from me.
“I hate you,” I say, my voice breaking.
“You don’t,” he says simply.
I hate it even more that he’s right.
I step over him and walk to the shore. My toes nearly touch the water. I want to get in and swim right now, my body craving the cool water. But it won’t change anything.
I try to rein in my pain, my anger as he sits up. His sweater is covered in mud. I shouldn’t have pushed him like that. What’s strange is that he didn’t bother fighting back; he just let me do it. It’s as if he knew I needed to get rid of the fury boiling through me.
“So,” I say, turning my attention to the water.
“So . . .?” he asks.
“I want to be with him. Cole,” I say.
“I know.” I hear the edge of pain in his voice. The pain in my chest grows. Why do I always have to hurt people?
“But . . .”
“Yes?”
“He’s already asking so many questions. He’s not going to stop until he knows the truth. And then when he does, he’ll just leave.” I pause, wincing at the way this sounds when I say it aloud. “If I don’t accidently kill him first.”
“I know.”
“You swear you can fix this?”
My question lingers for a long moment. Finally, he finds the words. “I can’t promise you that you’ll fall in love with me. But I can promise that if you do . . . if we do . . .”
I interrupt him, a new idea dawning in my mind. “Why didn’t one of you guys find my mom? She died for this curse. One of you could have saved her.”
“Like I said before . . . you’re hard to find. It’s not as if you advertise what you are.”
“Yeah, I get that. But why didn’t she know about your existence? My curse dates back two hundred and fifty years, and none of them went looking for you guys?”
He looks up at me from where he sits, still in the mud. “I had hoped you’d be looking for me. But I suppose I’m not surprised. Sirens rarely last long enough to pass on the legend.”
I jerk back and look at him.
“I’m sorry. But it’s the truth. Sirens just don’t seem to handle this as well as nixes. Maybe it’s the difference between men and women. Maybe it’s the difference between our curses. It’s just very hard to find a siren who lives long enough to pass the legend down to her daughter. Nixes, on the other hand, we’ve passed this down for generations. We grow up knowing what is to come. What we need to do before we reach our eighteenth birthday.”
“When is your eighteenth birthday?”
“Twenty-seven days.”
I whirl around and stare at him, my jaw unhinged. “A month? Less than a month?”
He blinks and stares back at his muddy palms. “Yeah. That’s why I was so desperate to find you. Because without you? I have no life.”
When I meet his eyes, I snap my jaw shut. Hope. That’s all I see there. He actually wants to be with me, wants me to realize he’s right. Wants me to save him from the things he’s describing.
I’m always the one to cause pain. I’ve never been the one to save someone from it.
“If I agree to this . . . what comes next?”
When he stands, I cringe at the mud covering his backside. He edges forward, so his shoes hit the edge of the water. He’s so much taller than I am—we stand shoulder to biceps instead of shoulder to shoulder. “We spend some time together. I can’t promise you this will work. But if we fall in love . . .”
A second of silence lingers there, and we stare at each other, a hundred things passing between us. He clears his throat. “If we fall in love, the curses break.”